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The Story of a New York House, a novel by Henry Cuyler Bunner |
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Chapter 3 |
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_ CHAPTER 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.
"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! * * * * * Jacob Dolph the elder took but a doubtful part in all the festivities. The cloud that had hung dimly over him had begun to show little rifts; but the dark masses between the rifts were thicker and heavier than ever. It was the last brief convulsive struggle of the patient against the power of the anaesthetic, when the nervous hand goes up to put the cloth away from the mouth, just before the work is done and consciousness slips utterly away, and life is no more for the sufferer, though his heart beat and the breath be warm between his lips. When he was bright he was almost like his old self, and these delusive periods came oftenest when he met some old friend, or in quiet morning hours when his daughter--so he always called her--sat at his feet in the sunny breakfast-room, and sewed and listened, or perhaps read to him from Scott's latest novel. He may have had some faint sub-consciousness of his condition, for although he took the deepest interest in the balls and the dinners, he would never appear before his son's guests except when he was at his best and brightest. But he loved to sit, withdrawn in a corner, watching the young life that fluttered through the great rooms, smiling to himself, and gently pleased if some old crony sought him out and talked of old times--the older the times were, the better he remembered them. Indeed, he now recalled some things that he had not thought of since his far-off boyhood. In truth, the younger Dolphs often had small heart in their festal doings. But the medical science of the day, positive, self-satisfied, and blinded by all manner of tradition, gave them, through its ministers, cruelly false hopes of the old man's ultimate recovery. Besides, they could not well order things otherwise. The extravagant hospitality of the day demanded such ceremonial, and to have abated any part of it would only have served to grieve and to alarm the object of their care. The whole business was a constant pride and joy to old Mr. Jacob Dolph. When there was a dinner to be given, he would follow Aline as she went about the house superintending the preparations of her servants, in her flowered apron of black silk, with her bunch of keys--honest keys, those, a good four inches long, with tongues as big as a domino--jingling at her side. He would himself overlook the making ready of the wines, and give oft-repeated instructions as to the proper temperature for the port, and see that the champagne was put on ice in the huge octagonal cellaret in the dining-room corner. And when all was ready, as like as not he would kiss Aline on the forehead, and say: "I have a headache to-night, my dear, and I think I shall take my dinner in my room." And he would go feebly up stairs, and when old Julius, who always waited upon him, brought up his tray, he would ask: "Is it a fine dinner, Julius? Did everybody come?" And Julius would invariably reply, with profound African dignity: "Mons'us gran' dinneh, seh! 'E fines' dinneh I eveh witness', seh! I have stood behin' you' chai', seh, this thutty y'ah, an' I neveh see no such a gran' dinneh, Misteh Do'ph, seh!" "Except the dinner we gave Mr. Hamilton; in State Street, Julius," the old man would put in. "Excep' that, seh," Julius would gravely reply: "that was a pol-litical dinneh, seh; an', of co'se, a pol'litical dinneh--" an expressive pause--"but this he' is sho'ly a mons'us fine dinneh, seh." * * * * * His bodily vigor was unimpaired, however, and except that his times of entire mental clearness grew fewer and briefer as the months went on, there was little change in the old gentleman when the spring of 1829 came. He was not insane, he was not idiotic, even at the worst. It seemed to be simply a premature old age that clouded his faculties. He forgot many things, he was weakly absent-minded, often he did not recognize a familiar face, and he seemed ever more and more disinclined to think and to talk. He liked best to sit in silence, seemingly unconscious of the world about him; and if he was aroused from his dreamy trance, his wandering speech would show that his last thought--and it might have entered his mind hours before, at the suggestion of some special event--was so far back in the past that it dealt with matters beyond his son's knowledge. He was allowed to do as he pleased, for in the common affairs of daily life he seemed to be able to care for himself, and he plaintively resented anything that looked like guardianship. So he kept up his custom of walking down into the city, at least as far as St. Paul's. It was thought to be safe enough, for he was a familiar figure in the town, and had friends at every turn. But one afternoon he did not return in time for dinner. Young Jacob was out for his afternoon ride, which that day had taken him in the direction of the good doctor's house. And when he had reached the house, he found the doctor likewise mounted for a ride. The doctor was going