for stray patients past, the parlors became scenes of revelry. Eight
o'clock was then the usual calling time in the city, and when the voice
of the old clock had finished welcoming in that portion of the evening
dear to feminine hearts, Thomas had answered the knock of many a
beau. These were the good old days when jolly Colonel Marinus Willet,
the city's mayor, was the model of every smooth-faced buck, and sweet
Anne Bankhead, coming to town with her fair tresses arranged in the
Paris mode resembling the comb of a rooster, started a fashion which
made the fortune of the "Empereur des Barbieres Frizzing Palace on de
Brudeway." We know the names of many of the Moore girls' callers. Among
the favored were Henry Major, who married Jane Moore on August 2, 1808,
in St. John's Church, still standing on Varick Street. Then there was
Henry de Rham, who married her sister Maria; John Titus, engaged in
business with Mr. Major; John Swartwout, the loyal friend of Colonel
Burr; Theodore Frelinghuysen, and many others.
On the Orleans claw-footed sofas, then humiliated by chintz covering
depicting the Corsican's bees, the Misses Moore would sit with their
swains. There were four of these ponderous pieces of furniture in the
large room, so that there was never any danger of crowding. We can
picture to ourselves Ellen and her lover taking part in the gayety and
longing to be by themselves in some quieter spot. In Monmouth her heart
would not tell her that she loved him, but here she had discovered the
sweet secret.
How beautiful was their blossoming love-dream! No doubt, after Thomas
crept down to the servants' quarters to bed and the hall was deserted,
they often stole away from the company, opened the massive mahogany
door, and gazed off over the patch of garden into the night. Only the
garden knew of their first kisses,--the nesting birds and the drowsy
flowers. They always seem to keep an eye open for human lovers. The
robins and the bluebirds chirp sadly, and the flowers give forth
fragrant sighs just as if they knew that the course of "true love
never runs smooth."
Under the little beech-tree, with his arm about her, he told her of
the humble home he hoped to rent in Gansevoort Street when she would
say "Yes." He would not be dependent on his father. His office down on
Nassau Street was no longer always deserted.
"I will bring mammy from the country," she would whisper. "And Ned."
"Yes, dear," he would answer.
"I shall cook the breakfast for you with my own hands every morning."
Little white hands. How he pressed them!
"Isn't it beautiful just to be here together?" her lips would falter,
as if afraid of the words.
Poor little old-time lovers! Poor little fluttering hearts! There are
steps on the pavement outside the gates, for the watch have started on
the weary walk with night.
The Moore girls who decorously occupied the Orleans sofas all through
the calling hours soon began to notice the couple who so often left
the circle. In the morning at the breakfast-table there were often
sly innuendoes that Dr. Moore, absorbed in his _Herald_, never paid
any attention to and Mrs. Moore could not understand. She would have,
though, if she had observed the burning roses in a maiden's cheeks and
the angry eyes of the youth opposite glaring at his tormentors.
"Oh, girls, did you observe the new moon last night?" Jane Moore would
innocently ask. "Ellen, you must have." Then how they would giggle.
"Hush, girls!" Mrs. Moore would say as she poised her Wedgwood
coffee-cup and gazed around the table. "Young ladies in your station of
life should never laugh so loudly; it is not genteel."
Some of the young fellows who called at the house were not so observing
as the Moore girls. Freddy Frelinghuysen used to try and keep the
pretty country cousin by his side on one of the sofas when the sparking
hour was on. Captain William Montgomery, just home from the West
Indies, professed open admiration for a New York maiden who could spin.
"If you will spin me a shirt in an afternoon like the girls in Melrose
used to make I will give you the handsomest lace dress to be found in
the city," he once said.
"Agreed," she answered. "And if I fail I will give you the finest dress
suit a tailor can make."
You may be sure that the proud sister-in-law of a bishop never heard of
this wager. The girls kept it a secret.
"It is not anything, after all," Jane said to her sisters. "Ellen not
being town bred, it will exonerate her."
Ned did not like the idea very much, but Ellen seemed so delighted at
the chance to show her skill that he did not have the heart to dampen
her pleasure with a lecture on the improprieties.
"I must remember that she is a bloom of the fresh free countryside,
where life is broader and less restrained by convention," he said to
himself. So Ellen was left to win her wager with happiness.
