Legends of the Province-House

I.

HOWE’S MASQUERADE

One afternoon last summer, while walking along Washington street, my

eye was attracted by a sign-board protruding over a narrow archway

nearly opposite the Old South Church. The sign represented the front of

a stately edifice which was designated as the “OLD PROVINCE HOUSE, kept

by Thomas Waite.” I was glad to be thus reminded of a purpose, long

entertained, of visiting and rambling over the mansion of the old royal

governors of Massachusetts, and, entering the arched passage which

penetrated through the middle of a brick row of shops, a few steps

transported me from the busy heart of modern Boston into a small and

secluded court-yard. One side of this space was occupied by the square

front of the Province House, three stories high and surmounted by a

cupola, on the top of which a gilded Indian was discernible, with his

bow bent and his arrow on the string, as if aiming at the weathercock

on the spire of the Old South. The figure has kept this attitude for

seventy years or more, ever since good Deacon Drowne, a cunning carver

of wood, first stationed him on his long sentinel’s watch over the

city.

The Province House is constructed of brick, which seems recently to

have been overlaid with a coat of light-colored paint. A flight of red

freestone steps fenced in by a balustrade of curiously wrought iron

ascends from the court-yard to the spacious porch, over which is a

balcony with an iron balustrade of similar pattern and workmanship to

that beneath. These letters and figures—“16 P.S. 79”—are wrought into

the ironwork of the balcony, and probably express the date of the

edifice, with the initials of its founder’s name.

A wide door with double leaves admitted me into the hall or entry, on

the right of which is the entrance to the bar-room. It was in this

apartment, I presume, that the ancient governors held their levees with

vice-regal pomp, surrounded by the military men, the counsellors, the

judges, and other officers of the Crown, while all the loyalty of the

province thronged to do them honor. But the room in its present

condition cannot boast even of faded magnificence. The panelled

wainscot is covered with dingy paint and acquires a duskier hue from

the deep shadow into which the Province House is thrown by the brick

block that shuts it in from Washington street. A ray of sunshine never

visits this apartment any more than the glare of the festal torches

which have been extinguished from the era of the Revolution. The most

venerable and ornamental object is a chimney-piece set round with Dutch

tiles of blue-figured china, representing scenes from Scripture, and,

for aught I know, the lady of Pownall or Bernard may have sat beside

this fireplace and told her children the story of each blue tile. A bar

in modern style, well replenished with decanters, bottles, cigar-boxes

and network bags of lemons, and provided with a beer-pump and a

soda-fount, extends along one side of the room.

At my entrance an elderly person was smacking his lips with a zest

which satisfied me that the cellars of the Province House still hold

good liquor, though doubtless of other vintages than were quaffed by

the old governors. After sipping a glass of port-sangaree prepared by

the skilful hands of Mr. Thomas Waite, I besought that worthy successor

and representative of so many historic personages to conduct me over

their time-honored mansion. He readily complied, but, to confess the

truth, I was forced to draw strenuously upon my imagination in order to

find aught that was interesting in a house which, without its historic

associations, would have seemed merely such a tavern as is usually

favored by the custom of decent city boarders and old-fashioned country

gentlemen. The chambers, which were probably spacious in former times,

are now cut up by partitions and subdivided into little nooks, each

affording scanty room for the narrow bed and chair and dressing-table

of a single lodger: The great staircase, however, may be termed,

without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence. It

winds through the midst of the house by flights of broad steps, each

flight terminating in a square landing-place, whence the ascent is

continued toward the cupola. A carved balustrade, freshly painted in

the lower stories, but growing dingier as we ascend, borders the

staircase with its quaintly twisted and intertwined pillars, from top

to bottom. Up these stairs the military boots, or perchance the gouty

shoes, of many a governor have trodden as the wearers mounted to the

cupola which afforded them so wide a view over their metropolis and the

surrounding country. The cupola is an octagon with several windows, and

a door opening upon the roof. From this station, as I pleased myself

with imagining, Gage may have beheld his disastrous victory on Bunker

Hill (unless one of the tri-mountains intervened), and Howe have marked

the approaches of Washington’s besieging army, although the buildings

since erected in the vicinity have shut out almost every object save

the steeple of the Old South, which seems almost within arm’s length.

Descending from the cupola, I paused in the garret to observe the

ponderous white-oak framework, so much more massive than the frames of

modern houses, and thereby resembling an antique skeleton. The brick

walls, the materials of which were imported from Holland, and the

timbers of the mansion, are still as sound as ever, but, the floors and

other interior parts being greatly decayed, it is contemplated to gut

the whole and build a new house within the ancient frame-and brickwork.

Among other inconveniences of the present edifice, mine host mentioned

that any jar or motion was apt to shake down the dust of ages out of

the ceiling of one chamber upon the floor of that beneath it.

We stepped forth from the great front window into the balcony where in

old times it was doubtless the custom of the king’s representative to

show himself to a loyal populace, requiting their huzzas and tossed-up

hats with stately bendings of his dignified person. In those days the

front of the Province House looked upon the street, and the whole site

now occupied by the brick range of stores, as well as the present

court-yard, was laid out in grass-plats overshadowed by trees and

bordered by a wrought-iron fence. Now the old aristocratic edifice

hides its time-worn visage behind an upstart modern building; at one of

the back windows I observed some pretty tailoresses sewing and chatting

and laughing, with now and then a careless glance toward the balcony.

Descending thence, we again entered the bar-room, where the elderly

gentleman above mentioned—the smack of whose lips had spoken so

favorably for Mr. Waite’s good liquor—was still lounging in his chair.

He seemed to be, if not a lodger, at least a familiar visitor of the

house who might be supposed to have his regular score at the bar, his

summer seat at the open window and his prescriptive corner at the

winter’s fireside. Being of a sociable aspect, I ventured to address

him with a remark calculated to draw forth his historical

reminiscences, if any such were in his mind, and it gratified me to

discover that, between memory and tradition, the old gentleman was

really possessed of some very pleasant gossip about the Province House.

The portion of his talk which chiefly interested me was the outline of

the following legend. He professed to have received it at one or two

removes from an eye-witness, but this derivation, together with the

lapse of time, must have afforded opportunities for many variations of

the narrative; so that, despairing of literal and absolute truth, I

have not scrupled to make such further changes as seemed conducive to

the reader’s profit and delight.

At one of the entertainments given at the province-house during the

latter part of the siege of Boston there passed a scene which has never

yet been satisfactorily explained. The officers of the British army and

the loyal gentry of the province, most of whom were collected within

the beleaguered town, had been invited to a masqued ball, for it was

the policy for Sir William Howe to hide the distress and danger of the

period and the desperate aspect of the siege under an ostentation of

festivity. The spectacle of this evening, if the oldest members of the

provincial court circle might be believed, was the most gay and

gorgeous affair that had occurred in the annals of the government. The

brilliantly-lighted apartments were thronged with figures that seemed

to have stepped from the dark canvas of historic portraits or to have

flitted forth from the magic pages of romance, or at least to have

flown hither from one of the London theatres without a change of

garments. Steeled knights of the Conquest, bearded statesmen of Queen

Elizabeth and high-ruffed ladies of her court were mingled with

characters of comedy, such as a parti-colored Merry Andrew jingling his

cap and bells, a Falstaff almost as provocative of laughter as his

prototype, and a Don Quixote with a bean-pole for a lance and a pot-lid

for a shield.

But the broadest merriment was excited by a group of figures

ridiculously dressed in old regimentals which seemed to have been

purchased at a military rag-fair or pilfered from some receptacle of

the cast-off clothes of both the French and British armies. Portions of

their attire had probably been worn at the siege of Louisburg, and the

coats of most recent cut might have been rent and tattered by sword,

ball or bayonet as long ago as Wolfe’s victory. One of these worthies—a

tall, lank figure brandishing a rusty sword of immense

longitude—purported to be no less a personage than General George

Washington, and the other principal officers of the American army, such

as Gates, Lee, Putnam, Schuyler, Ward and Heath, were represented by

similar scarecrows. An interview in the mock-heroic style between the

rebel warriors and the British commander-in-chief was received with

immense applause, which came loudest of all from the loyalists of the

colony.

There was one of the guests, however, who stood apart, eying these

antics sternly and scornfully at once with a frown and a bitter smile.

It was an old man formerly of high station and great repute in the

province, and who had been a very famous soldier in his day. Some

surprise had been expressed that a person of Colonel Joliffe’s known

Whig principles, though now too old to take an active part in the

contest, should have remained in Boston during the siege, and

especially that he should consent to show himself in the mansion of Sir

William Howe. But thither he had come with a fair granddaughter under

his arm, and there, amid all the mirth and buffoonery, stood this stern

old figure, the best-sustained character in the masquerade, because so

well representing the antique spirit of his native land. The other

guests affirmed that Colonel Joliffe’s black puritanical scowl threw a

shadow round about him, although, in spite of his sombre influence,

their gayety continued to blaze higher, like—an ominous comparison—the

flickering brilliancy of a lamp which has but a little while to burn.

Eleven strokes full half an hour ago had pealed from the clock of the

Old South, when a rumor was circulated among the company that some new

spectacle or pageant was about to be exhibited which should put a

fitting close to the splendid festivities of the night.

“What new jest has Your Excellency in hand?” asked the Reverend Mather

Byles, whose Presbyterian scruples had not kept him from the

entertainment. “Trust me, sir, I have already laughed more than beseems

my cloth at your Homeric confabulation with yonder ragamuffin general

of the rebels. One other such fit of merriment, and I must throw off my

clerical wig and band.”

“Not so, good Dr. Byles,” answered Sir William Howe; “if mirth were a

crime, you had never gained your doctorate in divinity. As to this new

foolery, I know no more about it than yourself—perhaps not so much.

Honestly, now, doctor, have you not stirred up the sober brains of some

of your countrymen to enact a scene in our masquerade?”

“Perhaps,” slyly remarked the granddaughter of Colonel Joliffe, whose

high spirit had been stung by many taunts against New England—“perhaps

we are to have a masque of allegorical figures—Victory with trophies

from Lexington and Bunker Hill, Plenty with her overflowing horn to

typify the present abundance in this good town, and Glory with a wreath

for His Excellency’s brow.”

Sir William Howe smiled at words which he would have answered with one

of his darkest frowns had they been uttered by lips that wore a beard.

He was spared the necessity of a retort by a singular interruption. A

sound of music was heard without the house, as if proceeding from a

full band of military instruments stationed in the street, playing, not

such a festal strain as was suited to the occasion, but a slow

funeral-march. The drums appeared to be muffled, and the trumpets

poured forth a wailing breath which at once hushed the merriment of the

auditors, filling all with wonder and some with apprehension. The idea

occurred to many that either the funeral procession of some great

personage had halted in front of the province-house, or that a corpse

in a velvet-covered and gorgeously-decorated coffin was about to be

borne from the portal. After listening a moment, Sir William Howe

called in a stern voice to the leader of the musicians, who had

hitherto enlivened the entertainment with gay and lightsome melodies.

The man was drum-major to one of the British regiments.

“Dighton,” demanded the general, “what means this foolery? Bid your

band silence that dead march, or, by my word, they shall have

sufficient cause for their lugubrious strains. Silence it, sirrah!”

“Please, Your Honor,” answered the drum-major, whose rubicund visage

had lost all its color, “the fault is none of mine. I and my band are

all here together, and I question whether there be a man of us that

could play that march without book. I never heard it but once before,

and that was at the funeral of his late Majesty, King George II.”

“Well, well!” said Sir William Howe, recovering his composure; “it is

the prelude to some masquerading antic. Let it pass.”

A figure now presented itself, but among the many fantastic masks that

were dispersed through the apartments none could tell precisely from

whence it came. It was a man in an old-fashioned dress of black serge

and having the aspect of a steward or principal domestic in the

household of a nobleman or great English landholder. This figure

advanced to the outer door of the mansion, and, throwing both its

leaves wide open, withdrew a little to one side and looked back toward

the grand staircase, as if expecting some person to descend. At the

same time, the music in the street sounded a loud and doleful summons.

