They were tearing down the old Gwynne house the other day as we drove
past, and it was not without a twinge of sentimental regret that we
beheld the spectacle. The old Gwynne house was what our newspapers
delight to honour by referring to as an "historic landmark." In the
huge, expensive, devastating, and reconstructing haste of a growing
American town--a town of the middle West at that--any building
twenty-five years of age is likely to be so described; but this must
have numbered all of four-score. Many valiant notable deeds and people
were associated with it; it went through a whole epic of adventures
like--as one might whimsically fancy--a stationary Odysseus. At the
latter end it fell to be that common drudge and slattern among homes,
a boarding-house; reached the last sordid depth as a tenement; and now
they are abolishing it utterly, and a new subdivision to be called, I
believe, Gwynne Park Place, will presently flourish above the grave.
Once upon a time there _was_ a park; it lay upon the utmost border
of town, and brick walls bound with a ribbon of stone along the top,
kept the house and its outlying lawns in a pompous seclusion. That was
all swept away long ago; of late the ground has been reclaimed from
slums and shanties and laid out in building-lots, curbed, sewered,
gas-mained. But you may see here and there a single elm or buckeye,
keeping yet amongst the spruce new flower-beds and within call of
factory-whistles, some air of its antique dignity, remote and cool. In
my time Doctor Vardaman's cottage, hard by where you used to turn into
the Gwynne driveway, was the only other dwelling hereabouts; a great,
spraddling, staring apartment-house covers the site of it now.
Governor Gwynne built his mansion--as he probably called it--in the
year eighteen-thirty or thereabouts; and being an admirer of the
classic and a wealthy man for those days, treated himself to a fine
Parthenon front, with half a dozen stone pillars in the Doric taste
springing from the black-and-white pavement of the veranda to uphold
the overreach of the roof, "Governor Gwynne's Attic roof," as some wit
of the mid-century once styled it; that wretched pun survives to-day in
a kind of deathless feebleness; it will only pass from men's memories
with the house itself. Much the same fashion of architecture is popular
nowadays, but people pay more attention to comfort. The governor's
pillars were ingeniously disposed so as to darken all the windows
looking that way, whether in the double parlours on the first floor,
the bed-chambers on the second, or the big ballroom over the entire
house on the third. It was a rather gloomy splendour in which the old
gentleman lived, I think. The rich, ponderous mahogany furniture,
the dismal brocade draperies, the hair-cloth and brass nails, the
ghastly white marble mantelpieces carved with mortuary-looking urns
and cornucopias spilling out cold white marble fruits, with which he
embellished his abode, were yet to be seen when I was a child. The
hall was decorated with a wall-paper setting forth the wanderings of
Aeneas, wherein he and his companions marched, fought, and sailed
progressively all about the walls and up the stairs, ending--entirely
innocent of any irony--with the descent into hell, and the awful
waves of Phlegethon flaming on either side of the double-doors
into the ballroom, on the top landing. The sternness of the subject
somehow subdued or dominated its brilliant colouring; and I have
never been able to divest my mind of that incongruous association.
For me the pale helmsman still steers toward that ballroom door; and
it is beside Governor Gwynne's ancient black walnut newel-post that I
shall always behold the splendid figure of the hero lusty and living
amongst the exiguous shadows. In the library the Governor's law-books
paraded along the shelves in close order behind the securely locked,
shining glass-and-mahogany doors; in the dining-room there stood a
grim old mahogany wine-cellaret like a short upright coffin; it was
difficult to imagine any sort of good-cheer proceeding from that
forbidding receptacle, but out of it Governor Gwynne had entertained
Andrew Jackson, Captain Marryat, Henry Clay, a whole long register of
celebrities. And I believe--under correction, for the date is cloudy in
my recollection--that he was preparing to entertain the Prince of Wales
with its help, when that young gentleman visited this country, had not
humanity's oldest and best-known guest called upon him earlier. They
used to show you the exact spot in the vast darkling front parlour on
the south side where his body had lain in state a September afternoon
in 1851, and Chase had pronounced the funeral oration over him. There
was a full-length portrait of him scowling at a scroll of legal cap,
with a big double-inkstand on the table beside him--"handy so he could
shy it at you in case you disagreed," Gwynne Peters used profanely to
suggest--hanging on the parlour wall just opposite the long mirror
between the windows; the chairs and sofas were always shrouded in
white linen covers; white net bags swathed the ornate gilt-and-glass
chandeliers. It was a ghostly place, that room, with a clock mounted in
a kind of Greek temple of alabaster under a glass dome on the mantel
sepulchrally ticking out the irrecoverable hours, and Governor Gwynne
eyeing you sternly from his elevation. He looked not too well pleased
with his canvas immortality and considering what he must see, it was no
wonder.
