invoices slipped to the floor and fluttered after the wool balls like
merchants aspiring to new possessions. What cared the horn of plenty on
the door for the profits of the Fleet Sally? It had watched the ebb and
flow of lordlier fortunes. "That ear-splitting bell hubbub--and now
visitors," said the master, advancing to his offspring as if they were the
cause of this new annoyance.
Juma, already half-drunk with dreams, rubbed his dazed head and hastened
toward the entry. Was Toussaint calling him? Did the chair of Marie du Buc
de Marcinelle, the Elizabethtown beauty, pause before the hair-dresser's
sign? Then time and place came back. Realizing that he was watched, he
drew the great bolt with a show of strength, and in bounded the gale-blown
humanity.
"You?" queried the head of the Knickerbockers. That was the only greeting
he gave his nearest relations on Easter eve. He glanced at Julie to see
whether she secreted any packages about her person.
Georgina, entering the room, her face stern and white, said, eyeing him,
"Prepare yourself for a shock."
He returned the challenge.
Had she been tampering with her five-per-cents for Peruvian investments?
Was it the old plaint--Jerusalem's frivolity? Why did the woman gaze at
him so mournfully?
"Prepare yourself," she continued, her voice rising to a shriek.
"Patricia--your Patricia--has disgraced us!"
[Illustration]
The girl peering from the landing heard her name called. Her secret was
known to the world and would soon be an implement of torture. The arbutus
fell from her bodice unheeded. She could not meet that cruel group below!
"Richard," sighed the stray gusts of wind on the staircase; "Richard"
chimed the patient clock. She crept closer to the baluster railing. Some
mysterious force was guiding--impelling her onward. Out of the shadows
flashed a face. Like a smile it vanished. She ran to the steps. For a
moment she stood silent, gaining courage to descend.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
At the very moment when she had glanced back tremblingly for a parting
benediction from the stars, a figure wrapped in a great-coat was hurrying
out of the Sheridan garden. It was Patricia's lover. The youth often came
to gaze at her home after sleep locked all the doors of the world but the
dream door for which he had never yet found a key. Then the daytime's
barriers were broken and she was his alone. Under the Knickerbocker
elm-trees he would stand, sometimes, a wild, impassioned troubadour,
aflame with songs of love for his imprisoned mate. Again she came to him a
vision pure and ethereal and he folded her to his heart in memory of one
perfect Junetime day--while multitudes of roses shed their fragrant petals
and birds trilled a divine chorus. To-night, with the wondrous Easter
peace upon him, she seemed to walk by his side. Those bell-notes drifting
on the air were the music of their lives. Hand in hand they floated on the
flow of the darkness. Through the days--and the years. Through the
springs--and the summers. Always together! Little forms clutched their
knees. Carking care crept out of black coverts. Death beckoned to them in
the distance--still, there was the scent of Junetime roses. Ah, God! those
roses of love, they were theirs for all eternity!
As he neared Knickerbocker Mansion his mood changed. The bells were dying
away again. Old Jenkins up in the steeple above the lights of the drowsy
city was letting his metal children rest. Their task would soon be over,
for the faithful moss-hung clock already pointed to the nightcap hour. The
rushes in the poorer regions near the waste lands were flickering
out--only the gentry street was still aglow.
A flock of snow-sparrows caught by the gale dashed past the youth,
chattering bird imprecations. Beyond, in the moonlight, loomed Her
dwelling-place. Coldly white and dreary it looked. Everything about it was
mute and unaware of the joyous night. Did Juma keep his promise and give
her the arbutus? A longing thrilled him to know her thoughts at this hour.
Were they of him? He hastened into the carriage-path, following the
footprints made by the trio from Goby House. The leaden statues leered at
him in the spaces between the evergreens. Bare shrubs sighed their gusty
dirges at his heels.
At the lordly flight of steps he paused and hesitated. Then her pleading
voice seemed to rise on the wind. A strange intuition swayed him. The
great door of the mansion was moving, opening inward. He asked himself if
he were going stark mad, as he crept to it softly, like a thief.
A cry met his ears, and he staggered back--"I love him! I shall love him
always!" came the words.
"Patricia," he whispered breathlessly.
Before him was the dismal length of the hall that he had never hoped to
enter. Slowly he reeled forward.
