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Title: The Story of a New York House
Author: Henry Cuyler Bunner
Illustrator: A. B. Frost
Release Date: December 13, 2009 [EBook #30662]
Language: English
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[Illustration: Then out of the door came Jacob Dolph.]
THE STORY
OF
A NEW YORK HOUSE
BY
H. C. BUNNER
_ILLUSTRATED BY A. B. FROST_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1887
COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York.
TO
A. L. B.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
_Then out of the door came Jacob Dolph_ FRONTISPIECE
PAGE
_"I thumped him"_ 14
_"It's a monstrous great place for a country-house, Mr. Dolph"_ 18
_There was only one idea, and that was flight_ 28
_The light flickered on the top of the church spire_ 32
(_By F. Hopkinson Smith._)
_They hesitated a second, looking at the great arm chair_ 37
_"Stay there, sir--you, sir, you, Jacob Dolph!"_ 41
_After awhile he began to take timorous strolls_ 46
_Jacob Dolph the elder ... stood on his hearth rug_ 51
_And then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering no one to
go with him_ 55
_In quiet morning hours ... when his daughter sat at his feet_ 77
_"Mons'us gran dinneh, seh!"_ 79
_"All of a sudden, chock forward he went, right on his face"_ 83
_He heard the weak, spasmodic wail of another Dolph_ 88
_"Central American," said the clerk_ 107
_"Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment_ 109
_O'Reagan of Castle Reagan_ 118
_"If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
have had"_ 120
_"I know'd you'd take me in, Mist' Dolph," he panted_ 132
_"Have you got a nigger here?"_ 133
_Abram Van Riper makes a business communication._ 141
_And so she set his necktie right, and he went_ 144
_Looking on his face, she saw death quietly coming upon him_ 149
_Finial_ 151
THE STORY
OF A NEW YORK HOUSE.
I.
"I hear," said Mrs. Abram Van Riper, seated at her breakfast-table, and
watching the morning sunlight dance on the front of the great Burrell
house on the opposite side of Pine Street, "that the Dolphs are going to
build a prodigious fine house out of town--somewhere up near the
Rynders's place."
"And I hear," said Abram Van Riper, laying down last night's _Evening
Post_, "that Jacob Dolph is going to give up business. And if he does,
it's a disgrace to the town."
It was in the summer of 1807, and Abram Van Riper was getting well over
what he considered the meridian line of sixty years. He was hale and
hearty; his business was flourishing; his boy was turning out all that
should have been expected of one of the Van Riper stock; the refracted
sunlight from the walls of the stately house occupied by the Cashier of
the Bank of the United States lit with a subdued secondary glimmer the
Van Riper silver on the breakfast-table--the squat teapot and slop-bowl,
the milk-pitcher, that held a quart, and the apostle-spoon in the broken
loaf-sugar on the Delft plate. Abram Van Riper was decorously happy, as
a New York merchant should be. In all other respects, he was pleased to
think, he was what a New York merchant should be, and the word of the
law and the prophets was fulfilled with him and in his house.
"I'm sure," Mrs. Van Riper began again, somewhat querulously, "I can't
see why Jacob Dolph shouldn't give up business, if he's so minded. He's
a monstrous fortune, from all I hear--a good hundred thousand dollars."
"A hundred thousand dollars!" repeated her husband, scornfully. "Ay, and
twice twenty thousand pounds on the top of that. He's done well, has
Dolph. All the more reason he should stick to his trade; and not go to
lolling in the sun, like a runner at the Custom-House door. He's not
within ten years of me, and here he must build his country house, and
set up for the fine gentleman. Jacob Dolph! Did I go on his note, when
he came back from France, brave as my master, in '94, or did I not? And
where 'ud he have raised twenty thousand in this town, if I hadn't?
What's got into folks nowadays? Damn me if I can see!"
His wife protested, in wifely fashion. "I'm sure, Van Riper," she began,
"you've no need to fly in such a huff if I so much as speak of folks who
have some conceit of being genteel. It's only proper pride of Mr. Dolph
to have a country house, and--" (her voice faltering a little,
timorously) "ride in and--and out----"
"_Ride!_" snorted Mr. Van Riper. "In a carriage, maybe?"
"In a carriage, Van Riper. You may think to ride in a carriage is like
being the Pope of Rome; but there's some that knows better. And if you'd
set up your carriage," went on the undaunted Mrs. Van Riper, "and gone
over to Greenwich Street two years ago, as I'd have had you, and made
yourself friendly with those people there, I'd have been on the Orphan
Asylum Board at this very minute; and _you_ would----"
Mr. Van Riper knew all that speech by heart, in all its variations. He
knew perfectly well what it would end in, this time, although he was not
a man of quick perception: "He would have been a member of the new
Historical Society."
"Yes," he thought to himself, as he found his hat and shuffled out into
Pine Street; "and John Pintard would have had my good check in his
pocket for his tuppenny society. Pine Street is fine enough for me."
Mr. Van Riper had more cause for his petulancy than he would have
acknowledged even to himself. He was a man who had kept his shop open
all through Clinton's occupancy, and who had had no trouble with the
British. And when they were gone he had had to do enough to clear his
skirts of any smirch of Toryism, and to implant in his own breast a
settled feeling of militant Americanism. He did not like it that the
order of things should change--and the order of things was changing.
The town was growing out of all knowledge of itself. Here they had their
Orphan Asylum, and their Botanical Garden, and their Historical Society;
and the Jews were having it all their own way; and now people were
talking of free schools, and of laying out a map for the upper end of
the town to grow on, in the "system" of straight streets and avenues. To
the devil with systems and avenues! said he. That was all the doing of
those cursed Frenchmen. He knew how it would be when they brought their
plaguy frigate here in the first fever year--'93--and the fools marched
up from Peck's Slip after a red nightcap, and howled their cut-throat
song all night long.
It began to hum itself in his head as he walked toward Water Street--_Ça
ira--ça ira--les aristocrats à la lanterne_. A whiff of the wind that
blew through Paris streets in the terrible times had come across the
Atlantic and tickled his dull old Dutch nostrils.
But something worse than this vexed the conservative spirit of Abram Van
Riper. He could forgive John Pintard--whose inspiration, I think,
foreran the twentieth century--his fancy for free schools and historical
societies, as he had forgiven him his sidewalk-building fifteen years
before; he could proudly overlook the fact that the women were busying
themselves with all manner of wild charities; he could be contented
though he knew that the Hebrew Hart was president of that merchants'
club at Baker's, of which he himself would fain have been a member. But
there was some thing in the air that he could neither forgive nor
overlook, nor be contented with.
There was a change coming over the town--a change which he could not
clearly define, even in his own mind. There was a great keeping of
carriages, he knew. A dozen men had bought carriages, or were likely to
buy them at any time. The women were forming societies for the
improvement of this and that. And he, who had moved up-town from Dock
Street, was now in an old-fashioned quarter. All this he knew, but the
something which made him uneasy was more subtile.
Within the last few years he had observed an introduction of certain
strange distinctions in the social code of the town. It had been vaguely
intimated to him--perhaps by his wife, he could not remember--that there
was a difference between his trade and Jacob Dolph's trade. He was a
ship-chandler. Jacob Dolph sold timber. Their shops were side by side;
Jacob Dolph's rafts lay in the river in front of Abram Van Riper's shop,
and Abram Van Riper had gone on Jacob Dolph's note, only a few years
ago. Yet, it seemed that it was _genteel_ of Jacob Dolph to sell timber,
and it was not genteel of Abram Van Riper to be a ship-chandler. There
was, then, a difference between Jacob Dolph and Abram Van Riper--a
difference which, in forty years, Abram Van Riper had never conceived
of. There were folks who held thus. For himself, he did not understand
it. What difference there was between selling the wood to make a ship,
and selling the stores to go inside of her, he could not understand.
The town was changing for the worse; he saw that. He did not wish--God
forbid!--that his son John should go running about to pleasure-gardens.
But it would be no more than neighborly if these young bucks who went
out every night should ask him to go with them. Were William Irving's
boys and Harry Brevoort and those young Kembles too fine to be friends
with his boy? Not that he'd go with them a-rollicking--no, not that--but
'twould be neighborly. It was all wrong, he thought; they were going
whither they knew not, and wherefore they knew not; and with that he
cursed their airs and their graces, and pounded down to the Tontine, to
put his name at the head of the list of those who subscribed for a
testimonial service of plate, to be presented to our esteemed
fellow-citizen and valued associate, Jacob Dolph, on his retirement from
active business.
* * * * *
Jacob Dolph at this moment was setting forth from his house in State
Street, whose pillared balcony, rising from the second floor to the
roof, caught a side glance of the morning sun, that loved the Battery
far better than Pine Street. He had his little boy by the hand--young
Jacob, his miniature, his heir, and the last and only living one of his
eight children. Mr. Dolph walked with his stock thrust out and the lower
end of his waistcoat drawn in--he was Colonel Dolph, if he had cared to
keep the title; and had come back from Monmouth with a hole in his hip
that gave him a bit of a limp, even now in eighteen-hundred-and-seven.
He and the boy marched forth like an army with a small but enthusiastic
left wing, into the poplar-studded Battery. The wind blew fresh off the
bay; the waves beat up against the seawall, and swirled with a chuckle
under Castle Garden bridge. A large brig was coming up before the wind,
all her sails set, as though she were afraid--and she was--of British
frigates outside the Hook. Two or three fat little boats, cat-rigged,
after the good old New York fashion, were beating down toward Staten
Island, to hunt for the earliest blue-fish.
The two Dolphs crossed the Battery, where the elder bowed to his friends
among the merchants who lounged about the city's pleasure-ground, lazily
chatting over their business affairs. Then they turned up past Bowling
Green into Broadway, where Mr. Dolph kept on bowing, for half the town
was out, taking the fresh morning for marketing and all manner of
shopping. Everybody knew Jacob Dolph afar off by his blue coat with the
silver buttons, his nankeen waistcoat, and his red-checked Indian silk
neckcloth. He made it a sort of uniform. Captain Beare had brought him a
bolt of nankeen and a silk kerchief every year since 1793, when Mr.
Dolph gave him credit for the timber of which the _Ursa Minor_ was
built.
And everybody seemed willing to make acquaintance with young Jacob's
London-made kerseymere breeches, of a bright canary color, and with his
lavender silk coat, and with his little _chapeau de Paris_. Indeed,
young Jacob was quite the most prominent moving spectacle on Broadway,
until they came to John Street, and saw something rolling down the
street that quite cut the yellow kerseymeres out of all popular
attention.
This was a carriage, the body of which was shaped like a huge section of
a cheese, set up on its small end upon broad, swinging straps between
two pairs of wheels. It was not unlike a piece of cheese in color, for
it was of a dull and faded grayish-green, like mould, relieved by
pale-yellow panels and gilt ornaments. It was truly an interesting
structure, and it attracted nearly as much notice on Broadway in 1807 as
it might to-day. But it was received with far more reverence, for it was
a court coach, and it belonged to the Des Anges family, the rich
Huguenots of New Rochelle. It had been built in France, thirty years
before, and had been sent over as a present to his brother from the
Count des Anges, who had himself neglected to make use of his
opportunities to embrace the Protestant religion.
When the white-haired old lady who sat in this coach, with a very little
girl by her side, saw Mr. Dolph and his son, she leaned out of the
window and signalled to the old periwigged driver to stop, and he drew
up close to the sidewalk. And then Mr. Dolph and his son came up to the
window and took off their hats, and made a great low bow and a small low
bow to the old lady and the little girl.
"Madam Des Anges," said Mr. Dolph, with an idiom which he had learned
when he was presented at the court of Louis the Sixteenth, "has surely
not driven down from New Rochelle this morning? That would tax even her
powers."
Madam Des Anges did not smile--she had no taste for smiling--but she
bridled amiably.
"No, Mr. Dolph," she replied; "I have been staying with my
daughter-in-law, at her house at King's Bridge, and I have come to town
to put my little granddaughter to school. She is to have the privilege
of being a pupil of Mme. Dumesnil."
Madam Des Anges indicated the little girl with a slight movement, as
though she did not wish to allow the child more consideration than a
child deserved. The little girl turned a great pair of awed eyes, first
on her grandmother, and then on the gentlemen, and spoke no word. Young
Jacob Dolph stared hard at her, and then contemplated his kerseymeres
with lazy satisfaction. He had no time for girls. And a boy who had his
breeches made in London was a boy of consequence, and need not concern
himself about every one he saw.
"And this is your son, I make no doubt," went on Madam Des Anges; "you
must bring him to see us at King's Bridge, while we are so near you.
These young people should know each other."
Mr. Dolph said he would, and showed a becoming sense of the honor of the
invitation; and he made young Jacob say a little speech of thanks, which
he did with a doubtful grace; and then Mr. Dolph sent his compliments to
Madam Des Anges' daughter-in-law, and Madam Des Anges sent her
compliments to Mrs. Dolph, and there was more stately bowing, and the
carriage lumbered on, with the little girl looking timorously out of the
window, her great eyes fixed on the yellow kerseymeres, as they twinkled
up the street.
"Papa," said young Jacob, as they turned the corner of Ann Street, "when
may I go to a boys' school? I'm monstrous big to be at Mrs. Kilmaster's.
And I don't like to be a girl-boy."
"Are you a girl-boy?" inquired his father, smiling.
"Aleck Cameron called me one yesterday. He said I was a girl-boy because
I went to dame-school. He called me Missy, too!" the boy went on, with
his breast swelling.
[Illustration]
"We'll see about it," said Mr. Dolph, smiling again; and they walked on
in silence to Mrs. Kilmaster's door, where he struck the knocker, and a
neat mulatto girl opened the narrow door. Then he patted his boy on the
head and bade him good-by for the morning, and told him to be a good boy
at school. He took a step or two and looked back. Young Jacob lingered
on the step, as if he had a further communication to make. He paused.
"I thumped him," said young Jacob, and the narrow door swallowed him up.
Mr. Dolph continued on his walk up Broadway. As he passed the upper end
of the Common he looked with interest at the piles of red sandstone
among the piles of white marble, where they were building the new City
Hall. The Council had ordered that the rear or northward end of the
edifice should be constructed of red stone; because red stone was cheap,
and none but a few suburbans would ever look down on it from above
Chambers Street. Mr. Dolph shook his head. He thought he knew better. He
had watched the growth of trade; he knew the room for further growth; he
had noticed the long converging lines of river-front, with their
unbounded accommodation for wharves and slips. He believed that the day
would come--and his own boy might see it--when the business of the city
would crowd the dwelling-houses from the river side, east and west, as
far, maybe, as Chambers Street. He had no doubt that the boy might find
himself, forty years from then, in a populous and genteel neighborhood.
Perhaps he foresaw too much; but he had a jealous yearning for a house
that should be a home for him, and for his child, and for his
grandchildren. He wanted a place where his wife might have a garden; a
place which the boy would grow up to love and cherish, where the boy
might bring a wife some day. And even if it were a little out of
town--why, his wife did not want a rout every night; and it was likely
his old friends would come out and see him once in a while, and smoke a
pipe in his garden and eat a dish of strawberries, perhaps.
As he thought it all over for the hundredth time, weighing for and
against in his gentle and deliberative mind, he strolled far out of
town. There was a house here and there on the road--a house with a trim,
stiff little garden, full of pink and white and blue flowers in orderly,
clam-shell-bordered beds. But it was certainly, he had to admit, as he
looked about him, very _countrified_ indeed. It seemed that the city
must lose itself if it wandered up here among these rolling meadows and
wooded hills. Yet even up here, half way to Greenwich Village, there
were little outposts of the town--clumps of neighborly houses, mostly of
the poorer class, huddling together to form small nuclei for sporadic
growth. There was one on his right, near the head of Collect Street.
