Herewith began another volume in the saga of the old Gwynne house.
After nearly fifty years of Gwynnes, it must now pass to other
ownership. The thing happens every day, and should be no great tragedy;
few Americans are born and live and die in the same house, and a
building of any sort rarely remains the property of one family for
more than a generation. But the Gwynnes, one and all, mourned aloud
and refused to be comforted. Governor Gwynne's house, Uncle Samuel's
house, the house that great man planned and built, whose hospitalities
had been enjoyed by the very best and highest in the land! Why, the
State ought to buy that house! The State was of a different opinion,
although the house was offered at a ridiculously low price, not more
than twice what it was worth. None of the Gwynnes, it appeared, could
afford to buy it in, or even rent it, the expense of living there was
so terrifying. At that distance from town, one must keep a horse and
carriage, the street-cars being so far away; the care of the park and
garden required one man's whole time; and there was the huge old house
itself. It had at least sixteen rooms, and with its high ceilings,
and long rambling hallways, took as much coal to heat it in our
winters as three ordinary houses. Besides, it had--ahem--undeniably
run down somewhat during poor Harriet's administration, and was in
need of costly repairs. No, alack and alas! the house must be sold or
leased--dreadful profanation! The furniture was at last cleared out;
the Governor's portrait went down to the State-house, and you may see
him there at this moment, in line with all the rest of the governors,
but in a rather obscure corner--such is the notorious ingratitude of
republics. All the Gwynne establishments in town blossomed out with
relics, brass andirons, branch candlesticks, horse-hair sofas--people
confided to one another that, on the whole, Mrs. Horace Gwynne had made
a pretty fair division; she herself sternly declined to take anything
but the alabaster clock in the south parlour. That mausoleum-looking
engine now ticks out the time from the middle of a charming white wood
mantel in her eldest son's "colonial" residence. It long since ticked
out eternity for Mrs. Gwynne, as for some of the other friends we met
in the last chapter. The Armenians finally accomplished the dismantling
of the attic and cellar; the contents, Gwynne Peters once told me,
brought just seventy-two dollars. "That was a little less than four
dollars all around," he said with a grin. "I spent my four on my first
box of cigars, and got awfully sick on the very first one I tried to
smoke, I remember--as if it were for a judgment on me!" He went back
to college. Old Hannah went, whimpering, to live in the country with a
married niece. The windows were boarded up, the old iron gates chained
across; and, for a while, an advertisement appeared in our papers,
and, I believe, in some of the big New York and Chicago ones: "FOR
SALE OR LEASE--Commodious mansion built by the late Governor Gwynne,
delightfully situated in the suburbs, within easy walking-distance of
two lines of cars.[3] Large grounds, fruit and shade trees, stable,
dairy, etc. House of twenty rooms in perfect order with all modern
improvements. Suitable for a young ladies' seminary or summer-hotel.
For further particulars address Virgil H. Templeton, Agt. for the
Gwynne Estate."
There is a peculiar fascination in these artless notices; one may
read whole columns of such Paradises awaiting tenants, every morning
in the journals. They are so rich in promise, so fertile in pleasant
suggestion, it seems as if a person might spend a happy lifetime in
the simple pursuit of renting and moving into them one after another.