The eyes of Sir William Howe and his guests being directed to the

staircase, there appeared on the uppermost landing-place, that was

discernible from the bottom, several personages descending toward the

door. The foremost was a man of stern visage, wearing a steeple-crowned

hat and a skull-cap beneath it, a dark cloak and huge wrinkled boots

that came halfway up his legs. Under his arm was a rolled-up banner

which seemed to be the banner of England, but strangely rent and torn;

he had a sword in his right hand and grasped a Bible in his left. The

next figure was of milder aspect, yet full of dignity, wearing a broad

ruff, over which descended a beard, a gown of wrought velvet and a

doublet and hose of black satin; he carried a roll of manuscript in his

hand. Close behind these two came a young man of very striking

countenance and demeanor with deep thought and contemplation on his

brow, and perhaps a flash of enthusiasm in his eye; his garb, like that

of his predecessors, was of an antique fashion, and there was a stain

of blood upon his ruff. In the same group with these were three or four

others, all men of dignity and evident command, and bearing themselves

like personages who were accustomed to the gaze of the multitude. It

was the idea of the beholders that these figures went to join the

mysterious funeral that had halted in front of the province-house, yet

that supposition seemed to be contradicted by the air of triumph with

which they waved their hands as they crossed the threshold and vanished

through the portal.

“In the devil’s name, what is this?” muttered Sir William Howe to a

gentleman beside him. “A procession of the regicide judges of King

Charles the martyr?”

“These,” said Colonel Joliffe, breaking silence almost for the first

time that evening—“these, if I interpret them aright, are the Puritan

governors, the rulers of the old original democracy of

Massachusetts—Endicott with the banner from which he had torn the

symbol of subjection, and Winthrop and Sir Henry Vane and Dudley,

Haynes, Bellingham and Leverett.”

“Why had that young man a stain of blood upon his ruff?” asked Miss

Joliffe.

“Because in after-years,” answered her grandfather, “he laid down the

wisest head in England upon the block for the principles of liberty.”

“Will not Your Excellency order out the guard?” whispered Lord Percy,

who, with other British officers, had now assembled round the general.

“There may be a plot under this mummery.”

“Tush! we have nothing to fear,” carelessly replied Sir William Howe.

“There can be no worse treason in the matter than a jest, and that

somewhat of the dullest. Even were it a sharp and bitter one, our best

policy would be to laugh it off. See! here come more of these gentry.”

Another group of characters had now partly descended the staircase. The

first was a venerable and white-bearded patriarch who cautiously felt

his way downward with a staff. Treading hastily behind him, and

stretching forth his gauntleted hand as if to grasp the old man’s

shoulder, came a tall soldier-like figure equipped with a plumed cap of

steel, a bright breastplate and a long sword, which rattled against the

stairs. Next was seen a stout man dressed in rich and courtly attire,

but not of courtly demeanor; his gait had the swinging motion of a

seaman’s walk, and, chancing to stumble on the staircase, he suddenly

grew wrathful and was heard to mutter an oath. He was followed by a

noble-looking personage in a curled wig such as are represented in the

portraits of Queen Anne’s time and earlier, and the breast of his coat

was decorated with an embroidered star. While advancing to the door he

bowed to the right hand and to the left in a very gracious and

insinuating style, but as he crossed the threshold, unlike the early

Puritan governors, he seemed to wring his hands with sorrow.

“Prithee, play the part of a chorus, good Dr. Byles,” said Sir William

Howe. “What worthies are these?”

“If it please Your Excellency, they lived somewhat before my day,”

answered the doctor; “but doubtless our friend the colonel has been

hand and glove with them.”

“Their living faces I never looked upon,” said Colonel Joliffe,

gravely; “although I have spoken face to face with many rulers of this

land, and shall greet yet another with an old man’s blessing ere I die.

But we talk of these figures. I take the venerable patriarch to be

Bradstreet, the last of the Puritans, who was governor at ninety or

thereabouts. The next is Sir Edmund Andros, a tyrant, as any New

England schoolboy will tell you, and therefore the people cast him down

from his high seat into a dungeon. Then comes Sir William Phipps,

shepherd, cooper, sea-captain and governor. May many of his countrymen

rise as high from as low an origin! Lastly, you saw the gracious earl

of Bellamont, who ruled us under King William.”

“But what is the meaning of it all?” asked Lord Percy.

“Now, were I a rebel,” said Miss Joliffe, half aloud, “I might fancy

that the ghosts of these ancient governors had been summoned to form

the funeral procession of royal authority in New England.”

Several other figures were now seen at the turn of the staircase. The

one in advance had a thoughtful, anxious and somewhat crafty expression

of face, and in spite of his loftiness of manner, which was evidently

the result both of an ambitious spirit and of long continuance in high

stations, he seemed not incapable of cringing to a greater than

himself. A few steps behind came an officer in a scarlet and

embroidered uniform cut in a fashion old enough to have been worn by

the duke of Marlborough. His nose had a rubicund tinge, which, together

with the twinkle of his eye, might have marked him as a lover of the

wine-cup and good-fellowship; notwithstanding which tokens, he appeared

ill at ease, and often glanced around him as if apprehensive of some

secret mischief. Next came a portly gentleman wearing a coat of shaggy

cloth lined with silken velvet; he had sense, shrewdness and humor in

his face and a folio volume under his arm, but his aspect was that of a

man vexed and tormented beyond all patience and harassed almost to

death. He went hastily down, and was followed by a dignified person

dressed in a purple velvet suit with very rich embroidery; his demeanor

would have possessed much stateliness, only that a grievous fit of the

gout compelled him to hobble from stair to stair with contortions of

face and body. When Dr. Byles beheld this figure on the staircase, he

shivered as with an ague, but continued to watch him steadfastly until

the gouty gentleman had reached the threshold, made a gesture of

anguish and despair and vanished into the outer gloom, whither the

funeral music summoned him.

“Governor Belcher—my old patron—in his very shape and dress!” gasped

Dr. Byles. “This is an awful mockery.”

“A tedious foolery, rather,” said Sir William Howe, with an air of

indifference. “But who were the three that preceded him?”

“Governor Dudley, a cunning politician; yet his craft once brought him

to a prison,” replied Colonel Joliffe. “Governor Shute, formerly a

colonel under Marlborough, and whom the people frightened out of the

province, and learned Governor Burnett, whom the legislature tormented

into a mortal fever.”

“Methinks they were miserable men—these royal governors of

Massachusetts,” observed Miss Joliffe. “Heavens! how dim the light

grows!”

It was certainly a fact that the large lamp which illuminated the

staircase now burned dim and duskily; so that several figures which

passed hastily down the stairs and went forth from the porch appeared

rather like shadows than persons of fleshly substance.

Sir William Howe and his guests stood at the doors of the contiguous

apartments watching the progress of this singular pageant with various

emotions of anger, contempt or half-acknowledged fear, but still with

an anxious curiosity. The shapes which now seemed hastening to join the

mysterious procession were recognized rather by striking peculiarities

of dress or broad characteristics of manner than by any perceptible

resemblance of features to their prototypes. Their faces, indeed, were

invariably kept in deep shadow, but Dr. Byles and other gentlemen who

had long been familiar with the successive rulers of the province were

heard to whisper the names of Shirley, of Pownall, of Sir Francis

Bernard and of the well-remembered Hutchinson, thereby confessing that

the actors, whoever they might be, in this spectral march of governors

had succeeded in putting on some distant portraiture of the real

personages. As they vanished from the door, still did these shadows

toss their arms into the gloom of night with a dread expression of woe.

Following the mimic representative of Hutchinson came a military figure

holding before his face the cocked hat which he had taken from his

powdered head, but his epaulettes and other insignia of rank were those

of a general officer, and something in his mien reminded the beholders

of one who had recently been master of the province-house and chief of

all the land.

“The shape of Gage, as true as in a looking-glass!” exclaimed Lord

Percy, turning pale.

“No, surely,” cried Miss Joliffe, laughing hysterically; “it could not

be Gage, or Sir William would have greeted his old comrade in arms.

Perhaps he will not suffer the next to pass unchallenged.”

“Of that be assured, young lady,” answered Sir William Howe, fixing his

eyes with a very marked expression upon the immovable visage of her

grandfather. “I have long enough delayed to pay the ceremonies of a

host to these departing guests; the next that takes his leave shall

receive due courtesy.”

A wild and dreary burst of music came through the open door. It seemed

as it the procession, which had been gradually filling up its ranks,

were now about to move, and that this loud peal of the wailing trumpets

and roll of the muffled drums were a call to some loiterer to make

haste. Many eyes, by an irresistible impulse, were turned upon Sir

William Howe, as if it were he whom the dreary music summoned to the

funeral of departed power.

“See! here comes the last,” whispered Miss Joliffe, pointing her

tremulous finger to the staircase.

A figure had come into view as if descending the stairs, although so

dusky was the region whence it emerged some of the spectators fancied

that they had seen this human shape suddenly moulding itself amid the

gloom. Downward the figure came with a stately and martial tread, and,

reaching the lowest stair, was observed to be a tall man booted and

wrapped in a military cloak, which was drawn up around the face so as

to meet the napped brim of a laced hat; the features, therefore, were

completely hidden. But the British officers deemed that they had seen

that military cloak before, and even recognized the frayed embroidery

on the collar, as well as the gilded scabbard of a sword which

protruded from the folds of the cloak and glittered in a vivid gleam of

light. Apart from these trifling particulars there were characteristics

of gait and bearing which impelled the wondering guests to glance from

the shrouded figure to Sir William Howe, as if to satisfy themselves

that their host had not suddenly vanished from the midst of them. With

a dark flush of wrath upon his brow, they saw the general draw his

sword and advance to meet the figure in the cloak before the latter had

stepped one pace upon the floor.

“Villain, unmuffle yourself!” cried he. “You pass no farther.”

The figure, without blenching a hair’s-breadth from the sword which was

pointed at his breast, made a solemn pause and lowered the cape of the

cloak from about his face, yet not sufficiently for the spectators to

catch a glimpse of it. But Sir William Howe had evidently seen enough.

The sternness of his countenance gave place to a look of wild

amazement, if not horror, while he recoiled several steps from the

figure and let fall his sword upon the floor. The martial shape again

drew the cloak about his features and passed on, but, reaching the

threshold with his back toward the spectators, he was seen to stamp his

foot and shake his clenched hands in the air. It was afterward affirmed

that Sir William Howe had repeated that selfsame gesture of rage and

sorrow when for the last time, and as the last royal governor, he

passed through the portal of the province-house.

“Hark! The procession moves,” said Miss Joliffe.

The music was dying away along the street, and its dismal strains were

mingled with the knell of midnight from the steeple of the Old South

and with the roar of artillery which announced that the beleaguered

army of Washington had intrenched itself upon a nearer height than

before. As the deep boom of the cannon smote upon his ear Colonel

Joliffe raised himself to the full height of his aged form and smiled

sternly on the British general.

“Would Your Excellency inquire further into the mystery of the

pageant?” said he.

“Take care of your gray head!” cried Sir William Howe, fiercely, though

with a quivering lip. “It has stood too long on a traitor’s shoulders.”

“You must make haste to chop it off, then,” calmly replied the colonel,

“for a few hours longer, and not all the power of Sir William Howe, nor

of his master, shall cause one of these gray hairs to fall. The empire

of Britain in this ancient province is at its last gasp to-night;

almost while I speak it is a dead corpse, and methinks the shadows of

the old governors are fit mourners at its funeral.”