Perhaps that quizzical little old German was right, who had told him
that King's Bridge property was a rational investment.
He went across the hill where Grand Street crosses Broadway, and up past
what was then North and is to-day Houston Street, and then turned down a
straggling road that ran east and west. He walked toward the Hudson, and
passed a farmhouse or two, and came to a bare place where there were no
trees, and only a few tangled bushes and ground-vines.
Here a man was sitting on a stone, awaiting him. As he came near, the
man arose.
"Ah, it's you, Weeks? And have you the plan?"
"Yes, Colonel--Mr. Dolph. I've put the window where you want it--that
is, my brother Levi did--though I don't see as you're going to have much
trouble in looking over anything that's likely to come between you and
the river."
[Illustration]
Mr. Dolph took the crisp roll of parchment and studied it with loving
interest. It had gone back to Ezra Weeks, the builder, and his brother
Levi, the architect, for the twentieth time, perhaps. Was there ever an
architect's plan put in the hands of a happy nest-builder where the
windows did not go up and down from day to day, and the doors did not
crawl all around the house, and the veranda did not contract and expand
like a sensitive plant; or where the rooms and closets and corridors did
not march backward and forward and in and out at the bidding of every
fond, untutored whim?
"It's a monstrous great big place for a country-house, Mr. Dolph," said
Ezra Weeks, as he looked over Jacob Dolph's shoulder at the drawings of
the house, and shook his head with a sort of pitying admiration for the
projector's audacity.
They talked for a while, and looked at the site as if they might see
more in it than they saw yesterday, and then Weeks set off for the city,
pledged to hire laborers and to begin the work on the morrow.
"I think I can get you some of that stone that's going into the back of
the City Hall, if you say so, Mr. Dolph. That stone was bought cheap,
you know--bought for the city."
"See what you can do, Weeks," said Mr. Dolph; and Mr. Weeks went
whistling down the road.
Jacob Dolph walked around his prospective domain. He kicked a wild
blackberry bush aside, to look at the head of a stake, and tried to
realize that that would be the corner of his house. He went to where the
parlor fireplace would be, and stared at the grass and stones, wondering
what it would be like to watch the fire flickering on the new hearth.
Then he looked over toward the Hudson, and saw the green woods on Union
Hill and the top of a white sail over the high river-bank. He hoped that
no one would build a large house between him and the river.
He lingered so long that the smoke of midday dinners was arising from
Greenwich Village when he turned back toward town. When he reached the
Commons on his homeward way he came across a knot of idlers who were
wasting the hour of the noontide meal in gaping at the unfinished
municipal building.
They were admiringly critical. One man was vociferously enthusiastic.
"It's a marvellous fine building, say I, sir! Worthy of the classic
shades of antiquity. If Europe can show a finer than that will be when
she's done, then, in _my_ opinion, sir, Europe is doing well."
"You admire the architecture, Mr. Huggins?" asked Mr. Dolph, coming up
behind him. Mr. Huggins turned around, slightly disconcerted, and
assumed an amiability of manner such as can only be a professional
acquirement among us poor creatures of human nature.
"Ah, Mr. Dolph--Colonel, I should say! I have purposed to do myself the
honor of presenting myself at your house this afternoon, Colonel Dolph,
to inquire if you did not desire to have your peruke _frisée_. For I had
taken the liberty of observing you in conversation with Madam Des Anges
this morning, in her equipage, and it had occurred to me that possibly
the madam might be a-staying with you."
"Madam Des Anges does not honor my house this time, Huggins," returned
Mr. Dolph, with an indulgent little laugh; "and my poor old peruke will
do very well for to-day."
There was a perceptible diminution in Mr. Huggins's ardor; but he was
still suave.
"I hope the madam is in good health," he remarked.
"She is, I believe," said Mr. Dolph.
"And your good lady, sir? I have not had the pleasure of treating Mrs.
Dolph professionally for some time, sir, I----"
Mr. Dolph was wary. "I don't think Mrs. Dolph is fond of the latest
modes, Huggins. But here comes Mr. Van Riper. Perhaps he will have his
peruke _frisée_."
Mr. Huggins got out of a dancing-master's pose with intelligent
alacrity, bade Mr. Dolph a hasty "Good-afternoon!" and hurried off
toward his shop, one door above Wall Street. Mr. Van Riper did not like
"John Richard Desbrosses Huggins, Knight of the Comb."
There was something else that Mr. Van Riper did not like.
"Hullo, Dolph!" he hailed his friend. "What's this I heard about you
building a preposterous tom-fool of a town-house out by Greenwich? Why
don't you hire that house that Burr had, up near Lispenard's
cow-pasture, and be done with it?"
Mr. Dolph seized his chance.
"It's not so preposterous as all that. By the way, talking of Burr, I
hear from Richmond that he'll positively be tried next week. Did you
know that young Irving--William's son, the youngest, the lad that writes
squibs--has gone to Richmond for the defence?"
"William Irving's son might be in better business," grunted Mr. Van
Riper, for a moment diverted. "If we'd got at that devil when he
murdered poor Hamilton--'fore gad, we'd have saved the trouble of trying
him. Do you remember when we was for going to Philadelphia after him,
and there the sly scamp was at home all the time up in his fine house,
a-sitting in a tub of water, reading French stuff, as cool as a
cowcumber, with the whole town hunting for him?" Then he came back. "But
that house of yours. You haven't got this crazy notion that New York's
going to turn into London while you smoke your pipe, have you? You're
keeping some of your seven business senses, ain't you?"
"I don't know," Mr. Dolph mildly defended his hobby; "there is a great
potentiality of growth in this city. Here's an estimate that John
Pintard made the other day----"
"John Pintard! He's another like _you_!" said Mr. Van Riper.
"Well, look at it for yourself," pleaded the believer in New York's
future.
Mr. Van Riper took the neatly written paper, and simply snorted and
gasped as he read this:
_Statistical_.
By the numeration of the inhabitants of this city, recently
published, the progress of population for the last 5 years appears
to be at the rate of 25 per cent. Should our city continue to
increase in the same proportion during the present century, the
aggregate number at its close will far exceed that of any other city
in the Old World, Pekin not excepted, as will appear from the
following table. Progress of population in the city of New York,
computed at the rate of 25 per cent, every 5 years:
1805 75,770 1855 705,650
1810 95,715 1860 882,062
1815 110,390 1865 1,102,577
1820 147,987 1870 1,378,221
1825 184,923 1875 1,722,776
1830 231,228 1880 2,153,470
1835 289,035 1885 2,691,837
1840 361,293 1890 3,364,796
1845 451,616 1895 4,205,995
1850 564,520 1900 5,257,493
When he had read it through he was a-quivering, crimson with that rage
of Conservative indignation which is even more fervent than the flames
of Radical enthusiasm.
"Yes," he said; "there's seventy-five thousand people in this town, and
there'll be seventy-five thousand bankrupts if this lunacy goes on. And
there's seventy-five thousand maggots in your brain, and seventy-five
thousand in John Pintard's; and if you two live to see nineteen hundred,
you'll have twice five million two hundred and fifty-seven thousand four
hundred and ninety-three--whatever that may be!" And he thrust the paper
back at Jacob Dolph, and made for the Tontine and the society of
sensible men.
* * * * *
The house was built, in spite of Abram Van Riper's remonstrance. It had
a stone front, almost flush with the road, and brick gable-ends, in each
one of which, high up near the roof, stood an arched window, to lift an
eyebrow to the sun, morning and evening. But it was only a
country-house, after all; and the Dolphs set up their carriage and
drove out and in, from June to September.
There was a garden at the side, where Mrs. Dolph could have the flowers
her heart had yearned after ever since Jacob Dolph brought her from her
home at Rondout, when she was seventeen.
* * * * *
Strengthened by the country air--so they said--young Jacob grew clean
out of his dame-school days and into and out of Columbia College, and
was sent abroad, a sturdy youth, to have a year's holiday. It was to the
new house that he came back the next summer, with a wonderful stock of
fine clothes and of finer manners, and with a pair of mustaches that
scandalized everybody but Madam Des Anges, who had seen the like in
France when she visited her brother. And a very fine young buck was
young Jacob, altogether, with his knowledge of French and his ignorance
of Dutch, and a way he had with the women, and another way he had with
the men, and his heirship to old Jacob Dolph's money and his two
houses.
For they stayed in the old house until 1822.
* * * * *
It was a close, hot night in the early summer; there was a thick, warm
mist that turned now and then into a soft rain; yet every window in the
Dolphs' house on State Street was closed.
It had been a hideous day for New York. From early morning until long
after dark had set in, the streets had been filled with frightened,
disordered crowds. The city was again stricken with the old, inevitable,
ever-recurring scourge of yellow fever, and the people had lost their
heads. In every house, in every office and shop, there was hasty
packing, mad confusion, and wild flight. It was only a question of
getting out of town as best one might. Wagons and carts creaked and
rumbled and rattled through every street, piled high with household
chattels, up-heaped in blind haste. Women rode on the swaying loads, or
walked beside with the smaller children in their arms. Men bore heavy
burdens, and children helped according to their strength. There was
only one idea, and that was flight--from a pestilence whose coming
might have been prevented, and whose course could have been stayed. To
most of these poor creatures the only haven seemed to be Greenwich
Village; but some sought the scattered settlements above; some crossed
to Hoboken; some to Bushwick; while others made a long journey to Staten
Island, across the bay. And when they reached their goals, it was to beg
or buy lodgings anywhere and anyhow; to sleep in cellars and garrets, in
barns and stables.
[Illustration]
The panic was not only among the poor and ignorant. Merchants were
moving their offices, and even the Post Office and the Custom House
were to be transferred to Greenwich. There were some who remained
faithful throughout all, and who labored for the stricken, and whose
names are not even written in the memory of their fellow-men. But the
city had been so often ravaged before, that at the first sight there was
one mere animal impulse of flight that seized upon all alike.
At one o'clock, when some of the better streets had once more taken on
their natural quiet, an ox-cart stood before the door of the Dolphs' old
house. A little behind it stood the family carriage, its lamps unlit.
The horses stirred uneasily, but the oxen waited in dull, indifferent
patience. Presently the door opened, and two men came out and awkwardly
bore a plain coffin to the cart. Then they mounted to the front of the
cart, hiding between them a muffled lantern. They wore cloths over the
lower part of their faces, and felt hats drawn low over their eyes.
Something in their gait showed them to be seafaring men, or the like.
Then out of the open door came Jacob Dolph, moving with a feeble shuffle
between his son and his old negro coachman--this man and his wife the
only faithful of all the servants. The young man put his father in the
carriage, and the negro went back and locked the doors and brought the
keys to his young master. He mounted to the box, and through the
darkness could be seen a white towel tied around his arm--the old badge
of servitude's mourning.
The oxen were started up, and the two vehicles moved up into Broadway.
They travelled with painful slowness; the horses had to be held in to
keep them behind the cart, for the oxen could be only guided by the
whip, and not by word of mouth. The old man moaned a little at the pace,
and quivered when he heard the distant sound of hammers.
"What is it?" he asked, nervously.
"They are boarding up some of the streets," said his son; "do not fear,
father. Everything is prepared; and if we make no noise, we shall not be
troubled."
"If we can only keep her out of the Potter's Field--the Potter's Field!"
cried the father; "I'll thank God--I'll ask no more--I'll ask no more!"
And then he broke down and cried a little, feebly, and got his son's
hand in the darkness and put on his own shoulder.
It was nearly two when they came to St. Paul's and turned the corner to
the gate. It was dark below, but some frenzied fools were burning
tar-barrels far down Ann Street, and the light flickered on the top of
the church spire. They crossed the churchyard to where a shallow grave
had been dug, half way down the hill. The men lowered the body into it;
the old negro gave them a little _rouleau_ of coin, and they went
hurriedly away into the night.
[Illustration]
The clergyman came out by and by, with the sexton behind him. He stood
high up above the grave, and drew his long cloak about him and lifted an
old pomander-box to his face. He was not more foolish than his fellows;
in that evil hour men took to charms and to saying of spells. Below the
grave and apart, for the curse rested upon them, too, stood Jacob Dolph
and his son, the old man leaning on the arm of the younger. Then the
clergyman began to read the service for the burial of the dead, over
the departed sister--and wife and mother. He spoke low; but his voice
seemed to echo in the stillness. He came forward with a certain
shrinking, and cast the handful of dust and ashes into the grave. When
it was done, the sexton stepped forward and rapidly threw in the earth
until he had filled the little hollow even with the ground. Then, with
fearful precaution, he laid down the carefully cut sods, and smoothed
them until there was no sign of what had been done. The clergyman turned
to the two mourners, without moving nearer to them, and lifted up his
hands. The old man tried to kneel; but his son held him up, for he was
too feeble, and they bent their heads for a moment of silence. The
clergyman went away as he had come; and Jacob Dolph and his son went
back to the carriage. When his father was seated, young Jacob Dolph said
to the coachman: "To the new house."
The heavy coach swung into Broadway, and climbed up the hill out into
the open country. There were lights still burning in the farmhouses,
bright gleams to east and west, but the silence of the damp summer night
hung over the sparse suburbs, and the darkness seemed to grow more
intense as they drove away from the city. The trees by the roadside were
almost black in the gray mist; the raw, moist smell of the night, the
damp air, chilly upon the high land, came in through the carriage
windows. Young Jacob looked out and noted their progress by familiar
landmarks on the road; but the old man sat with his head bent on his new
black stock.
It was almost three, and the east was beginning to look dark, as though
a storm were settling there in the grayness, when they turned down the
straggling street and drew up before the great dark mass that was the
new house. The carriage-wheels gritted against the loose stones at the
edge of the roadway, and the great door of the house swung open. The
light of one wavering candle-flame, held high above her head, fell on
the black face of old Chloe, the coachman's wife. There were no candles
burning on the high-pitched stairway; all was dark behind her in the
empty house.
Young Jacob Dolph helped his father to the ground, and between the young
man and the negro old Jacob Dolph wearily climbed the steps. Chloe
lifted her apron to her face, and turned to lead them up the stair. Her
husband went out to his horses, shutting the door softly after him,
between Jacob Dolph's old life and the new life that was to begin in the
new house.
II.
When young Jacob Dolph came down to breakfast the next morning he found
his father waiting for him in the breakfast-room. The meal was upon the
table. Old Chloe stood with her black hands folded upon her white apron,
and her pathetic negro eyes following the old gentleman as he moved
wistfully about the room.
Father and son shook hands in silence, and turned to the table. There
were three chairs in their accustomed places. They hesitated a
half-second, looking at the third great arm-chair, as though they waited
for the mistress of the house to take her place. Then they sat down. It
was six years before any one took that third chair, but every morning
Jacob Dolph the elder made that little pause before he put himself at
the foot of the table.
On this first morning there was very little said and very little eaten.
But when they had made an end of sitting at the table old Jacob Dolph
said, with something almost like testiness in his husky voice:
"Jacob, I want to sell the house."
"Father!"
[Illustration]
"The old house, I mean; I shall never go back there."
His son looked at him with a further inquiry. He felt a sudden new
apprehension. The father sat back in his easy-chair, drumming on the
arms with nervous fingers.
"I shall never go back there," he said again.
"Of course you know best, sir," said young Jacob, gently; "but would it
be well to be precipitate? It is possible that you may feel differently
some time----"
"There is no 'some time' for me!" broke in the old man, gripping the
chair-arms, fiercely; "my time's done--done, sir!"
Then his voice broke and became plaintively kind.
