Through Happy Youth to Man's Estate.
As we two children became slowly transformed into youths, the Valley with
no less steadiness developed in activity, population, and wealth. Good
roads were built; new settlements sprang up; the sense of being in the
hollow of the hand of savagery wore off. Primitive conditions lapsed,
disappeared one by one. We came to smile at the uncouth dress and unshaven
faces of the "bush-bauer" Palatines--once so familiar, now well nigh
outlandish. Families from Connecticut and the Providence Plantations began
to come in numbers, and their English tongue grew more and more to be the
common language. People spoke now of the Winchester bushel, instead of the
Schoharie spint and skipple. The bounty on wolves' heads went up to a
pound sterling. The number of gentlemen who shaved every day, wore
ruffles, and even wigs or powder on great occasions, and maintained
hunting with hounds and horse-racing, increased yearly--so much so that
some innocent people thought England itself could not offer more
attractions.
There was much envy when John Johnson, now twenty-three years old, was
sent on a visit to England, to learn how still better to play the
gentleman--and even more when he came back a knight, with splendid London
clothes, and stories of what the King and the princes had said to him.
The Johnsons were a great family now, receiving visits from notable people
all over the colony at their new hall, which Sir William had built on the
hills back of his new Scotch settlement. Nothing could have better shown
how powerful Sir William had become, and how much his favor was to be
courted, than the fact that ladies of quality and strict propriety, who
fancied themselves very fine folk indeed, the De Lanceys and Phillipses
and the like, would come visiting the widower baronet in his hall, and
close their eyes to the presence there of Miss Molly and her half-breed
children. Sir William's neighbors, indeed, overlooked this from their love
for the man, and their reliance in his sense and strength. But the others,
the aristocrats, held their tongues from fear of his wrath, and of his
influence in London.
They never liked him entirely; he in turn had so little regard for them
and their pretensions that, when they came, he would suffer none of them
to markedly avoid or affront the Brant squaw, whom indeed they had often
to meet as an associate and equal. Yet this bold, independent, really
great man, so shrewdly strong in his own attitude toward these gilded
water-flies, was weak enough to rear his own son to be one of them, to
value the baubles they valued, to view men and things through their
painted spectacles--and thus to come to grief.
Two years after Johnson Hall was built, Mr. Stewart all at once decided
that he too would have a new house; and before snow flew the handsome,
spacious "Cedars," as it was called, proudly fronted the Valley highway.
Of course it was not, in size, a rival of the Hall at Johnstown, but it
none the less was among the half-dozen best houses in the Mohawk Valley,
and continued so to be until John Johnson burned it to the ground fifteen
years later. It stood in front of our old log structure, now turned over
to the slaves. It was of two stories, with lofty and spacious rooms, and
from the road it presented a noble appearance, now that the old stockade
had given place to a wall of low, regular masonry.
With this new residence came a prodigious change in our way of life. Daisy
was barely twelve years old, but we already thought of her as the lady of
the house, for whom nothing was too good. The walls were plastered, and
stiff paper from Antwerp with great sprawling arabesques, and figures of
nymphs and fauns chasing one another up and down with ceaseless, fruitless
persistency, was hung upon them, at least in the larger rooms. The floors
were laid smoothly, each board lapping into the next by a then novel
joiner's trick.
On the floor in Daisy's room there was a carpet, too, a rare and
remarkable thing in those days, and also from the Netherlands. In this
same chamber, as well, were set up a bed of mahogany, cunningly carved and
decorated, and a tall foreign cabinet of some rich dark wood, for linen,
frocks, and the like. Here, likewise, were two gilt cages from Paris, in
which a heart-breaking succession of native birds drooped and died, until
four Dublin finches were at last imported for Daisy's special delight; and
a case with glass doors and a lock, made in Boston, wherein to store her
books; and, best of all, a piano--or was it a harpsichord?--standing on
its own legs, which Mr. Stewart heard of as for sale in New York and
bought at a pretty high figure. This last was indeed a rickety, jangling
old box, but Daisy learned in a way to play upon it, and we men-folk,
sitting in her room in the candle-light, and listening to her voice cooing
to its shrill tinkle of accompaniment, thought the music as sweet as that
of the cherubim.