But, strange to say, for many months Mr. Virgil H. Templeton piped and
nobody would dance! The causes of both health and education suffered
serious neglect; nobody showed the least anxiety to teach young ladies
in the commodious mansion built by the late Governor Gwynne; nobody
wanted to establish a summer-resort within easy walking-distance of two
lines of cars. Once in a while someone would come in, get the keys,
and go out to inspect the place; but invariably "they laughed as they
rode away," like the false knight in the ballad. It is possible that
the disadvantages connected with living in it which the family had
noticed, were, by some strange chance, apparent to would-be tenants
also. Templeton did his best; he placarded the brick walls of the
park; he changed and re-worded his advertisements; he even lowered
the terms and promised repairs! All these measures were looked upon
with strong disfavour by the family; and it is safe to say that no
real-estate dealer before or since has ever come in for the share of
bullying and badgering that that well-meaning man received. The two
old Misses Gwynne, Arthur's daughters, put on their two old bonnets,
and went down to Judge Lewis' office, where the unfortunate agent had
a desk, declaiming loudly against the vulgarity of advertising their
noble ancestral residence in the _common_ papers where every ragamuffin
might read their names shamelessly printed. "Want me to go 'round and
whisper it to everybody, I s'pose," said Templeton in a rage, when they
had left. He was an excitable little man. Mrs. Horace Gwynne visited
him with the information that she, for one, would never consent to
the house being rented for less than two hundred. "Cents or dollars,
ma'am?" asked Templeton politely sarcastic. "You're quite as likely
to get one as the other." Steven Gwynne, as "queer" a body as one
commonly sees at large without a keeper--he was a Southern sympathiser,
and never cut his hair or beard after the fall of Vicksburg--ambushed
Templeton in Judge Lewis' own room, to tell him roundly that what was
good enough for Governor Gwynne was good enough for any damned upstart
that wanted to rent his house, and that not one square inch of new
wall-paper should go on those walls, so help him, if he, Steven Gwynne,
had to camp on the doorstep with a shot-gun! The judge witnessed
these passages-at-arms with mingled annoyance and amusement; it was
a nuisance of course, he said; he was minded to evict Templeton a
dozen times--but how it did enliven the dull legal round! The Gwynnes
and their agent furnished that jolly and kind-hearted jurist with
material for some of the best after-dinner stories he ever told. "By
George," he used to say, "it got so that whenever one of my clerks
came in and found a Gwynne lying in wait for Templeton and breathing
fire and slaughter, he'd post somebody in the hall, and when Templeton
came along: 'Hey, go slow, Temp., the enemy's poisoned the well!' and
Templeton would shin for the street so fast you could play checkers on
his coat-tail!"
The fact is the poor old house was going to rack and ruin as rapidly as
so solid and substantial a structure could go; the wonder was that Mrs.
Peters had managed to get along at all in that comfortless monument
to the Gwynne family-pride, but living there was probably a point of
honour with her, that fantastic standard of honour, to which all the
race of Gwynnes clung with a fanatic tenacity. No single member of the
family could afford to spend any money on the house, and concerted
action among fifteen or twenty Gwynne heirs was, as their agent
speedily found out, next to an impossibility. The only thing about
which they were in entire concord was the glory past, present, and to
come of their name; they saw desecration in laying hands upon the torn
and mildewed wall-paper, the blistered varnish, the leaking roofs of
Uncle Samuel's shrine. It would have taken twelve or fifteen hundred
dollars to put the place in order, at the least; and indeed as time
went on, it promised to take more. The viewless forces of destruction
invade an empty house, and lay it waste like a devastating army. "If
they would just let me shingle the roof anyhow," said Templeton in
despair. "But the only one of 'em all that has any sense is that young
Peters fellow--not the queer one, you know, the one that's on the ranch
in New Mexico, but that other, that nice tall red-haired boy. Trouble
is, he's a minor. You just wait a couple of years or so till he's
twenty-one and through college, and I'll bet he makes 'em all stand
'round!"
The stout, excitable little man displayed more penetration than one
would have supposed he possessed. Gwynne did make them stand 'round.
When he came home on his vacations, you might see him prowling
about the place with a delegation of unwilling relatives, arguing,
explaining, persuading. Being a Gwynne himself, the boy knew how to get
at his kin, upon what side to take them without offence. There was very
little boyishness about his weary, anxious, gently humorous face, and
the family all knew, that, young as he was, he already had one grave
and bitter care. Perhaps that made them respect him; there are some
people that never grow up, and, conversely, there are some who never
seem to have any youth. When Gwynne came home, the estate's property
all at once took on a smiling look of change. Sidewalks were mended and
shutters painted; the grass was cut in the park and the rubbish cleared
away; he even got them to consent to putting a furnace in the house!
Templeton went about in jubilant relief at having someone to share his
responsibilities. "Told you so! That boy has a _head_! All Peters and
mighty little Gwynne, that's what _he_ is!"
In spite of their efforts, however, the house, as Templeton pointed
out with a solemn wagging of the head, "was not a paying proposition."
Going away to boarding-school at this time with Kitty Oldham and
others of about our age, we heard and saw less and less of it. Nobody
of our acquaintance would risk the experiment of living in it; it
was only strangers who fitfully came and went as tenants of the old
Gwynne house. Sometimes there would be curtains at the windows, and
smoke hanging from the chimneys; on our next return it would be again
shut and deserted. Those people? Oh, yes, they were in some railroad
position, and they've been moved to Indianapolis. No, no one called
on them, it's so hard to get out there, you know, and they were only
here a few months. Once the tenants scuttled out in a dreadful state
of scare, declaring that Arthur Gwynne's ghost came down and paraded
the ballroom o' nights, with his head on one side, and the rag of
sheet dangling from his twisted neck! "I do hope poor Cousin Eleanor
and Cousin Mollie won't hear that story," said Gwynne, in concern,
and painstakingly invented and retailed to them another excuse for
the sudden cessation of rent. Once, in the summer vacation, the Board
of Lady Managers of the Home for Incurables gave a lawn-party on
the grounds for the benefit of their charity. There were booths set
up and Japanese lanterns swinging under the beeches, and a deal of
noise beneath Caroline Gwynne's windows where we children had been
obliged to go so sedately in the old days. People who had no carriages
came in long weary procession from the Lexington and Amherst Street
cars--within easy walking-distance--bearing their contributions of
bowls of salad and chocolate-cakes shrouded in their oldest napkins.