He was born some time during the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, and therefore must have been upwards of sixty before the
day when Chase sonorously reminded his hearers in the south parlour
that--"The history of Samuel Gwynne's life was, in very truth, the
history of his native State, so closely was he associated with her
struggles, her vicissitudes, and her achievements.... If zeal, if
integrity, if courage and ability in the discharge alike of public and
private duties can establish a claim upon the grateful remembrance of
posterity, _then_, fellow-citizens, we may well point with pride....
_This_ was the noblest Roman of them all," etc. A neat pamphlet
containing the address and the Resolutions of the Bar Association was
afterwards printed and distributed; it was only the other day that I
came upon a copy of it, very yellow and dusty, but bearing no marks
of ever having been tampered with by a reader--indeed, some of the
leaves were yet uncut--among other essays and orations of a like nature
blushing unseen in the darkest corner of a second-hand book-shop. From
it I extracted the rhetorical gems just cited, and it is doubtful if
they will ever see the light again, yet I am confident that the old
gentleman deserved much that was said of him, and would have been the
first to deprecate any "pointing with pride." He was an upright judge,
a temperate and God-fearing man; he amassed a handsome fortune, and
served his particular section of the country through two terms as
Governor, rather fancying himself, I believe, in the role of statesman,
and all unwittingly laying the foundations of that intolerable, absurd,
and tragic Gwynne family pride; it beset all his descendants and all
the countless kindred of Gwynnes like a curse. No more arrogantly
self-righteous set of people ever existed; and no more hysterically
clannish. The Governor's memory held them all together for forty years
after his death; only recently, with the introduction of new blood, has
that strange, intangible bond dissolved. Samuel died and was gathered
to his fathers; and Samuel, his son reigned in his stead, and busily
drank himself to death in as short a time as that agreeable result
could be compassed; he was not the first nor the last of the family to
make thus the easy Avernian descent. I have heard some of the Gwynnes
themselves comment upon the familiar fate and character of great men's
sons, as exemplified by Governor Gwynne's with a kind of melancholy
complacence.[1] The Governor left a queer, unjust, and wrong-headed
will--realising, perhaps, how queer, unjust, and wrong-headed were
some of his prospective heirs--tying up a part of his property to the
third generation, devising what seemed an unfair proportion to his
brothers and sisters, of whom it might be said that their name was
legion--Lucien Gwynne, David Gwynne, Charlotte, Eleanor, Marian; I have
never known anyone who could accurately catalogue all the Gwynnes--and
bequeathing the house and furniture to all his children in succession,
as if he had a premonition that none of them would enjoy it long.
There was a son who had run away to sea and was never heard of again;
no provision was made for him in case he should reappear, although he
was the oldest. Then came Sam, that died in a fit of delirium tremens;
then Arthur. Him they found hanging to a beam under the "Attic" roof
one summer morning not long after he had succeeded to the kingdom of
the Gwynnes; and I suppose there was a horrid silence in the attic,
and presently wild, pale-faced women and running and hurry and horses'
hoofs churning the gravel before the door. The body was laid in the
same south parlour and Governor Gwynne stared over his scroll at the
suicide. Arthur left two daughters, young women grown; by the time I
put on long dresses they were two old maids and lived narrowly, doing
their own work, in a little cheap house at the other end of town. They
were always clad alike in the last bombazine that was ever seen among
us, I am sure, and wore their hair in the ringlets of eighteen-sixty,
with knobs of black satin ribbon at the temples. They had the name of
being queer, but then all the Gwynnes were queer.