Mr. Stewart and I lived in far less splendor. There was no foreign
furniture to speak of in our portions of the house; we slept on beds the
cords of which creaked through honest American maple posts; we walked on
floors which offered gritty sand to the tread instead of carpet-stuffs.
But there were two great stands laden with good books in our living-room;
we had servants now within sound of a bell; we habitually wore garments
befitting men of refinement and substance; we rode our own horses, and we
could have given Daisy a chaise had the condition of our roads made it
desirable.
I say "we" because I had come to be a responsible factor in the control of
the property. Mr. Stewart had never been poor; he was now close upon being
wealthy. Upon me little by little had devolved the superintendence of
affairs. I directed the burning over and clearing of land, which every
year added scores of tillable acres to our credit; saw to the planting,
care, and harvesting of crops; bought, bred, and sold the stock; watched
prices, dickered with travelling traders, provisioned the house--in a
word, grew to be the manager of all, and this when I was barely twenty.
Mr. Stewart bore his years with great strength, physically, but he readily
gave over to me, as fast as I could assume them, the details of out-door
work. The taste for sitting indoors or in the garden, and reading, or
talking with Daisy--the charm of simply living in a home made beautiful by
a good and clever young girl--gained yearly upon him.
Side by side with this sedentary habit, curiously enough, came up a second
growth of old-world, mediaeval notions--a sort of aristocratic aftermath.
It was natural, no doubt. His inborn feudal ideas had not been killed by
ingratitude, exile, or his rough-and-ready existence on the edge of the
wilderness, but only chilled to dormancy; they warmed now into life under
the genial radiance of a civilized home. But it is not my purpose to dwell
upon this change, or rather upon its results, at this stage of the story.
Social position was now a matter for consideration. With improved means of
intercourse and traffic, each year found some family thrifty enough to
thrust its head above the rude level of settlers' equality, and take on
the airs of superiority. Twenty years before, it had been Colonel Johnson
first, and nobody else second. Now the Baronet-General was still
preeminently first; but every little community in the Valley chain had its
two or three families holding themselves only a trifle lower than
the Johnsons.
Five or six nationalities were represented. Of the Germans, there were the
Herkimers up above the Falls, the Lawyers at Schoharie, the Freys (who
were commonly thus classed, though they came originally from Switzerland),
and many others. Of important Dutch families, there were the Fondas at
Caughnawaga, the Mabies and Groats at Rotterdam, below us, and the
Quackenbosses to the west of us, across the river. The Johnsons and
Butlers were Irish. Over at Cherry Valley the Campbells and Clydes were
Scotch--the former being, indeed, close blood relatives of the great
Argyll house. Colonel Isaac Paris, a prominent merchant near Stone Arabia,
came from Strasbourg, and accounted himself a Frenchman, though he spoke
German better than French, and attended the Dutch Calvinistic church.
There were also English families of quality. I mention them all to show
how curious was the admixture of races in our Valley. One cannot
understand the terrible trouble which came upon us later without some
knowledge of these race divisions.
Mr. Stewart held a place in social estimation rather apart from any of
these cliques. He was both Scotch and Irish by ancestry; he was French by
education; he had lived and served in the Netherlands and sundry German
states. Thus he could be all things to all men--yet he would not. He
indeed became more solitary as he grew older, for the reasons I have
already mentioned. He once had been friendly with all his intelligent
neighbors, no matter what their nationality. Gradually he came to be
intimate with only the Johnsons and Butlers on the theory that they were
alone well born. Hours upon hours he talked with them of the Warrens and
the Ormund-Butlers in Ireland, from whom they claimed descent, and of the
assurance of Dutch and German cobblers and tinkers, in setting up for
gentlemen.
Sir William, in truth, had too much sense to often join or sympathize with
these notions. But young Sir John and the Butlers, father and son, adopted
them with enthusiasm, and I am sorry to say there were both Dutch and
German residents, here and there, mean-spirited enough to accept these
reflections upon their ancestry, and strive to atone for their assumed
lack of birth by aping the manners, and fawning for the friendship, of
their critics.