* * * * *
While her lover was coming to her through the night, the girl was
descending the staircase. At the bottom she paused and remained very
still. From the room beyond an army of candle rays was slipping underneath
the green sarcenet curtain and capering gnome-like about her feet. They
were waiting for her in there! A prowling rat scampered down the dark
passage. In another moment she would stand before her indignant family.
The curtain shifted and shadows chased away the light. Behind the awful
thing were their watchful eyes. She began to tremble and stretch out her
hands imploringly at the space before it. The courage that had brought her
so near to the chamber of judgment was fast vanishing when Juma came
slowly out of the pantry. He did not speak, but his sad old eyes rested on
her lovingly. Stifled sobs shook her slender frame as she nestled close to
him, seeking the help that he was powerless to give. A wilder gust of wind
blew the neglected spray of arbutus from the landing above and it fell at
her feet like a message. She looked at it a moment, then slowly parted the
veil of the inevitable. The eyes she feared were now upon her.
Jonathan, choleric with indignation, stood by his desk, clenching his
hands. At the sight of the child whose conduct swept aside every
Knickerbocker law his rage overflowed, and the room was full of a torrent
of reproaches. Once he came near knocking over a bust of Mr. Washington,
the property of a Makemie, and Miss Julie gave a slight scream.
Patricia heard him silently. She was calmer than any of the spectators.
The other Mansion girls continually slid off their chairs and made weird
gurgles with their throats. Several times they almost interrupted their
parent. As for Georgina, her high-built hair shook like a barrister's wig
in the heat of a court appeal.
"You have disgraced us--a common follower fit for a tire-woman! Yes, miss,
in your veins flows the Knickerbocker blood, though I cannot credit it.
Say 'tis a lie ere I turn you out. Say 'tis the fabrication of that
catamount Trenton woman, envious of your aunts' reputation. Speak, girl!
Is it true that the town has seen you keeping trysts with him at the
Battery? Speak!" gasped the worthy man.
"It is true," said Patricia, trying to keep herself strong for battle.
The draught from the half opened door, which Juma in his excitement had
neglected to shut, swept the chimney piece and ended the life of a candle.
"Look!" said Jonathan dragging his daughter by the arms, and pointing to
the portraits along the wall. "You are the first to disgrace them! They
were as fine a line of men and women as was ever bred up in America. Think
you they stepped down from their high places for silly fancies? Think you
they forgot they were born to superior circumstances and sullied their
reputations?"
Here the autocrat of York's voice broke slightly. The same ghostly face
that had appeared to Miss Georgina in Cut-throat Alley leered at him
suddenly, and he recoiled. Aghast, he remembered the painting under the
attic eaves!
Patricia was facing him. The word love was in his ears. With a maddened
cry he advanced quivering. Along the films of the air he saw his ancestors
as he often pictured them to himself--a fine mass of superior clay on a
pedestal.
"You shall give him up!" he thundered. Then he turned. The green sarcenet
curtain moved ominously, and the form of Richard Sheridan was disclosed in
its folds.
The youth, heedless of the frowning faces about him, gazed only at the
woman he was ready to die for if need were. The passions of the world were
swept away as the echo of her cry "I love him--I shall love him
always!"--bounded through his heart. For one harmonious moment they gazed
into each other's eyes forgetful of surging discords. With stronger grip
he clutched at the curtain!
"You, sirrah!" scoffed the voice Patricia thought would go on forever,
inflicting fresh wounds at each new outburst. "Impudent organ thumper--to
dare come here! I'll better your judgment." As he moved nearer Richard she
thrust herself before him.
From the corner of the room came a wail from Julie. "Oh, don't be hard on
them, Jonathan. You helped father make me give up Captain MacLeerie," she
faltered. "I might have been Mrs. Captain MacLeerie! Poor Bodsey--he vowed
he'd never sail a ship into Amboy Harbor again--and perhaps the cannibals
have him now, or the devil fishes!"
She began to weep softly. Outside a heavy oaken shutter clanked against
the house. Patricia threw her arms about her lover's neck, and her father
gazed at her spellbound with fury.
"Disgraced us, hussy," he muttered. "Go with your tinker!"
Juma fell on his knees and began to lament after the fashion of his kind.
"Begone!"--spoke the voice again, breaking at last--"You are no longer one
of us!"