With these words Colonel Joliffe threw on his cloak, and, drawing his

granddaughter’s arm within his own, retired from the last festival that

a British ruler ever held in the old province of Massachusetts Bay. It

was supposed that the colonel and the young lady possessed some secret

intelligence in regard to the mysterious pageant of that night. However

this might be, such knowledge has never become general. The actors in

the scene have vanished into deeper obscurity than even that wild

Indian hand who scattered the cargoes of the tea-ships on the waves and

gained a place in history, yet left no names. But superstition, among

other legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale that on the

anniversary night of Britain’s discomfiture the ghosts of the ancient

governors of Massachusetts still glide through the portal of the

Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in a military

cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping his

iron-shod boots upon the broad freestone steps with a semblance of

feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp.

When the truth-telling accents of the elderly gentleman were hushed, I

drew a long breath and looked round the room, striving with the best

energy of my imagination to throw a tinge of romance and historic

grandeur over the realities of the scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a

scent of cigar-smoke, clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way

of visible emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale.

Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were woefully disturbed by the rattling

of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey-punch which Mr. Thomas Waite was

mingling for a customer. Nor did it add to the picturesque appearance

of the panelled walls that the slate of the Brookline stage was

suspended against them, instead of the armorial escutcheon of some

far-descended governor. A stage-driver sat at one of the windows

reading a penny paper of the day—the Boston _Times_—and presenting a

figure which could nowise be brought into any picture of “Times in

Boston” seventy or a hundred years ago. On the window-seat lay a bundle

neatly done up in brown paper, the direction of which I had the idle

curiosity to read: “MISS SUSAN HUGGINS, at the PROVINCE HOUSE.” A

pretty chambermaid, no doubt. In truth, it is desperately hard work

when we attempt to throw the spell of hoar antiquity over localities

with which the living world and the day that is passing over us have

aught to do. Yet, as I glanced at the stately staircase down which the

procession of the old governors had descended, and as I emerged through

the venerable portal whence their figures had preceded me, it gladdened

me to be conscious of a thrill of awe. Then, diving through the narrow

archway, a few strides transported me into the densest throng of

Washington street.

II.

EDWARD RANDOLPH’S PORTRAIT

The old legendary guest of the Province House abode in my remembrance

from midsummer till January. One idle evening last winter, confident

that he would be found in the snuggest corner of the bar-room, I

resolved to pay him another visit, hoping to deserve well of my country

by snatching from oblivion some else unheard-of fact of history. The

night was chill and raw, and rendered boisterous by almost a gale of

wind which whistled along Washington street, causing the gaslights to

flare and flicker within the lamps.

As I hurried onward my fancy was busy with a comparison between the

present aspect of the street and that which it probably wore when the

British governors inhabited the mansion whither I was now going. Brick

edifices in those times were few till a succession of destructive fires

had swept, and swept again, the wooden dwellings and warehouses from

the most populous quarters of the town. The buildings stood insulated

and independent, not, as now, merging their separate existences into

connected ranges with a front of tiresome identity, but each possessing

features of its own, as if the owner’s individual taste had shaped it,

and the whole presenting a picturesque irregularity the absence of

which is hardly compensated by any beauties of our modern architecture.

Such a scene, dimly vanishing from the eye by the ray of here and there

a tallow candle glimmering through the small panes of scattered

windows, would form a sombre contrast to the street as I beheld it with

the gaslights blazing from corner to corner, flaming within the shops

and throwing a noonday brightness through the huge plates of glass. But

the black, lowering sky, as I turned my eyes upward, wore, doubtless,

the same visage as when it frowned upon the ante-Revolutionary New

Englanders. The wintry blast had the same shriek that was familiar to

their ears. The Old South Church, too, still pointed its antique spire

into the darkness and was lost between earth and heaven, and, as I

passed, its clock, which had warned so many generations how transitory

was their lifetime, spoke heavily and slow the same unregarded moral to

myself. “Only seven o’clock!” thought I. “My old friend’s legends will

scarcely kill the hours ’twixt this and bedtime.”

Passing through the narrow arch, I crossed the courtyard, the confined

precincts of which were made visible by a lantern over the portal of

the Province House. On entering the bar-room, I found, as I expected,

the old tradition-monger seated by a special good fire of anthracite,

compelling clouds of smoke from a corpulent cigar. He recognized me

with evident pleasure, for my rare properties as a patient listener

invariably make me a favorite with elderly gentlemen and ladies of

narrative propensites. Drawing a chair to the fire, I desired mine host

to favor us with a glass apiece of whiskey-punch, which was speedily

prepared, steaming hot, with a slice of lemon at the bottom, a dark-red

stratum of port wine upon the surface and a sprinkling of nutmeg strewn

over all. As we touched our glasses together, my legendary friend made

himself known to me as Mr. Bela Tiffany, and I rejoiced at the oddity

of the name, because it gave his image and character a sort of

individuality in my conception. The old gentleman’s draught acted as a

solvent upon his memory, so that it overflowed with tales, traditions,

anecdotes of famous dead people and traits of ancient manners, some of

which were childish as a nurse’s lullaby, while others might have been

worth the notice of the grave historian. Nothing impressed me more than

a story of a black mysterious picture which used to hang in one of the

chambers of the Province House, directly above the room where we were

now sitting. The following is as correct a version of the fact as the

reader would be likely to obtain from any other source, although,

assuredly, it has a tinge of romance approaching to the marvellous.

In one of the apartments of the province-house there was long preserved

an ancient picture the frame of which was as black as ebony, and the

canvas itself so dark with age, damp and smoke that not a touch of the

painter’s art could be discerned. Time had thrown an impenetrable veil

over it and left to tradition and fable and conjecture to say what had

once been there portrayed. During the rule of many successive governors

it had hung, by prescriptive and undisputed right, over the mantel

piece of the same chamber, and it still kept its place when

Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson assumed the administration of the

province on the departure of Sir Francis Bernard.

The lieutenant-governor sat one afternoon resting his head against the

carved back of his stately arm-chair and gazing up thoughtfully at the

void blackness of the picture. It was scarcely a time for such inactive

musing, when affairs of the deepest moment required the ruler’s

decision; for within that very hour Hutchinson had received

intelligence of the arrival of a British fleet bringing three regiments

from Halifax to overawe the insubordination of the people. These troops

awaited his permission to occupy the fortress of Castle William and the

town itself, yet, instead of affixing his signature to an official

order, there sat the lieutenant-governor so carefully scrutinizing the

black waste of canvas that his demeanor attracted the notice of two

young persons who attended him. One, wearing a military dress of buff,

was his kinsman, Francis Lincoln, the provincial captain of Castle

William; the other, who sat on a low stool beside his chair, was Alice

Vane, his favorite niece. She was clad entirely in white—a pale,

ethereal creature who, though a native of New England, had been

educated abroad and seemed not merely a stranger from another clime,

but almost a being from another world. For several years, until left an

orphan, she had dwelt with her father in sunny Italy, and there had

acquired a taste and enthusiasm for sculpture and painting which she

found few opportunities of gratifying in the undecorated dwellings of

the colonial gentry. It was said that the early productions of her own

pencil exhibited no inferior genius, though perhaps the rude atmosphere

of New England had cramped her hand and dimmed the glowing colors of

her fancy. But, observing her uncle’s steadfast gaze, which appeared to

search through the mist of years to discover the subject of the

picture, her curiosity was excited.

“Is it known, my dear uncle,” inquired she, “what this old picture once

represented? Possibly, could it be made visible, it might prove a

masterpiece of some great artist; else why has it so long held such a

conspicuous place?”

As her uncle, contrary to his usual custom—for he was as attentive to

all the humors and caprices of Alice as if she had been his own

best-beloved child—did not immediately reply, the young captain of

Castle William took that office upon himself.

“This dark old square of canvas, my fair cousin,” said he, “has been an

heirloom in the province-house from time immemorial. As to the painter,

I can tell you nothing; but if half the stories told of it be true, not

one of the great Italian masters has ever produced so marvellous a

piece of work as that before you.”

Captain Lincoln proceeded to relate some of the strange fables and

fantasies which, as it was impossible to refute them by ocular

demonstration, had grown to be articles of popular belief in reference

to this old picture. One of the wildest, and at the same time the

best-accredited, accounts stated it to be an original and authentic

portrait of the evil one, taken at a witch-meeting near Salem, and that

its strong and terrible resemblance had been confirmed by several of

the confessing wizards and witches at their trial in open court. It was

likewise affirmed that a familiar spirit or demon abode behind the

blackness of the picture, and had shown himself at seasons of public

calamity to more than one of the royal governors. Shirley, for

instance, had beheld this ominous apparition on the eve of General

Abercrombie’s shameful and bloody defeat under the walls of

Ticonderoga. Many of the servants of the province-house had caught

glimpses of a visage frowning down upon them at morning or evening

twilight, or in the depths of night while raking up the fire that

glimmered on the hearth beneath, although, if any were, bold enough to

hold a torch before the picture, it would appear as black and

undistinguishable as ever. The oldest inhabitant of Boston recollected

that his father—in whose days the portrait had not wholly faded out of

sight—had once looked upon it, but would never suffer himself to be

questioned as to the face which was there represented. In connection

with such stories, it was remarkable that over the top of the frame

there were some ragged remnants of black silk, indicating that a veil

had formerly hung down before the picture until the duskiness of time

had so effectually concealed it. But, after all, it was the most

singular part of the affair that so many of the pompous governors of

Massachusetts had allowed the obliterated picture to remain in the

state-chamber of the province-house.

“Some of these fables are really awful,” observed Alice Vane, who had

occasionally shuddered as well as smiled while her cousin spoke. “It

would be almost worth while to wipe away the black surface of the

canvas, since the original picture can hardly be so formidable as those

which fancy paints instead of it.”

“But would it be possible,” inquired her cousin,” to restore this dark

picture to its pristine hues?”

“Such arts are known in Italy,” said Alice.

The lieutenant-governor had roused himself from his abstracted mood,

and listened with a smile to the conversation of his young relatives.

Yet his voice had something peculiar in its tones when he undertook the

explanation of the mystery.

“I am sorry, Alice, to destroy your faith in the legends of which you

are so fond,” remarked he, “but my antiquarian researches have long

since made me acquainted with the subject of this picture—if picture it

can be called—which is no more visible, nor ever will be, than the face

of the long-buried man whom it once represented. It was the portrait of

Edward Randolph, the founder of this house, a person famous in the

history of New England.”

“Of that Edward Randolph,” exclaimed Captain Lincoln, “who obtained the

repeal of the first provincial charter, under which our forefathers had

enjoyed almost democratic privileges—he that was styled the arch-enemy

of New England, and whose memory is still held in detestation as the

destroyer of our liberties?”

“It was the same Randolph,” answered Hutchinson, moving uneasily in his

chair. “It was his lot to taste the bitterness of popular odium.”

“Our annals tell us,” continued the captain of Castle William, “that

the curse of the people followed this Randolph where he went and

wrought evil in all the subsequent events of his life, and that its

effect was seen, likewise, in the manner of his death. They say, too,

that the inward misery of that curse worked itself outward and was

visible on the wretched man’s countenance, making it too horrible to be

looked upon. If so, and if this picture truly represented his aspect,

it was in mercy that the cloud of blackness has gathered over it.”

“These traditions are folly to one who has proved, as I have, how

little of historic truth lies at the bottom,” said the

lieutenant-governor. “As regards the life and character of Edward

Randolph, too implicit credence has been given to Dr. Cotton Mather,

who—I must say it, though some of his blood runs in my veins—has filled

our early history with old women’s tales as fanciful and extravagant as

those of Greece or Rome.”

“And yet,” whispered Alice Vane, “may not such fables have a moral? And

methinks, if the visage of this portrait be so dreadful, it is not

without a cause that it has hung so long in a chamber of the

province-house. When the rulers feel themselves irresponsible, it were

well that they should be reminded of the awful weight of a people’s

curse.”

The lieutenant-governor started and gazed for a moment at his niece, as

if her girlish fantasies had struck upon some feeling in his own breast

which all his policy or principles could not entirely subdue. He knew,

indeed, that Alice, in spite of her foreign education, retained the

native sympathies of a New England girl.