"There, there! Forgive me, Jacob, boy. But it's true, my boy, true. The
world's done, for me; but there's a world ahead for you, my son, thank
God! I'll be patient--I'll be patient. God has been good to me, and I
haven't many years to wait, in the course of nature."
He looked vacantly out of the window, trying to see the unforeseen with
his mental sight.
"While I'm here, Jacob, let the old man have his way. It's a whimsey; I
doubt 'tis hardly rational. But I have no heart to go home. Let me learn
to live my life here. 'Twill be easier."
"But do you think it necessary to sell, sir? Could you not hold the
house? Are you certain that you would like to have a stranger living
there?"
"I care not a pin who lives within those four walls now, sir!" cried the
elder, with a momentary return of his vehemence. "It's no house to me
now. Sell it, sir, sell it!--if there's any one will give money for it
at a time like this. Bring every stick of furniture and every stitch of
carpet up here; and let me have my way, Jacob--it won't be for long."
He got up and went blindly out of the room, and his son heard him
muttering, "Not for long--not for long, now," as he wandered about the
house and went aimlessly into room after room.
Old Jacob Dolph had always been an indulgent parent, and none kinder
ever lived. But we should hardly call him indulgent to-day. Good as he
was to his boy, it had always been with the goodness of a superior. It
was the way of his time. A half-century ago the child's position was
equivocal. He lived by the grace of God and his parents, and their duty
to him was rather a duty to society, born of an abstract morality. Love
was given him, not as a right, but as an indulgence. And young Jacob
Dolph, in all his grief and anxiety, was guiltily conscious of a secret
thrill of pleasure--natural enough, poor boy!--in his sudden elevation
to the full dignity of manhood, and his father's abdication of the
headship of the house.
A little later in the day, urged again by the old gentleman, he put on
his hat and went to see Abram Van Riper. Mr. Van Riper was now, despite
his objections to the pernicious institution of country-houses, a near
neighbor of the Dolphs. He had yielded, not to fashion, but to yellow
fever, and at the very first of the outbreak had bought a house on the
outskirts of Greenwich Village, and had moved there in unseemly haste.
He had also registered an unnecessarily profane oath that he would never
again live within the city limits.
When young Jacob Dolph came in front of the low, hip-roofed house, whose
lower story of undressed stone shone with fresh whitewash, Mr. Van Riper
stood on his stoop and checked his guest at the front gate, a dozen
yards away. From this distance he jabbed his big gold-headed cane toward
the young man, as though to keep him off.
[Illustration]
"Stay there, sir--you, sir, you Jacob Dolph!" he roared, brandishing the
big stick. "Stand back, I tell you! Don't come in, sir! Good-day,
sir--good-day, good-day, good-day!" (This hurried excursus was in
deference to a sense of social duty.) "Keep away, confound you, keep
away--consume your body, sir, stay where you are!"
"I'm not coming any nearer, Mr. Van Riper," said Jacob Dolph, with a
smile which he could not help.
"I can't have you in here, sir," went on Mr. Van Riper, with no
abatement of his agitation. "I don't want to be inhospitable; but I've
got a wife and a son, sir, and you're infectious--damn it, sir, you're
infectious!"
"I'll stay where I am, Mr. Van Riper," said young Jacob, smiling again.
"I only came with a message from my father."
"With a what?" screamed Mr. Van Riper. "I can't have--oh, ay, a message!
Well, say it then and be off, like a sensible youngster. Consume it,
man, can't you talk farther out in the street?"
When Mr. Van Riper learned his visitor's message, he flung his stick on
the white pebbles of the clam-shell-bordered path, and swore that he,
Van Riper, was the only sane man in a city of lunatics, and that if
Jacob Dolph tried to carry out his plan he should be shipped
straightway to Bloomingdale.
But young Jacob had something of his father's patience, and, despite the
publicity of the interview, he contrived to make Mr. Van Riper
understand how matters stood. To tell the truth, Van Riper grew quite
sober and manageable when he realized that his extravagant imputation of
insanity was not so wide of the mark as it might have seemed, and that
there was a possibility that his old friend's mind might be growing
weak. He even ventured a little way down the path and permitted Jacob to
come to the gate while they discussed the situation.
"Poor old Dolph--poor old Jacob!" he groaned. "We must keep him out of
the hands of the sharks, that we must!" He did not see young Jacob's
irrepressible smile at this singular extension of metaphor. "He mustn't
be allowed to sell that house in open market--never, sir! Confound it,
I'll buy it myself before I'll see him fleeced!"
In the end he agreed, on certain strict conditions of precaution, to see
young Jacob the next day and discuss ways and means to save the
property.
"Come here, sir, at ten, and I'll see you in the sitting-room, and we'll
find out what we can do for your father--curse it, it makes me feel bad;
by gad, it does! Ten to-morrow, then--and come fumigated, young man,
don't you forget that--come fumigated, sir!"
It was Van Riper who bought the property at last. He paid eighteen
thousand dollars for it. This was much less than its value; but it was
more than any one else would have given just at that time, and it was
all that Van Riper could afford. The transaction weighed on the
purchaser's mind, however. He had bought the house solely out of
kindness, at some momentary inconvenience to himself; and yet it looked
as though he were taking advantage of his friend's weakness. Abram Van
Riper was a man who cultivated a clear conscience, of a plain,
old-fashioned sort, and the necessity for self-examination was novel and
disagreeable to him.
* * * * *
Life lived itself out at Jacob Dolph's new house whether he liked it or
not. The furniture came up-town, and was somewhat awkwardly disposed
about its new quarters; and in this unhomelike combination of two homes
old Mr. Dolph sat himself down to finish his stint of life. He awoke
each morning and found that twenty-four hours of sleep and waking lay
before him, to be got through in their regular order, just as they were
lived through by men who had an interest in living. He went to bed every
night, and crossed off one from a tale of days of which he could not
know the length.
Of course his son, in some measure, saved his existence from emptiness.
He was proud of young Jacob--fond and proud. He looked upon him as a
prince of men, which he was, indeed. He trusted absolutely in the young
man, and his trust was well placed. And he knew that his boy loved him.
But he had an old man's sad consciousness that he was not necessary to
Jacob--that he was an adjunct, at the best, not an integral part of this
younger existence. He saw Jacob the younger gradually recovering from
his grief for the mother who had left them; and he knew that even so
would Jacob some day recover from grief when his father should have
gone.
He saw this; but it is doubtful if he felt it acutely. Nature was
gradually dulling his sensibilities with that wonderful anæsthetic of
hers, which is so much kinder to the patient than it is to his watching
friends. After the first wild freak of selling the house, he showed, for
a long time, no marked signs of mental impairment, beyond his lack of
interest in the things which he had once cared about--even in the growth
of the city he loved. And in a lonely and unoccupied man, sixty-five
years of age, this was not unnatural. It was not unnatural, even, if now
and then he was whimsical, and took odd fancies and prejudices. But
nevertheless the work was going on within his brain, little by little,
day by day.
He settled his life into an almost mechanical routine, of which the most
active part was his daily walk down into the city. At first he would not
go beyond St. Paul's churchyard; but after awhile he began to take
timorous strolls among the old business streets where his life had been
passed. He would drop into the offices of his old friends, and would
read the market reports with a pretence of great interest, and then he
would fold up his spectacles and put them in their worn leather case,
and walk slowly out. He was always pleased when one of the younger
clerks bowed to him and said, "Good-day, Mr. Dolph!"
[Illustration]
It was in the fourth year of his widowhood that he bethought himself of
young Jacob's need of a more liberal social life than he had been
leading. The boy went about enough; he was a good deal of a beau, so
his father heard; and there was no desirable house in the town that did
not welcome handsome, amiable young Dolph. But he showed no signs of
taking a wife unto himself, and in those days the bachelor had only a
provisional status in society. He was expected to wed, and the whole
circle of his friends chorused yearly a deeper regret for the lost
sheep, as time made that detestable thing, an "old bachelor," of him.
Young Jacob was receiving many courtesies and was making no adequate
return. He felt it himself, but he was too tender of his father's
changeless grief to urge him to open the great empty house to their
friends. The father, however, felt that it was his duty to sacrifice his
own desire for solitude, and, when the winter of 1825 brought home the
city's wandering children--there were not so many of the wandering sort
in 1825--he insisted that young Jacob should give a dinner to his
friends among the gay young bachelors. That would be a beginning; and if
all went well they would have an old maiden aunt from Philadelphia to
spend the winter with them, and help them to give the dinner parties
which do not encourage bachelorhood, but rather convert and reform the
coy celibate.
The news went rapidly through the town. The Dolph hospitality had been
famous, and this was taken for a signal that the Dolph doors were to
open again. There was great excitement in Hudson Street and St. John's
Park. Maidens, bending over their tambour-frames, working secret hopes
and aspirations in with their blossoming silks and worsted, blushed,
with faint speculative smiles, as they thought of the vast social
possibilities of the mistress of the grand Dolph house. Young bachelors,
and old bachelors, too, rolled memories of the Dolph Madeira over
longing tongues.
The Dolph cellar, too, had been famous, and just at that period New
Yorkers had a fine and fanciful taste in wine, if they had any
self-respect whatever.
I think it must have been about then that Mr. Dominick Lynch began his
missionary labors among the smokers and drinkers of this city; he who
bought a vineyard in France and the Vuelta Abajo plantations in Cuba,
solely to teach the people of his beloved New York what was the
positively proper thing in wines and cigars. If it was not then, it
could not have been much later that Mr. Dolph had got accustomed to
receiving, every now and then, an unordered and unexpected consignment
of wines or Havana cigars, sent up from Little Dock Street--or what we
call Water Street now, the lower end of it. And I am sure that he paid
Mr. Lynch's bill with glowing pride; for Mr. Lynch extended the
evangelizing hand of culture to none but those of pre-eminent social
position.
It was to be quite a large dinner; but it was noticeable that none of
the young men who were invited had engagements of regrettable priority.
Jacob Dolph the elder looked more interested in life than he had looked
in four years when he stood on the hearthrug in the drawing-room and
received his son's guests. He was a bold figure among all the young men,
not only because he was tall and white-haired, and for the moment
erect, and of a noble and gracious cast of countenance, but because he
clung to his old style of dress--his knee-breeches and silk stockings,
and his long coat, black, for this great occasion, but of the
"shadbelly" pattern. He wore his high black stock, too, and his
snow-white hair was gathered behind into a loose peruke.
[Illustration]
The young men wore trousers, or pantaloons, as they mostly called them,
strapped under their varnished boots. Their coats were cut like our
dress-coats, if you can fancy them with a wild amplitude of collar and
lapel. They wore large cravats and gaudy waistcoats, and two or three of
them who had been too much in England came with shawls or rugs around
their shoulders.
They were a fashionable lot of people, and this was a late dinner, so
they sat down at six o'clock in the great dining-room--not the little
breakfast-room--with old Jacob Dolph at one end of the table and young
Jacob Dolph at the other.
It was a pleasant dinner, and the wine was good, and the company duly
appreciative, although individually critical.
Old Jacob Dolph had on his right an agreeable French count, just arrived
in New York, who was creating a _furor_; and on his left was Mr. Philip
Waters, the oldest of the young men, who, being thirty-five, had a
certain consideration for old age. But old Jacob Dolph was not quite at
his ease. He did not understand the remarkable decorum of the young men.
He himself belonged to the age of "bumpers and no heel taps," and nobody
at his board to-night seemed to care about drinking bumpers, even out
of the poor, little, newfangled claret-glasses, that held only a
thimbleful apiece. He had never known a lot of gentlemen, all by
themselves, to be so discreet. Before the evening was over he became
aware of the fact that he was the only man who was proposing toasts, and
then he proposed them no more.
Things had changed since he was a young buck, and gave bachelor parties.
Why, he could remember seeing his own good father--an irreproachable
gentleman, surely--lock the door of his dining-room on the inside--ay,
at just such a dinner as this--and swear that no guest of his should go
out of that room sober. And his word had been kept. Times were changing.
He thought, somehow, that these young men needed more good port in their
veins.
Toward the end of the festivities he grew silent. He gave no more
toasts, and drank no more bumpers, although he might safely have put
another bottle or two under his broad waistcoat. But he leaned back in
his chair, and rested one hand on the table, playing with his wineglass
in an absent-minded way. There was a vague smile on his face; but every
now and then he knit his heavy gray brows as if he were trying to work
out some problem of memory. Mr. Philip Waters and the French count were
talking across him; he had been in the conversation, but he had dropped
out some time before. At last he rose, with his brows knit, and pulled
out his huge watch, and looked at its face. Everybody turned toward him,
and, at the other end of the table, his son half rose to his feet. He
put the watch back in his pocket, and said, in his clear, deep voice:
"Gentlemen, I think we will rejoin the ladies."
There was a little impulsive stir around the table, and then he seemed
to understand that he had wandered, and a frightened look came over his
face. He tottered backward, and swayed from side to side. Mr. Philip
Waters and the Frenchman had their arms behind him before he could fall,
and in a second or two he had straightened himself up. He made a
stately, tremulous apology for what he called his "infelicitous
absence of mind," and then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering
no one to go with him.
[Illustration: And then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering no
one to go with him.]
A little while later in the evening, Mr. Philip Waters, walking down
Broadway (which thoroughfare was getting to have a fairly suburban
look), informed the French count that in his, Mr. Waters's, opinion,
young Jacob Dolph would own that house before long.
Young Jacob Dolph's father insisted on repetitions of the bachelor
dinner, but he never again appeared in the great dining-room. When there
was a stag party he took his own simple dinner at five o'clock and went
to bed early, and lay awake until his son had dismissed the last mild
reveller, and he could hear the light, firm, young footstep mounting the
stairs to the bedroom door opposite his own.
* * * * *
That was practically the end of it for old Jacob Dolph. The maiden aunt,
who had been invited, was notified that she could not come, for Mr.
Dolph was not well enough to open his house that winter. But it was
delicately intimated to her that if he grew worse she might still be
sent for, and that alleviated her natural disappointment. She liked to
give parties; but there is also a chastened joy for some people in being
at the head of a house of mourning.
Old Mr. Dolph grew no worse physically, except that he was inclined to
make his daily walks shorter, and that he grew fonder of sitting at home
in the little breakfast-room, where the sun shone almost all day long,
and where Mrs. Dolph had once been fond of coming to sew. Her little
square work-table of mahogany stood there still. There the old gentleman
liked to dine, and often he dined alone. Young Jacob was in great demand
all over town, and his father knew that he ought to go out and amuse
himself. And the young man, although he was kind and loving, and never
negligent in any office of respect or affection, had that strong youth
in him which makes it impossible to sit every day of the week opposite
an old man whose world had slipped by him, who knew nothing of youth
except to love it and wonder at it.
In the morning, before he went out for his daily tramp into town, old
Jacob would say to young Jacob:
"I suppose I shall see you at dinner, my boy?"
And young Jacob would say, "Yes, sir," or "No, sir, I think not. Mrs.
Des Anges was in town yesterday, and she asked me to ride up there
to-day and dine. And Diana" (Diana was his big black mare) "needs a
little work; she's getting badly out of condition. So, if it doesn't
matter to you, sir, I'll just run up there and get back before the moon
sets."
And the father would answer that it didn't matter, and would send his
best respects, through Mrs. Des Anges at King's Bridge, to Madam Des
Anges at New Rochelle; and at night he would sit down alone to his
dinner in the breakfast-room, served by old Chloe, who did her humble
best to tempt his appetite, which was likely to be feeble when Master
Jacob was away.
