The ghosts of their ancestors Part 4

"You, sirrah!" scoffed the voice Patricia thought would go on forever, inflicting fresh wounds at each new outburst. "Impudent organ thumper--to dare come here! I'll better your judgment." As he moved nearer Richard she thrust herself before him.

From the corner of the room came a wail from Julie. "Oh, don't be hard on them, Jonathan. You helped father make me give up Captain MacLeerie," she faltered. "I might have been Mrs. Captain MacLeerie! Poor Bodsey--he vowed he'd never sail a ship into Amboy Harbor again--and perhaps the cannibals have him now, or the devil fishes!"

She began to weep softly. Outside a heavy oaken shutter clanked against the house. Patricia threw her arms about her lover's neck, and her father gazed at her spellbound with fury.

"Disgraced us, hussy," he muttered. "Go with your tinker!"

Juma fell on his knees and began to lament after the fashion of his kind.

"Begone!"--spoke the voice again, breaking at last--"You are no longer one of us!"

The girl, supported by the man to whom she was giving her young life, and followed by the trembling negro, crept slowly away.

Whiffs of air increasing to a current swept from out the hall. The remaining lights fought with it--then despaired. A tired moon was slumbering behind the western pines, and only the glow of a few watchful stars dripped through the cas.e.m.e.nts.

Simultaneously the breaths of every one in the room came faster and faster. Vapors wan and tinged with dust filled the atmosphere, and an unmistakable odor of sandal-wood, faint from long imprisonment.

The startled Knickerbockers retreated to the walls, knocking over chairs and tables in their flight. Before the green sarcenet curtain which had played such a part in the affairs of the night there was a waft of airy garments. A white weft of towering hair--black, burning eyes. Three Knickerbockers knew them! The lady of the banished portrait was moving through the doorway and speaking in quaint last-century utterance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_The lady of the banished portrait was moving through the doorway_"]

"Come back!" she called to the lovers, speaking to Patricia. "'Tis a weary while I have been in the other world, but your sore need has brought me here on the anniversary of the birth of love. I am your great-great-grandmother, who felt the full force of the pretty pa.s.sion and stole away with my dear heart from yonder theatre in old John Street--a grain house in your time, so one from York who recently joined us informed me.

"Although my likeness does not hang in the family line, I bear you small malice. I get a surfeit of their society." Here the ghost sighed, and with the saddest air possible tapped her empty snuffbox and went through the act of inhaling a reviving pinch of strong Spanish. "This girl who has the bloom of me I would befriend, and as the greatness of your ancestors is all that stands in the way of a marriage with the man of her choice, I have bid them come to meet you and get their opinions, mayhap."

A tremor went through the room! More unearthly visitants? The flesh was creeping on the bones of all the living Knickerbockers!

"They are waiting for us in Lady Knickerbocker's state-room yonder--Sir William tried to kiss me there once after a junket," she continued. "He would not come to-night--I fear he was afraid it would be dull."

She moved over to Jonathan, who was speechless from fright, and laid a shadowy hand on his. Once past the door ledge she began the descent of the hall as if footing the air of some ancient melody. With grim, rebellious face the present head of her house moved with her, apparently against his own volition.

By the one brightly floriated mirror she straightened her osprey plumes and tapped him gently with her fan. "You dance like a footman," she said.

"Have you go-carts 'neath your feet?"

The trembling file of Knickerbockers followed after them, seemingly blown by the wind, whose diabolical wailing reverberated through the house.

Doors and windows raged and rattled. There were stridulous, uncanny groans from quaking beams. Behind the panels adown the hall rose and swelled the confused murmur of many voices. The echoes of long dead years were reviving. Above them all was a dying requiem of bells, tolling low and mournfully like a warning to belated road-farers that the ghosts of the haughty Knickerbockers were seeking earth again.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_Chapter Four_

[Ill.u.s.tration]

As the family neared the long unused state parlor the din grew louder--a rising treble of voices, ascending from hoa.r.s.e trumpet tones to a twittering falsetto, accompanied by a maddening persistent tapping of high heels on the smooth floor. The sounds of shivering gla.s.s as a girandole crashed from its joining met their ears. Each second was a discord running wild with panic-striking incidents.

Julie grasped frantically at the more stalwart Georgina, while clinging to her own garments were the three Mansion girls, screeching like the town's whistles in a March twilight.

The ghost little Jerusalem feared the most was that of the stern Judge.

"Will he know that I have changed my name?" she wailed. "Oh, sister, I ate up those bracelets he gave me for taking treacle. I sold them to a silversmith and bought French prunes. You know you said that you'd as soon eat stewed bull-frogs as anything grown by the Monsieurs, and all York was stewing prunes!"