“Peace, silly child!” cried he, at last, more harshly than he had ever

before addressed the gentle Alice. “The rebuke of a king; is more to be

dreaded than the clamor of a wild, misguided multitude.—Captain

Lincoln, it is decided: the fortress of Castle William must be occupied

by the royal troops. The two remaining regiments shall be billeted in

the town or encamped upon the Common. It is time, after years of

tumult, and almost rebellion, that His Majesty’s government should have

a wall of strength about it.”

“Trust, sir—trust yet a while to the loyalty of the people,” said

Captain Lincoln, “nor teach them that they can ever be on other terms

with British soldiers than those of brotherhood, as when they fought

side by side through the French war. Do not convert the streets of your

native town into a camp. Think twice before you give up old Castle

William, the key of the province, into other keeping than that of

true-born New Englanders.”

“Young man, it is decided,” repeated Hutchinson, rising from his chair.

“A British officer will be in attendance this evening to receive the

necessary instructions for the disposal of the troops. Your presence

also will be required. Till then, farewell.”

With these words the lieutenant-governor hastily left the room, while

Alice and her cousin more slowly followed, whispering together, and

once pausing to glance back at the mysterious picture. The captain of

Castle William fancied that the girl’s air and mien were such as might

have belonged to one of those spirits of fable—fairies or creatures of

a more antique mythology—who sometimes mingled their agency with mortal

affairs, half in caprice, yet with a sensibility to human weal or woe.

As he held the door for her to pass Alice beckoned to the picture and

smiled.

“Come forth, dark and evil shape!” cried she. “It is thine hour.”

In the evening Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson sat in the same chamber

where the foregoing scene had occurred, surrounded by several persons

whose various interests had summoned them together. There were the

selectmen of Boston—plain patriarchal fathers of the people, excellent

representatives of the old puritanical founders whose sombre strength

had stamped so deep an impress upon the New England character.

Contrasting with these were one or two members of council, richly

dressed in the white wigs, the embroidered waistcoats and other

magnificence of the time, and making a somewhat ostentatious display of

courtier-like ceremonial. In attendance, likewise, was a major of the

British army, awaiting the lieutenant-governor’s orders for the landing

of the troops, which still remained on board the transports. The

captain of Castle William stood beside Hutchinson’s chair, with folded

arms, glancing rather haughtily at the British officer by whom he was

soon to be superseded in his command. On a table in the centre of the

chamber stood a branched silver candlestick, throwing down the glow of

half a dozen waxlights upon a paper apparently ready for the

lieutenant-governor’s signature.

Partly shrouded in the voluminous folds of one of the window-curtains,

which fell from the ceiling to the floor, was seen the white drapery of

a lady’s robe. It may appear strange that Alice Vane should have been

there at such a time, but there was something so childlike, so wayward,

in her singular character, so apart from ordinary rules, that her

presence did not surprise the few who noticed it. Meantime, the

chairman of the selectmen was addressing to the lieutenant-governor a

long and solemn protest against the reception of the British troops

into the town.

“And if Your Honor,” concluded this excellent but somewhat prosy old

gentleman, “shall see fit to persist in bringing these mercenary

sworders and musketeers into our quiet streets, not on our heads be the

responsibility. Think, sir, while there is yet time, that if one drop

of blood be shed, that blood shall be an eternal stain upon Your

Honor’s memory. You, sir, have written with an able pen the deeds of

our forefathers; the more to be desired is it, therefore, that yourself

should deserve honorable mention as a true patriot and upright ruler

when your own doings shall be written down in history.”

“I am not insensible, my good sir, to the natural desire to stand well

in the annals of my country,” replied Hutchinson, controlling his

impatience into courtesy, “nor know I any better method of attaining

that end than by withstanding the merely temporary spirit of mischief

which, with your pardon, seems to have infected older men than myself.

Would you have me wait till the mob shall sack the province-house as

they did my private mansion? Trust me, sir, the time may come when you

will be glad to flee for protection to the king’s banner, the raising

of which is now so distasteful to you.”

“Yes,” said the British major, who was impatiently expecting the

lieutenant-governor’s orders. “The demagogues of this province have

raised the devil, and cannot lay him again. We will exorcise him in

God’s name and the king’s.”

“If you meddle with the devil, take care of his claws,” answered the

captain of Castle William, stirred by the taunt against his countrymen.

“Craving your pardon, young sir,” said the venerable selectman, “let

not an evil spirit enter into your words. We will strive against the

oppressor with prayer and fasting, as our forefathers would have done.

Like them, moreover, we will submit to whatever lot a wise Providence

may send us—always after our own best exertions to amend it.”

“And there peep forth the devil’s claws!” muttered Hutchinson, who well

understood the nature of Puritan submission. “This matter shall be

expedited forthwith. When there shall be a sentinel at every corner and

a court of guard before the town-house, a loyal gentleman may venture

to walk abroad. What to me is the outcry of a mob in this remote

province of the realm? The king is my master, and England is my

country; upheld by their armed strength, I set my foot upon the rabble

and defy them.”

He snatched a pen and was about to affix his signature to the paper

that lay on the table, when the captain of Castle William placed his

hand upon his shoulder. The freedom of the action, so contrary to the

ceremonious respect which was then considered due to rank and dignity,

awakened general surprise, and in none more than in the

lieutenant-governor himself. Looking angrily up, he perceived that his

young relative was pointing his finger to the opposite wall.

Hutchinson’s eye followed the signal, and he saw what had hitherto been

unobserved—that a black silk curtain was suspended before the

mysterious picture, so as completely to conceal it. His thoughts

immediately recurred to the scene of the preceding afternoon, and in

his surprise, confused by indistinct emotions, yet sensible that his

niece must have had an agency in this phenomenon, he called loudly upon

her:

“Alice! Come hither, Alice!”

No sooner had he spoken than Alice Vane glided from her station, and,

pressing one hand across her eyes, with the other snatched away the

sable curtain that concealed the portrait. An exclamation of surprise

burst from every beholder, but the lieutenant-governor’s voice had a

tone of horror.

“By Heaven!” said he, in a low inward murmur, speaking rather to

himself than to those around him; “if the spirit of Edward Randolph

were to appear among us from the place of torment, he could not wear

more of the terrors of hell upon his face.”

“For some wise end,” said the aged selectman, solemnly, “hath

Providence scattered away the mist of years that had so long hid this

dreadful effigy. Until this hour no living man hath seen what we

behold.”

Within the antique frame which so recently had enclosed a sable waste

of canvas now appeared a visible picture-still dark, indeed, in its

hues and shadings, but thrown forward in strong relief. It was a

half-length figure of a gentleman in a rich but very old-fashioned

dress of embroidered velvet, with a broad ruff and a beard, and wearing

a hat the brim of which overshadowed his forehead. Beneath this cloud

the eyes had a peculiar glare which was almost lifelike. The whole

portrait started so distinctly out of the background that it had the

effect of a person looking down from the wall at the astonished and

awe-stricken spectators. The expression of the face, if any words can

convey an idea of it, was that of a wretch detected in some hideous

guilt and exposed to the bitter hatred and laughter and withering scorn

of a vast surrounding multitude. There was the struggle of defiance,

beaten down and overwhelmed by the crushing weight of ignominy. The

torture of the soul had come forth upon the countenance. It seemed as

if the picture, while hidden behind the cloud of immemorial years, had

been all the time acquiring an intenser depth and darkness of

expression, till now it gloomed forth again and threw its evil omen

over the present hour. Such, if the wild legend may be credited, was

the portrait of Edward Randolph as he appeared when a people’s curse

had wrought its influence upon his nature.

“’Twould drive me mad, that awful face,” said Hutchinson, who seemed

fascinated by the contemplation of it.

“Be warned, then,” whispered Alice. “He trampled on a people’s rights.

Behold his punishment, and avoid a crime like his.”

The lieutenant-governor actually trembled for an instant, but, exerting

his energy—which was not, however, his most characteristic feature—he

strove to shake off the spell of Randolph’s countenance.

“Girl,” cried he, laughing bitterly, as he turned to Alice, “have you

brought hither your painter’s art, your Italian spirit of intrigue,

your tricks of stage-effect, and think to influence the councils of

rulers and the affairs of nations by such shallow contrivances? See

here!”

“Stay yet a while,” said the selectman as Hutchinson again snatched the

pen; “for if ever mortal man received a warning from a tormented soul,

Your Honor is that man.”

“Away!” answered Hutchinson, fiercely. “Though yonder senseless picture

cried ‘Forbear!rsquo; it should not move me!”

Casting a scowl of defiance at the pictured face—which seemed at that

moment to intensify the horror of its miserable and wicked look—he

scrawled on the paper, in characters that betokened it a deed of

desperation, the name of Thomas Hutchinson. Then, it is said, he

shuddered, as if that signature had granted away his salvation.

“It is done,” said he, and placed his hand upon his brow.

“May Heaven forgive the deed!” said the soft, sad accents of Alice

Vane, like the voice of a good spirit flitting away.

When morning came, there was a stifled whisper through the household,

and spreading thence about the town, that the dark mysterious picture

had started from the wall and spoken face to face with

Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson. If such a miracle had been wrought,

however, no traces of it remained behind; for within the antique frame

nothing could be discerned save the impenetrable cloud which had

covered the canvas since the memory of man. If the figure had, indeed,

stepped forth, it had fled back, spirit-like, at the day-dawn, and

hidden itself behind a century’s obscurity. The truth probably was that

Alice Vane’s secret for restoring the hues of the picture had merely

effected a temporary renovation. But those who in that brief interval

had beheld the awful visage of Edward Randolph desired no second

glance, and ever afterward trembled at the recollection of the scene,

as if an evil spirit had appeared visibly among them. And, as for

Hutchinson, when, far over the ocean, his dying-hour drew on, he gasped

for breath and complained that he was choking with the blood of the

Boston Massacre, and Francis Lincoln, the former captain of Castle

William, who was standing at his bedside, perceived a likeness in his

frenzied look to that of Edward Randolph. Did his broken spirit feel at

that dread hour the tremendous burden of a people’s curse?

At the conclusion of this miraculous legend I inquired of mine host

whether the picture still remained in the chamber over our heads, but

Mr. Tiffany informed me that it had long since been removed, and was

supposed to be hidden in some out-of-the-way corner of the New England

Museum. Perchance some curious antiquary may light upon it there, and,

with the assistance of Mr. Howorth, the picture-cleaner, may supply a

not unnecessary proof of the authenticity of the facts here set down.

During the progress of the story a storm had been gathering abroad and

raging and rattling so loudly in the upper regions of the Province

House that it seemed as if all the old governors and great men were

running riot above stairs while Mr. Bela Tiffany babbled of them below.

In the course of generations, when many people have lived and died in

an ancient house, the whistling of the wind through its crannies and

the creaking of its beams and rafters become strangely like the tones

of the human voice, or thundering laughter, or heavy footsteps treading

the deserted chambers. It is as if the echoes of half a century were

revived. Such were the ghostly sounds that roared and murmured in our

ears when I took leave of the circle round the fireside of the Province

House and, plunging down the doorsteps, fought my way homeward against

a drifting snow-storm.

III.

LADY ELEANORE’S MANTLE

Mine excellent friend the landlord of the Province House was pleased

the other evening to invite Mr. Tiffany and myself to an oyster-supper.

This slight mark of respect and gratitude, as he handsomely observed,

was far less than the ingenious tale-teller, and I, the humble

note-taker of his narratives, had fairly earned by the public notice

which our joint lucubrations had attracted to his establishment. Many a

cigar had been smoked within his premises, many a glass of wine or more

potent _aqua vitæ_ had been quaffed, many a dinner had been eaten, by

curious strangers who, save for the fortunate conjunction of Mr.

Tiffany and me, would never have ventured through that darksome avenue

which gives access to the historic precincts of the Province House. In

short, if any credit be due to the courteous assurances of Mr. Thomas

Waite, we had brought his forgotten mansion almost as effectually into

public view as if we had thrown down the vulgar range of shoe-shops and

dry-good stores which hides its aristocratic front from Washington

street. It may be unadvisable, however, to speak too loudly of the

increased custom of the house, lest Mr. Waite should find it difficult

to renew the lease on so favorable terms as heretofore.