The girl, supported by the man to whom she was giving her young life, and
followed by the trembling negro, crept slowly away.
Whiffs of air increasing to a current swept from out the hall. The
remaining lights fought with it--then despaired. A tired moon was
slumbering behind the western pines, and only the glow of a few watchful
stars dripped through the casements.
Simultaneously the breaths of every one in the room came faster and
faster. Vapors wan and tinged with dust filled the atmosphere, and an
unmistakable odor of sandal-wood, faint from long imprisonment.
The startled Knickerbockers retreated to the walls, knocking over chairs
and tables in their flight. Before the green sarcenet curtain which had
played such a part in the affairs of the night there was a waft of airy
garments. A white weft of towering hair--black, burning eyes. Three
Knickerbockers knew them! The lady of the banished portrait was moving
through the doorway and speaking in quaint last-century utterance.
[Illustration: "_The lady of the banished portrait was moving through the
doorway_"]
"Come back!" she called to the lovers, speaking to Patricia. "'Tis a weary
while I have been in the other world, but your sore need has brought me
here on the anniversary of the birth of love. I am your
great-great-grandmother, who felt the full force of the pretty passion and
stole away with my dear heart from yonder theatre in old John Street--a
grain house in your time, so one from York who recently joined us informed
me.
"Although my likeness does not hang in the family line, I bear you small
malice. I get a surfeit of their society." Here the ghost sighed, and with
the saddest air possible tapped her empty snuffbox and went through the
act of inhaling a reviving pinch of strong Spanish. "This girl who has the
bloom of me I would befriend, and as the greatness of your ancestors is
all that stands in the way of a marriage with the man of her choice, I
have bid them come to meet you and get their opinions, mayhap."
A tremor went through the room! More unearthly visitants? The flesh was
creeping on the bones of all the living Knickerbockers!
"They are waiting for us in Lady Knickerbocker's state-room yonder--Sir
William tried to kiss me there once after a junket," she continued. "He
would not come to-night--I fear he was afraid it would be dull."
She moved over to Jonathan, who was speechless from fright, and laid a
shadowy hand on his. Once past the door ledge she began the descent of the
hall as if footing the air of some ancient melody. With grim, rebellious
face the present head of her house moved with her, apparently against his
own volition.
By the one brightly floriated mirror she straightened her osprey plumes
and tapped him gently with her fan. "You dance like a footman," she said.
"Have you go-carts 'neath your feet?"
The trembling file of Knickerbockers followed after them, seemingly blown
by the wind, whose diabolical wailing reverberated through the house.
Doors and windows raged and rattled. There were stridulous, uncanny groans
from quaking beams. Behind the panels adown the hall rose and swelled the
confused murmur of many voices. The echoes of long dead years were
reviving. Above them all was a dying requiem of bells, tolling low and
mournfully like a warning to belated road-farers that the ghosts of the
haughty Knickerbockers were seeking earth again.
[Illustration]
_Chapter Four_
[Illustration]
As the family neared the long unused state parlor the din grew louder--a
rising treble of voices, ascending from hoarse trumpet tones to a
twittering falsetto, accompanied by a maddening persistent tapping of high
heels on the smooth floor. The sounds of shivering glass as a girandole
crashed from its joining met their ears. Each second was a discord running
wild with panic-striking incidents.
Julie grasped frantically at the more stalwart Georgina, while clinging to
her own garments were the three Mansion girls, screeching like the town's
whistles in a March twilight.
The ghost little Jerusalem feared the most was that of the stern Judge.
"Will he know that I have changed my name?" she wailed. "Oh, sister, I ate
up those bracelets he gave me for taking treacle. I sold them to a
silversmith and bought French prunes. You know you said that you'd as soon
eat stewed bull-frogs as anything grown by the Monsieurs, and all York was
stewing prunes!"
Georgina never turned her head at this remarkable confession. Her features
had assumed a strange rigidity; she was as silent as her brother. The
shrieks of her nieces, old Juma's incessant lamentations, and the low
whispers of the lovers were all unheeded. The racket behind the cobwebbed
doors, never opened but for Knickerbocker weddings and funerals, absorbed
her senses. Slowly they were swinging back for Jonathan and his phantom
partner. The delicate odor of sandal-wood, was strengthened by gasps of
musk. Into a yellow blinding glare of light the file of Knickerbockers
looked, and their eyes grew gooseberry-like with horror.