One morning Mrs. Moore announced from behind the George III. coffee-urn
bearing the arms of the Fish family that she had decided to give a
ball. "As the wife of a physician and the sister of a bishop, I feel
it my duty to do something for society. Not a bread-and-butter affair
like old Mrs. Hone gives; nor should I care to entertain the mob of
vulgarians Mrs. Van Pelt does. Something elegant for the representative
families, William," she said, giving her spouse's coffee-cup a
conciliatory dash of cream.
"Oh, you lovely, lovely mamsey!" the Moore girls chorus. "No, we can't
sit still," they cry, heedless of her admonishment. About the table
they pirouette and out into the hall, almost knocking over the haughty,
stout Miss Rattlebones whom Thomas is leading to the doctor's office.
"Won't it be simply perfect?" they keep asking Ellen. "We will have the
waltz,--the new dance so fashionable abroad, you know."
"And 'The Devil among the Tailors' they had at Matilda Hoffman's the
other night," Jane added.
"The what? The devil something do I hear you say?" asks Mrs. Moore,
rolling her eyes in a horrified fashion. "We will never have that
indecent dance in my abode."
What happy days followed Mrs. Moore's announcement, with the hundred
things to be planned and finished! Every gallant who shared the Orleans
sofas with the Misses Moore during those evenings before the great
event was asked whether he preferred white or blue bunting for the
parlor ceiling. Did he like the idea of pink roses in the Nast vases
on the chimney-piece? Could he imagine the room lighted by five hundred
candles? Wasn't it shocking that mother was contemplating serving five
kinds of punch? The parlor was becoming a huge question mark and the
Moore ball the talk of the city.
Ellen and her lover shared in all the preparations for the affair, but
very often they stole out to their trysting-spot of an evening to be
alone.
The fateful night before the ball the Argus eyes of Mrs. Moore descried
them from her bedroom window seated under their favorite beech-tree. At
first she thought the figures were Jane and Mr. Major. Then, blowing
out her candle, the cruel spring starlight helped her to make out the
forms of Nathaniel and Ellen. Like one fascinated, she watched them.
The wind blew the silver leaves of the beech-tree and she learned
their secret. He had kissed her. "Oh, it is dreadful!" she whispered
to herself, murmuring like one who has received a shock. "They are
first cousins. My Nathaniel loves her. I have been blind." The memory
of the bantering words passed at table came back to her with a new
meaning. Why, only the other day William, her younger son, had told her
that Nathaniel was in Brooke's getting the rents of Gansevoort Street
houses. The ball had driven everything else from her mind. The affair
must be broken off at once. She would seek William.
Doctor Moore was seated by a hickory-wood fire in an adjoining
apartment, ensconced in a flowered chintz dressing-gown. The bustle
of preparation for the past few days had annoyed him, but the spirit
of peace now seemed to have found a place in the wide firelit room. A
negress was passing a warming-pan lightly over the lavender-scented
sheets of the high four-poster. It was an old-fashioned winter custom
that the doctor demanded all through the spring. The air was filled
with the dreamy scents of lavender and the pungent odor of the hickory
boughs. The fire made the tired man close his eyes, and the ponderous
medical treatise dropped to the floor. Morpheus was wooing him when
the startling figure of Mrs. Moore, with her nightcap awry and her
hair falling over her shoulders, entered the room, bringing him back
to the world he was trying to forget. The walls of the old room heard
sad things that night. Young hearts that had blossomed out like twin
buds on a stem were to be torn asunder. Their little beech-tree in the
garden seemed to be aware of impending disaster, and the dreary sighing
of its leaves suddenly fell upon the two by the fire. The night was
nearly dead.
"Perhaps, after all, Jane, we have been premature with our worrying
and there is nothing between them," the weary father said. "I will see
Nathaniel in the morning. Now go to bed, dear; you know to-morrow is
your ball, and that will bring you many duties."
The mystical to-morrow. Like some wan and beggared guest, it tapped
on the panes of the great Moore mansion. The cold starlight had not
fulfilled its promise, and the face of the day was old before the world
was up to see it. Outside the Moore gates it was all gray mist, and
yet many of the household looked at it happily. The cooks sang as they
worked over the breakfast by candle-light. In a week's time they had
prepared a roomful of good things for the children of pleasure to eat
that night.