But let me defer these painful matters as long as possible. There are
still the joys of youth to recall.
I had grown now into a tall, strong young man, and I was in the way of
meeting no one who did not treat me as an equal. It seems to me now that I
was not particularly popular among my fellows, but I was conscious of no
loneliness then. I had many things to occupy my mind, besides my regular
tasks. Both natural history and botany interested me greatly, and I was
privileged also to assist Sir William's investigations in the noble paths
of astronomy. He had both large information and many fine thoughts on the
subject, and used laughingly to say that if he were not too lazy he would
write a book thereon. This was his way of saying that he had more labor to
get through than any other man in the Colony. It was his idea that some
time I should write the work instead; upon the Sacondaga hills, he said,
we saw and read the heavens without Old-World dust in our eyes, and our
book that was to be should teach the European moles the very alphabet of
planets. Alas! I also was too indolent--truly, not figuratively; the book
was never written.
In those days there was royal sport for rod and gun, but books also had a
solid worth. We did not visit other houses much--Daisy and I--but held
ourselves to a degree apart. The British people were, as a whole, nearer
our station than the others, and had more ideas in common with us; but
they were not of our blood, and we were not drawn toward many of them. As
they looked down upon the Dutch, so the Dutch, in turn, were supercilious
toward the Germans. I was Dutch, Daisy was German: but by a sort of tacit
consent we identified ourselves with neither race, and this aided our
isolation.
There was also the question of religion. Mr. Stewart had been bred a
Papist, and at the time of which I write, after the French war, Jesuit
priests of that nation several times visited him to renew old European
friendships. But he never went to mass, and never allowed them or anybody
else to speak with him on the subject, no matter how deftly they
approached it. This was prudent, from a worldly point of view, because the
Valley, and for that matter the whole upper Colony, was bitterly opposed
to Romish pretensions, and the first Scotch Highlanders who brought the
mass into the Valley above Johnstown were openly denounced as idolaters.
But it was certainly not caution which induced Mr. Stewart's backsliding.
He was not the man to defer in that way to the prejudices of others. The
truth was that he had no religious beliefs or faith whatever. But his
scepticism was that of the French noble of the time, that of Voltaire and
Mirabeau, rather than of the English plebeian and democrat, Thomas Paine.
Naturally Daisy and I were not reared as theologians. We nominally
belonged to the Calvinistic church, but not being obliged to attend its
services, rarely did so. This tended to further separate us from our
neighbors, who were mainly prodigious church-goers.
But, more than all else, we lived by ourselves because, by constant
contact with refined associations, we had grown to shrink from the
coarseness which ruled outside. All about us marriages were made between
mere children, each boy setting up for himself and taking a wife as soon
as he had made a voyage to the Lakes and obtained a start in fur-trading.
There was precious little sentiment or delicacy in these early courtships
and matches, or in the state of society which they reflected--uncultured,
sordid, rough, unsympathetic, with all its elementary instincts bluntly
exposed and expressed. This was of course a subject not to be discussed by
us. Up to the spring of 1772, when I was twenty-three years of age and
Daisy was eighteen, no word of all the countless words which young men and
women have from the dawn of language spoken on this great engrossing topic
had ever been exchanged between us. In earlier years, when we were on the
threshold of our teens, Mr. Stewart had more than once thought aloud in
our hearing upon the time when we should inherit his home and fortune as a
married couple. Nothing of that talk, though, had been heard for a
long while.
I had not entirely forgotten it; but I carried the idea along in the attic
of my mind, as a thing not to be thrown away, yet of no present use or
value or interest.
Occasionally, indeed, I did recall it for the moment, and cast a diffident
conjecture as to whether Daisy also remembered. Who shall say? I have been
young and now am old, yet have I not learned the trick of reading a
woman's mind. Very far indeed was I from it in those callow days.
And now, after what I fear has been a tiresome enough prologue, my story
awaits.