they sat down at six o'clock in the great dining-room--not the little
breakfast-room--with old Jacob Dolph at one end of the table and young
Jacob Dolph at the other.
It was a pleasant dinner, and the wine was good, and the company duly
appreciative, although individually critical.
Old Jacob Dolph had on his right an agreeable French count, just arrived
in New York, who was creating a _furor_; and on his left was Mr. Philip
Waters, the oldest of the young men, who, being thirty-five, had a
certain consideration for old age. But old Jacob Dolph was not quite at
his ease. He did not understand the remarkable decorum of the young men.
He himself belonged to the age of "bumpers and no heel taps," and nobody
at his board to-night seemed to care about drinking bumpers, even out
of the poor, little, newfangled claret-glasses, that held only a
thimbleful apiece. He had never known a lot of gentlemen, all by
themselves, to be so discreet. Before the evening was over he became
aware of the fact that he was the only man who was proposing toasts, and
then he proposed them no more.
Things had changed since he was a young buck, and gave bachelor parties.
Why, he could remember seeing his own good father--an irreproachable
gentleman, surely--lock the door of his dining-room on the inside--ay,
at just such a dinner as this--and swear that no guest of his should go
out of that room sober. And his word had been kept. Times were changing.
He thought, somehow, that these young men needed more good port in their
veins.
Toward the end of the festivities he grew silent. He gave no more
toasts, and drank no more bumpers, although he might safely have put
another bottle or two under his broad waistcoat. But he leaned back in
his chair, and rested one hand on the table, playing with his wineglass
in an absent-minded way. There was a vague smile on his face; but every
now and then he knit his heavy gray brows as if he were trying to work
out some problem of memory. Mr. Philip Waters and the French count were
talking across him; he had been in the conversation, but he had dropped
out some time before. At last he rose, with his brows knit, and pulled
out his huge watch, and looked at its face. Everybody turned toward him,
and, at the other end of the table, his son half rose to his feet. He
put the watch back in his pocket, and said, in his clear, deep voice:
"Gentlemen, I think we will rejoin the ladies."
There was a little impulsive stir around the table, and then he seemed
to understand that he had wandered, and a frightened look came over his
face. He tottered backward, and swayed from side to side. Mr. Philip
Waters and the Frenchman had their arms behind him before he could fall,
and in a second or two he had straightened himself up. He made a
stately, tremulous apology for what he called his "infelicitous
absence of mind," and then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering
no one to go with him.
[Illustration: And then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering no
one to go with him.]
A little while later in the evening, Mr. Philip Waters, walking down
Broadway (which thoroughfare was getting to have a fairly suburban
look), informed the French count that in his, Mr. Waters's, opinion,
young Jacob Dolph would own that house before long.
Young Jacob Dolph's father insisted on repetitions of the bachelor
dinner, but he never again appeared in the great dining-room. When there
was a stag party he took his own simple dinner at five o'clock and went
to bed early, and lay awake until his son had dismissed the last mild
reveller, and he could hear the light, firm, young footstep mounting the
stairs to the bedroom door opposite his own.
* * * * *
That was practically the end of it for old Jacob Dolph. The maiden aunt,
who had been invited, was notified that she could not come, for Mr.
Dolph was not well enough to open his house that winter. But it was
delicately intimated to her that if he grew worse she might still be
sent for, and that alleviated her natural disappointment. She liked to
give parties; but there is also a chastened joy for some people in being
at the head of a house of mourning.
Old Mr. Dolph grew no worse physically, except that he was inclined to
make his daily walks shorter, and that he grew fonder of sitting at home
in the little breakfast-room, where the sun shone almost all day long,
and where Mrs. Dolph had once been fond of coming to sew. Her little
square work-table of mahogany stood there still. There the old gentleman
liked to dine, and often he dined alone. Young Jacob was in great demand
all over town, and his father knew that he ought to go out and amuse
himself. And the young man, although he was kind and loving, and never
negligent in any office of respect or affection, had that strong youth
in him which makes it impossible to sit every day of the week opposite
an old man whose world had slipped by him, who knew nothing of youth
except to love it and wonder at it.
In the morning, before he went out for his daily tramp into town, old
Jacob would say to young Jacob:
"I suppose I shall see you at dinner, my boy?"