A crowd of shades bedecked in their last earthly garniture were gliding
and teetering about; some dignified as at a stately farce, others
hilarious with ungraceful levity.
As the living Knickerbockers appeared in the room the waggling and
chortling fell into a monotone, and the company began to pass in review
before them, seemingly desirous of attracting individual notice. Few wore
the costly attire one would have expected from the tales spread about them
by the Knickerbockers of Vesey Street. Several were clad in plain hum-hums
and torn fustians. One chirpy dame in a moth-eaten tabby hugged a little
package of Bohea to her stomacher, unmindful of the fact that the luxury
had grown much cheaper since she quitted this sphere. Another, who
evidently thought herself a beauty, wore a false frontage of goat hair
before her muslin cap, and ogled Jonathan as she passed, though he did not
seem eager for a flirtation with his ugly great-aunt.
An ungainly yokel stepped on the feet of the Mansion girls, and some bold
gentlemen, who had spent a goodly portion of their natural lives in
Bridewell, swore at them. Still the awful procession kept moving on--faces
were as thick as the tapers glowing in every bracket and candelabra.
Bursts of music rose on the wind--a wheezing tune that sobbed of past
jubilation. Suddenly all the Knickerbockers gasped. Stern Judge
Knickerbocker, who had rarely smiled in life, was seen advancing, bent
double with laughter and clinging to a figure in a cardinal hoop.
"Oh, let us cover our eyes," whispered Miss Georgina. "This is more than I
can bear."
"Don't!" said the lady of the banished portrait. "You have often boasted
of your family's intimacy with that queer figure. Through your veneration
of him, York has made him into quite a hero. It is the friend of one of
the first American Knickerbockers--Lord Cornbury! He was addicted to
wearing women's furbelows!"
"Gazooks!" exclaimed his Lordship, in a tone loud enough for the
Knickerbockers to hear. "More of those tiresome impertinents! The next
thing the whole of the presumptuous clan will be petitioning me for
standing room at my routs."
"Don't go any nearer to them," said the Judge, in the tones of a
sycophant. "If they bore you, my dear Corny, I am willing to cut them.
_You know it is the fashion on earth to recognize only the most desirable_
ancestors, and we can return the compliment. Besides it was decreed that I
should be jocular for the next half century, and I'm afraid a too close
inspection would cause me to don weepers."
The group by the doors felt a sickening sensation in their flaccid frames.
Jonathan's partner, knowing how grievously they must all have been
affected by the change in their parent, turned her head.
A one-eyed hag was advancing to her. She curtsied low, and presented two
bits of plaster which had fallen from the ceiling.
"Messages," she snickered, fumbling with her hands.
"From Marmaduke and Leonidas Barula," read the lady (though no one knows
how, for she only observed the niches). "We beg to be excused from coming
to-night. To put it mildly, we were raised aloft in Pearl Street Hollow
for practising target shooting on coach-drivers, and our necks are still
out of joint and not fit to be seen in company."
As the merriment waxed louder a Gobie, who had spent her life as a
fish-fag, began tapping on the panelled wainscot. With a hoarse guffaw she
turned her piercing alaquine eyes on Miss Julie and squinted--"More negus!
More here, you slubber-degullions. We Gobies has a thirst. 'Twas what we
were noted for in life--not our learning, great-niece," she mocked, as she
turned her head and grimaced at Miss Georgina.
"Go away!" snuffled that once resolute woman, too weak to combat any
longer. A feeling of despair was settling upon her like a pall. What if
Mrs. Rumbell, or, worse still, if Mrs. Snograss should be passing
Knickerbocker House and hear the oaths and ungenteel voices of the
supposedly elegant family? No tap-room fracas at Fraunces' could have
equalled the deafening hubbub.
"Beshrew the old fool, she be as jealous for the lies she told of us as a
Barbary pigeon."
"Go away!" continued the sinking sister of the autocrat of York.
That distraught-looking gentleman himself was hastening across the room
with restorative salts, which one of his daughters always carried in her
reticule. As he approached Georgina the Gobie snatched the bottle from his
hand and drained it at a gulp.