Master Jacob had taken to riding to King's Bridge of late. Sometimes he
would start out early in the morning, just about the time when young
Van Riper was plodding by on his way to the shop. Young Van Riper liked
to be at the shop an hour earlier than his father. Old Mr. Dolph was
always up, on these occasions, to see his son start off. He loved to
look at the boy, in his English riding-boots and breeches, astride of
black Diana, who pranced and curvetted up the unpaved road. Young Jacob
had her well in hand, but he gave her her head and let her play until
they reached Broadway, where he made her strike a rattling regular pace
until they got well up the road; and then she might walk up Bloomingdale
way or across to Hickory Lane.
If he went up by the east he was likely to dismount at a place which you
can see now, a little west and south of McComb's Dam Bridge, where there
is a bit of a rocky hollow, and a sort of horizontal cleft in the rocks
that has been called a cave, and a water-washed stone above, whose oddly
shaped depression is called an Indian's footprint. He would stop there,
because right in that hollow, as I can tell you myself, grew, in his
time as in mine, the first of the spring flowers. It was full of violets
once, carpeted fairly with the pale, delicate petals.
And up toward the west, on a bridle-path between the hills and the
river, as you came toward Fort Washington, going to Tubby Hook--we are
refined nowadays, and Tubby Hook is "Inwood"--Heaven help it!--there
were wonderful flowers in the woods. The wind-flowers came there early,
nestling under the gray rocks that sparkled with garnets; and there
bloomed great bunches of Dutchman's-breeches--not the thin sprays that
come in the late New England spring, but huge clumps that two men could
not enclose with linked hands; great masses of scarlet and purple,
and--mostly--of a waxy white, with something deathlike in their
translucent beauty. There, also, he would wade into the swamps around a
certain little creek, lured by a hope of the jack-in-the-pulpit, to find
only the odorous and disappointing skunk-cabbage. And there the woods
were full of the aroma of sassafras, and of birch tapped by the earliest
woodpecker, whose drumming throbbed through the young man's deep and
tender musing.
And--strange enough for a young man who rides only to exercise his black
mare--he never came out of those woods without an armful of columbine or
the like. And--strange enough for any young man in this world of strange
things--when he sat down at the table of Mrs. Des Anges, in her pleasant
house near Harlem Creek, Miss Aline Des Anges wore a bunch of those
columbines at her throat. Miss Aline Des Anges was a slim girl, not very
tall, with great dark eyes that followed some people with a patient
wistfulness.
* * * * *
One afternoon, in May of 1827, young Jacob found his father in the
breakfast-room, and said to him:
"Father, I am going to marry Aline Des Anges."
His father, who had been dozing in the sun by the south window, raised
his eyes to his son's face with a kindly, blank look, and said,
thoughtfully:
"Des Anges. That's a good family, Jacob, and a wonderful woman, Madam
Des Anges. Is she alive yet?"
* * * * *
When Madam Des Anges, eighty years old, and strong and well, heard of
this, she said:
"It is the etiquette of France that one family should make the
proposition to the other family. Under the circumstances _I_ will be the
family that proposes. I will make a precedent. The Des Anges make
precedents."
And she rode down to the Dolph house in the family carriage--the last
time it ever went out--and made her "proposition" to Jacob Dolph the
elder, and he brightened up most wonderfully, until you would have
thought him quite his old self, and he told her what an honor he
esteemed the alliance, and paid her compliments a hundred words long.
And in May of the next year, King's Bridge being out of the question,
and etiquette being waived at the universal demand of society, the young
couple stood up in the drawing-room of the Dolph house to be wed.
The ceremony was fashionably late--seven o'clock in the evening. And
after it was over, and the young couple had digested what St. Paul had
to say about the ordinance of wedlock, and had inaudibly promised to do
and be whatever the domine required of them, they were led by the
half-dozen groomsmen to the long glass between the front windows, and
made to stand up there, with their faces toward the company, and to
receive the congratulations of a mighty procession of friends, who all
used the same formulas, except the very old ones, who were delicately
indelicate.
The bridegroom wore a blue coat and trousers, and a white satin
waistcoat embroidered with silver-thread roses and lilies-of-the-valley.
The coat was lined with cream-colored satin, quilted in a most elaborate
pattern; and his necktie was of satin, too, with embroidered ends. His
shirt was a miracle of fine linen. As to the bride, she was in white
satin and lace, and at her throat she wore a little bunch of late white
columbines, for which Mr. Jacob Dolph the younger had scoured the woods
near Fort Washington.
There was to be a grand supper, later; and the time of waiting was
filled up with fashionable conversation.
That dear old doctor, who was then a dear young doctor, and whose fine
snow-crowned face stood in later years as an outward and visible sign of
all that was brave, kindly, self-sacrificing, and benevolent in the art
of healing, was seated by Madam Des Anges, and was telling her, in
stately phrase, suited to his auditor, of a certain case of heroism with
which he had met in the course of his practice. Mr. Blank, it appeared,
had been bitten by a dog that was supposed to be possessed by the
rabies. For months he had suffered the agonies of mental suspense and of
repeated cauterizing of the flesh, and during those months had concealed
his case from his wife, that he might spare her pain--suffering in
silence enough to unnerve most men.
"It was heroic," said Dr. F.
Madam Des Anges bowed her gray head approvingly.
"I think," she said, "his conduct shows him to be a man of taste. Had he
informed his wife of his condition, she might have experienced the most
annoying solicitude; and I am informed that she is a person of feeble
character."
The doctor looked at her, and then down at the floor; and then he asked
her if she did not hope that Almaviva Lynch would bring Garcia back
again, with that marvellous Italian opera, which, as he justly observed,
captivated the eye, charmed the ear, and awakened the profoundest
emotions of the heart.
And at that Madam Des Anges showed some animation, and responded that
she had listened to some pleasing operas in Paris; but she did not know
that they were of Italian origin.
But if Madam Des Anges was surprised to learn that any good thing could
come out of any other country than France, there was another surprise in
store for her, and it did not long impend.
It was only a little while after this that her grandson-in-law, finding
her on his right and Abram Van Riper on his left--he had served out his
time as a statue in front of the mirror--thought it proper to introduce
to Madam Des Anges his father's old friend, Mr. Van Riper. Mr. Van
Riper bowed as low as his waistcoat would allow, and courteously
observed that the honor then accorded him he had enjoyed earlier in the
evening through the kind offices of Mr. Jacob Dolph, senior.
Madam Des Anges dandled her quizzing-glass as though she meant to put it
up to her eye, and said, in a weary way:
"Mr.--ah--Van Riper must pardon me. I have not the power of remembering
faces that some people appear to have; and my eyes--my eyes are not
strong."
Old Van Riper stared at her, and he turned a turkey-cock purple all over
his face, down to the double chin that hung over his white neckerchief.
"If your ladyship has to buy spectacles," he sputtered, "it needn't be
on my account."
And he stamped off to the sideboard and tried to cool his red-hot rage
with potations of Jamaica rum. There his wife found him. She had drawn
near when she saw him talking with the great Madam Des Anges, and she
had heard, as she stood hard by and smiled unobtrusively, the end of
that brief conversation. Her face, too, was flushed--a more fiery red
than her flame-colored satin dress.
She attacked him in a vehement whisper.
"Van Riper, what are you doing? I'd almost believe you'd had too much
liquor, if I didn't know you hadn't had a drop. Will you ever learn what
gentility is? D'ye want us to live and die like toads in a hole? Here
you are with your ill manners, offending Madam Des Anges, that everybody
knows is the best of the best, and there's an end of all likelihood of
ever seeing her and her folks, and two nieces unmarried and as good
girls as ever was, and such a connection for your son, who hasn't been
out of the house it's now twelve months--except to this very wedding
here, and you've no thought of your family when once you lose that
mighty fine temper of yours, that you're so prodigious proud of; and
where you'll end us, Van Riper, is more than I know, I vow."
But all she could get out of Van Riper was:
"The old harridan! She'll remember my name this year or two to come,
I'll warrant ye!"
* * * * *
It was all over at last, and old black Julius, who had been acting as a
combination of link-boy and major-domo at the foot of the front steps,
extinguished his lantern, and went to bed, some time before a little
white figure stole up the stairs and slipped into a door that
Chloe--black Chloe--held open.
And the next day Jacob Dolph the elder handed the young bride into the
new travelling-carriage with his stateliest grace, and Mr. and Mrs.
Jacob Dolph, junior, rolled proudly up the road, through Bloomingdale,
and across King's Bridge--stopping for luncheon at the Des Anges
house--over to New Rochelle, where the feminine head of the house of Des
Anges received them at her broad front door, and where they had the
largest room in her large, old-fashioned house, for one night. Madam Des
Anges wished to keep them longer, and was authoritative about it. But
young Jacob settled the question of supremacy then and there, with the
utmost courtesy, and Madam Des Anges, being great enough to know that
she was beaten, sent off the victor on the morrow, with his trembling
accomplice by his side, and wished them _bon voyage_ as heartily as she
possibly could.
So they started afresh on their bridal tour, and very soon the
travelling carriage struck the old Queen Anne's Road, and reached
Yonkers. And there, and from there up to Fishkill, they passed from one
country-house to another, bright particular stars at this dinner and at
that supper, staying a day here and a night there, and having just the
sort of sociable, public, restless, rattling good time that neither of
them wanted.
At every country-house where they stayed a day they were pressed to stay
a week, and always the whole neighborhood was routed out to pay them
social tribute. The neighbors came in by all manner of conveyances. One
family of aristocrats started at six o'clock in the morning, and
travelled fourteen miles down the river in an ox-cart, the ladies
sitting bolt upright, with their hair elaborately dressed for the
evening's entertainment. And once a regular assembly ball was given in
their honor, at a town-hall, the use of which was granted for the
purpose specified by unanimous vote of the town council. Of course,
they had a very good time; but then there are various sorts of good
times. Perhaps they might have selected another sort for themselves.
There is a story that, on their way back, they put up for several days
at a poor little hostelry under the hills below Peekskill, and spent
their time in wandering through the woods and picking wild-flowers; but
it lacks confirmation, and I should be sorry to believe that two
well-brought-up young people would prefer their own society to the
unlimited hospitality of their friends in the country.
Old Jacob Dolph, at home, had the great house all to himself; and,
although black Chloe took excellent care of his material comforts, he
was restless and troubled. He took most pleasure in a London almanac, on
whose smudgy pages he checked off the days. Letters came as often as the
steamboat arrived from Albany, and he read them, after his fashion. It
took him half the week to get through one missive, and by that time
another had arrived. But I fear he did not make much out of them.
Still, they gave him one pleasure. He endorsed them carefully with the
name of the writer, and the date of receipt, and then he laid them away
in his desk, as neatly as he had filed his business letters in his old
days of active life.
Every night he had a candle alight in the hallway; and if there were a
far-off rumble of carriage-wheels late at night, he would rise from his
bed--he was a light sleeper, in his age--and steal out into the
corridor, hugging his dressing-robe about him, to peer anxiously down
over the balusters till the last sound and the last faint hope of his
son's return had died away.
And, indeed, it was late in July when the travelling-carriage once more
drew up in front of the Dolph house, and old Julius opened the door, and
old Mr. Dolph welcomed them, and told them that he had been very lonely
in their absence, and that their mother--and then he remembered that
their mother was dead, and went into the house with his head bowed low.
III.
St. John's Park and Hudson Street and all well-bred New York, for that
matter, had its fill of the Dolph hospitality the next winter. It was
dinner and ball and rout and merry-making of one sort or another, the
season through. The great family sleighs and the little bachelor sleighs
whirred and jingled up to the Dolph door surely two, and sometimes four,
evenings in every week, and whirred and jingled away again at intensely
fashionable hours, such as plain folk used for sleeping.
They woke up Abram Van Riper, did the revellers northward bound to
country houses on the river-side, and, lying deep in his feather-bed, he
directed his rumbling imprecations at the panes of glass, that sparkled
with frost in the mild moonlight.
"Oh, come, maidens, come, o'er the blue, rolling wave,
The lovely should still be the care of the brave--
Trancadillo, trancadillo, trancadillo, dillo, dillo, dillo!"
sang the misguided slaves of fashion, as they sped out of hearing.
"Trancadillo!" rumbled Mr. Van Riper. "I'd like to trancadillo them,
consume 'em!" and then he cursed his old friend's social circle for a
parcel of trumpery fools; and Mrs. Van Riper, lying by his side, sighed
softly with chastened regret and hopeless aspiration.
But everybody else--everybody who was anybody--blessed the Dolphs and
the Dolphs' cellar, and their man-servant and their maid-servant, and
their roasted ox and their saddle of venison, and the distinguished
stranger who was within their gates; and young Mrs. Dolph was made as
welcome as she made others.
For the little girl with the great dark eyes took to all this giddiness
as naturally as possible--after her quiet fashion. The dark eyes
sparkled with subdued pleasure that had no mean pride in it when she sat
at the head of her great mahogany table, and smiled at the double row of
bright faces that hemmed in the gorgeous display of the Dolph silver and
china and fine linen. And it was wonderful how charming were the famous
Des Anges manners, when they were softened and sweetened by so much
grace and beauty.
"Who would have thought she had it in her?" said the young ladies down
in St. John's Park. "You remember her, don't you, what a shy little slip
of a thing she was when we were at old Dumesnil's together? Who was it
used to say that she had had the life grandmothered out of her?"
"Fine little creature, that wife of Dolph's," said the young men as they
strolled about in Niblo's Garden. "Dolph wouldn't have had the road all
to himself if that old dragon of a grandmother had given the girl half a
chance. 'Gad, she's an old grenadier! They say that Dolph had to put her
through her facings the day after he was married, and that he did it in
uncommon fine style, too."
"He's a lucky devil, that Dolph," the younger ones would sigh. "Nothing
to do, all the money he wants, pretty wife, and the best wine in New
York! I wish _my_ old man would cut the shop and try to get an education
in wine."
Their devotion to the frivolities of fashion notwithstanding, the young
Dolphs were a loving, and, in a way, a domestic couple. Of course,
everybody they knew had to give them a dinner or a ball, or pay them
some such social tribute, and there were a myriad calls to be received
and returned; but they found time for retired communings, even for long
drives in the sleigh which, many a time in young Jacob Dolph's bachelor
days, had borne the young man and a female companion--not always the
same companion, either--up the Bloomingdale Road. And in the confidences
of those early days young Jacob learned what his gentle little wife told
him--without herself realizing the pathos of it--the story of her
crushed, unchildlike youth, loveless till he came, her prince, her
deliverer. Dolph understood it; he had known, of course, that she could
not have been happy under the _régime_ of Madam Des Anges; but when he
heard the simple tale in all its monotonous detail, and saw spread out
before him this poor young life, with its thousand little
disappointments, submissions, abnegations, and undeserved punishments
and needless restrictions, a generous rage glowed in his heart, and
perhaps sprang once in a while to his indiscreet lips; and out of this
grew a deeper and maturer tenderness than his honeymoon love for the
sweet little soul that he had at first sought only for the dark eyes
through which it looked out upon its joyless world.
It is unwise to speak in profane language, it is injudicious to speak
disrespectfully of old age, yet the Recording Angel, if he did not see
fit to let a tear fall upon the page, perchance found it convenient to
be mending his pen when young Jacob Dolph once uttered certain words
that made his wife cry out:
"Oh, Jacob, don't, _please_ don't. She didn't mean it!"
This is only a supposition. Perhaps Madam Des Anges really had meant
well. But oh, how much happier this world would be if all the people who
"mean well" and do ill would only take to meaning ill and doing well!
* * * * *
Jacob Dolph the elder took but a doubtful part in all the festivities.