The house was opened, and the ladies of the committee heated coffee on
the crippled old built-in range in Hannah's kitchen. They every one
agreed in buzzing whispers that the place was a perfect rattle-trap,
and they could not imagine how any people could move out leaving a
house so dirty as the last inmates had done. The young men gaily
took turns drawing water from the ancient clanking pump outside the
kitchen-door, and bringing in armfuls of firewood. Children raced
and romped with a thunderous uproar in the big echoing rooms. In the
evening there was a curtain rigged between the Parthenon pillars, and
a play was given in which Teddy Johns appeared and sang the kind of
topical song popular in those days, of which I remember one verse:
"The gloaming one day was beginning to gloam,
That's all, that's all!
When I heard someone say 'The Incurables' Home?
That's all, that's all!
He told me of servants they had more than eight,
And he thought that the one poor old battered inmate
Must certainly live in magnificent state,
That's all, that's all!"
A humorous effort which was received with great applause, the paucity
of Incurables, and the disproportionate energy of their Lady Managers
being a standing joke in our community. Mrs. Oldham was rumoured to
have remarked acutely upon being applied to for a donation to the Home,
that the only thing incurable about it was the idiots who ran it.
Teddy sang and swaggered through his part in a very amusing fashion;
he was good at that sort of entertainment. The fête--anything carried
on out-doors was a fête in those days--was a success, netting _the_
Incurable the handsome sum of fifty-one dollars twenty-seven cents,
according to Mrs. Lewis' report. And the next day everyone in town
was circulating the story of how some blundering or malicious person
actually went up to poor Gwynne Peters and asked him where Sam was and
what he was doing!
After this the house went again into one of its periods of eclipse,
so to call them. No one even cared to look it over any more; and few
people visited the neighbourhood at all since dear old Miss Clara
Vardaman died and the doctor gave up practice. If it had not been for
Gwynne I believe the house would have fallen down, and he must have had
a hard pull getting the rest of them to contribute their share of the
taxes and insurance. It was offered for sale at gradually diminishing
terms; they had one chance to dispose of it to a German gentleman who
proposed to convert it into a place of entertainment for the masses
to be called Silberberg's Garden. Templeton was enthusiastically in
favour of this plan, but figure the indignation of the two old Misses
Gwynne! Even Gwynne, while he laughed, was a little ruffled. "Think of
a band-stand and merry-go-round in the park," he said. "German waiters
in their shirt-sleeves dashing from the house with beer-glasses and
plates of wienerwurst, plumbers' apprentices and their girls waltzing
and perspiring in our old ballroom, with a free fight thrown in now
and then by way of variety! And how Doctor Vardaman would relish it!
Picnic parties, sardine-cans, paper napkins, beer-bottles, sentimental
couples spooning, band scraping and tooting 'Die Wacht am Rhein,' and
'How can I leave thee?' under his windows all day long--his property
would be absolutely unsalable. We can't do it, I guess; no, not even
for Silberberg's twenty-five thousand dollars!" I told him he was like
the Arab who wouldn't part from his steed, in the poem at the back of
the Third or Fourth Reader. "My beautiful, my beautiful----" he says;
"Avaunt, tempter, I scorn thy gold!" And, springing on the horse's
back, vanishes into the desert. Thus did all the Gwynnes turn up their
noses--in the vernacular--at Silberberg. Templeton was very doleful.
"You're missing the only chance you'll ever have to get rid of that
damned old white elephant, Mr. Peters," he said. "Why not let the
Dutchman have it? Lord, what difference does it make to you whether he
turns it into a beer-garden or a cemetery? It's had its day." But, for
once in his life, the little real-estate agent was at fault; for, on a
sudden, without notice, fully five years after the house came on the
market, when it had weathered through nearly every vicissitude known
to houses, and its fortunes were at the dregs, the wheel took another
turn--spun clean around--came full circle, in fact. Time and the hour
run through the roughest day.