Thomas chuckled gleefully as he showed his new red-and-gold party
livery to the company below stairs. He knew that he was a very handsome
nigger, and many a lady's maid would smile at him as she followed her
mistress through the hall when the ball commenced. None of the ladies
appeared at breakfast, and after the last dish was removed Doctor
Moore asked Nathaniel to follow him to the office.
"Nathaniel," the father said, motioning his son to a seat, "your mother
saw your conduct in the garden last night with Miss Conover, and I wish
to know its meaning."
The young man had refused to be seated, and stood by one of the
windows gazing out into the mist. The grayness filled him with a vague
intimation of approaching trouble. Ellen's name was its first sense of
realization. "I love Miss Conover," he answered, almost unconsciously.
The old physician in the stiff-backed desk-chair knit his brow and
pulled his stock up higher about his throat, an action familiar to
his patients. He seemed lost in thought. In front of him was his desk
covered with medicine phials, but here was a case that no medicine he
could give would help.
"My son," he said, and the clock accentuated the huskiness of his
voice. "My son, you have no right to love Miss Conover. She is your
first cousin, and you can never marry her. It is a hopeless love."
"Other men have married their cousins, sir. There are Jonathan
Kortright and Hulda Reid, and Chauncey Prince----"
"Yes, Nathaniel," the doctor's voice interrupted his passionate speech,
"the world is full of law-breakers; but it is the edict of God that two
of one flesh cannot marry. I should never countenance such a union.
Your children would be accursed."
The glowing eyes of the young man were riveted on those older eyes
drooping beneath the gray wig. Why didn't he storm and rage as he
used to in the old days when a lad in torn nankeens and begrimed face
was brought to that desk like a culprit before a tribunal of justice?
He could see that his father pitied him. In the next room they were
tacking up the wall decorations for the ball, and a monotonous tap, tap
was joined to the maddening ticking of the clock.
Suddenly the youth rose to his full height before the old man and
caught his weary eyes. "I shall marry her," he said. "I defy you, God,
or the devil to stop me!"
The wrinkled, passive face before him seemed dazed and blurred. There
was no answer. Oh, how cold and dreary the room looked! Life, after
all, held very little. The fire died out in the youth's eyes. "My God,
what a hell you have given me!" he cried. There was a knock at the door
and the father rose to open it. In the middle of the floor he stopped
and went up to his son. Upon the strong young arms he placed his feeble
hands. "Be a brave man, my son," he said. "May God help you!"
In her aunt's room overhead Ellen was humming an air she remembered
Miss Trelawny singing a week before at the Park, when Nathaniel had
given a gay little theatre party to celebrate the winning of Captain
Montgomery's gown. It had arrived only that morning from Madame
Bouchard's on Cortlandt Street, and the black maid had spread it on
a bed where the young ladies could admire it. Very beautiful were its
soft folds of Machlin lace.
"You will be more like a partner of the fashionable Madame Moreau than
a country girl to-night," Jane Moore told Ellen, as she and her sisters
hurried off to deliver some of their mother's orders.
"Watch Ned's eyes, Jane, when he first sees her," Maria whispered, as
she closed the bedroom door softly.
Ellen gazed out into the street. The mist was rising. Perhaps, after
all, it would be a clear night. Through the gates came a ceaseless
stream of flower men and women carrying wicker baskets piled high with
early blooms; Fly-Market dealers with bundles of provisions; Mrs. Leach
and some of the girls from the Broadway Frozen Cream Parlor to make the
sherbets and syllabubs. A group of urchins and older busybodies were
standing in the middle of the street gazing up at the windows.
"It would be grand to be rich and give parties like them foine birds,"
a chimney-sweep's wife remarked to the woman next to her.
"Now, don't ye envy them, miss," her companion replied. "Ye never can
tell when ye look at a big house what's hiding behind the velvets afore
the windows."
The grim Pompeys on the gates seemed to smile at her logic. And yet,
after all, the darkness overhead was breaking away, and from out the
sombre clouds the sky was spilling pale new-born sunshine over roofs
and steeples and despairing streets.