And young Jacob would say, "Yes, sir," or "No, sir, I think not. Mrs.
Des Anges was in town yesterday, and she asked me to ride up there
to-day and dine. And Diana" (Diana was his big black mare) "needs a
little work; she's getting badly out of condition. So, if it doesn't
matter to you, sir, I'll just run up there and get back before the moon
sets."
And the father would answer that it didn't matter, and would send his
best respects, through Mrs. Des Anges at King's Bridge, to Madam Des
Anges at New Rochelle; and at night he would sit down alone to his
dinner in the breakfast-room, served by old Chloe, who did her humble
best to tempt his appetite, which was likely to be feeble when Master
Jacob was away.
Master Jacob had taken to riding to King's Bridge of late. Sometimes he
would start out early in the morning, just about the time when young
Van Riper was plodding by on his way to the shop. Young Van Riper liked
to be at the shop an hour earlier than his father. Old Mr. Dolph was
always up, on these occasions, to see his son start off. He loved to
look at the boy, in his English riding-boots and breeches, astride of
black Diana, who pranced and curvetted up the unpaved road. Young Jacob
had her well in hand, but he gave her her head and let her play until
they reached Broadway, where he made her strike a rattling regular pace
until they got well up the road; and then she might walk up Bloomingdale
way or across to Hickory Lane.
If he went up by the east he was likely to dismount at a place which you
can see now, a little west and south of McComb's Dam Bridge, where there
is a bit of a rocky hollow, and a sort of horizontal cleft in the rocks
that has been called a cave, and a water-washed stone above, whose oddly
shaped depression is called an Indian's footprint. He would stop there,
because right in that hollow, as I can tell you myself, grew, in his
time as in mine, the first of the spring flowers. It was full of violets
once, carpeted fairly with the pale, delicate petals.
And up toward the west, on a bridle-path between the hills and the
river, as you came toward Fort Washington, going to Tubby Hook--we are
refined nowadays, and Tubby Hook is "Inwood"--Heaven help it!--there
were wonderful flowers in the woods. The wind-flowers came there early,
nestling under the gray rocks that sparkled with garnets; and there
bloomed great bunches of Dutchman's-breeches--not the thin sprays that
come in the late New England spring, but huge clumps that two men could
not enclose with linked hands; great masses of scarlet and purple,
and--mostly--of a waxy white, with something deathlike in their
translucent beauty. There, also, he would wade into the swamps around a
certain little creek, lured by a hope of the jack-in-the-pulpit, to find
only the odorous and disappointing skunk-cabbage. And there the woods
were full of the aroma of sassafras, and of birch tapped by the earliest
woodpecker, whose drumming throbbed through the young man's deep and
tender musing.
And--strange enough for a young man who rides only to exercise his black
mare--he never came out of those woods without an armful of columbine or
the like. And--strange enough for any young man in this world of strange
things--when he sat down at the table of Mrs. Des Anges, in her pleasant
house near Harlem Creek, Miss Aline Des Anges wore a bunch of those
columbines at her throat. Miss Aline Des Anges was a slim girl, not very
tall, with great dark eyes that followed some people with a patient
wistfulness.
* * * * *
One afternoon, in May of 1827, young Jacob found his father in the
breakfast-room, and said to him:
"Father, I am going to marry Aline Des Anges."
His father, who had been dozing in the sun by the south window, raised
his eyes to his son's face with a kindly, blank look, and said,
thoughtfully:
"Des Anges. That's a good family, Jacob, and a wonderful woman, Madam
Des Anges. Is she alive yet?"
* * * * *
When Madam Des Anges, eighty years old, and strong and well, heard of
this, she said:
"It is the etiquette of France that one family should make the
proposition to the other family. Under the circumstances _I_ will be the
family that proposes. I will make a precedent. The Des Anges make
precedents."
And she rode down to the Dolph house in the family carriage--the last
time it ever went out--and made her "proposition" to Jacob Dolph the
elder, and he brightened up most wonderfully, until you would have
thought him quite his old self, and he told her what an honor he
esteemed the alliance, and paid her compliments a hundred words long.
