The ghosts of their ancestors Part 1

The ghosts of their ancestors.

by Weymer Jay Mills.

Chapter _One_

There was a clanging, bra.s.sy melody upon the air. For three-score years since York of the Scarlet Coats died, and the tune "G.o.d Save the King"

floated for the last time out of tavern door and mansion window, the bells of old St. Paul's had begun their ringing like this:

"Loud and full voiced at eight o'clock sends good cheer abroad," said the tottering s.e.xton. "Softer and softer, as folks turn into bed, and faint and sweet at midnight, when our dear Lord rises with the dawn." Cheery bells full of hope--gentle chimes, as if the holy mother were dreaming of her babe. Joyous, jingling, jangling bells! Through the town their tones drifted, over the thousands of slate-colored roofs, now insistent on the Broadway, now lessening a little in some long winding alley, and then finally dying away on the bare Lispenard Meadows.

Vesey Street--the gentry street--heard them first. The bigwigs in the long ago, with the help of Gracious George, built the church, and who had a better right than their children to its voices. Calm and serene lay Vesey Street with its rows of leafing elms. Over the dim confusion of architectural forms slipped the moonlight in silver ribbons, seeming to make sport of the grave, smug faces of the antiquated domiciles. Like a line of deserted dowagers waiting for some recalcitrant Sir Roger de Coverley, they stood scowling at one another. No longer linkboys and running footmen stuck brave lights into the well-painted extinguishers at each doorstep. No longer fashion fluttered to their gates. The gallants who had been wont to pa.s.s them with, "Lud! what a pretty house!" were most of them asleep now on the green breast of mother England, forgetful of that wide thoroughfare, which had never reckoned life without them.

Into the parlor of Knickerbocker House, dubbed Knickerbocker Mansion some years after the bibulous Sir William Howe had laid down his sceptre as ruler of the town, the chorus of bells crashed.

"What a dastardly noise!" cried Jonathan Knickerbocker, throwing his newspaper over his head. "Can this Easter time never be kept without an infernal bell bombilation? I shall call a meeting of the vestry--that idiot Jenkins should be kept at home!"

The head of the Knickerbocker family turned irately in his chair and glared at his daughters. Three timid pairs of blinking eyes were raised from short sacks in answer to his challenge, then lowered again over the wool. The fourth and fairest daughter of the house, seated on the walnut sofa in the bow-window, gave no heed to his vehemence but a suppressed sigh. With a final snort the _Gazette_ was picked up again. The Easter melody was waning.

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The Knickerbocker parlor--not the state parlor, which had long been closed--was a dismal place--so large that four candles and one Rumford lamp made but a patch of brightness in the gloom. Most of the furniture was ponderous and ugly, with two or three alien little chairs that looked as if they might once have belonged to some light-hearted lover of the Louis. On the almost barren chimney-piece stood a pair of tall nankeen beakers, sepulchrally reminiscent of buried Chinese years. Along the walls hung a score of mediocre portraits, the handiwork of the usurious limner John Watson and his compatriot Hessilius. Spans of sunlit days had stolen every tinge of carmine from their immobile and woodeny faces, leaving them the drab color of time, in keeping with the room.

Above the cornice, near the sofa where Patricia Knickerbocker sat, hung an empty frame. The portrait it contained had been banished to the attic while her three eldest sisters were still in Wellington pantalets.

"The woman looks like a Jezebel," Jonathan had sputtered. "Och! that leering smile." He tried to blot from his mind the stray leaves he knew of her story, and the disturbing thought that she was of his blood. "She shall not remain with the likenesses of my ancestors!" he had told his sisters, who were over from Goby House.