Being thus welcomed as benefactors, neither Mr. Tiffany nor myself felt

any scruple in doing full justice to the good things that were set

before us. If the feast were less magnificent than those same panelled

walls had witnessed in a bygone century; if mine host presided with

somewhat less of state than might have befitted a successor of the

royal governors; if the guests made a less imposing show than the

bewigged and powdered and embroidered dignitaries who erst banqueted at

the gubernatorial table and now sleep within their armorial tombs on

Copp’s Hill or round King’s Chapel,—yet never, I may boldly say, did a

more comfortable little party assemble in the province-house from Queen

Anne’s days to the Revolution. The occasion was rendered more

interesting by the presence of a venerable personage whose own actual

reminiscences went back to the epoch of Gage and Howe, and even

supplied him with a doubtful anecdote or two of Hutchinson. He was one

of that small, and now all but extinguished, class whose attachment to

royalty, and to the colonial institutions and customs that were

connected with it, had never yielded to the democratic heresies of

after-times. The young queen of Britain has not a more loyal subject in

her realm—perhaps not one who would kneel before her throne with such

reverential love—as this old grandsire whose head has whitened beneath

the mild sway of the republic which still in his mellower moments he

terms a usurpation. Yet prejudices so obstinate have not made him an

ungentle or impracticable companion. If the truth must be told, the

life of the aged loyalist has been of such a scrambling and unsettled

character—he has had so little choice of friends and been so often

destitute of any—that I doubt whether he would refuse a cup of kindness

with either Oliver Cromwell or John Hancock, to say nothing of any

democrat now upon the stage. In another paper of this series I may

perhaps give the reader a closer glimpse of his portrait.

Our host in due season uncorked a bottle of Madeira of such exquisite

perfume and admirable flavor that he surely must have discovered it in

an ancient bin down deep beneath the deepest cellar where some jolly

old butler stored away the governor’s choicest wine and forgot to

reveal the secret on his death-bed. Peace to his red-nosed ghost and a

libation to his memory! This precious liquor was imbibed by Mr. Tiffany

with peculiar zest, and after sipping the third glass it was his

pleasure to give us one of the oddest legends which he had yet raked

from the storehouse where he keeps such matters. With some suitable

adornments from my own fancy, it ran pretty much as follows.

Not long after Colonel Shute had assumed the government of

Massachusetts Bay—now nearly a hundred and twenty years ago—a young

lady of rank and fortune arrived from England to claim his protection

as her guardian. He was her distant relative, but the nearest who had

survived the gradual extinction of her family; so that no more eligible

shelter could be found for the rich and high-born Lady Eleanore

Rochcliffe than within the province-house of a Transatlantic colony.

The consort of Governor Shute, moreover, had been as a mother to her

childhood, and was now anxious to receive her in the hope that a

beautiful young woman would be exposed to infinitely less peril from

the primitive society of New England than amid the artifices and

corruptions of a court. If either the governor or his lady had

especially consulted their own comfort, they would probably have sought

to devolve the responsibility on other hands, since with some noble and

splendid traits of character Lady Eleanore was remarkable for a harsh,

unyielding pride, a haughty consciousness of her hereditary and

personal advantages, which made her almost incapable of control.

Judging from many traditionary anecdotes, this peculiar temper was

hardly less than a monomania; or if the acts which it inspired were

those of a sane person, it seemed due from Providence that pride so

sinful should be followed by as severe a retribution. That tinge of the

marvellous which is thrown over so many of these half-forgotten legends

has probably imparted an additional wildness to the strange story of

Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe.

The ship in which she came passenger had arrived at Newport, whence

Lady Eleanore was conveyed to Boston in the governor’s coach, attended

by a small escort of gentlemen on horseback. The ponderous equipage,

with its four black horses, attracted much notice as it rumbled through

Cornhill surrounded by the prancing steeds of half a dozen cavaliers

with swords dangling to their stirrups and pistols at their holsters.

Through the large glass windows of the coach, as it rolled along, the

people could discern the figure of Lady Eleanore, strangely combining

an almost queenly stateliness with the grace and beauty of a maiden in

her teens. A singular tale had gone abroad among the ladies of the

province that their fair rival was indebted for much of the

irresistible charm of her appearance to a certain article of dress—an

embroidered mantle—which had been wrought by the most skilful artist in

London, and possessed even magical properties of adornment. On the

present occasion, however, she owed nothing to the witchery of dress,

being clad in a riding-habit of velvet which would have appeared stiff

and ungraceful on any other form.

The coachman reined in his four black steeds, and the whole cavalcade

came to a pause in front of the contorted iron balustrade that fenced

the province-house from the public street. It was an awkward

coincidence that the bell of the Old South was just then tolling for a

funeral; so that, instead of a gladsome peal with which it was

customary to announce the arrival of distinguished strangers, Lady

Eleanore Rochcliffe was ushered by a doleful clang, as if calamity had

come embodied in her beautiful person.

“A very great disrespect!” exclaimed Captain Langford, an English

officer who had recently brought despatches to Governor Shute. “The

funeral should have been deferred lest Lady Eleanore’s spirits be

affected by such a dismal welcome.”

“With your pardon, sir,” replied Dr. Clarke, a physician and a famous

champion of the popular party, “whatever the heralds may pretend, a

dead beggar must have precedence of a living queen. King Death confers

high privileges.”

These remarks-were interchanged while the speakers waited a passage

through the crowd which had gathered on each side of the gateway,

leaving an open avenue to the portal of the province-house. A black

slave in livery now leaped from behind the coach and threw open the

door, while at the same moment Governor Shute descended the flight of

steps from his mansion to assist Lady Eleanore in alighting. But the

governor’s stately approach was anticipated in a manner that excited

general astonishment. A pale young man with his black hair all in

disorder rushed from the throng and prostrated himself beside the

coach, thus offering his person as a footstool for Lady Eleanore

Rochcliffe to tread upon. She held back an instant, yet with an

expression as if doubting whether the young man were worthy to bear the

weight of her footstep rather than dissatisfied to receive such awful

reverence from a fellow-mortal.

“Up, sir!” said the governor, sternly, at the same time lifting his

cane over the intruder. “What means the Bedlamite by this freak?”

“Nay,” answered Lady Eleanore, playfully, but with more scorn than pity

in her tone; “Your Excellency shall not strike him. When men seek only

to be trampled upon, it were a pity to deny them a favor so easily

granted—and so well deserved!” Then, though as lightly as a sunbeam on

a cloud, she placed her foot upon the cowering form and extended her

hand to meet that of the governor.

There was a brief interval during which Lady Eleanore retained this

attitude, and never, surely, was there an apter emblem of aristocracy

and hereditary pride trampling on human sympathies and the kindred of

nature than these two figures presented at that moment. Yet the

spectators were so smitten with her beauty, and so essential did pride

seem to the existence of such a creature, that they gave a simultaneous

acclamation of applause.

“Who is this insolent young fellow?” inquired Captain Langford, who

still remained beside Dr. Clarke. “If he be in his senses, his

impertinence demands the bastinado; if mad, Lady Eleanore should be

secured from further inconvenience by his confinement.”

“His name is Jervase Helwyse,” answered the doctor—“a youth of no birth

or fortune, or other advantages save the mind and soul that nature gave

him; and, being secretary to our colonial agent in London, it was his

misfortune to meet this Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe. He loved her, and her

scorn has driven him mad.”

“He was mad so to aspire,” observed the English officer.

“It may be so,” said Dr. Clarke, frowning as he spoke; “but I tell you,

sir, I could wellnigh doubt the justice of the Heaven above us if no

signal humiliation overtake this lady who now treads so haughtily into

yonder mansion. She seeks to place herself above the sympathies of our

common nature, which envelops all human souls; see if that nature do

not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring her level

with the lowest.”

“Never!” cried Captain Langford, indignantly—“neither in life nor when

they lay her with her ancestors.”

Not many days afterward the governor gave a ball in honor of Lady

Eleanore Rochcliffe. The principal gentry of the colony received

invitations, which were distributed to their residences far and near by

messengers on horseback bearing missives sealed with all the formality

of official despatches. In obedience to the summons, there was a

general gathering of rank, wealth and beauty, and the wide door of the

province-house had seldom given admittance to more numerous and

honorable guests than on the evening of Lady Eleanore’s ball. Without

much extravagance of eulogy, the spectacle might even be termed

splendid, for, according to the fashion of the times, the ladies shone

in rich silks and satins outspread over wide-projecting hoops, and the

gentlemen glittered in gold embroidery laid unsparingly upon the purple

or scarlet or sky-blue velvet which was the material of their coats and

waistcoats. The latter article of dress was of great importance, since

it enveloped the wearer’s body nearly to the knees and was perhaps

bedizened with the amount of his whole year’s income in golden flowers

and foliage. The altered taste of the present day—a taste symbolic of a

deep change in the whole system of society—would look upon almost any

of those gorgeous figures as ridiculous, although that evening the

guests sought their reflections in the pier-glasses and rejoiced to

catch their own glitter amid the glittering crowd. What a pity that one

of the stately mirrors has not preserved a picture of the scene which

by the very traits that were so transitory might have taught us much

that would be worth knowing and remembering!

Would, at least, that either painter or mirror could convey to us some

faint idea of a garment already noticed in this legend—the Lady

Eleanore’s embroidered mantle, which the gossips whispered was invested

with magic properties, so as to lend a new and untried grace to her

figure each time that she put it on! Idle fancy as it is, this

mysterious mantle has thrown an awe around my image of her, partly from

its fabled virtues and partly because it was the handiwork of a dying

woman, and perchance owed the fantastic grace of its conception to the

delirium of approaching death.

After the ceremonial greetings had been paid, Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe

stood apart from the mob of guests, insulating herself within a small

and distinguished circle to whom she accorded a more cordial favor than

to the general throng. The waxen torches threw their radiance vividly

over the scene, bringing out its brilliant points in strong relief, but

she gazed carelessly, and with now and then an expression of weariness

or scorn tempered with such feminine grace that her auditors scarcely

perceived the moral deformity of which it was the utterance. She beheld

the spectacle not with vulgar ridicule, as disdaining to be pleased

with the provincial mockery of a court-festival, but with the deeper

scorn of one whose spirit held itself too high to participate in the

enjoyment of other human souls. Whether or no the recollections of

those who saw her that evening were influenced by the strange events

with which she was subsequently connected, so it was that her figure

ever after recurred to them as marked by something wild and unnatural,

although at the time the general whisper was of her exceeding beauty

and of the indescribable charm which her mantle threw around her. Some

close observers, indeed, detected a feverish flush and alternate

paleness of countenance, with a corresponding flow and revulsion of

spirits, and once or twice a painful and helpless betrayal of

lassitude, as if she were on the point of sinking to the ground. Then,

with a nervous shudder, she seemed to arouse her energies, and threw

some bright and playful yet half-wicked sarcasm into the conversation.

There was so strange a characteristic in her manners and sentiments

that it astonished every right-minded listener, till, looking in her

face, a lurking and incomprehensible glance and smile perplexed them

with doubts both as to her seriousness and sanity. Gradually, Lady

Eleanore Rochcliffe’s circle grew smaller, till only four gentlemen

remained in it. These were Captain Langford, the English officer before

mentioned; a Virginian planter who had come to Massachusetts on some

political errand; a young Episcopal clergyman, the grandson of a

British earl; and, lastly, the private secretary of Governor Shute,

whose obsequiousness had won a sort of tolerance from Lady Eleanore.