Those who heard of the glories of the Moore ball in their youth are not
likely ever to forget it: the music, the supper, the graciousness of
host and hostess, and the company. There was a new Astor piano borrowed
from the bishop to mingle its fresh voice with that of the tired Moore
spinet and the playing of the Park's four violinists. The people who
attended it, whose names were as well known then as the pure tones
of Trinity's bells,--Le Roys, Rutgers, Gouverneurs, Beekmans, Jays,
de Lanceys, Wilcoxes, Livingstons, Kissams, Kortrights, Clarksons,
Schermerhorns, Van Pelts, Clarks, Varicks, Waddingtons, Van Santvoorts,
Van Nests, Pells, Kembles, Fairlees, and Waters,--they were the great
of 1807.
In the largest parlor, where the Orleans sofas are pushed ignominiously
against the wall, youthful New York is whirling about to the strains
of the Corporal Listnor waltz. Two belles of the evening the room
contains,--Maria Mayo, of Virginia and New Jersey, who married
General Winfield Scott, and Matilda Hoffman, the love of gay young
Washington Irving. A third, and the most remarked of all that large
company,--Ellen Conover,--has just passed through the doorway on the
arm of Nathaniel Moore. A handsome couple they make,--she in her lace
gown and he in dark plum-colored evening clothes. She is smiling, for
she does not see the look of misery in his eyes.
"The stars are out, dear; shall we go into the garden and sit under our
own little beech-tree?" she asks.
Our beech-tree! How the words sink into his soul and cut like knives!
"No, Ellen," he answers; "the leaves of the tree, so tender and young,
are old and seared for us."
"Why, Nathaniel, how strange you talk!" she says. Then she looks into
his white face and begins to understand.
Oh, the anguish of his drawn young face, as he folds her in his arms
and tells her to be brave. Into the library she follows him. Her step
has lost its buoyancy and the roses have died in her cheeks. A woman's
intuition has guessed what he has to tell her. Something has come
between them. Softly he closes the door on the lights, the music, and
the babble of happy voices.
"Kiss me and never let me speak again, darling," he whispers. But she
lets him speak--and break her heart.
Almost a century has passed since the dawn after the Moore ball when
a girl stole down the slender staircase of that proud mansion. It was
Ellen Conover garbed for a journey. Like the ghost of pleasure, she
crept through the trellis-work of faded flowers which adorned the
landing and hurried noiselessly over the slippery hall. No one was
about but Thomas, who was picking up some of the motto papers and dead
flowers strewn over the dining-room floor. Hearing the rustle of a
woman's dress, he came to the door of that room and looked out with
startled eyes.
"Why, missy, is you going abroad so early?" he asked, incredulously.
"Yes, Tom, I'm going back to Monmouth."
Seeing a question in his eyes, she continued,--
"Aunt will understand. I have left a note by her door."
In her hand she held a square deerskin bag, and the negro, not
forgetting his manners in his bewilderment, asked whether he could
carry it for her.
"Thanks, Tom," she said, wearily, as he relieved her of the heavy
burden. "Colonel Montgomery is to be at the Broadway corner for me. He
is going to Englishtown, and has promised to see me home. The Paulus
Hook coach passes at seven, you know."
Beside the lyre-shaped hat-rack Ellen paused for a moment. Thomas
thought that she was going to faint, but she beckoned for him to go
on. Before her was Nathaniel's gray beaver, the one she had liked him
in so much. She remembered he wore it that happy day they wandered
down to Gansevoort Street to look at their little dream-house. Dear
dream-house, that would never be theirs. The wistaria vine that twined
so lovingly about the stoop-rail high up to the dormer window would
never purple for them. Was he asleep now? She wondered what he would
think of her running off in this fashion. "Perhaps it is foolish, but
I could never stand seeing him again," she murmured to herself. On the
floor were his riding-gloves, swept off the hat-rack by some heedless
reveller of the night before. Like one lingering in a dream, she
picked them up and tenderly put them in the pocket of her coat. For a
moment she stood silent with her hand on the door in the attitude of
one listening to a benediction. Outside a soughing wind was sweeping
through the deserted street and the dark hall was full of its whispered
sighs. Softly she opened the door on the new day, and then, as if
speaking to an invisible presence, she said, "May you sometimes think
of me as I shall always think of you, dear heart." And the sweetest
part of the story is, he was faithful to her memory until death.
A TRUE PICTURE OF THE
LAST DAYS OF AARON BURR
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
A TRUE PICTURE OF THE LAST DAYS OF AARON BURR
An old house that has fallen to ruin always has something pathetic
about it, but a great hostelry in the clutches of decay, where warmth
and cheer have welcomed generations of travellers, is sadder still.