The cloud that had hung dimly over him had begun to show little rifts;
but the dark masses between the rifts were thicker and heavier than
ever. It was the last brief convulsive struggle of the patient against
the power of the anæsthetic, when the nervous hand goes up to put the
cloth away from the mouth, just before the work is done and
consciousness slips utterly away, and life is no more for the sufferer,
though his heart beat and the breath be warm between his lips.
[Illustration]
When he was bright he was almost like his old self, and these delusive
periods came oftenest when he met some old friend, or in quiet morning
hours when his daughter--so he always called her--sat at his feet in the
sunny breakfast-room, and sewed and listened, or perhaps read to him
from Scott's latest novel.
He may have had some faint sub-consciousness of his condition, for
although he took the deepest interest in the balls and the dinners, he
would never appear before his son's guests except when he was at his
best and brightest. But he loved to sit, withdrawn in a corner, watching
the young life that fluttered through the great rooms, smiling to
himself, and gently pleased if some old crony sought him out and talked
of old times--the older the times were, the better he remembered them.
Indeed, he now recalled some things that he had not thought of since his
far-off boyhood.
In truth, the younger Dolphs often had small heart in their festal
doings. But the medical science of the day, positive, self-satisfied,
and blinded by all manner of tradition, gave them, through its
ministers, cruelly false hopes of the old man's ultimate recovery.
Besides, they could not well order things otherwise. The extravagant
hospitality of the day demanded such ceremonial, and to have abated any
part of it would only have served to grieve and to alarm the object of
their care.
The whole business was a constant pride and joy to old Mr. Jacob Dolph.
When there was a dinner to be given, he would follow Aline as she went
about the house superintending the preparations of her servants, in her
flowered apron of black silk, with her bunch of keys--honest keys,
those, a good four inches long, with tongues as big as a
domino--jingling at her side. He would himself overlook the making ready
of the wines, and give oft-repeated instructions as to the proper
temperature for the port, and see that the champagne was put on ice in
the huge octagonal cellaret in the dining-room corner. And when all was
ready, as like as not he would kiss Aline on the forehead, and say:
"I have a headache to-night, my dear, and I think I shall take my dinner
in my room."
[Illustration: "Mons'us gran' dinneh, Seh!"]
And he would go feebly up stairs, and when old Julius, who always waited
upon him, brought up his tray, he would ask:
"Is it a fine dinner, Julius? Did everybody come?"
And Julius would invariably reply, with profound African dignity:
"Mons'us gran' dinneh, seh! 'E fines' dinneh I eveh witness', seh! I
have stood behin' you' chai', seh, this thutty y'ah, an' I neveh see no
such a gran' dinneh, Misteh Do'ph, seh!"
"Except the dinner we gave Mr. Hamilton; in State Street, Julius," the
old man would put in.
"_Ex_cep' that, seh," Julius would gravely reply: "_that_ was a
pol-litical dinneh, seh; an', _of_ co'se, a pol'litical dinneh--" an
expressive pause--"but this he' is sho'ly a mons'us fine dinneh, seh."
* * * * *
His bodily vigor was unimpaired, however, and except that his times of
entire mental clearness grew fewer and briefer as the months went on,
there was little change in the old gentleman when the spring of 1829
came. He was not insane, he was not idiotic, even at the worst. It
seemed to be simply a premature old age that clouded his faculties. He
forgot many things, he was weakly absent-minded, often he did not
recognize a familiar face, and he seemed ever more and more disinclined
to think and to talk. He liked best to sit in silence, seemingly
unconscious of the world about him; and if he was aroused from his
dreamy trance, his wandering speech would show that his last
thought--and it might have entered his mind hours before, at the
suggestion of some special event--was so far back in the past that it
dealt with matters beyond his son's knowledge.
He was allowed to do as he pleased, for in the common affairs of daily
life he seemed to be able to care for himself, and he plaintively
resented anything that looked like guardianship. So he kept up his
custom of walking down into the city, at least as far as St. Paul's. It
was thought to be safe enough, for he was a familiar figure in the town,
and had friends at every turn.
But one afternoon he did not return in time for dinner. Young Jacob was
out for his afternoon ride, which that day had taken him in the
direction of the good doctor's house. And when he had reached the house,
he found the doctor likewise mounted for a ride. The doctor was going up
to Bond Street--the Dolphs' quarter was growing fashionable already--to
look at a house near Broadway that he had some thoughts of buying, for
he was to be married the coming winter. So they had ridden back
together, and after a long examination of the house, young Jacob had
ridden off for a gallop through the country lanes; and it was five
o'clock, and dinner was on the table, when he came to his father's house
and learned from tearful Aline that his father was missing.
The horse was at the stable door when young Jacob mounted him once more
and galloped off to Bond Street, where he found the doctor just ready to
turn down the Bowery; and they joined forces and hurried back, and down
Broadway, inquiring of the people who sat on their front stoops--it was
a late spring evening, warm and fair--if they had seen old Mr. Dolph
that day.
Many had seen him as he went down; but no one could remember that the
old gentleman had come back over his accustomed path. At St. Paul's, the
sexton thought that Mr. Dolph had prolonged his walk down the street.
Further on, some boys had seen him, still going southward. The searchers
stopped at one or two of the houses where he might have called; but
there was no trace of him. It was long since old Jacob Dolph had made a
formal call.
But at Bowling Green they were hailed by Mr. Philip Waters, who came
toward them with more excitement in his mien than a young man of good
society often exhibited.
"I was going for a carriage, Dolph," he said: "your father is down there
in the Battery Park, and I'm afraid--I'm afraid he's had a stroke of
paralysis."
They hurried down, and found him lying on the grass, his head on the lap
of a dark-skinned, ear-ringed Spanish sailor. He had been seen to fall
from the bench near by, another maritime man in the crowd about him
explained.
"It was only a minit or two ago," said the honest seafarer, swelled with
the importance that belongs to the narrator of a tale of accident and
disaster. "He was a-settin' there, had been for two hours 'most, just
a-starin' at them houses over there, and all of a sudden chuck forward
he went, right on his face. And then a man come along that knowed him,
and said he'd go for a kerridge, or I'd 'a' took him on my sloop--she's
a-layin' here now, with onions from Weathersfield--and treated him
well; I see he wa'n't no disrespectable character. Here, Pedro, them's
the old man's folks--let 'em take him. A-settin' there nigh on two
hours, he was, just a-studyin' them houses. B'long near here?"
[Illustration]
Young Jacob had no words for the Connecticut captain. Waters had
arrived, with somebody's carriage, confiscated on the highway, and they
gently lifted up the old gentleman and set off homeward. They were just
in time, for Waters had been the earliest of the evening promenaders to
reach the Battery. It was dinner hour--or supper hour for many--and the
park was given up to the lounging sailors from the river-side streets.
The doctor's face was dark.
"No, it is not paralysis," he said. "Let us proceed at once to your own
home, Mr. Dolph. In view of what I am now inclined to consider his
condition, I think it would be the most advisable course."
He was as precise and exact in his speech, even then, as he was later
on, when years had given an innocent, genial pomposity to his delivery
of his rounded sentences.
They put old Jacob Dolph to bed in the room which he had always
occupied, in his married as in his widowed days. He never spoke again;
that day, indeed, he hardly moved. But on the next he stirred uneasily,
as though he were striving to change his position. The doctor bled him,
and they shifted him as best they could, but he seemed no more
comfortable. So the doctor bled him again; and even that did no good.
About sunset, Aline, who had watched over him with hardly a moment's
rest, left the room for a quarter of an hour, to listen to what the
doctors had to say--there were four of them in the drawing-room below.
When she and her husband entered the sick-room again, the old man had
moved in his bed. He was lying on his side, his face to the windows that
looked southward, and he had raised himself a little on his arm. There
was a troubled gaze in his eyes, as of one who strains to see something
that is unaccountably missing from his sight. He turned his head a
little, as though to listen. Thus gazing, with an inward and spiritual
vision only, at the bay that his eyes might never again see, and
listening to the waves whose cadence he should hear no more, the
troubled look faded into one of inscrutable peace, and he sank back into
the hollow of his son's arm and passed away.
* * * * *
The next time that the doctor was in the house it was of a snowy night a
few days after New Year's Day. It was half-past two o'clock in the
morning, and Jacob Dolph--no longer Jacob Dolph the younger--had been
pacing furiously up and down the long dining-room--that being the
longest room in the house--when the doctor came down stairs, and
addressed him with his usual unruffled precision:
"I will request of you, Dolph, a large glass of port. I need not suggest
to you that it is unnecessary to stint the measure, for the hospitality
of this house is----"
"How is she, doctor? For God's sake, tell me--is she--is she----"
"The hospitality of this house is prover--" the precise doctor
recommenced.
"Damn the hospitality!" cried Jacob Dolph: "I mean--oh, doctor--tell
me--is anything wrong?"
"Should I request of you the cup of amity and geniality, Mr. Dolph, were
there cause for anything save rejoicing in this house?" demanded the
physician, with amiable severity. "I had thought that my words would
have conveyed----"
"It's all over?"
"And bravely over!" And the doctor nodded his head with a dignified
cheerfulness.
"And may I go to her?"
"You may, sir, after you have given me my glass of port. But remember,
sir----"
Dolph turned to the sideboard, grasped a bottle and a glass, and thrust
them into the doctor's hand, and started for the door.
"But remember, sir," went on the unperturbed physician, "you must not
agitate or excite her. A gentle step, a tranquil tone, and a cheerful
and encouraging address, brief and affectionate, will be all that is
permitted."
Dolph listened in mad impatience, and was over the threshold before the
doctor's peremptory call brought him back.
"What is it now?" he demanded, impatiently.
The doctor looked at him with a gaze of wonder and reproach.
"It is a male child, sir," he said.
[Illustration]
Jacob Dolph crept up the stairs on tiptoe. As he paused for a moment in
front of a door at the head, he heard the weak, spasmodic wail of
another Dolph.
* * * * *
"There's no help for it--I've got to do it," said Jacob Dolph.
It was another wintry morning, just after breakfast. The snow was on the
ground, and the sleigh-bells up in Broadway sent down a faint jingling.
Ten winters had come and gone, and Mr. Dolph was as comfortably stout as
a man should be who is well fed and forty. He stood with his back to the
fire, pulling at his whiskers--which formed what was earlier known as a
Newgate collar--with his right thumb and forefinger. His left thumb was
stuck in the armhole of his flowered satin waistcoat, black and shiny.
Opposite him sat a man of his own age, clean-shaven and sharp-featured.
He had calm, somewhat cold, gray eyes, a deliberate, self-contained
manner of speaking, and a pallid, dry complexion that suited with his
thin features. His dress was plain, although it was thoroughly neat. He
had no flowered satin waistcoat; but something in his bearing told you
that he was a man who had no anxiety about the narrow things of the
counting-room; who had no need to ask himself how much money was coming
in to-morrow. And at the same time you felt that every cent of whatever
might be to-morrow's dues would find its way to his hands as surely as
the representative figures stood on his ledger's page. It was young Mr.
Van Riper--but he, too, had lost his right to that title, not only
because of his years, but because, in the garret of the house in
Greenwich Village, a cobweb stretched from one of the low beams to the
head of old Abram Van Riper's great walking-stick, which stood in the
corner where it had been placed, with other rubbish, the day after Abram
Van Riper's funeral.
"I should not advise it, Dolph, if it can be helped," Mr. Van Riper
observed, thoughtfully.
"It can't be helped."
"I can give you your price, of course," Van Riper went on, with
deliberation; "but equally of course, it won't be anything like what the
property will bring in the course of a few years."
Dolph kicked at the hearthrug, as he answered, somewhat testily:
"I'm not making a speculation of it."
Mr. Van Riper was unmoved.
"And I'm not making a speculation of you, either," he said, calmly: "I
am speaking only for your own benefit, Dolph."
Mr. Dolph put his hands in his pockets, strode to the window and back
again, and then said, with an uneasy little laugh:
"I beg your pardon, Van Riper; you're quite right, of course. The fact
is, I've got to do it. I must have the money, and I must have it now."
Mr. Van Riper stroked his sharp chin.
"Is it necessary to raise the money in that particular way? You are
temporarily embarrassed--I don't wish to be intrusive--but why not
borrow what you need, and give me a mortgage on the house?"
Ten years had given Jacob Dolph a certain floridity; but at this he
blushed a hot red.
"Mortgage on the house? No, sir," he said, with emphasis.
"Well, any other security, then," was Van Riper's indifferent amendment.
Again Jacob Dolph strode to the window and back again, staring hard at
the carpet, and knitting his brows.
Mr. Van Riper waited in undisturbed calm until his friend spoke once
more.
"I might as well tell you the truth, Van Riper," he said, at last;
"I've made a fool of myself. I've lost money, and I've got to pocket the
loss. As to borrowing, I've borrowed all I ought to borrow. I _won't_
mortgage the house. This sale simply represents the hole in my capital."
Something like a look of surprise came into Mr. Van Riper's wintry eyes.
"It's none of my business, of course," he observed; "but if you haven't
any objection to telling me----"
"What did it? What does for everybody nowadays? Western lands and Wall
Street--that's about the whole story. Oh, yes, I know--I ought to have
kept out of it. But I didn't. I was nothing better than a fool at such
business. I'm properly punished."
He sighed as he stood on the hearthrug, his hands under his coat-tails,
and his head hanging down. He looked as though many other thoughts were
going through his mind than those which he expressed.
"I wish," he began again, "that my poor old father had brought me up to
business ways. I might have kept out of it all. College is a good thing
for a man, of course; but college doesn't teach you how to buy lots in
western cities--especially when the western cities aren't built."
"College teaches you a good many other things, though," said Van Riper,
frowning slightly, as he put the tips of his long fingers together; "I
wish I'd had your chance, Dolph. _My_ boy shall go to Columbia, that's
certain."
"_Your_ boy?" queried Dolph, raising his eyebrows.
Van Riper smiled.
"Yes," he said, "my boy. You didn't know I had a boy, did you? He's
nearly a year old."
This made Mr. Jacob Dolph kick at the rug once more, and scowl a little.
"I'm afraid I haven't been very neighborly, Van Riper--" he began; but
the other interrupted him, smiling good-naturedly.
"You and I go different ways, Dolph," he said. "We're plain folks over
in Greenwich Village, and you--you're a man of fashion."
Jacob Dolph smiled--not very mirthfully. Van Riper's gaze travelled
around the room, quietly curious.
"It costs money to be a man of fashion, doesn't it?"
"Yes," said Dolph, "it does."
There was silence for a minute, which Van Riper broke.
"If you've got to sell, Dolph, why, it's a pity; but I'll take it. I'll
see Ogden to-day, and we can finish the business whenever you wish. But
in my opinion, you'd do better to borrow."
Dolph shook his head.
"I've been quite enough of a fool," he replied.
"Well," said Mr. Van Riper, rising, "I must get to the office. You'll
hear from Ogden to-morrow. I'm sorry you've got in such a snarl; but--"
his lips stretched into something like a smile--"I suppose you'll know
better next time. Good-day."
* * * * *
After Mr. Dolph had bowed his guest to the door, Mrs. Dolph slipped down
the stairs and into the drawing-room.
"Did he take it?" she asked.
"Of course he took it," Dolph answered, bitterly, "at that price."
"Did he say anything," she inquired again, "about its being hard for us
to--to sell it?"
"He said we had better not sell it now--that it would bring more a few
years hence."
"He doesn't understand," said Mrs. Dolph.
"He _couldn't_ understand," said Mr. Dolph.
Then she went over to him and kissed him.
"It's only selling the garden, after all," she said; "it isn't like
selling our home."