When this descendant of the Knickerbockers spoke of his progenitors he always held his head a trifle more erect, and puffed out his pompous figure, though, strange to relate, like many another worthy man of a later day having the same foible, he knew very little about them. Of course he could have told you that the lady over the east bookcase, wearing a blue tucker and holding a spray of milk-weed in her hand, was his Aunt Jane; and that his father was a noted New York judge, the pride of three circuits. Or if his digression were extended, there was his trump card, one of the first American Knickerbockers, labelled "The Friend of Lord Cornbury!" These were the firmest rocks in his family history, to which he could climb in safety, thence to look down with scorn on those unfortunates beneath his social eminence. He was a Knickerbocker, of Knickerbocker Mansion, Vesey Street, and a member of one of the oldest families in York and America.

Patricia, smiling little Patricia, rummaging one day among the dust-bins under the eaves, had found the banished portrait. Juma, the gray-wooled negro, a comparatively new member of the Knickerbocker household, who had appointed himself her body-servant ever since his arrival at the mansion, was with her.

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A faithful slave to old Miss Johnstone of Crown Street, Juma had been forced by his mistress's death into new service. He was a picture of ebonized urbanity, a good specimen of the vanished race of Gotham blacks, gentler in manners and clearer in speech than their Southern cousins. In his youth he had been sent to one Jean Toussaint of Elizabethtown to learn the art of hair-dressing. He could impart much knowledge of wigs to a wigless age, and talked in a grandiloquent fashion of Spencers, Albemarles, and Lavants. Many a beau peruke and macaroni toupee his lithe fingers curled and sprinkled with sweet flower-water. The voices of the fine people who were his visitors made constant music in his memory, and his tongue was ever ready with anecdotes of wizened beauties and uncrowned cavaliers.

Juma was faithful to the period of his greatest splendor. Deep in his heart he despised the home to which freedom and poverty had led him after the demise of his protectress. "Gold braid on company coat and silk stockings done ravel out in dese days. Knickerbockers talk quality, but dey ain't got quality mannahs--Missy Patsy is de only one of dem with tone."

He loved to listen to the girl as she tripped through the great rooms, humming softly some air from Lennet's "London Song-Book"--one of the relics of his "ole Miss." Patricia always sang on the days when her sisters were visiting their aunts on the bluff. Juma loved her, and during his five years' residence in the family had many times taken her youthful mind in train with quaint eighteenth-century maxims and fetiches.

"De wise miss drop her fan when she enters de ballroom," he would say.

"Den she gets de men on der knees from de start."

"I wish I were invited to b.a.l.l.s," Patricia sighed. "The Kings and Grahams give one or two every year, but father never notices them."

"Well, you jes' know how to behave," he chuckled. "Doan' yo' forget de tricks your Uncle Juma taught yo'."

When the two had met in the attic that April day, Juma's spirits were as ebullient as usual.

"How lovely she is, Juma! See, there is a blush on each cheek. Her pink brocade makes me think of a rose dancing in the wind."

Patricia stared into the canvas face before her and the lips seemed to curve themselves into the shadow of a smile. "I know you were the fairest one of us," she whispered, "the fairest and the best."

"Dat's the real quality way of holding the head," vouchsafed Juma. "I'se pow'ful 'clined to think she looks like yo', missy." And then they had laughed, shut away with maimed chairs, tired spinets, and other voiceless things, glad to have escaped from Knickerbocker frowns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_How lovely she is, Juma!_"]

It was a dismal household, that of the old mansion--the master absorbed in his pa.s.sion for wealth and worship of family; the three eldest daughters, who might once have had some individuality but now were moulded in the form of their father. "Callow old maids," any individual of the lower ranks of York would have dubbed them. They wore little bunches of sedate curls over each ear, and dressed in sombre, genteel colors proper to their exalted rank. On the first day of the week they dozed through a long sermon; on its last day they simpered politely at the Whist Club. Fears of broken jelly-moulds or of the romping Patricia's next prank were the only disturbers of the tranquillity of their lives. Jonathan Knickerbocker was their one Almighty Mirror. When he labelled Mrs. Scruggins, the draper's niece, a person not fit to a.s.sociate with, their stiff gowns obediently gave forth hisses at the said lady. When he prated of his father's shrewdness, they nodded discreet approval; and at the mere mention of the loyal friend of Lord Cornbury, they bobbed like gra.s.s before a gale.