At different periods of the evening the liveried servants of the

province-house passed among the guests bearing huge trays of

refreshments and French and Spanish wines. Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe,

who refused to wet her beautiful lips even with a bubble of champagne,

had sunk back into a large damask chair, apparently overwearied either

with the excitement of the scene or its tedium; and while, for an

instant, she was unconscious of voices, laughter and music, a young man

stole forward and knelt down at her feet. He bore a salver in his hand

on which was a chased silver goblet filled to the brim with wine, which

he offered as reverentially as to a crowned queen—or, rather, with the

awful devotion of a priest doing sacrifice to his idol. Conscious that

some one touched her robe, Lady Eleanore started, and unclosed her eyes

upon the pale, wild features and dishevelled hair of Jervase Helwyse.

“Why do you haunt me thus?” said she, in a languid tone, but with a

kindlier feeling than she ordinarily permitted herself to express.

“They tell me that I have done you harm.”

“Heaven knows if that be so,” replied the young man, solemnly. “But,

Lady Eleanore, in requital of that harm, if such there be, and for your

own earthly and heavenly welfare, I pray you to take one sip of this

holy wine and then to pass the goblet round among the guests. And this

shall be a symbol that you have not sought to withdraw yourself from

the chain of human sympathies, which whoso would shake off must keep

company with fallen angels.”

“Where has this mad fellow stolen that sacramental vessel?” exclaimed

the Episcopal clergyman.

This question drew the notice of the guests to the silver cup, which

was recognized as appertaining to the communion-plate of the Old South

Church, and, for aught that could be known, it was brimming over with

the consecrated wine.

“Perhaps it is poisoned,” half whispered the governor’s secretary.

“Pour it down the villain’s throat!” cried the Virginian, fiercely.

“Turn him out of the house!” cried Captain Langford, seizing Jervase

Helwyse so roughly by the shoulder that the sacramental cup was

overturned and its contents sprinkled upon Lady Eleanore’s mantle.

“Whether knave, fool or Bedlamite, it is intolerable that the fellow

should go at large.”

“Pray, gentlemen, do my poor admirer no harm,” said Lady Eleanore, with

a faint and weary smile. “Take him out of my sight, if such be your

pleasure, for I can find in my heart to do nothing but laugh at him,

whereas, in all decency and conscience, it would become me to weep for

the mischief I have wrought.”

But while the bystanders were attempting to lead away the unfortunate

young man he broke from them and with a wild, impassioned earnestness

offered a new and equally strange petition to Lady Eleanore. It was no

other than that she should throw off the mantle, which while he pressed

the silver cup of wine upon her she had drawn more closely around her

form, so as almost to shroud herself within it.

“Cast it from you,” exclaimed Jervase Helwyse, clasping his hands in an

agony of entreaty. “It may not yet be too late. Give the accursed

garment to the flames.”

But Lady Eleanore, with a laugh of scorn, drew the rich folds of the

embroidered mantle over her head in such a fashion as to give a

completely new aspect to her beautiful face, which, half hidden, half

revealed, seemed to belong to some being of mysterious character and

purposes.

“Farewell, Jervase Helwyse!” said she. “Keep my image in your

remembrance as you behold it now.”

“Alas, lady!” he replied, in a tone no longer wild, but sad as a

funeral-bell; “we must meet shortly when your face may wear another

aspect, and that shall be the image that must abide within me.” He made

no more resistance to the violent efforts of the gentlemen and servants

who almost dragged him out of the apartment and dismissed him roughly

from the iron gate of the province-house.

Captain Langford, who had been very active in this affair, was

returning to the presence of Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe, when he

encountered the physician, Dr. Clarke, with whom he had held some

casual talk on the day of her arrival. The doctor stood apart,

separated from Lady Eleanore by the width of the room, but eying her

with such keen sagacity that Captain Langford involuntarily gave him

credit for the discovery of some deep secret.

“You appear to be smitten, after all, with the charms of this queenly

maiden,” said he, hoping thus to draw forth the physician’s hidden

knowledge.

“God forbid!” answered Dr. Clarke, with a grave smile; “and if you be

wise, you will put up the same prayer for yourself. Woe to those who

shall be smitten by this beautiful Lady Eleanore! But yonder stands the

governor, and I have a word or two for his private ear. Good-night!” He

accordingly advanced to Governor Shute and addressed him in so low a

tone that none of the bystanders could catch a word of what he said,

although the sudden change of His Excellency’s hitherto cheerful visage

betokened that the communication could be of no agreeable import. A

very few moments afterward it was announced to the guests that an

unforeseen circumstance rendered it necessary to put a premature close

to the festival.

The ball at the province-house supplied a topic of conversation for the

colonial metropolis for some days after its occurrence, and might still

longer have been the general theme, only that a subject of

all-engrossing interest thrust it for a time from the public

recollection. This was the appearance of a dreadful epidemic which in

that age, and long before and afterward, was wont to slay its hundreds

and thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. On the occasion of which

we speak it was distinguished by a peculiar virulence, insomuch that it

has left its traces—its pitmarks, to use an appropriate figure—on the

history of the country, the affairs of which were thrown into confusion

by its ravages. At first, unlike its ordinary course, the disease

seemed to confine itself to the higher circles of society, selecting

its victims from among the proud, the well-born and the wealthy,

entering unabashed into stately chambers and lying down with the

slumberers in silken beds. Some of the most distinguished guests of the

province-house—even those whom the haughty Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe had

deemed not unworthy of her favor—were stricken by this fatal scourge.

It was noticed with an ungenerous bitterness of feeling that the four

gentlemen—the Virginian, the British officer, the young clergyman and

the governor’s secretary—who had been her most devoted attendants on

the evening of the ball were the foremost on whom the plague-stroke

fell. But the disease, pursuing its onward progress, soon ceased to be

exclusively a prerogative of aristocracy. Its red brand was no longer

conferred like a noble’s star or an order of knighthood. It threaded

its way through the narrow and crooked streets, and entered the low,

mean, darksome dwellings and laid its hand of death upon the artisans

and laboring classes of the town. It compelled rich and poor to feel

themselves brethren then, and stalking to and fro across the Three

Hills with a fierceness which made it almost a new pestilence, there

was that mighty conqueror—that scourge and horror of our

forefathers—the small-pox.

We cannot estimate the affright which this plague inspired of yore by

contemplating it as the fangless monster of the present day. We must

remember, rather, with what awe we watched the gigantic footsteps of

the Asiatic cholera striding from shore to shore of the Atlantic and

marching like Destiny upon cities far remote which flight had already

half depopulated. There is no other fear so horrible and unhumanizing

as that which makes man dread to breathe heaven’s vital air lest it be

poison, or to grasp the hand of a brother or friend lest the grip of

the pestilence should clutch him. Such was the dismay that now followed

in the track of the disease or ran before it throughout the town.

Graves were hastily dug and the pestilential relics as hastily covered,

because the dead were enemies of the living and strove to draw them

headlong, as it were, into their own dismal pit. The public councils

were suspended, as if mortal wisdom might relinquish its devices now

that an unearthly usurper had found his way into the ruler’s mansion.

Had an enemy’s fleet been hovering on the coast or his armies trampling

on our soil, the people would probably have committed their defence to

that same direful conqueror who had wrought their own calamity and

would permit no interference with his sway. This conqueror had a symbol

of his triumphs: it was a blood-red flag that fluttered in the tainted

air over the door of every dwelling into which the small-pox had

entered.

Such a banner was long since waving over the portal of the

province-house, for thence, as was proved by tracking its footsteps

back, had all this dreadful mischief issued. It had been traced back to

a lady’s luxurious chamber, to the proudest of the proud, to her that

was so delicate and hardly owned herself of earthly mould, to the

haughty one who took her stand above human sympathies—to Lady Eleanore.

There remained no room for doubt that the contagion had lurked in that

gorgeous mantle which threw so strange a grace around her at the

festival. Its fantastic splendor had been conceived in the delirious

brain of a woman on her death-bed and was the last toil of her

stiffening fingers, which had interwoven fate and misery with its

golden threads. This dark tale, whispered at first, was now bruited far

and wide. The people raved against the Lady Eleanore and cried out that

her pride and scorn had evoked a fiend, and that between them both this

monstrous evil had been born. At times their rage and despair took the

semblance of grinning mirth; and whenever the red flag of the

pestilence was hoisted over another and yet another door, they clapped

their hands and shouted through the streets in bitter mockery: “Behold

a new triumph for the Lady Eleanore!”

One day in the midst of these dismal times a wild figure approached the

portal of the province-house, and, folding his arms, stood

contemplating the scarlet banner, which a passing breeze shook

fitfully, as if to fling abroad the contagion that it typified. At

length, climbing one of the pillars by means of the iron balustrade, he

took down the flag, and entered the mansion waving it above his head.

At the foot of the staircase he met the governor, booted and spurred,

with his cloak drawn around him, evidently on the point of setting

forth upon a journey.

“Wretched lunatic, what do you seek here?” exclaimed Shute, extending

his cane to guard himself from contact. “There is nothing here but

Death; back, or you will meet him.”

“Death will not touch me, the banner-bearer of the pestilence,” cried

Jervase Helwyse, shaking the red flag aloft. “Death and the pestilence,

who wears the aspect of the Lady Eleanore, will walk through the

streets to-night, and I must march before them with this banner.”

“Why do I waste words on the fellow?” muttered the governor, drawing

his cloak across his mouth. “What matters his miserable life, when none

of us are sure of twelve hours’ breath?—On, fool, to your own

destruction!”

He made way for Jervase Helwyse, who immediately ascended the

staircase, but on the first landing-place was arrested by the firm

grasp of a hand upon his shoulder. Looking fiercely up with a madman’s

impulse to struggle with and rend asunder his opponent, he found

himself powerless beneath a calm, stern eye which possessed the

mysterious property of quelling frenzy at its height. The person whom

he had now encountered was the physician, Dr. Clarke, the duties of

whose sad profession had led him to the province-house, where he was an

infrequent guest in more prosperous times.

“Young man, what is your purpose?” demanded he.

“I seek the Lady Eleanore,” answered Jervase Helwyse, submissively.

“All have fled from her,” said the physician. “Why do you seek her now?

I tell you, youth, her nurse fell death-stricken on the threshold of

that fatal chamber. Know ye not that never came such a curse to our

shores as this lovely Lady Eleanore, that her breath has filled the air

with poison, that she has shaken pestilence and death upon the land

from the folds of her accursed mantle?”

“Let me look upon her,” rejoined the mad youth, more wildly. “Let me

behold her in her awful beauty, clad in the regal garments of the

pestilence. She and Death sit on a throne together; let me kneel down

before them.”

“Poor youth!” said Dr. Clarke, and, moved by a deep sense of human

weakness, a smile of caustic humor curled his lip even then. “Wilt thou

still worship the destroyer and surround her image with fantasies the

more magnificent the more evil she has wrought? Thus man doth ever to

his tyrants. Approach, then. Madness, as I have noted, has that good

efficacy that it will guard you from contagion, and perhaps its own

cure may be found in yonder chamber.” Ascending another flight of

stairs, he threw open a door and signed to Jervase Helwyse that he

should enter.

The poor lunatic, it seems probable, had cherished a delusion that his

haughty mistress sat in state, unharmed herself by the pestilential

influence which as by enchantment she scattered round about her. He

dreamed, no doubt, that her beauty was not dimmed, but brightened into

superhuman splendor. With such anticipations he stole reverentially to

the door at which the physician stood, but paused upon the threshold,

gazing fearfully into the gloom of the darkened chamber.

“Where is the Lady Eleanore?” whispered he.

“Call her,” replied the physician.

“Lady Eleanore! princess! queen of Death!” cried Jervase Helwyse,

advancing three steps into the chamber. “She is not here. There, on

yonder table, I behold the sparkle of a diamond which once she wore

upon her bosom. There”—and he shuddered—“there hangs her mantle, on

which a dead woman embroidered a spell of dreadful potency. But where

is the Lady Eleanore?”

Something stirred within the silken curtains of a canopied bed and a

low moan was uttered, which, listening intently, Jervase Helwyse began

to distinguish as a woman’s voice complaining dolefully of thirst. He

fancied, even, that he recognized its tones.