He put his arm about her waist, and they walked into the breakfast-room,
and looked out on the garden which to-morrow would be theirs no longer,
and in a few months would not be a garden at all.
High walls hemmed it in--the walls of the houses which had grown up
around them. A few stalks stood up out of the snow, the stalks of
old-fashioned flowers--hollyhock and larkspur and Job's-tears and the
like--and the lines of the beds were defined by the tiny hedges of box,
with the white snow-powder sifted into their dark, shiny green. The
bare rose-bushes were there, with their spikes of thorns, and little
mounds of snow showed where the glories of the poppy-bed had bloomed.
Jacob Dolph, looking out, saw the clear summer sunlight lying where the
snow lay now. He saw his mother moving about the paths, cutting a flower
here and a bud there. He saw himself, a little boy in brave breeches,
following her about, and looking for the harmless toads, and working
each one into one of the wonderful legends which he had heard from the
old German gardener across the way. He saw his father, too, pacing those
paths of summer evenings, when the hollyhocks nodded their pink heads,
and glancing up, from time to time, at his mother as she sat knitting at
that very window. And, last of all in the line, yet first in his mind,
he saw his wife tripping out in the fresh morning, to smile on the
flowers she loved, to linger lovingly over the beds of verbena, and to
pick the little nosegay that stood by the side of the tall coffee-urn at
every summer-morning breakfast.
And the wife, looking out by his side, saw that splendid boy of theirs
running over path and bed, glad of the flowers and the air and the
freedom, full of young life and boyish sprightliness, his long hair
floating behind him, the light of hope and youth in his bright face.
And to-morrow it would be Van Riper's; and very soon there would be
houses there, to close up the friendly window which had seen so much,
which had let so much innocent joy and gladness into the old
breakfast-room; and there would be an end of flower-bordered paths and
nodding hollyhocks. She put her face upon her husband's shoulder, and
cried a little, though he pretended not to know it. When she lifted it,
somehow she had got her eyes dry, though they were painfully bright and
large.
"It isn't like selling our house," she said.
IV.
Jacob Dolph got out of the Broadway stage at Bowling Green, followed by
Eustace Dolph. Eustace Dolph at twenty-two was no more like his father
than his patrician name was like simple and scriptural Jacob. The elder
Dolph was a personable man, certainly; a handsome man, even, who looked
to be nearer forty than fifty-two; and he was well dressed--perhaps a
trifle out of the mode--and carried himself with a certain genial
dignity, and with the lightness of a man who has not forgotten that he
has been a buck in his time. But Eustace was distinctly and unmistakably
a dandy. There are superficial differences, of course, between the dandy
of 1852 and the dandy of 1887; but the structural foundation of all
types of dandy is the same through all ages. Back of the clothes--back
of the ruffles, or the bright neckcloth, or the high pickardil--which
may vary with the time or the individual, you will ever find clearly
displayed to your eyes the obvious and unmistakable spiritual reason
for and cause of the dandy--and it is always self-assertion pushed
beyond the bounds of self-respect.
Now, as a matter of fact, young Eustace's garments were not really worse
than many a man has worn from simple, honest bad taste. To be sure, the
checked pattern of his trousers was for size like the design of a prison
grating; he had a coat so blue that it shimmered in the sunlight; his
necktie was of purple satin, and fearfully and wonderfully made and
fringed, and decked with gems fastened by little gold chains to other
inferior guardian gems; and his waistcoat was confected of satin and
velvet and damask all at once; yet you might have put all these things
on his father, and, although the effect would not have been pleasant,
you would never have called the elder gentleman a dandy. In other words,
it was why young Eustace wore his raiment that made it dandified, and
not the inherent gorgeousness of the raiment itself.
The exchange of attire might readily have been made, so far as the size
of the two men was concerned. But only in size were they alike. There
was nothing of the Dolph in Eustace's face. He bore, indeed, a strong
resemblance to his maternal great-grandmother, now many years put away
where she could no longer trouble the wicked, and where she had to let
the weary be at rest. (And how poor little Aline had wept and wailed
over that death, and lamented that she had not been more dutiful as a
child!) But his face was not strong, as the face of Madam Des Anges had
been. Some strain of a weaker ancestry reappeared in it, and, so to
speak, changed the key of the expression. What had been pride in the old
lady bordered on superciliousness in the young man. What had been
sternness became a mere haughtiness. Yet it was a handsome face, and
pleasant, too, when the young smile came across it, and you saw the
white small teeth and the bright, intelligent light in the dark eyes.
The two men strolled through the Battery, and then up South Street, and
so around through Old Slip. They were on business; but this was also a
pleasure trip to the elder. He walked doubly in spirit through those
old streets--a boy by his father's side, a father with his son at his
elbow. He had not been often in the region of late years. You remember,
he was a man of pleasure. He was one of the first-fruits of metropolitan
growth and social culture. His father had made an idler and _dilettante_
of him. It was only half a life at best, he thought, happy as he had
been; blessed as he was in wife and child. He was going to make a
business man of his own boy. After all, it was through the workers that
great cities grew. Perhaps we were not ripe yet for that European
institution, the idler. He himself had certain accomplishments that
other Americans had not. He could _flâner_, for instance. But to have to
_flâner_ through fifty or sixty or seventy years palled on the spirit,
he found. And one thing was certain, if any Dolph was ever to be an
accomplished _flâneur_, and to devote his whole life to that occupation,
the Dolph fortune must be vastly increased. Old Jacob Dolph had
miscalculated. The sum he had left in 1829 might have done very well for
the time, but it was no fortune to idle on among the fashionables of
1852.
Something of this Mr. Dolph told his son; but the young man, although he
listened with respectful attention, appeared not to take a deep interest
in his father's reminiscences. Jacob Dolph fancied even that Eustace did
not care to be reminded of the city's day of small things. Perhaps he
had something of the feeling of the successful struggler who tries to
forget the shabbiness of the past. If this were the case, his pride must
have been chafed, for his father was eloquent in displaying the powers
of an uncommonly fine memory; and he had to hear all about the slips,
and the Fly Market, and the gradual extension of the water-front, and
the piles on which the old Tontine was built, and the cucumber-wood
pipes of the old water-company, still lying under their feet. Once, at
least, he showed a genuine enjoyment of his father's discourse, and that
was when it ran on the great retinue of servants in which Jacob Dolph
the elder had indulged himself. I think he was actually pleased when he
heard that his grandfather had at one time kept slaves.
Wandering in this way, to the running accompaniment of Mr. Dolph's
lecture, they came to Water Street, and here, as though he were reminded
of the object of their trip, the father summed up his reminiscences in
shape for a neat moral.
"The city grows, you see, my boy, and we've got to grow with it. I've
stood still; but you sha'n't."
"Well, governor," said the younger man, "I'll be frank with you. I don't
like the prospect."
"You will--you will, my boy. You'll live to thank me."
"Very likely you're right, sir; I don't deny it; but, as I say, I don't
like the prospect. I don't see--with all due respect, sir--how any
gentleman can _like_ trade. It may be necessary, and of course I don't
think it's lowering, or any of that nonsense, you know; but it can't be
_pleasant_. Of course, if _your_ governor had to do it, it was all
right; but I don't believe he liked it any better than I should, or he
wouldn't have been so anxious to keep you out of it."
"My poor father made a great mistake, Eustace. He would admit it now,
I'm sure, if he were alive."
"Well, sir, I'm going to try it, of course. I'll give it a fair trial.
But when the two years are up, sir, as we agreed, I hope you won't say
anything against my going into the law, or--well, yes--" he colored a
little--"trying what I can do on the Street. I know what you think about
it, sir," he went on, hastily; "but there are two sides to the question,
and it's my opinion that, for an intelligent man, there's more money to
be made up there in Wall Street in one year than can be got out of
haggling over merchandise for a lifetime."
Jacob Dolph grew red in the face and shook his head vigorously.
"Don't speak of it, sir, don't speak of it!" he said, vehemently. "It's
the curse of the country. If you have any such infernal opinions, don't
vent them in my presence, sir. I know what I am talking about. Keep
clear of Wall Street, sir. It is the straight road to perdition."
They entered one of a row of broad-fronted buildings of notable severity
and simplicity of architecture. Four square stone columns upheld its
brick front, and on one of these faded gilt letters, on a ground of
dingy black, said simply:
ABRAM VAN RIPER'S SON.
There was no further announcement of Abram Van Riper's Son's character,
or of the nature of his business. It was assumed that all people knew
who Abram Van Riper's Son was, and that his (Abram Van Riper's)
ship-chandlery trade had long before grown into a great "commission
merchant's" business.
It was full summer, and there were no doors between the pillars to bar
entrance to the gloomy cavern behind them, which stretched in
semi-darkness the whole length and width of the building, save for a
narrow strip at the rear, where, behind a windowed partition, clerks
were writing at high desks, and where there was an inner and more
secluded pen for Abram Van Riper's son.
In the front of the cave, to one side, was a hoistway, where bales and
boxes were drawn up from the cellar or swung twisting and twirling to
the lofts above. Amidships the place was strewn with small tubs,
matting-covered bales and boxes, coils of bright new rope, and
odd-looking packages of a hundred sorts, all of them with gaping wounds
in their envelopes, or otherwise having their pristine integrity
wounded. From this it was not difficult to guess that these were samples
of merchandise. Most of them gave forth odors upon the air, odors
ranging from the purely aromatic, suggestive of Oriental fancies or
tropic dreams of spice, to the positively offensive--the latter
varieties predominating.
[Illustration]
But certain objects upon a long table were so peculiar in appearance
that the visitors could not pass them by with a mere glance of wonder.
They looked like small leather pies, badly warped in the baking. A clerk
in his shirt sleeves, with his straw hat on one side of his head,
whistled as he cut into these, revealing a livid interior, the color of
half-cooked veal, which he inspected with care. Eustace was moved to
positive curiosity.
"What are they?" he inquired of the clerk, pride mingling with disgust
in his tone, as he caught a smell like unto the smell which might arise
from raw smoked salmon that had lain three days in the sun.
"Central American," responded the clerk, with brevity, and resumed his
whistling of
"My name is Jake Keyser, I was born in Spring Garden;
To make me a preacher my father did try."
"Central American _what_?" pursued the inquirer.
"_Rubber!_" said the clerk, with a scorn so deep and far beyond
expression that the combined pride of the Dolphs and the Des Anges
wilted into silence for the moment. As they went on toward the rear
office, while the clerk gayly whistled the notes of
"It's no use a-blowing, for I am a hard 'un--
I'm bound to be a butcher, by heavens, or die!"
Eustace recovered sufficiently to demand of his father:
"I say, sir, shall I have to handle that damned stuff?"
"Hush!" said his senior; "here's Mr. Van Riper."
Mr. Van Riper came to the office door to welcome them, with his thin
face set in the form of a smile.
"Ah!" he said, "here's the young man, is he? Fine big fellow, Dolph.
Well, sir, so you are going to embrace a mercantile career, are you?
That's what they call it in these fine days, Dolph."
"I am going to try to, sir," replied the young man.
"He will, Van Riper," put in his father, hastily; "he'll like it as soon
as he gets used to it--I know he will."
"Well," returned Mr. Van Riper, with an attempt at facetious geniality,
"we'll try to get his nose down to the grindstone, we will. Come into my
office with me, Dolph, and I'll hand this young gentleman over to old
Mr. Daw. Mr. Daw will feel his teeth--eh, Mr. Daw?--see what he
_doesn't_ know--how's that, Mr. Daw? You remember Mr. Daw, Dolph--used
to be with your father before he went out of business--been with us ever
since. Let's see, how long is that, Daw? Most fifty years, ain't it?"
[Illustration: "Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment.]
Mr. Daw, who looked as though he might have been one hundred years at
the business, wheeled around and descended with stiff deliberation from
his high stool, holding his pen in his mouth as he solemnly shook hands
with Jacob Dolph, and peered into his face. Then he took the pen out of
his mouth.
"Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment. "Forty-five years the
twenty-ninth of this month, sir. You was a little shaver then. I
remember you comin' into the store and whittlin' timber with your little
jack-knife. I was only eleven years with your father, sir--eleven years
and six months--went to him when I was fourteen years old. That's
fifty-six years and six months in the service of two of the best houses
that ever was in New York--an' I can do my work with any two young
shavers in the town--ain't missed a day in nineteen years now. Your
father hadn't never ought to have gone out of business, Mr. Dolph. He
did a great business for those days, and he had the makin' of a big
house. Goin' to bring your boy up like a good New York merchant, hey?
Come along here with me, young man, and I'll see if you're half the man
your grandfather was. He hadn't never ought to have given up business,
Mr. Dolph. But he was all for pleasuring an' the play-houses, an' havin'
fine times. Come along, young man. What's your name?"
"Eustace Dolph."
"Hm! Jacob's better."
And he led the neophyte away.
"Curious old case," said Mr. Van Riper, dryly. "Best accountant in New
York. See that high stool of his?--can't get him off it. Five years ago
I gave him a low desk and an arm-chair. In one week he was back again,
roosting up there. Said he didn't feel comfortable with his feet on the
ground. He thought that sort of thing might do for aged people, but _he_
wasn't made of cotton-batting."
Thus began Eustace Dolph's apprenticeship to business, and mightily ill
he liked it.
* * * * *
There came a day, a winter day in 1854, when there was great agitation
among what were then called the real old families of New York. I cannot
use the term "fashionable society," because that is more comprehensive,
and would include many wealthy and ambitious families from New England,
who were decidedly not of the Dolphs' set. And then, the Dolphs could
hardly be reckoned among the leaders of fashion. To live on or near the
boundaries of fashion's domain is to lower your social status below the
absolute pitch of perfection, and fashion in 1854 drew the line pretty
sharply at Bleecker Street. Above Bleecker Street the cream of the cream
rose to the surface; below, you were ranked as skim milk. The social
world was spreading up into the wastes sacred to the circus and the
market-garden, although, if Admiral Farragut had stood on his sea-legs
where he stands now, he might have had a fairly clear view of Chelsea
Village, and seen Alonzo Cushman II., or Alonzo Cushman III., perhaps,
going around and collecting his rents.
But the old families still fought the tide of trade, many of them
neck-deep and very uncomfortable. They would not go from St. John's
Park, nor from North Moore and Grand Streets. They had not the
_bourgeois_ conservatism of the Greenwich Villagers, which has held them
in a solid phalanx almost to this very day; but still, in a way, they
resented the up-town movement, and resisted it. So that when they did
have to buy lots in the high-numbered streets they had to pay a fine
price for them.
It was this social party that was stirred by a bit of scandal about the
Dolphs. I do not know why I should call it scandal; yet I am sure
society so held it. For did not society whisper it, and nod and wink
over it, and tell it in dark corners, and chuckle, and lift its
multitudinous hands and its myriad eyebrows, and say in innumerable
keys: "Well, _upon_ my word!" and "Well, I _should_ think----!" and "Who
would _ever_ have thought of such a thing?" and the like? Did not
society make very funny jokes about it, and did not society's
professional gossips get many an invitation to dinner because they
professed to have authentic details of the way Mr. and Mrs. Dolph looked
when they spoke about it, and just what they had to say for themselves?
And yet it was nothing more than this, that Mr. Dolph being fifty-four,
and his wife but a few years younger, were about to give to the world
another Dolph. It was odd, I admit; it was unusual; if I must go so far,
it was, I suppose, unconventional. But I don't see that it was necessary
for Mr. Philip Waters to make an epigram about it. It was a very clever
epigram; but if you had seen dear old Mrs. Dolph, with her rosy cheeks
and the gray in her hair, knitting baby-clothes with hands which were
still white and plump and comely, while great dark eyes looked
timorously into the doubtful, fear-clouded future, I think you would
have been ashamed that you had even listened to that epigram.