After Arthur, a daughter, Harriet Peters, went to live in the house;
she was a widow, Donald Peters having gone into the army--about '62
or '63, I think--and died of typhus in Libby Prison. One would have
thought the house held out very slender attractions for the remaining
Gwynnes, by this time; but all the heirs were pretty well straitened
in means, and Mrs. Peters probably welcomed any way of reducing
expenses. No one, least of all the heirs themselves, ever seemed to
know, or be able to explain what had become of the Gwynne fortune;
but it is certain that ten years after the Governor's death it was
almost entirely dissipated, except what was held in trust or otherwise
secured. This included the house, which could not be sold, as I have
been told; at any rate Mrs. Peters had it for her life rent-free. I
dare say she had pleasant enough memories of old days when she was a
child and played about the pillars with her brothers and Caroline;
she had two children, two little boys of her own, and she liked the
idea of bringing them up in what she called without the least notion
of being affected, her ancestral home. All the Gwynnes loved their
dreary inheritance; they had as great a fondness and reverence for
their name as if everyone that ever bore it had lived and died in the
odour of sanctity; and doubtless regarded the house with something akin
to the sacred affection of the Israelites for the Temple. I remember
Mrs. Peters when she lived there, a tall woman with the thin, aquiline
features and red hair of the family, going about with her black
skirts and solemn face. Being constantly treated by her friends as a
broken-hearted heroine, the daughter of one departed patriot and widow
of another, I believe the pose became not distasteful to her as years
went on; I have heard her refer to herself in sounding and mournful
phrase as "the last of the Gwynnes,"--whereas, Heavens knows there were
enough Gwynnes to stock a colony! She must have meant that she was the
last of the Governor's immediate descendants--and so she was, excepting
Caroline.[2]
It was at this time that I began to know the house; as I think of
those days, I suffer a sharp return of that feeling which Mr. Andrew
Lang has somewhere most touchingly and truly called "the _heimweh_ of
childhood." When I was a young lady of eight years or so, they used
to pack me into our elderly phaeton and send me out to the country to
spend the day playing with Gwynne Peters. I wore my white embroidered
piqué, with a pink sash; and the brilliant red-and-green plaid
stockings in which at that period it was the fashion to encase the
legs of little girls. All glorious without was I; the feminine mind
recalls these details with a photographic minuteness. Gwynne was a
gentle little boy about my own age and not very strong, which was one
reason why they asked me, a girl, to play with him. Another, which,
with an elegant modesty, I refrained from mentioning first, was that
Gwynne was very devoted to me--I was Juliet in my plaid stockings!
Romeo wore baggy little trousers that buttoned on a yoke about his
manly waist, if I recollect aright. I had in my possession until a
short while ago--I gave it to Gwynne's eldest daughter the last time
she visited me, finding her screaming with laughter over it and the
other contents of an old desk--a solid and rumpled document reciting
that: "This is to say that i Gwynne Peters do love you Mary Stanley,
and we will be marrid when we grow up in witnes whareoff i have sined
this with my bludd yours respektifly Gwynne Peters." It is painfully
printed on a leaf of thick cream-coloured paper with a high gloss; we
tore it out of an old photograph-album we found in the attic. That was
a charming playground, crowded with the most fascinating assortment of
rubbish, that a nimble imagination could convert into almost any kind
of stage "property." There were broken-down chairs and tables, mildewed
old pictures, carpetbags, bandboxes covered with flowered wall-paper,
saddle-bags and holsters, a round-topped hair-trunk studded with
nails, with mangy bare patches upon its flanks that conferred an air
of reality on it when it figured romantically as a horse, camel, or
other beast in our dramas. We spurred into Araby on that hair-trunk,
we fought with Moslems, we carted off bales of treasure. When fancy
flagged we could turn to two chests of mothy, mouse-eaten old books
that stood under the eaves; no one ever opened the cases in the great
gloomy library downstairs, notwithstanding our pleadings. Gwynne,
who has always been of an affectionately reminiscent disposition,
said to me not so long ago: "I should like to go back and be eleven
years old again, just to read 'Ivanhoe' the first time. Don't you
remember?" Indeed I remembered very well two children huddling by the
low attic window with the book between them; sometimes it is in the
chilly twilight of a winter's afternoon, with eerie shadows hovering
in the corners, and a landscape all in sharp blacks and whites like
an India-ink drawing, outside; sometimes the warm, hasty summer rain
switches on the roof; sometimes there is a fresh chorus of birds
beneath our window, and mating sparrows flit about the chimneys.
"Hound of the Temple--Stain to thine order--Set free the damsel!"
"Bois-Guilbert, notwithstanding the confusion of the bloody fray,
showed every attention to her safety. Repeatedly he was by her side,
and neglecting his own defence, held before her the fence of his
triangular steel-plated shield." "That's the way I'd take care of you,"
says Gwynne, not grasping the point of Bois-Guilbert's assiduities
about Rebecca. "Let's play it, and we'll play the trunk's Zamor, the
good steed that never yet failed his master." We could be as noisy as
we chose in the attic, for the whole lofty barn-like ballroom beneath
us intervened to deaden all sounds. There was no other place about
the house where we were allowed to run and shout, and even outside we
must go decorously. We longed to play Robin Hood under the beautiful
old beeches and in the alleys of the garden, but someone was forever
hushing us. Mrs. Peters would come out on the veranda, where, standing
between the columns at the top of the steps in her flowing black she
looked exactly like Medea in the big steel-engraving of "The Marriage
of Jason and Creusa" over the sideboard in the dining room: "Gwynne,
my son, I am astonished. Don't you know you may disturb your Aunt
Caroline?"
