THE WADDYS OF DULLISH COURT, FROM WHITEGIFT TO OUR HERO
While Governor Winthrop was planning the future city of Boston, he
went, one rainy day, to the heights of those hills that give the spot
the name of Trimountain. A violent June storm had channelled the
hillsides, and strong water-courses filled the valleys. No phenomenon
is idle to the observing mind.
“These channels,” said the prudent governor, “shall be the streets of
our future city.”
He then pursued his way downward, slipping along the oozy trails, until
he paused at a small pool where several little, muddy rivulets united
to form a stagnancy. Here, he contemplated for a while his grave but
genial visage, and smiled as his reflected face broadened or lengthened
grotesquely and his pointed beard wagged in the waves of the water.
“This,” said he at last, “shall be a place for pauses in city life.
Here shall be a no-thoroughfare court, a lurking-place for shy
respectability, for proud poverty; not quite for neediness, but for
those who want and would, but will not.”
Boston was laid out; the streets named themselves. This court chanced
to be called Dulwich Court, which soon degraded itself to Dullish, and
so it remained in nature and in name.
Whitegift Waddy, and Mehitabel, his wife, floating purposeless waifs
through the new settlements, drifted into Dullish Court to live
dull lives and then to meekly die. There was always one son in each
generation of their family, an unwholesome lad, fed on remainder
biscuits and stale mince pies. Still, it gradually became aristocratic
to have come in with the Pilgrims. A certain consideration began to
attach itself to the family, and the current Waddy, if such phrase may
be used of so very stagnant a person, was always espoused by someone
of a better class than his social condition could warrant. It was
generally some pale schoolmistress, or invalided housekeeper of a
great mansion, who became the better half of each gentle shopkeeper of
Dullish Court.
These wives brought refinement and education with them; so that,
at last, could they have sunk the shop, the Waddys would have been
admitted as gentlefolk anywhere. They enjoyed, too, the consciousness
of being better in rank than their neighbours. They never spoke of
Whitegift as the cook, but as the Steward, or sometimes the Purveyor,
of the _Mayflower_. They liked to walk through Beacon Street and smile
placidly at the efforts of new people to win position by great houses,
crowded balls and routs, and promotion marriages.
By-and-by it chanced that, quite contrary to rule, there were three
sons in one generation playing in the puddles of Dullish Court and
slyly filching dry gingerbread from the showcases of the old shop. It
was a time when there was a flame in the land, and the elder twin of
the three young Waddys, Whitegift by name, who had been early taken
with tin soldiers and penny trumpets, awoke one morning after booziness
to find himself, to his total surprise, with a red coat on his back
and a king’s shilling in his pocket. There was so little real martial
ardour in his soul that he at once withered away, and being sent to the
garrison of New York as a recruit of doubtful loyalty, he was there
soon invalided. He finally dropped into the family trade and became a
sutler. The Boston Waddys, saddened by his desertion of a cause they
had vigour enough to support, soon forgot his existence--which does not
at all imply that such existence terminated.
The other twin was apparently of the usual Waddy type; but when the
great flame blazed forth at last unquenchable, he also took fire. He
was a volunteer at Lexington and did active service, dropping several
invaders in their bloody tracks. He was at once made sergeant in
Captain Janeway’s company, and gained the respect of his officers by
his quick, ready energy. Ira was his name--Ira Waddy, the First.
Two months later, when the British were trying that uphill work at
Bunker Hill for the third time, Captain Jane way and Sergeant Waddy
waited rather too long. Three or four of the British rushed at Janeway
with eyes staring for plunder. One of them stared at what he got and
lay there staring, with his head down-hill. To bore this fellow had
occupied Janeway’s sword, and though Sergeant Waddy’s clubbed musket
could brain another assailant, it could not parry two bayonet thrusts.
His breast could and did; so that Janeway felt nothing more than a
scratch, when, with a murderous stamp of the left foot, another soldier
ran the sergeant through. Just then a rush of flying Yankees came by
and cleared the spot of foes. The captain had a moment to kneel by his
preserver and hear him gasp some broken words:
“Mother! Take care of them, captain. Oh, Mary, Mary!”
When, after the surrender of Boston, Captain, now Colonel, Janeway
called on that Mary with the news of her lover’s death and his last
words, she knew her life was widowed. There was nothing in the power of
a man of wealth and growing distinction that the colonel did not offer
her. She rejected all with a New England woman’s quiet independence and
mild self-reliance. To become a schoolmistress, as she did, was only
to return to her original destiny.
Janeway remained her friend. He alone knew her secret. She was one of
those strangely spiritual beings who interfere like dreamy visions in
the inventive, busy business of Yankee life. She had a great, ennobling
sorrow. Her lover had been a martyr of two religions. He had died for
his country and for his friend. It may be said he died instinctively;
but Mary knew that only the noble and the brave have noble and brave
instincts.
To most people, Mary was only a pale schoolmistress. One person,
however, met her on terms of devoted respect. Governor Janeway, the
pre-eminently practical and successful man, found in her society what
he found not with his gorgeous wife. She became the Cassandra of young
Janeway--who went to the bad, it is true, but long after her death--and
the kindly guide of his infant child.
Late in life she married Benajah Waddy, the youngest brother of the
three. Janeway had made him bookkeeper, secretary, agent, but he had
finally, after his mother’s death, dwindled into the old shop. Mary,
considering herself his brother’s widow, came to a Hebraical, religious
conclusion as to her duty. With entire simplicity of heart, she told
Benajah that they ought to be married. As a matter of course, they
were. The usual wife found, also, in process of time, their only son,
Benajah, and married him. These both died, leaving their only son, Ira
Waddy, to the charge of his aged and widowed grandmother, Mary, widow
in heart of Ira the First.
Her grandson was named Ira after his great-uncle, the soldier.
By-and-by it was discovered that a wide river in India bore the same
name, and young Waddy was attracted toward his namesake. The old
influence which, now reviving, made his blood hot as flame, urged him
to know the land not merely of the citron and myrtle, but of spice and
pungent condiments. His grandmother lavished upon him all the beautiful
tenderness of her long-suppressed and desolated love, and then she died.
Ira Waddy’s hot ardency of nature could not bear coolly any wrong.
Wrong came to him. It would have extinguished an ancestor of the
Whitegift class. Him it only kindled to counter-fire. He had his
great quarrel with life, as many men have; he, in his young life. The
Janeways had always been kind to him; so had their neighbours, the
Beldens. In childish sports and youthful intercourse with the children
of both families, he had often talked with enthusiasm of tropic
splendours and India, his destined abode. When the world of his early
associations became too narrow for him--too narrow because there his
wrong would meet and hurtle him daily--then he thought again of India,
and tropic indolence, and thoughtless people. Being an orphan and
without kin, he could go where he chose. He chose India.
There, as the years passed, he became rich and powerful, a nabob, a
merchant prince; but with all that this tale has no concern--it is
written merely to chronicle the facts of his Return.