And in May of the next year, King's Bridge being out of the question,
and etiquette being waived at the universal demand of society, the young
couple stood up in the drawing-room of the Dolph house to be wed.
The ceremony was fashionably late--seven o'clock in the evening. And
after it was over, and the young couple had digested what St. Paul had
to say about the ordinance of wedlock, and had inaudibly promised to do
and be whatever the domine required of them, they were led by the
half-dozen groomsmen to the long glass between the front windows, and
made to stand up there, with their faces toward the company, and to
receive the congratulations of a mighty procession of friends, who all
used the same formulas, except the very old ones, who were delicately
indelicate.
The bridegroom wore a blue coat and trousers, and a white satin
waistcoat embroidered with silver-thread roses and lilies-of-the-valley.
The coat was lined with cream-colored satin, quilted in a most elaborate
pattern; and his necktie was of satin, too, with embroidered ends. His
shirt was a miracle of fine linen. As to the bride, she was in white
satin and lace, and at her throat she wore a little bunch of late white
columbines, for which Mr. Jacob Dolph the younger had scoured the woods
near Fort Washington.
There was to be a grand supper, later; and the time of waiting was
filled up with fashionable conversation.
That dear old doctor, who was then a dear young doctor, and whose fine
snow-crowned face stood in later years as an outward and visible sign of
all that was brave, kindly, self-sacrificing, and benevolent in the art
of healing, was seated by Madam Des Anges, and was telling her, in
stately phrase, suited to his auditor, of a certain case of heroism with
which he had met in the course of his practice. Mr. Blank, it appeared,
had been bitten by a dog that was supposed to be possessed by the
rabies. For months he had suffered the agonies of mental suspense and of
repeated cauterizing of the flesh, and during those months had concealed
his case from his wife, that he might spare her pain--suffering in
silence enough to unnerve most men.
"It was heroic," said Dr. F.
Madam Des Anges bowed her gray head approvingly.
"I think," she said, "his conduct shows him to be a man of taste. Had he
informed his wife of his condition, she might have experienced the most
annoying solicitude; and I am informed that she is a person of feeble
character."
The doctor looked at her, and then down at the floor; and then he asked
her if she did not hope that Almaviva Lynch would bring Garcia back
again, with that marvellous Italian opera, which, as he justly observed,
captivated the eye, charmed the ear, and awakened the profoundest
emotions of the heart.
And at that Madam Des Anges showed some animation, and responded that
she had listened to some pleasing operas in Paris; but she did not know
that they were of Italian origin.
But if Madam Des Anges was surprised to learn that any good thing could
come out of any other country than France, there was another surprise in
store for her, and it did not long impend.
It was only a little while after this that her grandson-in-law, finding
her on his right and Abram Van Riper on his left--he had served out his
time as a statue in front of the mirror--thought it proper to introduce
to Madam Des Anges his father's old friend, Mr. Van Riper. Mr. Van
Riper bowed as low as his waistcoat would allow, and courteously
observed that the honor then accorded him he had enjoyed earlier in the
evening through the kind offices of Mr. Jacob Dolph, senior.
Madam Des Anges dandled her quizzing-glass as though she meant to put it
up to her eye, and said, in a weary way:
"Mr.--ah--Van Riper must pardon me. I have not the power of remembering
faces that some people appear to have; and my eyes--my eyes are not
strong."
Old Van Riper stared at her, and he turned a turkey-cock purple all over
his face, down to the double chin that hung over his white neckerchief.
"If your ladyship has to buy spectacles," he sputtered, "it needn't be
on my account."
And he stamped off to the sideboard and tried to cool his red-hot rage
with potations of Jamaica rum. There his wife found him. She had drawn
near when she saw him talking with the great Madam Des Anges, and she
had heard, as she stood hard by and smiled unobtrusively, the end of
that brief conversation. Her face, too, was flushed--a more fiery red
than her flame-colored satin dress.
She attacked him in a vehement whisper.