Patricia's impressionable temperament was saved by Juma's advent from the sirocco of dulness that wafted her sisters over the lake of years. His "ole Miss," a looker on at the "Court of Florizel," had unconsciously taught him to imbibe the atmosphere surrounding the Graces. A democracy could not spoil her elegance, for Chesterfield's warning was ever before her eyes. She who copied the footsteps of Baccelli, adored her Sterne and Beattie, and though her eyes grew dim, never let romance pa.s.s her window unmolested, had left her impress upon the mind of the faithful servitor.

Life to him was a gay-colored picture-book, brighter perhaps because he could not read the printed page. All his maids were cherry-ribboned and belaced; all his roystering sparks clinked gilded canakins. Love was ever smiling on them! For wellnigh half a century he had listened to tales of the gay G.o.d as he bound one romance-loving woman's silken tresses. Small wonder that he thought the urchin ruled the world!

When the bells rested their bra.s.sy throats for the first time that night, and Jonathan Knickerbocker could take up his West Indies accounts undisturbed, giving his daughters freedom to doze in peace, "Miss Patsy"

stole on tiptoe from the room. She wanted to be alone. Juma, ambling through the dim hall to his pantry, caught sight of her fluttering garments, but did not speak. Only an hour or two before, he had placed in the chamber where she slept a bunch of arbutus which young Sheridan, the organist, had given into his keeping. The wild, sweet-scented flower grew in but one spot near the town--an island in the centre of the Woodbridge Swamp, where Captain Kidd in a freak of fancy had planted it over the body of a comrade, tradition said, and no one ever disputed the story. To reach it, even the most sure-footed ran the danger of being caught in the bog.

Patricia wondered as she mounted the stairs how her lover had been able to come with her gift unseen. The watching negro smiled sadly and shook his head when the last bit of her garment disappeared over the staircase like a white moth moving treeward.

Oh, how terrible it was never to see him in her father's house! Never to have seen him alone, only that one time, after twilight service, when she had stolen a meeting at the Battery, while her family were taking their Sabbath-day ride up the Bowery Road!

The old vehicle held but six, and as the aunts always rode home with their brother, Patricia was left to the escort of Juma, custodian of the prayer-books. By the clump of protecting boxwood at the end of the Marine Parade she had come upon him. The sea held his eyes until there was no mistaking the footsteps. Her approaching crinoline made soft little rustles, as if entreating him to leave his musings. Her body-guard's shuffles, too, were unmistakable. Like some young potentate her lover turned about, describing an elaborate bow with his white castor. The very picture of starched tranquillity he looked, but underneath the blue hammer-tail coat a heart was beating wildly, as she, made wise by love, knew well--for her own was its echo.

There was a brief moment while she watched the color mount to his sun-bronzed face, the blue eyes glow, the strong form quiver ever so slightly. Then her lips framed "Richard"--the key of the universe.

"Patricia!" came the answer.

Juma, from his discreet distance, heard her compared to the magnolia worn on the lapel of the coat she admired so much. In her white and fragrant young womanhood she was like it from sheer inaccessibility. The flower expressed her character and position--Patricia Knickerbocker, a daughter of the autocrat of York. When he mentioned her father's name the girl shivered. An invisible wall seemed to rise between them. Then the feeling died away. Her soul grew wider awake each moment her lover gazed at her.

As he drew her closer to him Juma's figure in the background bent over a flower in the path.

"Let 'em kiss," he mumbled. "Ole Miss used to say de female dat never lub am a sour pippin, and dere's enough ter start a vinegar press in dis family."

"You'll not permit them to take you away from me? You will be mine forever and ever?" said the youth.

A sigh of happiness answered him.

"I know I'm poor, Patricia, and my family can never equal yours."

"Don't!" she whispered. "What does it matter, what does anything matter--only that I'm here _with you_!"

"See the night creeping in off there, dear heart. It holds nothing more wonderful than this moment."

"How black the water looks," she faltered.

"I will go to your father and demand your hand." She was trembling.