“My throat! My throat is scorched,” murmured the voice. “A drop of

water!”

“What thing art thou?” said the brain-stricken youth, drawing near the

bed and tearing asunder its curtains. “Whose voice hast thou stolen for

thy murmurs and miserable petitions, as if Lady Eleanore could be

conscious of mortal infirmity? Fie! Heap of diseased mortality, why

lurkest thou in my lady’s chamber?”

“Oh, Jervase Helwyse,” said the voice—and as it spoke the figure

contorted itself, struggling to hide its blasted face—“look not now on

the woman you once loved. The curse of Heaven hath stricken me because

I would not call man my brother nor woman sister. I wrapped myself in

pride as in a mantle and scorned the sympathies of nature, and

therefore has Nature made this wretched body the medium of a dreadful

sympathy. You are avenged, they are all avenged, Nature is avenged; for

I am Eleanore Rochcliffe.”

The malice of his mental disease, the bitterness lurking at the bottom

of his heart, mad as he was, for a blighted and ruined life and love

that had been paid with cruel scorn, awoke within the breast of Jervase

Helwyse. He shook his finger at the wretched girl, and the chamber

echoed, the curtains of the bed were shaken, with his outburst of

insane merriment.

“Another triumph for the Lady Eleanore!” he cried. “All have been her

victims; who so worthy to be the final victim as herself?” Impelled by

some new fantasy of his crazed intellect, he snatched the fatal mantle

and rushed from the chamber and the house.

That night a procession passed by torchlight through the streets,

bearing in the midst the figure of a woman enveloped with a

richly-embroidered mantle, while in advance stalked Jervase Helwyse

waving the red flag of the pestilence. Arriving opposite the

province-house, the mob burned the effigy, and a strong wind came and

swept away the ashes. It was said that from that very hour the

pestilence abated, as if its sway had some mysterious connection, from

the first plague-stroke to the last, with Lady Elcanore’s mantle. A

remarkable uncertainty broods over that unhappy lady’s fate. There is a

belief, however, that in a certain chamber of this mansion a female

form may sometimes be duskily discerned shrinking into the darkest

corner and muffling her face within an embroidered mantle. Supposing

the legend true, can this be other than the once proud Lady Eleanore?

Mine host and the old loyalist and I bestowed no little Warmth of

applause upon this narrative, in which we had all been deeply

interested; for the reader can scarcely conceive how unspeakably the

effect of such a tale is heightened when, as in the present case, we

may repose perfect confidence in the veracity of him who tells it. For

my own part, knowing how scrupulous is Mr. Tiffany to settle the

foundation of his facts, I could not have believed him one whit the

more faithfully had he professed himself an eyewitness of the doings

and sufferings of poor Lady Eleanore. Some sceptics, it is true, might

demand documentary evidence, or even require him to produce the

embroidered mantle, forgetting that—Heaven be praised!—it was consumed

to ashes.

But now the old loyalist, whose blood was warmed by the good cheer,

began to talk, in his turn, about the traditions of the Province House,

and hinted that he, if it were agreeable, might add a few reminiscences

to our legendary stock. Mr. Tiffany, having no cause to dread a rival,

immediately besought him to favor us with a specimen; my own

entreaties, of course, were urged to the same effect; and our venerable

guest, well pleased to find willing auditors, awaited only the return

of Mr. Thomas Waite, who had been summoned forth to provide

accommodations for several new arrivals. Perchance the public—but be

this as its own caprice and ours shall settle the matter—may read the

result in another tale of the Province House.

IV.

OLD ESTHER DUDLEY

Our host having resumed the chair, he as well as Mr. Tiffany and myself

expressed much eagerness to be made acquainted with the story to which

the loyalist had alluded. That venerable man first of all saw lit to

moisten his throat with another glass of wine, and then, turning his

face toward our coal-fire, looked steadfastly for a few moments into

the depths of its cheerful glow. Finally he poured forth a great

fluency of speech. The generous liquid that he had imbibed, while it

warmed his age-chilled blood, likewise took off the chill from his

heart and mind, and gave him an energy to think and feel which we could

hardly have expected to find beneath the snows of fourscore winters.

His feelings, indeed, appeared to me more excitable than those of a

younger man—or, at least, the same degree of feeling manifested itself

by more visible effects than if his judgment and will had possessed the

potency of meridian life. At the pathetic passages of his narrative he

readily melted into tears. When a breath of indignation swept across

his spirit, the blood flushed his withered visage even to the roots of

his white hair, and he shook his clinched fist at the trio of peaceful

auditors, seeming to fancy enemies in those who felt very kindly toward

the desolate old soul. But ever and anon, sometimes in the midst of his

most earnest talk, this ancient person’s intellect would wander

vaguely, losing its hold of the matter in hand and groping for it amid

misty shadows. Then would he cackle forth a feeble laugh and express a

doubt whether his wits—for by that phrase it pleased our ancient friend

to signify his mental powers—were not getting a little the worse for

wear.

Under these disadvantages, the old loyalist’s story required more

revision to render it fit for the public eye than those of the series

which have preceded it; nor should it be concealed that the sentiment

and tone of the affair may have undergone some slight—or perchance more

than slight—metamorphosis in its transmission to the reader through the

medium of a thoroughgoing democrat. The tale itself is a mere sketch

with no involution of plot nor any great interest of events, yet

possessing, if I have rehearsed it aright, that pensive influence over

the mind which the shadow of the old Province House flings upon the

loiterer in its court-yard.

The hour had come—the hour of defeat and humiliation—when Sir William

Howe was to pass over the threshold of the province-house and embark,

with no such triumphal ceremonies as he once promised himself, on board

the British fleet. He bade his servants and military attendants go

before him, and lingered a moment in the loneliness of the mansion to

quell the fierce emotions that struggled in his bosom as with a

death-throb. Preferable then would he have deemed his fate had a

warrior’s death left him a claim to the narrow territory of a grave

within the soil which the king had given him to defend. With an ominous

perception that as his departing footsteps echoed adown the staircase

the sway of Britain was passing for ever from New England, he smote his

clenched hand on his brow and cursed the destiny that had flung the

shame of a dismembered empire upon him.

“Would to God,” cried he, hardly repressing his tears of rage, “that

the rebels were even now at the doorstep! A blood-stain upon the floor

should then bear testimony that the last British ruler was faithful to

his trust.”

The tremulous voice of a woman replied to his exclamation.

“Heaven’s cause and the king’s are one,” it said. “Go forth, Sir

William Howe, and trust in Heaven to bring back a royal governor in

triumph.”

Subduing at once the passion to which he had yielded only in the faith

that it was unwitnessed, Sir William Howe became conscious that an aged

woman leaning on a gold-headed staff was standing betwixt him and the

door. It was old Esther Dudley, who had dwelt almost immemorial years

in this mansion, until her presence seemed as inseparable from it as

the recollections of its history. She was the daughter of an ancient

and once eminent family which had fallen into poverty and decay and

left its last descendant no resource save the bounty of the king, nor

any shelter except within the walls of the province-house. An office in

the household with merely nominal duties had been assigned to her as a

pretext for the payment of a small pension, the greater part of which

she expended in adorning herself with an antique magnificence of

attire. The claims of Esther Dudley’s gentle blood were acknowledged by

all the successive governors, and they treated her with the punctilious

courtesy which it was her foible to demand, not always with success,

from a neglectful world. The only actual share which she assumed in the

business of the mansion was to glide through its passages and public

chambers late at night to see that the servants had dropped no fire

from their flaring torches nor left embers crackling and blazing on the

hearths. Perhaps it was this invariable custom of walking her rounds in

the hush of midnight that caused the superstition of the times to

invest the old woman with attributes of awe and mystery, fabling that

she had entered the portal of the province-house—none knew whence—in

the train of the first royal governor, and that it was her fate to

dwell there till the last should have departed.

But Sir William Howe, if he ever heard this legend, had forgotten it.

“Mistress Dudley, why are you loitering here?” asked he, with some

severity of tone. “It is my pleasure to be the last in this mansion of

the king.”

“Not so, if it please Your Excellency,” answered the time-stricken

woman. “This roof has sheltered me long; I will not pass from it until

they bear me to the tomb of my forefathers. What other shelter is there

for old Esther Dudley save the province-house or the grave?”

“Now, Heaven forgive me!” said Sir William Howe to himself. “I was

about to leave this wretched old creature to starve or beg.—Take this,

good Mistress Dudley,” he added, putting a purse into her hands. “King

George’s head on these golden guineas is sterling yet, and will

continue so, I warrant you, even should the rebels crown John Hancock

their king. That purse will buy a better shelter than the

province-house can now afford.”

“While the burden of life remains upon me I will have no other shelter

than this roof,” persisted Esther Dudley, striking her staff upon the

floor with a gesture that expressed immovable resolve; “and when Your

Excellency returns in triumph, I will totter into the porch to welcome

you.”

“My poor old friend!” answered the British general, and all his manly

and martial pride could no longer restrain a gush of bitter tears.

“This is an evil hour for you and me. The province which the king

entrusted to my charge is lost. I go hence in misfortune—perchance in

disgrace—to return no more. And you, whose present being is

incorporated with the past, who have seen governor after governor in

stately pageantry ascend these steps, whose whole life has been an

observance of majestic ceremonies and a worship of the king,—how will

you endure the change? Come with us; bid farewell to a land that has

shaken off its allegiance, and live still under a royal government at

Halifax.”

“Never! never!” said the pertinacious old dame. “Here will I abide, and

King George shall still have one true subject in his disloyal

province.”

“Beshrew the old fool!” muttered Sir William Howe, growing impatient of

her obstinacy and ashamed of the emotion into which he had been

betrayed. “She is the very moral of old-fashioned prejudice, and could

exist nowhere but in this musty edifice.—Well, then, Mistress Dudley,

since you will needs tarry, I give the province-house in charge to you.

Take this key, and keep it safe until myself or some other royal

governor shall demand it of you.” Smiling bitterly at himself and her,

he took the heavy key of the province-house, and, delivering it into

the old lady’s hands, drew his cloak around him for departure.

As the general glanced back at Esther Dudley’s antique figure he deemed

her well fitted for such a charge, as being so perfect a representative

of the decayed past—of an age gone by, with its manners, opinions,

faith and feelings all fallen into oblivion or scorn, of what had once

been a reality, but was now merely a vision of faded magnificence. Then

Sir William Howe strode forth, smiting his clenched hands together in

the fierce anguish of his spirit, and old Esther Dudley was left to

keep watch in the lonely province-house, dwelling there with Memory;

and if Hope ever seemed to flit around her, still it was Memory in

disguise.

The total change of affairs that ensued on the departure of the British

troops did not drive the venerable lady from her stronghold. There was

not for many years afterward a governor of Massachusetts, and the

magistrates who had charge of such matters saw no objection to Esther

Dudley’s residence in the province-house, especially as they must

otherwise have paid a hireling for taking care of the premises, which

with her was a labor of love; and so they left her the undisturbed

mistress of the old historic edifice. Many and strange were the fables

which the gossips whispered about her in all the chimney-corners of the

town.