No one ever saw Gwynne's Aunt Caroline. She lived in one of the large
bedrooms towards the front of the house--a bedroom with iron bars at
the windows. "Why are those rods there?" I once asked. "It used to be a
nursery--that's a place where they put babies, you know," said Gwynne,
flushing oddly; he had the singularly delicate, fair skin common to
all red-haired people, and a change of colour showed brilliantly on
his ordinarily pale face. "The bars were put there to keep them from
falling out." I was satisfied; it would never have occurred to me to
doubt Gwynne, who was even touchily truthful. But Miss Clara Vardaman,
the doctor's old-maid sister, who kept house for him, overhearing us,
frowned impartially on us both and shook her head. "Gwynne, child----"
she began severely; then checked herself, and turning upon me with
a severity even greater, in that it was, as I felt, unjust: "You
shouldn't ask so many questions," she said. "Little girls should be
seen and not heard." This was perplexing behaviour in Miss Clara, who,
in general, was the gentlest and tenderest of souls. She cried when the
doctor chloroformed their old cat; I think she would have cut off her
hand rather than spank either one of us, although we must sometimes
have tried her sorely. She used to invite us in and fill us with
doughnuts or other deleterious sweets when she caught us trespassing
in their garden. I remember a transient and rather resentful wonder
at the pained look on her face when she thus reproved us; and she was
afterwards, illogically enough, very gentle with Gwynne, and gave him a
notably larger share of cake than mine.
It would not have been possible to keep me in ignorance forever
about Aunt Caroline, of course, but the enlightenment came with a
sort of ferocious suddenness. It is one of a good many unpleasant
recollections of mine connected with Gwynne's brother, Sam Peters.
Sam was the elder by two or three years, a cold, surly, hulking lad
of whom I was very much afraid--with reason, for he used his superior
strength to browbeat and bully us. That the two brothers should be
eternally at odds is not surprising; every nursery has its tyrant,
and, remembering our own childish days, we must all be uneasily aware
that our youngsters fight like small savages amongst themselves, and,
as in most primitive communities, might makes right, and the battle
is generally to the strong. Gwynne had a high spirit in his poor
little weak body, and he invariably got the worst of it, yet never
gave in. Every way but physically he had the advantage of his brother,
who was a dull boy--and, I believe, liked Gwynne no better for being
cleverer than himself. "Smarty" was one of his favourite names for
him; I have known him to pummel his junior unmercifully upon some
boyish difference; yet he would sometimes come cringing to both of us
for help with his grimy slate and pencil. It would be hard to say in
which posture I most disliked and feared him; but I have a fancy now
that there was always something uncanny about Sam Peters in his fits
of stubborn silence, of unprovoked anger, of repellent and fawning
submission. He was most often to be found about the stables, and when
his mother's commands--she had scarcely any control over him, and he
treated her alternately with insolent indifference, and with a kind of
wild affection--or the servants' persuasions brought him indoors, came
scowling in upon our mild little games, kicking Gwynne's toys right
and left. He took away our "Ivanhoe" and kept it for days, in mere
spite, for he was not reading it himself--that I could have understood
and almost pardoned; but I never saw him with a book. He invented
various fantastically brutal ways of torturing the pet animals; and
enjoyed beyond measure our frantic tears and expostulations. Sam never
abated his tramping and whistling out of deference to Aunt Caroline;
he stormed through the house when and how he chose, and on Gwynne's
offering a remonstrance one day: "You shut up!" said Sam coarsely.
"Aunt Caroline's crazy, and when I grow up I'm going to send her to the
place where they put mad people so she won't be a bother any more."
Gwynne's thin face went white; he doubled his feeble fists and struck
out at his brother in a blind and futile indignation. "Don't you
believe him, Mary," he gasped. "It's a lie! How dare you say that, Sam?
How dare you tell?"
The cook and gardener rushed in, hearing the uproar of this battle and
separated the combatants, or rather the persecutor and his victim, for
Gwynne was helpless under his elder's hailing blows. They were old
servants, for the Gwynnes possessed among other ill-assorted traits,
a faculty for enlisting the lifelong fidelity and affection of their
underlings.
"My Lord, Mr. Gwynne, whatever is the matter?" said the cook; she took
him on her knee and staunched his bleeding nose with her apron. "Mr.
Sam, for shame! You'd oughtn't to hit your little brother."
Gwynne would not explain the cause of the quarrel, nor, for that
matter, would Sam; he went off whistling harshly. "He said Miss Gwynne
was crazy," I volunteered.
"It's a lie," blubbered Gwynne. "It's a lie, ain't it, Hannah?"
"S-h-h, you mustn't say that naughty word--there now--now," said the
cook soothingly, and she and the gardener exchanged a meaning glance.