In Port Richmond, Staten Island, there is still standing the Richmond
Inn, suffering from the weight of many years. Erected before the war
of 1812, until 1820 it was the home of the Mersereau family, who
owned most of the surrounding land when the place bore the name of
Mersereau's Ferry. The Mersereaus were Huguenots, and descended from
two brothers who fled with their mother from France to America on
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Richmond Inn rests on the
site of an earlier Mersereau mansion,--a witness of the Revolution.
During the early part of the last century there were no buildings to
shut off the view of the water-front, and its lawn ran down to a bluff
overlooking the ferry landing and wharf. There Jed Simonson, a soldier
who had fought at Monmouth, received the freight from the Jersey shore
and the chance scow bearing Indian luxuries purchased from the hold of
some newly-arrived merchantman. Great trees stood guard at the back
of the inn like a troop of shadowy sentinels, and through them came
sweet scents of the verdant country that rolled away over the British
breastworks still covering the nearby hills. On the wide galleries of
this haven of rest old sea-captains could always be seen gently
dozing as they puffed long pipes in the sunlight, or perchance gazing
through spy-glasses at the white sails flecking the harbor. The ocean
underwent quick transitions as they rounded Cape Hatteras or struck the
Gulf Stream, and the nautical yarns they spun of the "Merry Marys,"
"Saucy Belles," and "Swift Sallys" were ropes which led to the seamen's
true Elysium.
[Illustration: AN OLD VIEW OF STATEN ISLAND, ABOUT 1830]
At nightfall the mail-coach often drove up before the door with a load
of happy guests and bore others away. Those were the days when social
intercourse was a feature of tavern life. "Good-by! Good-by!" a dozen
feminine voices would call as the gay party of Southerners departed
on their long journey to Baltimore. Toasts of Calverts and St. Marys,
tears and kisses and fluttering handkerchiefs before the coach rumbled
past the little red general store into the darkness. And then later
in the evening, when it was time for the candles, the young people
remaining would assemble in the hall for a reel, made merrier by the
jingly protests of the gold-legged Clementi piano. It was to this abode
that Aaron Burr, world-weary and near death, was brought in 1836.
[Illustration: ON THE WIDE GALLERIES OF THIS HAVEN OF REST OLD
SEA-CAPTAINS COULD ALWAYS BE SEEN GENTLY DOZING AS THEY PUFFED LONG
PIPES IN THE SUNLIGHT]
Aaron Burr, the courageous, was then sunk into an abyss so low that
his enemies should have been satisfied. For years he had endured
the censure of his fellows, the vituperation of Federalists and
anti-Federalists, and the sneers of the populace without a murmur.
Like the rock depicted on the old seal with which he used to stamp
his letters, his lofty spirit had been unmoved by the winds and waves
of public opinion. But now disease and old age had found him, and
the spectre every human thing must some day face was his relentless
pursuer. Until recently there was one living who remembered his arrival
at the old hostelry. How the black stage-driver and a gentleman of
the party assisted him up the steps to the door and then up the
quaint staircase to the largest guest-room on the second floor. The
spot is still shown where stood the ancient curtained bed he occupied.
The wide, white carved mantel-piece where his tired eyes must have
often rested has not been disturbed, and one of the old window-panes
bears the sentence, scratched with a diamond, "All is vanity," which
tradition says is his work.
Aaron Burr's career is a strange record of triumphs almost reached; the
picture of a proud spirit tortured and frenzied by fate. The story has
been handed down from generation to generation in the Edwards family,
and is preserved among the papers of the late William Paterson, of
Perth Amboy, that when Aaron Burr was an infant in the parsonage on
Broad Street, Newark, his mother often prayed that her son should be as
a star among men. Her prayer was answered, but not in the way she would
have wished. From his mother Burr inherited that morbid sensitiveness
which eventually proved his downfall. Esther Edwards never forgot
some of the stings she had endured when painting fans in the manner of
Watteau for the fashionable women of Boston. Her son always believed
that Alexander Hamilton was the cause of his ruin in the eyes of
Washington, the loss of the Presidency of the United States, and the
constant blackener of his good name by tongue and pen. If the shadow of
Hamilton had never crossed the path of Burr, the latter's name might
have been glorious for all time.