Among the time-worn articles of furniture that had been left in the

mansion, there was a tall antique mirror which was well worthy of a

tale by itself, and perhaps may hereafter be the theme of one. The gold

of its heavily-wrought frame was tarnished, and its surface so blurred

that the old woman’s figure, whenever she paused before it, looked

indistinct and ghostlike. But it was the general belief that Esther

could cause the governors of the overthrown dynasty, with the beautiful

ladies who had once adorned their festivals, the Indian chiefs who had

come up to the province-house to hold council or swear allegiance, the

grim provincial warriors, the severe clergymen—in short, all the

pageantry of gone days, all the figures that ever swept across the

broad-plate of glass in former times,—she could cause the whole to

reappear and people the inner world of the mirror with shadows of old

life. Such legends as these, together with the singularity of her

isolated existence, her age and the infirmity that each added winter

flung upon her, made Mistress Dudley the object both of fear and pity,

and it was partly the result of either sentiment that, amid all the

angry license of the times, neither wrong nor insult ever fell upon her

unprotected head. Indeed, there was so much haughtiness in her demeanor

toward intruders—among whom she reckoned all persons acting under the

new authorities—that it was really an affair of no small nerve to look

her in the face. And, to do the people justice, stern republicans as

they had now become, they were well content that the old gentlewoman,

in her hoop-petticoat and faded embroidery, should still haunt the

palace of ruined pride and overthrown power, the symbol of a departed

system, embodying a history in her person. So Esther Dudley dwelt year

after year in the province-house, still reverencing all that others had

flung aside, still faithful to her king, who, so long as the venerable

dame yet held her post, might be said to retain one true subject in New

England and one spot of the empire that had been wrested from him.

And did she dwell there in utter loneliness? Rumor said, “Not so.”

Whenever her chill and withered heart desired warmth, she was wont to

summon a black slave of Governor Shirley’s from the blurred mirror and

send him in search of guests who had long ago been familiar in those

deserted chambers. Forth went the sable messenger, with the starlight

or the moonshine gleaming through him, and did his errand in the

burial-grounds, knocking at the iron doors of tombs or upon the marble

slabs that covered them, and whispering to those within, “My mistress,

old Esther Dudley, bids you to the province-house at midnight;” and

punctually as the clock of the Old South told twelve came the shadows

of the Olivers, the Hutchinsons, the Dudleys—all the grandees of a

bygone generation—gliding beneath the portal into the well-known

mansion, where Esther mingled with them as if she likewise were a

shade. Without vouching for the truth of such traditions, it is certain

that Mistress Dudley sometimes assembled a few of the stanch though

crestfallen old Tories who had lingered in the rebel town during those

days of wrath and tribulation. Out of a cobwebbed bottle containing

liquor that a royal governor might have smacked his lips over they

quaffed healths to the king and babbled treason to the republic,

feeling as if the protecting shadow of the throne were still flung

around them. But, draining the last drops of their liquor, they stole

timorously homeward, and answered not again if the rude mob reviled

them in the street.

Yet Esther Dudley’s most frequent and favored guests were the children

of the town. Toward them she was never stern. A kindly and loving

nature hindered elsewhere from its free course by a thousand rocky

prejudices lavished itself upon these little ones. By bribes of

gingerbread of her own making, stamped with a royal crown, she tempted

their sunny sportiveness beneath the gloomy portal of the

province-house, and would often beguile them to spend a whole play-day

there, sitting in a circle round the verge of her hoop-petticoat,

greedily attentive to her stories of a dead world. And when these

little boys and girls stole forth again from the dark, mysterious

mansion, they went bewildered, full of old feelings that graver people

had long ago forgotten, rubbing their eyes at the world around them as

if they had gone astray into ancient times and become children of the

past. At home, when their parents asked where they had loitered such a

weary while and with whom they had been at play, the children would

talk of all the departed worthies of the province as far back as

Governor Belcher and the haughty dame of Sir William Phipps. It would

seem as though they had been sitting on the knees of these famous

personages, whom the grave had hidden for half a century, and had toyed

with the embroidery of their rich waistcoats or roguishly pulled the

long curls of their flowing wigs. “But Governor Belcher has been dead

this many a year,” would the mother say to her little boy. “And did you

really see him at the province-house?”—“Oh yes, dear mother—yes!” the

half-dreaming child would answer. “But when old Esther had done

speaking about him, he faded away out of his chair.” Thus, without

affrighting her little guests, she led them by the hand into the

chambers of her own desolate heart and made childhood’s fancy discern

the ghosts that haunted there.

Living so continually in her own circle of ideas, and never regulating

her mind by a proper reference to present things, Esther Dudley appears

to have grown partially crazed. It was found that she had no right

sense of the progress and true state of the Revolutionary war, but held

a constant faith that the armies of Britain were victorious on every

field and destined to be ultimately triumphant. Whenever the town

rejoiced for a battle won by Washington or Gates or Morgan or Greene,

the news, in passing through the door of the province-house as through

the ivory gate of dreams, became metamorphosed into a strange tale of

the prowess of Howe, Clinton or Cornwallis. Sooner or later, it was her

invincible belief, the colonies would be prostrate at the footstool of

the king. Sometimes she seemed to take for granted that such was

already the case. On one occasion she startled the townspeople by a

brilliant illumination of the province-house with candles at every pane

of glass and a transparency of the king’s initials and a crown of light

in the great balcony-window. The figure of the aged woman in the most

gorgeous of her mildewed velvets and brocades was seen passing from

casement to casement, until she paused before the balcony and

flourished a huge key above her head. Her wrinkled visage actually

gleamed with triumph, as if the soul within her were a festal lamp.

“What means this blaze of light? What does old Esther’s joy portend?”

whispered a spectator. “It is frightful to see her gliding about the

chambers and rejoicing there without a soul to bear her company.”

“It is as if she were making merry in a tomb,” said another.

“Pshaw! It is no such mystery,” observed an old man, after some brief

exercise of memory. “Mistress Dudley is keeping jubilee for the king of

England’s birthday.”

Then the people laughed aloud, and would have thrown mud against the

blazing transparency of the king’s crown and initials, only that they

pitied the poor old dame who was so dismally triumphant amid the wreck

and ruin of the system to which she appertained.

Oftentimes it was her custom to climb the weary staircase that wound

upward to the cupola, and thence strain her dimmed eyesight seaward and

countryward, watching for a British fleet or for the march of a grand

procession with the king’s banner floating over it. The passengers in

the street below would discern her anxious visage and send up a shout:

“When the golden Indian on the province-house shall shoot his arrow,

and when the cock on the Old South spire shall crow, then look for a

royal governor again!” for this had grown a by-word through the town.

And at last, after long, long years, old Esther Dudley knew—or

perchance she only dreamed—that a royal governor was on the eve of

returning to the province-house to receive the heavy key which Sir

William Howe had committed to her charge. Now, it was the fact that

intelligence bearing some faint analogy to Esther’s version of it was

current among the townspeople. She set the mansion in the best order

that her means allowed, and, arraying herself in silks and tarnished

gold, stood long before the blurred mirror to admire her own

magnificence. As she gazed the gray and withered lady moved her ashen

lips, murmuring half aloud, talking to shapes that she saw within the

mirror, to shadows of her own fantasies, to the household friends of

memory, and bidding them rejoice with her and come forth to meet the

governor. And while absorbed in this communion Mistress Dudley heard

the tramp of many footsteps in the street, and, looking out at the

window, beheld what she construed as the royal governor’s arrival.

“Oh, happy day! Oh, blessed, blessed hour!” she exclaimed. “Let me but

bid him welcome within the portal, and my task in the province-house

and on earth is done.” Then, with tottering feet which age and

tremulous joy caused to tread amiss, she hurried down the grand

staircase, her silks sweeping and rustling as she went; so that the

sound was as if a train of special courtiers were thronging from the

dim mirror.

And Esther Dudley fancied that as soon as the wide door should be flung

open all the pomp and splendor of bygone times would pace majestically

into the province-house and the gilded tapestry of the past would be

brightened by the sunshine of the present. She turned the key, withdrew

it from the lock, unclosed the door and stepped across the threshold.

Advancing up the court-yard appeared a person of most dignified mien,

with tokens, as Esther interpreted them, of gentle blood, high rank and

long-accustomed authority even in his walk and every gesture. He was

richly dressed, but wore a gouty shoe, which, however, did not lessen

the stateliness of his gait. Around and behind him were people in plain

civic dresses and two or three war-worn veterans—evidently officers of

rank—arrayed in a uniform of blue and buff. But Esther Dudley, firm in

the belief that had fastened its roots about her heart, beheld only the

principal personage, and never doubted that this was the

long-looked-for governor to whom she was to surrender up her charge. As

he approached she involuntarily sank down on her knees and tremblingly

held forth the heavy key.

“Receive my trust! Take it quickly,” cried she, “for methinks Death is

striving to snatch away my triumph. But he comes too late. Thank Heaven

for this blessed hour! God save King George!”

“That, madam, is a strange prayer to be offered up at such a moment,”

replied the unknown guest of the province-house, and, courteously

removing his hat, he offered his arm to raise the aged woman. “Yet, in

reverence for your gray hairs and long-kept faith, Heaven forbid that

any here should say you nay. Over the realms which still acknowledge

his sceptre, God save King George!”

Esther Dudley started to her feet, and, hastily clutching back the key,

gazed with fearful earnestness at the stranger, and dimly and

doubtfully, as if suddenly awakened from a dream, her bewildered eyes

half recognized his face. Years ago she had known him among the gentry

of the province, but the ban of the king had fallen upon him. How,

then, came the doomed victim here? Proscribed, excluded from mercy, the

monarch’s most dreaded and hated foe, this New England merchant had

stood triumphantly against a kingdom’s strength, and his foot now trod

upon humbled royalty as he ascended the steps of the province-house,

the people’s chosen governor of Massachusetts.

“Wretch, wretch that I am!” muttered the old woman, with such a

heartbroken expression that the tears gushed from the stranger’s eyes.

“Have I bidden a traitor welcome?—Come, Death! come quickly!”

“Alas, venerable lady!” said Governor Hancock, lending her his support

with all the reverence that a courtier would have shown to a queen,

“your life has been prolonged until the world has changed around you.

You have treasured up all that time has rendered worthless—the

principles, feelings, manners, modes of being and acting which another

generation has flung aside—and you are a symbol of the past. And I and

these around me—we represent a new race of men, living no longer in the

past, scarcely in the present, but projecting our lives forward into

the future. Ceasing to model ourselves on ancestral superstitions, it

is our faith and principle to press onward—onward.—Yet,” continued he,

turning to his attendants, “let us reverence for the last time the

stately and gorgeous prejudices of the tottering past.”

While the republican governor spoke he had continued to support the

helpless form of Esther Dudley; her weight grew heavier against his

arm, but at last, with a sudden effort to free herself, the ancient

woman sank down beside one of the pillars of the portal. The key of the

province-house fell from her grasp and clanked against the stone.

“I have been faithful unto death,” murmured she. “God save the king!”

“She hath done her office,” said Hancock, solemnly. “We will follow her

reverently to the tomb of her ancestors, and then, my fellow-citizens,

onward—onward. We are no longer children of the past.”

As the old loyalist concluded his narrative the enthusiasm which had

been fitfully flashing within his sunken eyes and quivering across his

wrinkled visage faded away, as if all the lingering fire of his soul

were extinguished. Just then, too, a lamp upon the mantelpiece threw

out a dying gleam, which vanished as speedily as it shot upward,

compelling our eyes to grope for one another’s features by the dim glow

of the hearth. With such a lingering fire, methought, with such a dying

gleam, had the glory of the ancient system vanished from the

province-house when the spirit of old Esther Dudley took its flight.

And now, again, the clock of the Old South threw its voice of ages on

the breeze, knolling the hourly knell of the past, crying out far and

wide through the multitudinous city, and filling our ears, as we sat in

the dusky chamber, with its reverberating depth of tone. In that same

mansion—in that very chamber—what a volume of history had been told off

into hours by the same voice that was now trembling in the air! Many a

governor had heard those midnight accents and longed to exchange his

stately cares for slumber. And, as for mine host and Mr. Bela Tiffany

and the old loyalist and me, we had babbled about dreams of the past

until we almost fancied that the clock was still striking in a bygone

century. Neither of us would have wondered had a hoop-petticoated

phantom of Esther Dudley tottered into the chamber, walking her rounds

in the hush of midnight as of yore, and motioned us to quench the

fading embers of the fire and leave the historic precincts to herself

and her kindred shades. But, as no such vision was vouchsafed, I

retired unbidden, and would advise Mr. Tiffany to lay hold of another

auditor, being resolved not to show my face in the Province House for a

good while hence—if ever.