"Van Riper, what are you doing? I'd almost believe you'd had too much
liquor, if I didn't know you hadn't had a drop. Will you ever learn what
gentility is? D'ye want us to live and die like toads in a hole? Here
you are with your ill manners, offending Madam Des Anges, that everybody
knows is the best of the best, and there's an end of all likelihood of
ever seeing her and her folks, and two nieces unmarried and as good
girls as ever was, and such a connection for your son, who hasn't been
out of the house it's now twelve months--except to this very wedding
here, and you've no thought of your family when once you lose that
mighty fine temper of yours, that you're so prodigious proud of; and
where you'll end us, Van Riper, is more than I know, I vow."
But all she could get out of Van Riper was:
"The old harridan! She'll remember my name this year or two to come,
I'll warrant ye!"
* * * * *
It was all over at last, and old black Julius, who had been acting as a
combination of link-boy and major-domo at the foot of the front steps,
extinguished his lantern, and went to bed, some time before a little
white figure stole up the stairs and slipped into a door that
Chloe--black Chloe--held open.
And the next day Jacob Dolph the elder handed the young bride into the
new travelling-carriage with his stateliest grace, and Mr. and Mrs.
Jacob Dolph, junior, rolled proudly up the road, through Bloomingdale,
and across King's Bridge--stopping for luncheon at the Des Anges
house--over to New Rochelle, where the feminine head of the house of Des
Anges received them at her broad front door, and where they had the
largest room in her large, old-fashioned house, for one night. Madam Des
Anges wished to keep them longer, and was authoritative about it. But
young Jacob settled the question of supremacy then and there, with the
utmost courtesy, and Madam Des Anges, being great enough to know that
she was beaten, sent off the victor on the morrow, with his trembling
accomplice by his side, and wished them _bon voyage_ as heartily as she
possibly could.
So they started afresh on their bridal tour, and very soon the
travelling carriage struck the old Queen Anne's Road, and reached
Yonkers. And there, and from there up to Fishkill, they passed from one
country-house to another, bright particular stars at this dinner and at
that supper, staying a day here and a night there, and having just the
sort of sociable, public, restless, rattling good time that neither of
them wanted.
At every country-house where they stayed a day they were pressed to stay
a week, and always the whole neighborhood was routed out to pay them
social tribute. The neighbors came in by all manner of conveyances. One
family of aristocrats started at six o'clock in the morning, and
travelled fourteen miles down the river in an ox-cart, the ladies
sitting bolt upright, with their hair elaborately dressed for the
evening's entertainment. And once a regular assembly ball was given in
their honor, at a town-hall, the use of which was granted for the
purpose specified by unanimous vote of the town council. Of course,
they had a very good time; but then there are various sorts of good
times. Perhaps they might have selected another sort for themselves.
There is a story that, on their way back, they put up for several days
at a poor little hostelry under the hills below Peekskill, and spent
their time in wandering through the woods and picking wild-flowers; but
it lacks confirmation, and I should be sorry to believe that two
well-brought-up young people would prefer their own society to the
unlimited hospitality of their friends in the country.
Old Jacob Dolph, at home, had the great house all to himself; and,
although black Chloe took excellent care of his material comforts, he
was restless and troubled. He took most pleasure in a London almanac, on
whose smudgy pages he checked off the days. Letters came as often as the
steamboat arrived from Albany, and he read them, after his fashion. It
took him half the week to get through one missive, and by that time
another had arrived. But I fear he did not make much out of them.
Still, they gave him one pleasure. He endorsed them carefully with the
name of the writer, and the date of receipt, and then he laid them away
in his desk, as neatly as he had filed his business letters in his old
days of active life.
Every night he had a candle alight in the hallway; and if there were a
far-off rumble of carriage-wheels late at night, he would rise from his
bed--he was a light sleeper, in his age--and steal out into the
corridor, hugging his dressing-robe about him, to peer anxiously down
over the balusters till the last sound and the last faint hope of his
son's return had died away.
And, indeed, it was late in July when the travelling-carriage once more
drew up in front of the Dolph house, and old Julius opened the door, and
old Mr. Dolph welcomed them, and told them that he had been very lonely
in their absence, and that their mother--and then he remembered that
their mother was dead, and went into the house with his head bowed low.
III.
St. John's Park and Hudson Street and all well-bred New York, for that
matter, had its fill of the Dolph hospitality the next winter. It was
dinner and ball and rout and merry-making of one sort or another, the
season through. The great family sleighs and the little bachelor sleighs
whirred and jingled up to the Dolph door surely two, and sometimes four,
evenings in every week, and whirred and jingled away again at intensely
fashionable hours, such as plain folk used for sleeping.