"Anything with fire-water for me," she hiccoughed. Then clutching hold of
him, she sunk her voice to a whisper--"I left this sphere for drinking a
quart of gillyflower scent!"
Julie began to weep softly--"Oh, Aunt Jane, if you were only here! Our
Aunt Jane was different from these people," she wailed to herself, half
apologetically.
She was fond of studying the picture in the other room and could have
traced it from memory. Raising her eyes, she gave a prolonged shriek. The
fish-fag and some of the Makemies were dragging her beloved Jane over Lady
Lyron's court steps, out of the powdering closet.
The room was becoming uproarious. Doors were opening and shutting again,
letting in the moaning of the bells. The culmination of the buffoonery was
approaching.
"Good, Jane," sobbed Miss Julie.
"Good, Jane," echoed the chorus of the spectres.
Reluctant, and feigning a great stress of emotion, the poor lady was
pushed into the illuminated space below the hundred-taper drop. She looked
like some pretty long-vaulted effigy. In her hands she still carried the
spray of milk-weed.
The noise lessened for a moment. Jane gazed reproachfully at her niece,
Julie, as if the indiscreet wish were the cause of her present misery, and
said, in a pensive voice, "I did not want to come to-night."
"I always knew you were a modest woman," said Jonathan, recovering a
little of his once audacious manner.
"Modest forsooth!" giggled the fish-fag diabolically, and seizing one of
Jonathan's fat hands in her bony fingers, she drew it over the other's
face.
"Look, see the white streaks on her now! She reddened, the hussy,--or I'm
not a Gobie!"
"Yes, I was vain," answered the most prated-about of female
Knickerbockers. "I used countless beautifiers--pearl powders, cherry
salve, cupid's tints. Everything Mr. Gaine sold at the Crown. They hooked
the men. When pearl powders came upon the market, I received three
offers--Jenks--a tutor at King's College--not the President, as the report
remains on earth--wrote me a poem in the _Weekly Gossiper_, called 'Pink
and White Amanda.'"
"Jane Knickerbocker," said the ghost who was giving the party, "your
family has spent many hours telling the present generation of your womanly
virtues, and they cannot fail in having an overweening respect for any
opinion you may utter. Shall this girl who bears your blood marry yon
youth?"
"Let them wed by all means, if they see advantage in it. I vow if I could
come back to earth and live my twenty-eight years over again, I would join
hands with Jean, our Elizabeth-Town perfumer."
Lord Cornbury and the shades about him were bowed with mirth.
"Janet, you giddy girl, though half the age of most of us, I protest you
are becoming a wit. You will be getting into society next," he cried. "I
shall never be mean enough to tell that in sublunary times one of the
first American Knickerbockers knew me intimately only as my valet."
"A fig for your class distinctions," called the fair indignant, hunting
for a rouge rag. "Years ago we heard ''twas money made the court circle at
York.' Why, you must remember how you feared your creditors when they
first came below."
"Alack, indeed," said his Lordship plaintively, "this hooped petticoat was
never paid for."
After dishevelled Jane had vanished again into the powdering closet whence
she had first emerged, the lady of the banished portrait moved over to
Patricia and her lover. Standing side by side the resemblance between the
two women was remarkable. One was the budding flower; the other the
fragile shadow of a beautiful life.
"Her kind will always exist," she said. "They marry for pearl powders and
other vanities, and usually seek, or are forced into, a gilded cage.
There, like jackdaws, they call out their possessions from dawn till
night, and the heedless world passing by sees the sparkling of the gold,
mistakes the caws for singing, and applauds. I knew love--the ideal love
that smiles at one from the wayside when one is seeking it in the
well-kept gardens. I paid for it with my heart's blood, and I never had
cause to regret. Over the rough places of my earthly journey it followed
me with radiant illusions. The April winds were sweeter, the sunshine on
the roads warmer. I felt all the raptures mother nature gives her
children. That is why I could leave the other world to do you this
service. _Love_ is the one thing death cannot lull to sleep!"
Patricia tried to answer, but the power of speech had left her for the
moment. Juma's face was glowing with peaceful smiles. He bent low on his
right knee to kiss the diaphanous draperies of the shade.
Outside in the night there arose the low murmurous chanting of the town
waits moving homeward. A chime of bells, as soft as a blessing. The thorns
had fallen from the brows of love.