The expected event was of special and personal interest to only three
people--for, after all, when you think of it, it was not exactly
society's business--and it affected them in widely different ways.
Jacob Dolph was all tenderness to his wife, and all sympathy with her
fears, with her nervous apprehensions, even with her morbid forebodings
of impossible ills. He did not repine at the seclusion which the
situation forced upon them, although his life for years had been given
up to society's demands, until pleasure-seeking and pleasure-giving had
grown into a routine, which occupied his whole mind. His wife saw him
more than she had for many years. Clubs and card-parties had few
temptations for him now; he sat at home and read to her and talked to
her, and did his best to follow the injunctions of the doctor, and
"create and preserve in her a spirit of cheerful and hopeful
tranquillity, free of unnecessary apprehension."
But when he _did_ go to the club, when he was in male society, his
breast expanded, and if he had to answer a polite inquiry as to Mrs.
Dolph's general health, I am afraid that he responded: "Mrs. Dolph is
extremely well, sir, extremely well!" with a pride which the moralists
will tell you is baseless, unworthy, and unreasonable.
As for Aline herself, no one may know what timorous hopes stirred in her
bosom and charmed the years away, and brought back to her a lovely youth
that was almost girlish in its innocent, half-frightened gladness.
Outside, this great, wise, eminently proper world that she lived in
girded at the old woman who was to bear a child, and laughed behind
tasselled fans, and made wondrous merry over Nature's work; but within
the old house she sat, and sewed upon the baby-clothes, or, wandering
from cupboard to cupboard, found the yellowing garments, laid away more
than a score of years before--the poor little lace-decked trifles that
her first boy had worn; and she thanked heaven, in her humble way, that
twenty-four years had not taken the love and joy of a wife and a mother
out of her heart.
She could not find all her boy's dresses and toys, for she was
open-handed, and had given many of them away to people who needed them.
This brought about an odd encounter. The third person who had a special
interest in the prospect of the birth of a Dolph was young Eustace, and
he found nothing in it wherewith to be pleased. For Eustace Dolph was of
the ultra-fashionables. He cared less for old family than for new ideas,
and he did not let himself fall behind in the march of social progress,
even though he was, as he admitted with humility born of pride, only a
poor devil of a down-town clerk. If his days were occupied, he had his
nights to himself, and he lengthened them to suit himself. At first this
caused his mother to fret a little; but poor Aline had come into her
present world from the conventional seclusion of King's Bridge, and her
only authority on questions of masculine license was her husband. He,
being appealed to, had to admit that his own hours in youth had been
late, and that he supposed the hours of a newer generation should
properly be later still. Mr. Dolph forgot, perhaps, that while his early
potations had been vinous, those of the later age were distinctly
spirituous; and that the early morning cocktail and the midnight
brandy-and-soda were abominations unknown to his own well-bred youth.
With port and sherry and good Bordeaux he had been familiar all his
life; a dash of _liqueur_ after dinner did not trouble his digestion; he
found a bottle of champagne a pleasant appetizer and a gentle stimulant;
but whiskey and gin were to him the drinks of the vulgar; and rum and
brandy stood on his sideboard only to please fiercer tastes than his
own. Perhaps, also, he was ignorant of the temptations that assail a
young man in a great city, he who had grown up in such a little one that
he had at one time known every one who was worth knowing in it.
However this may have been, Eustace Dolph ruled for himself his going
out and his coming in. He went further, and chose his own associates,
not always from among the scions of the "old families." He found those
excellent young men "slow," and he selected for his own private circle a
set which was mixed as to origin and unanimously frivolous as to
tendency. The foreign element was strongly represented. Bright young
Irishmen of excellent families, and mysterious French and Italian counts
and marquises, borrowed many of the good gold dollars of the Dolphs,
and forgot to return an equivalent in the local currency of the
O'Reagans of Castle Reagan, or the D'Arcy de Montmorenci, or the
Montescudi di Bajocchi. Among this set there was much merry-making when
the news from the Dolph household sifted down to them from the
gossip-sieve of the best society. They could not very well chaff young
Dolph openly, for he was muscular and high-tempered, and, under the most
agreeable conditions, needed a fight of some sort every six months or
so, and liked a bit of trouble in between fights. But a good deal of low
and malicious humor came his way, from one source or another, and he,
with the hot and concentrated egotism of youth, thought that he was in a
ridiculous and trying position, and chafed over it.
[Illustration]
There had been innuendos and hints and glancing allusions, but no one
had dared to make any direct assault of wit, until one evening young
Haskins came into the club "a little flushed with wine." (The "wine" was
brandy.) It seems that young Haskins had found at home an ivory rattle
which had belonged to Eustace twenty years before, and which Mrs. Dolph
had given to Mrs. Haskins when Eustace enlarged his horizon in the
matter of toys.
Haskins, being, as I have said, somewhat flushed with brandy, came up to
young Dolph, who was smoking in the window, and meditating with frowning
brows, and said to him:
"Here, Dolph, I've done with this. You'd better take it back--it may be
wanted down your way."
There was a scene. Fortunately, two men were standing just behind Dolph,
who were able to throw their arms about him, and hold him back for a few
seconds. There would have been further consequences, however, if it had
not been that Eustace was in the act of throwing the rattle back at
Haskins when the two men caught him. Thus the toy went wide of its mark,
and fell in the lap of Philip Waters, who, old as he was, generally
chose to be in the company of the young men at the club; and then
Philip Waters did something that almost atones, I think, for the
epigram.
He looked at the date on the rattle, and then he rose up and went
between the two young men, and spoke to Haskins.
"Young man," he said, "when Mrs. Jacob Dolph gave your mother this
thing, your father had just failed for the second time in three years.
He had come to New York about five years before from Hartford, or
Providence, or--Succotash, or whatever his confounded town was. Mr.
Jacob Dolph got Mr. Van Riper to give your father an extension on his
note, or he would have gone to the debtors' prison down by the City
Hall. As it was, he had to sell his house, and the coat off his back,
for all I know. If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
have had, and you wouldn't have been living in Bond Street to-day."
[Illustration: "If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
have had."]
After which Mr. Philip Waters sat down and read the evening paper; and
when young Haskins was able to speak he asked young Dolph's pardon, and
got it--at least, a formal assurance that he had it.
The baby was born in the spring, and everybody said she was the image of
her mother.
* * * * *
There will come a day, it may be, when advancing civilization will
civilize sleighing out of existence, as far as New York is concerned.
Year after year the days grow fewer that will let a cutter slip up
beyond the farthest of the "road-houses" and cross the line into
Westchester. People say that the climate is changing; but close
observers recognize a sympathy between the decrease of snow-storms and
the increase of refinement--that is, a sympathy in inverse ratio; a
balanced progress in opposite directions. As we grow further and further
beyond even old-world standards of polite convention, as we formalize
and super-formalize our codes, and steadily eliminate every element of
amusement from our amusements, Nature in strict conformity represses her
joyous exuberance. The snow-storm of the past is gone, because the great
public sleigh that held twenty-odd merry-makers in a shell like a circus
band-wagon has gone out of fashion among all classes. Now we have,
during severe winters, just enough snow from time to time to bear the
light sleigh of the young man who, being in good society, is also horsy.
When _he_ finds the road vulgar, the poor plebeian souls who go
sleighing for the sport of it may sell their red and blue vehicles, for
Nature, the sycophant of fashion, will snow no more.
But they had "good old-fashioned" snow-storms eighty years after the
Declaration of Independence, and one had fallen upon New York that
tempted Mrs. Jacob Dolph to leave her baby, ten months old, in the
nurse's charge, and go out with her husband in the great family sleigh
for what might be the last ride of the season.
They had been far up the road--to Arcularius's, maybe, there swinging
around and whirling back. They had flown down the long country road, and
back into the city, to meet--it was early in the day--the great
procession of sleighing folk streaming northward up Broadway. It was one
of New York's great, irregular, chance-set carnivals, and every sleigh
was out, from the "exquisite's" gilded chariot, a shell hardly larger
than a fair-sized easy-chair, to the square, low-hung red sledge of the
butcher-boy, who braved it with the fashionables, his _Schneider_-made
clothes on his burly form, and his girl by his side, in her best Bowery
bonnet. Everybody was a-sleighing. The jingle of countless bells fell on
the crisp air in a sort of broken rhythm--a rude _tempo rubato_. It was
fashionable then. But we--we amuse ourselves less boisterously.
They drew up at the door of the Dolph house, and Jacob Dolph lifted his
wife out of the sleigh, and carried her up the steps into the
breakfast-room, and set her down in her easy-chair. He was bending over
her to ask her if her ride had done her good, when a servant entered and
handed him a letter marked "Immediate."
He read it, and all the color of the winter's day faded out of his face.
"I've got to go down to Van Riper's," he said, "at once; he wants me."
"Has anything happened to--to Eustace?" his wife cried out.
"He doesn't say so--I suppose--I suppose it's only business of some
sort," her husband said. His face was white. "Don't detain me, dear.
I'll come back as soon as--as soon as I get through."
He kissed her, and was gone. Half an hour later he sat in the office of
Abram Van Riper's Son.
There was no doubting it, no denying it, no palliating it even. The
curse had come upon the house of Jacob Dolph, and his son was a thief
and a fugitive.
It was an old story and a simple story. It was the story of the
Haskins's million and the Dolphs' hundred thousand; it was the story of
the boy with a hundred thousand in prospect trying to spend money
against the boy with a million in sight. It was the story of cards,
speculation--another name for that sort of gambling which is worse than
any on the green cloth--and what is euphemistically known as wine.
There was enough oral and documentary evidence to make the whole story
hideously clear to Jacob Dolph, as he sat in that dark little pen of Van
Riper's and had the history of his son's fall spelled out to him, word
by word. The boy had proved himself apt and clever in his office work.
His education had given him an advantage over all the other clerks, and
he had learned his duties with wonderful ease. And when, six months
before, old Mr. Daw had let himself down from his stool for the last
time, and had muffled up his thin old throat in his great green worsted
scarf, and had gone home to die, young Dolph had been put temporarily in
his place. In those six months he had done his bad work. Even Van Riper
admitted that it must have been a sudden temptation. But--he had
yielded. In those six months fifty thousand dollars of Abram Van Riper's
money had gone into the gulf that yawned in Wall Street; fifty thousand
dollars, not acquired by falsifying the books, but filched outright from
the private safe to which he had access; fifty thousand dollars, in
securities which he had turned into money, acting as the confidential
man of the house.
When Jacob Dolph, looking like a man of eighty, left the private office
of Mr. Van Riper he had two things to do. One was to tell his wife, the
other was to assign enough property to Van Riper to cover the amount of
the defalcation. Both had been done before night.
[Illustration]
V.
It is to be said for society that there was very little chuckling and
smiling when this fresh piece of news about the Dolphs came out. Nor did
the news pass from house to house like wildfire. It rather leaked out
here and there, percolating through barriers of friendly silence,
slipping from discreet lips and repeated in anxious confidence, with all
manner of qualifications and hopeful suppositions and suggestions. As a
matter of fact, people never really knew just what Eustace Dolph had
done, or how far his wrong-doing had carried him. All that was ever
positively known was that the boy had got into trouble down-town, and
had gone to Europe. The exact nature of the trouble could only be
conjectured. The very brokers who had been the instruments of young
Dolph's ruin were not able to separate his authorized speculations from
those which were illegitimate. They could do no more than guess, from
what they knew of Van Riper's conservative method of investment, that
the young man's unfortunate purchases were made for himself, and they
figured these at fifty-five thousand odd hundred dollars.
Somebody, who looked up the deed which Jacob Dolph executed that winter
day, found that he had transferred to Van Riper real estate of more than
that value.
No word ever came from the cold lips of Abram Van Riper's son; and his
office was a piece of all but perfect machinery, which dared not creak
when he commanded silence. And no one save Van Riper and Dolph, and
their two lawyers, knew the whole truth. Dolph never even spoke about it
to his wife, after that first night. It was these five people only who
knew that Mr. Jacob Dolph had parted with the last bit of real estate
that he owned, outside of his own home, and they knew that his other
property was of a doubtful sort, that could yield at the best only a
very limited income--hardly enough for a man who lived in so great a
house, and whose doors were open to all his friends nine months in the
year.
Yet he stayed there, and grew old with an age which the years have not
among their gifts. When his little girl was large enough to sit upon his
knee, her small hands clutched at a snowy-white mustache, and she
complained that his great, dark, hollow eyes never would look "right
into hers, away down deep." Yet he loved her, and talked more to her
perhaps than to any one else, not even excepting Aline.
But he never spoke to her of the elder brother whom she could not
remember. It was her mother who whispered something of the story to her,
and told her not to let papa know that she knew of it, for it would
grieve him. Aline herself knew nothing about the boy save that he lived,
and lived a criminal. Jacob himself could only have told her that their
son was a wandering adventurer, known as a blackleg and sharper in every
town in Europe.
The doors of the great house were closed to all the world, or opened
only for some old friend, who went away very soon out of the presence of
a sadness beyond all solace of words, or kindly look, or hand-clasp. And
so, in something that only the grace of their gentle lives relieved
from absolute poverty, those three dwelt in the old house, and let the
world slip by them.
* * * * *
There was no sleep for any one of the little household in the great
house on the night of the 14th of July, 1863. Doors and blinds were
closed; only a light shone through the half-open slats at a second-story
window, and in that room Aline lay sick, almost unto death, her white
hair loosed from its usual dainty neatness, her dark eyes turning with
an unmeaning gaze from the face of the little girl at her side to the
face of her husband at the foot of her bed. Her hands, wrinkled and
small, groped over the coverlet, with nervous twitchings, as every now
and then the howls or the pistol-shots of the mob in the streets below
them fell on her ear. And at every such movement the lips of the girl by
her pillow twitched in piteous sympathy. About half-past twelve there
was sharp firing in volleys to the southward of them, that threw the
half-conscious sufferer into an agony of supersensitive disturbance.
Then there came a silence that seemed unnaturally deep, yet it was only
the silence of a summer night in the deserted city streets.
Through it they heard, sharp and sudden, with something inexplicably
fearful about it, the patter of running feet. They had heard that sound
often enough that night and the night before; but these feet stopped at
their own door, and came up the steps, and the runner beat and pounded
on the heavy panels.
Father and child looked in each other's eyes, and then Jacob Dolph left
his post at the foot of the bed, and, passing out of the room, went down
the stairs with deliberate tread, and opened the door.
A negro's face, almost gray in its mad fear, stared into his with a
desperate appeal which the lips could not utter. Dolph drew the man in,
and shut the door behind him. The negro leaned, trembling and exhausted,
against the wall.
"I knowed you'd take me in, Mist' Dolph," he panted; "I'm feared they
seen me, though--they was mighty clost behind."
[Illustration]
They were close behind him, indeed. In half a minute the roar of the
mob filled the street with one terrible howl and shriek of animal rage,
heard high above the tramp of half a thousand feet; and the beasts of
disorder, gathered from all the city's holes and dens of crime, wild for
rapine and outrage, burst upon them, sweeping up the steps, hammering at
the great doors, crying for the blood of the helpless and the
innocent.
[Illustration: "Have you got a nigger here?"]
Foreign faces, almost all! Irish, mostly; but there were heavy, ignorant
German types of feature uplifted under the gas-light; sallow,
black-mustached Magyar faces; thin, acute, French faces--all with the
stamp of old-world ignorance and vice upon them.