Georgina never turned her head at this remarkable confession. Her features had a.s.sumed a strange rigidity; she was as silent as her brother. The shrieks of her nieces, old Juma's incessant lamentations, and the low whispers of the lovers were all unheeded. The racket behind the cobwebbed doors, never opened but for Knickerbocker weddings and funerals, absorbed her senses. Slowly they were swinging back for Jonathan and his phantom partner. The delicate odor of sandal-wood, was strengthened by gasps of musk. Into a yellow blinding glare of light the file of Knickerbockers looked, and their eyes grew gooseberry-like with horror.

A crowd of shades bedecked in their last earthly garniture were gliding and teetering about; some dignified as at a stately farce, others hilarious with ungraceful levity.

As the living Knickerbockers appeared in the room the waggling and chortling fell into a monotone, and the company began to pa.s.s in review before them, seemingly desirous of attracting individual notice. Few wore the costly attire one would have expected from the tales spread about them by the Knickerbockers of Vesey Street. Several were clad in plain hum-hums and torn fustians. One chirpy dame in a moth-eaten tabby hugged a little package of Bohea to her stomacher, unmindful of the fact that the luxury had grown much cheaper since she quitted this sphere. Another, who evidently thought herself a beauty, wore a false frontage of goat hair before her muslin cap, and ogled Jonathan as she pa.s.sed, though he did not seem eager for a flirtation with his ugly great-aunt.

An ungainly yokel stepped on the feet of the Mansion girls, and some bold gentlemen, who had spent a goodly portion of their natural lives in Bridewell, swore at them. Still the awful procession kept moving on--faces were as thick as the tapers glowing in every bracket and candelabra.

Bursts of music rose on the wind--a wheezing tune that sobbed of past jubilation. Suddenly all the Knickerbockers gasped. Stern Judge Knickerbocker, who had rarely smiled in life, was seen advancing, bent double with laughter and clinging to a figure in a cardinal hoop.

"Oh, let us cover our eyes," whispered Miss Georgina. "This is more than I can bear."

"Don't!" said the lady of the banished portrait. "You have often boasted of your family's intimacy with that queer figure. Through your veneration of him, York has made him into quite a hero. It is the friend of one of the first American Knickerbockers--Lord Cornbury! He was addicted to wearing women's furbelows!"

"Gazooks!" exclaimed his Lordship, in a tone loud enough for the Knickerbockers to hear. "More of those tiresome impertinents! The next thing the whole of the presumptuous clan will be pet.i.tioning me for standing room at my routs."

"Don't go any nearer to them," said the Judge, in the tones of a sycophant. "If they bore you, my dear Corny, I am willing to cut them.

_You know it is the fashion on earth to recognize only the most desirable_ ancestors, and we can return the compliment. Besides it was decreed that I should be jocular for the next half century, and I'm afraid a too close inspection would cause me to don weepers."

The group by the doors felt a sickening sensation in their flaccid frames.

Jonathan's partner, knowing how grievously they must all have been affected by the change in their parent, turned her head.

A one-eyed hag was advancing to her. She curtsied low, and presented two bits of plaster which had fallen from the ceiling.

"Messages," she snickered, fumbling with her hands.

"From Marmaduke and Leonidas Barula," read the lady (though no one knows how, for she only observed the niches). "We beg to be excused from coming to-night. To put it mildly, we were raised aloft in Pearl Street Hollow for practising target shooting on coach-drivers, and our necks are still out of joint and not fit to be seen in company."

As the merriment waxed louder a Gobie, who had spent her life as a fish-f.a.g, began tapping on the panelled wainscot. With a hoa.r.s.e guffaw she turned her piercing alaquine eyes on Miss Julie and squinted--"More negus!

More here, you slubber-degullions. We Gobies has a thirst. 'Twas what we were noted for in life--not our learning, great-niece," she mocked, as she turned her head and grimaced at Miss Georgina.

"Go away!" snuffled that once resolute woman, too weak to combat any longer. A feeling of despair was settling upon her like a pall. What if Mrs. Rumbell, or, worse still, if Mrs. Snogra.s.s should be pa.s.sing Knickerbocker House and hear the oaths and ungenteel voices of the supposedly elegant family? No tap-room fracas at Fraunces' could have equalled the deafening hubbub.

"Beshrew the old fool, she be as jealous for the lies she told of us as a Barbary pigeon."

"Go away!" continued the sinking sister of the autocrat of York.

That distraught-looking gentleman himself was hastening across the room with restorative salts, which one of his daughters always carried in her reticule. As he approached Georgina the Gobie s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle from his hand and drained it at a gulp.

"Anything with fire-water for me," she hiccoughed. Then clutching hold of him, she sunk her voice to a whisper--"I left this sphere for drinking a quart of gillyflower scent!"

Julie began to weep softly--"Oh, Aunt Jane, if you were only here! Our Aunt Jane was different from these people," she wailed to herself, half apologetically.

She was fond of studying the picture in the other room and could have traced it from memory. Raising her eyes, she gave a prolonged shriek. The fish-f.a.g and some of the Makemies were dragging her beloved Jane over Lady Lyron's court steps, out of the powdering closet.