They woke up Abram Van Riper, did the revellers northward bound to
country houses on the river-side, and, lying deep in his feather-bed, he
directed his rumbling imprecations at the panes of glass, that sparkled
with frost in the mild moonlight.
"Oh, come, maidens, come, o'er the blue, rolling wave,
The lovely should still be the care of the brave--
Trancadillo, trancadillo, trancadillo, dillo, dillo, dillo!"
sang the misguided slaves of fashion, as they sped out of hearing.
"Trancadillo!" rumbled Mr. Van Riper. "I'd like to trancadillo them,
consume 'em!" and then he cursed his old friend's social circle for a
parcel of trumpery fools; and Mrs. Van Riper, lying by his side, sighed
softly with chastened regret and hopeless aspiration.
But everybody else--everybody who was anybody--blessed the Dolphs and
the Dolphs' cellar, and their man-servant and their maid-servant, and
their roasted ox and their saddle of venison, and the distinguished
stranger who was within their gates; and young Mrs. Dolph was made as
welcome as she made others.
For the little girl with the great dark eyes took to all this giddiness
as naturally as possible--after her quiet fashion. The dark eyes
sparkled with subdued pleasure that had no mean pride in it when she sat
at the head of her great mahogany table, and smiled at the double row of
bright faces that hemmed in the gorgeous display of the Dolph silver and
china and fine linen. And it was wonderful how charming were the famous
Des Anges manners, when they were softened and sweetened by so much
grace and beauty.
"Who would have thought she had it in her?" said the young ladies down
in St. John's Park. "You remember her, don't you, what a shy little slip
of a thing she was when we were at old Dumesnil's together? Who was it
used to say that she had had the life grandmothered out of her?"
"Fine little creature, that wife of Dolph's," said the young men as they
strolled about in Niblo's Garden. "Dolph wouldn't have had the road all
to himself if that old dragon of a grandmother had given the girl half a
chance. 'Gad, she's an old grenadier! They say that Dolph had to put her
through her facings the day after he was married, and that he did it in
uncommon fine style, too."
"He's a lucky devil, that Dolph," the younger ones would sigh. "Nothing
to do, all the money he wants, pretty wife, and the best wine in New
York! I wish _my_ old man would cut the shop and try to get an education
in wine."
Their devotion to the frivolities of fashion notwithstanding, the young
Dolphs were a loving, and, in a way, a domestic couple. Of course,
everybody they knew had to give them a dinner or a ball, or pay them
some such social tribute, and there were a myriad calls to be received
and returned; but they found time for retired communings, even for long
drives in the sleigh which, many a time in young Jacob Dolph's bachelor
days, had borne the young man and a female companion--not always the
same companion, either--up the Bloomingdale Road. And in the confidences
of those early days young Jacob learned what his gentle little wife told
him--without herself realizing the pathos of it--the story of her
crushed, unchildlike youth, loveless till he came, her prince, her
deliverer. Dolph understood it; he had known, of course, that she could
not have been happy under the _regime_ of Madam Des Anges; but when he
heard the simple tale in all its monotonous detail, and saw spread out
before him this poor young life, with its thousand little
disappointments, submissions, abnegations, and undeserved punishments
and needless restrictions, a generous rage glowed in his heart, and
perhaps sprang once in a while to his indiscreet lips; and out of this
grew a deeper and maturer tenderness than his honeymoon love for the
sweet little soul that he had at first sought only for the dark eyes
through which it looked out upon its joyless world.
It is unwise to speak in profane language, it is injudicious to speak
disrespectfully of old age, yet the Recording Angel, if he did not see
fit to let a tear fall upon the page, perchance found it convenient to
be mending his pen when young Jacob Dolph once uttered certain words
that made his wife cry out:
"Oh, Jacob, don't, _please_ don't. She didn't mean it!"
This is only a supposition. Perhaps Madam Des Anges really had meant
well. But oh, how much happier this world would be if all the people who
"mean well" and do ill would only take to meaning ill and doing well!
* * * * *