The door opened, and the white-haired old gentleman, erect, haughty,
with brightening eyes, faced the leader of the mob--a great fellow,
black-bearded, who had a space to himself on the stoop, and swung his
broad shoulders from side to side.
"Have you got a nigger here?" he began, and then stopped short, for
Jacob Dolph was looking upon the face of his son.
Vagabond and outcast, he had the vagabond's quick wit, this leader of
infuriate crime, and some one good impulse stirred in him of his
forfeited gentlehood. He turned savagely upon his followers.
"He ain't here!" he roared. "I told you so--I saw him turn the corner."
"Shtap an' burrn the bondholder's house!" yelled a man behind. Eustace
Dolph turned round with a furious, threatening gesture.
"You damned fool!" he thundered; "he's no bondholder--he's one of _us_.
Go on, I tell you! Will you let that nigger get away?"
He half drove them down the steps. The old man stepped out, his face
aflame under his white hair, his whole frame quivering.
"You lie, sir!" he cried; but his voice was drowned in the howl of the
mob as it swept around the corner, forgetting all things else in the
madness of its hideous chase.
When Jacob Dolph returned to his wife's chamber, her feeble gaze was
lifted to the ceiling. At the sound of his footsteps she let it fall
dimly upon his face. He was thankful that, in that last moment of
doubtful quickening, she could not read his eyes; and she passed away,
smiling sweetly, one of her white old hands in his, and one in her
child's.
* * * * *
Age takes small account of the immediate flight of time. To the young, a
year is a mighty span. Be it a happy or an unhappy year that youth
looks forward to, it is a vista that stretches far into the future. And
when it is done, this interminable year, and youth, just twelve months
older, looks back to the first of it, what a long way off it is! What
tremendous progress we have made! How much more we know! How
insufficient are the standards by which we measured the world a poor
three hundred and sixty-five days back!
But age has grown habituated to the flight of time. Years? we have seen
so many of them that they make no great impression upon us. What! is it
ten years since young Midas first came to the counting-room, asking
humbly for an entry-clerk's place--he who is now the head of the firm?
Bless us! it seems like yesterday. Is it ten years since we first put on
that coat? Why, it must be clean out of the fashion by this time.
But age does not carry out the thought, and ask if itself be out of the
fashion. Age knows better. A few wrinkles, a stoop in the back, a
certain slowness of pace, do not make a man old at sixty--nor at
seventy, neither; for now you come to think of it, the ten years we were
speaking of is gone, and it is seventy now, and not sixty. Seventy! Why,
'tis not to be thought of as old age--save when it may be necessary to
rebuke the easy arrogance of youth.
The time had come to Jacob Dolph when he could not feel that he was
growing old. He was old, of course, in one sense. He was sixty-one when
the war broke out; and they had not allowed him to form a regiment and
go to the front at its head. But what was old for a soldier in active
service was not old for a well-preserved civilian. True, he could never
be the same man again, now that poor Aline was gone. True, he was
growing more and more disinclined for active exercise, and he regretted
he had led so sedentary a life. But though '64 piled itself up on '63,
and '65 on top of that, these arbitrary divisions of time seemed to him
but trivial.
Edith was growing old, perhaps; getting to be a great girl, taller than
her mother and fairer of complexion, yet not unlike her, he sometimes
thought, as she began to manage the affairs of the house, and to go
about the great shabby mansion with her mother's keys jingling at her
girdle. For the years went on crawling one over the other, and soon it
was 1873, and Edith was eighteen years old.
One rainy day in this year found Jacob Dolph in Wall Street. Although he
himself did not think so, he was an old man to others, and kindly hands,
such as were to be found even in that infuriate crowd, had helped him up
the marble steps of the Sub-Treasury and had given him lodgment on one
of the great blocks of marble that dominate the street. From where he
stood he could see Wall Street, east and west, and the broad plaza of
Broad Street to the south, filled with a compact mass of men, half
hidden by a myriad of umbrellas, rain-soaked, black, glinting in the dim
light. So might a Roman legion have looked, when each man raised his
targum above his head and came shoulder to shoulder with his neighbor
for the assault.
There was a confused, ant-like movement in the vast crowd, and a dull
murmur came from it, rising, in places, into excited shouts. Here and
there the fringe of the mass swelled up and swept against the steps of
some building, forcing, or trying to force, an entry. Sometimes a narrow
stream of men trickled into the half-open doorway; sometimes the great
portals closed, and then there was a mad outcry and a low groan, and the
foremost on the steps suddenly turned back, and in some strange way
slipped through the throng and sped in all directions to bear to hushed
or clamorous offices the news that this house or that bank had
"suspended payment." "Busted," the panting messengers said to
white-faced merchants; and in the slang of the street was conveyed the
message of doom. The great panic of 1873 was upon the town--the outcome
of long years of unwarranted self-confidence, of selfish extravagance,
of conscienceless speculation--and, as hour after hour passed by,
fortunes were lost in the twinkling of an eye, and the bread was taken
out of the mouths of the helpless.
After Jacob Dolph had stood for some time, looking down upon the
tossing sea of black umbrellas, he saw a narrow lane made through the
crowd in the wake of a little party of clerks and porters, bearing aid
perhaps to some stricken bank. Slipping down, he followed close behind
them. Perhaps the jostling hundreds on the sidewalk were gentle with
him, seeing that he was an old man; perhaps the strength of excitement
nerved him, for he made his way down the street to the flight of steps
leading to the door of a tall white building, and he crowded himself up
among the pack that was striving to enter. He had even got so far that
he could see the line pouring in above his head, when there was a sudden
cessation of motion in the press, and one leaf of the outer iron doors
swung forward, meeting the other, already closed to bar the crush, and
two green-painted panels stood, impassable, between him and the last of
the Dolph fortune.
One howl and roar, and the crowd turned back on itself, and swept him
with it. In five minutes a thousand offices knew of the greatest failure
of the day; and Jacob Dolph was leaning--weak, gasping, dazed--against
the side wall of a hallway in William Street, with two stray office-boys
staring at him out of their small, round, unsympathetic eyes.
Let us not ask what wild temptation led the old man back again to risk
all he owned in that hellish game that is played in the narrow street.
We may remember this: that he saw his daughter growing to womanhood in
that silent and almost deserted house, shouldered now by low tenements
and wretched shops and vile drinking-places; that he may have pictured
for her a brighter life in that world that had long ago left him behind
it in his bereaved and disgraced loneliness; that he had had some vision
of her young beauty fulfilling its destiny amid sweeter and fairer
surroundings. And let us not forget that he knew no other means than
these to win the money for which he cared little; which he found
absolutely needful.
After Jacob Dolph had yielded for the last time to the temptation that
had conquered him once before, and had ruined his son's soul; after that
final disastrous battle with the gamblers of Wall Street, wherein he
lost the last poor remnant of the great Dolph fortune, giving up with it
his father's home forever, certain old bread of his father's casting
came back to him upon strange waters.
[Illustration]
Abram Van Riper came to the daughter of the house of Dolph, a little
before it became certain that the house must be sold, and told her, in
his dry way, that he had to make a business communication to her, for he
feared that her father was hardly capable of understanding such matters
any longer. She winced a little; but he took a load off her heart when
he made his slow, precise explanation. The fact was, he said, that the
business transactions between her father and himself, consequent upon
the defalcation of her brother Eustace, had never been closed, in all
these seventeen years. (Edith Dolph trembled.) It was known at the time
that the property transferred by her father rather more than covered the
amount of her brother's--peculation. But her father's extreme
sensitiveness had led him to avoid a precise adjustment, and as the
property transferred was subject to certain long leases, he, Mr. Van
Riper, had thought it best to wait until the property was sold and the
account closed, to settle the matter with Mr. Dolph. This had lately
been done, and Mr. Van Riper found that, deducting charges, and interest
on his money at seven per cent., he had made by the transaction six
thousand three hundred and seventy dollars. This sum, he thought,
properly belonged to Mr. Dolph. And if Miss Dolph would take the counsel
of an old friend of her father's, she would leave the sum in charge of
the house of Abram Van Riper's Son. The house would invest it at ten per
cent.--he stopped and looked at Edith, but she only answered him with
innocent eyes of attention--and would pay her six hundred and
thirty-seven dollars annually in quarterly payments. It might be of
assistance to Mr. Dolph in his present situation.
It was of assistance. They lived on it, father and daughter, with such
aid as Decorative Art--just introduced to this country--gave in
semi-remunerative employment for her deft fingers.
Abram Van Riper, when he left the weeping, grateful girl, marched out
into the street, turned his face toward what was once Greenwich Village,
and said to his soul:
"I think that will balance any obligation my father may have put himself
under in buying that State Street house too cheap. Now then, old
gentleman, you can lie easy in your grave. The Van Ripers ain't beholden
to the Dolphs, that's sure."
* * * * *
A few years ago--shall we say as many as ten?--there were two small
rooms up in a quiet street in Harlem, tenanted by an old gentleman and a
young gentlewoman; and in the front room, which was the young woman's
room by night, but a sort of parlor or sitting-room in the daytime, the
old gentleman stood up, four times a year, to have his collar pulled up,
and his necktie set right, and his coat dusted off by a pair of small
white hands, so that he might be presentable when he went down town to
collect certain moneys due him.
[Illustration]
They were small rooms, but they were bright and cheerful, being
decorated with sketches and studies of an artistic sort, which may have
been somewhat crude and uncertain as to treatment, but were certainly
pleasant and feminine. Yet few saw them save the young woman and the old
man. The most frequent visitor was a young artist from the West, who
often escorted Miss Dolph to and from the Art League rooms. His name was
Rand; he had studied in Munich; he had a future before him, and was
making money on his prospects. He might just as well have lived in
luxurious bachelor quarters in the lower part of the city; but, for
reasons of his own, he preferred to live in Harlem.
Old Mr. Dolph insisted on going regularly every quarter-day to the
office of the Van Riper Estate, "to collect," as he said, "the interest
due him." Four times a year he went down town on the Eighth Avenue cars,
where the conductors soon learned to know him by his shiny black
broadcloth coat and his snow-white hair. His daughter was always uneasy
about these trips; but her father could not be dissuaded from them. To
him they were his one hold on active life--the all-important events of
the year. It would have broken his tender old heart to tell him that he
could not go to collect his "interest." And so she set his necktie
right, and he went.
When he got out of the car at Abingdon Square he tottered, in his slow,
old way, to a neat structure which combined modern jauntiness with
old-time solidity, and which was labelled simply: "Office of the Van
Riper Estate," and there he told the smilingly indulgent clerk that he
thought he would "take it in cash, this time," and, taking it in cash,
went forth.
And then he walked down through Greenwich Village into New York city,
and into the street where stood the house that his father had built.
Thus he had gone to view it four times a year, during every year save
the first, since he had given it up.
He had seen it go through one stage of decadence after another. First it
was rented, by its new owner, to the Jewish pawnbroker, with his
numerous family. Good, honest folk they were, who tried to make the
house look fine, and the five daughters made the front stoop resplendent
of summer evenings. But they had long ago moved up-town. Then it was a
cheap boarding-house, and vulgar and flashy men and women swarmed out in
the morning and in at eventide. Then it was a lodging-house, and shabby
people let themselves out and in at all hours of the day and night. And
last of all it had become a tenement-house, and had fallen into line
with its neighbors to left and right, and the window-panes were broken,
and the curse of misery and poverty and utter degradation had fallen
upon it.
But still it lifted its grand stone front, still it stood, broad and
great, among all the houses in the street. And it was the old man's
custom, after he had stood on the opposite sidewalk and gazed at it for
a while, to go to a little French _café_ a block to the eastward, and
there to take a glass of _vermouth gommé_--it was a mild drink, and
pleasing to an old man. Sometimes he chanced to find some one in this
place who would listen to his talk about the old house--he was very
grand; but they were decent people who went to that _café_, and perhaps
would go back with him a block and look at it. We would not have talked
to chance people in an east-side French _café_. But then we have never
owned such a house, and lost it--and everything else.
* * * * *
Late one hot summer afternoon young Rand sat in his studio, working
enthusiastically on a "composition." A new school of art had invaded New
York, and compositions were everything, for the moment, whether they
composed anything or nothing. He heard a nervous rattling at his
door-knob, and he opened the door. A young woman lifted a sweet,
flushed, frightened face to his.
"Oh, John," she cried, "father hasn't come home yet, and it's five
o'clock, and he left home at nine."
John Rand threw off his flannel jacket, and got into his coat.
"We'll find him; don't worry, dear," he said.
They found him within an hour. The great city, having no further use for
the old Dolph house, was crowding it out of existence. With the crashing
of falling bricks, and the creaking of the tackle that swung the great
beams downward, the old house was crumbling into a gap between two high
walls. Already you could see through to where the bright new bricks
were piled at the back to build the huge eight-story factory that was to
take its place. But it was not to see this demolition that the crowd was
gathered, filling the narrow street. It stood, dense, ugly, vulgar,
stolidly intent, gazing at the windows of the house opposite--a poor
tenement house.
As they went up the steps they met the young hospital surgeon, going
back to his ambulance.
"You his folks?" he inquired. "Sorry to tell you so, but I can't do any
good. Sunstroke, I suppose--may have been something else--but it's
collapse now, and no mistake. You take charge, sir?" he finished,
addressing Rand.
Jacob Dolph was lying on his back in the bare front room on the first
floor. His daughter fell on her knees by his side, and made as though
she would throw her arms around him; but, looking in his face, she saw
death quietly coming upon him, and she only bent down and kissed him,
while her tears wet his brow.
Meanwhile a tall Southerner, with hair halfway down his neck, and
kindly eyes that moved in unison with his broad gestures, was talking to
Rand.
[Illustration]
"I met the ol' gentleman in the French _café_, neah heah," he said, "and
he was jus' honing to have me come up and see his house, seh--house he
used to have. Well, I came right along, an' when we got here, sure
'nough, they's taihin' down that house. Neveh felt so bad in all my
life, seh. He wasn't expectin' of it, and I 'lowed 'twuz his old home
like, and he was right hahd hit, fo' a fact. He said to me, 'Good-day,
seh,' sezee; 'good-day, seh,' he says to me, an' then he starts across
the street, an' first thing I know, he falls down flat on his face, seh.
Saw that theah brick an' mortar comin' down, an' fell flat on his face.
This hyeh pill-man 'lowed 'twuz sunstroke; but a Southern man like I am
don't need to be told what a gentleman's feelings are when he sees his
house a-torn down--no, seh. If you ever down oweh way, seh, I'd be right
glad----"
But Rand had lifted Edith from the floor, for her father would know her
no more, and had passed out of this world, unconscious of all the
squalor and ruin about him; and the poor girl was sobbing on his
shoulder.
He was very tender with her, very sorry for her--but he had never known
the walls that fell across the way; he was a young man, an artist, with
a great future before him, and the world was young to him, and she was
to be his wife.
Still, looking down, he saw that sweetly calm, listening look, that
makes beautiful the faces of the dead, come over the face of Jacob
Dolph, as though he, lying there, heard the hammers of the workmen
breaking down his father's house, brick by brick--and yet the sound
could no longer jar upon his ear or grieve his gentle spirit.
[Illustration]
+----------------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber's Note: |
|The following printing errors were corrected in this text.|
| Page 82, period added after 'path'. |
| (back over his accustomed path. At) |
| Page 97, period added after 'said'. |
| (selling our house," she said.) |
| Page 99, 'w' in 'why' changed to lower case. |
| (it was why young Eustace) |
| Page 115, repeated 'the' removed. |
| (girded at the old woman) |
+----------------------------------------------------------+
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Henry Cuyler Bunner
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