up to Bond Street--the Dolphs' quarter was growing fashionable already--to look at a house near Broadway that he had some thoughts of buying, for he was to be married the coming winter. So they had ridden back together, and after a long examination of the house, young Jacob had ridden off for a gallop through the country lanes; and it was five o'clock, and dinner was on the table, when he came to his father's house and learned from tearful Aline that his father was missing. The horse was at the stable door when young Jacob mounted him once more and galloped off to Bond Street, where he found the doctor just ready to turn down the Bowery; and they joined forces and hurried back, and down Broadway, inquiring of the people who sat on their front stoops--it was a late spring evening, warm and fair--if they had seen old Mr. Dolph that day. Many had seen him as he went down; but no one could remember that the old gentleman had come back over his accustomed path. At St. Paul's, the sexton thought that Mr. Dolph had prolonged his walk down the street. Further on, some boys had seen him, still going southward. The searchers stopped at one or two of the houses where he might have called; but there was no trace of him. It was long since old Jacob Dolph had made a formal call. But at Bowling Green they were hailed by Mr. Philip Waters, who came toward them with more excitement in his mien than a young man of good society often exhibited. "I was going for a carriage, Dolph," he said: "your father is down there in the Battery Park, and I'm afraid--I'm afraid he's had a stroke of paralysis." They hurried down, and found him lying on the grass, his head on the lap of a dark-skinned, ear-ringed Spanish sailor. He had been seen to fall from the bench near by, another maritime man in the crowd about him explained. "It was only a minit or two ago," said the honest seafarer, swelled with the importance that belongs to the narrator of a tale of accident and disaster. "He was a-settin' there, had been for two hours 'most, just a-starin' at them houses over there, and all of a sudden chuck forward he went, right on his face. And then a man come along that knowed him, and said he'd go for a kerridge, or I'd 'a' took him on my sloop--she's a-layin' here now, with onions from Weathersfield--and treated him well; I see he wa'n't no disrespectable character. Here, Pedro, them's the old man's folks--let 'em take him. A-settin' there nigh on two hours, he was, just a-studyin' them houses. B'long near here?" Young Jacob had no words for the Connecticut captain. Waters had arrived, with somebody's carriage, confiscated on the highway, and they gently lifted up the old gentleman and set off homeward. They were just in time, for Waters had been the earliest of the evening promenaders to reach the Battery. It was dinner hour--or supper hour for many--and the park was given up to the lounging sailors from the river-side streets. The doctor's face was dark. "No, it is not paralysis," he said. "Let us proceed at once to your own home, Mr. Dolph. In view of what I am now inclined to consider his condition, I think it would be the most advisable course." He was as precise and exact in his speech, even then, as he was later on, when years had given an innocent, genial pomposity to his delivery of his rounded sentences. They put old Jacob Dolph to bed in the room which he had always occupied, in his married as in his widowed days. He never spoke again; that day, indeed, he hardly moved. But on the next he stirred uneasily, as though he were striving to change his position. The doctor bled him, and they shifted him as best they could, but he seemed no more comfortable. So the doctor bled him again; and even that did no good. About sunset, Aline, who had watched over him with hardly a moment's rest, left the room for a quarter of an hour, to listen to what the doctors had to say--there were four of them in the drawing-room below. When she and her husband entered the sick-room again, the old man had moved in his bed. He was lying on his side, his face to the windows that looked southward, and he had raised himself a little on his arm. There was a troubled gaze in his eyes, as of one who strains to see something that is unaccountably missing from his sight. He turned his head a little, as though to listen. Thus gazing, with an inward and spiritual vision only, at the bay that his eyes might never again see, and listening to the waves whose cadence he should hear no more, the troubled look faded into one of inscrutable peace, and he sank back into the hollow of his son's arm and passed away. * * * * * The next time that the doctor was in the house it was of a snowy night a few days after New Year's Day. It was half-past two o'clock in the morning, and Jacob Dolph--no longer Jacob Dolph the younger--had been pacing furiously up and down the long dining-room--that being the longest room in the house--when the doctor came down stairs, and addressed him with his usual unruffled precision: "I will request of you, Dolph, a large glass of port. I need not suggest to you that it is unnecessary to stint the measure, for the hospitality of this house is----" "How is she, doctor? For God's sake, tell me--is she--is she----" "The hospitality of this house is prover--" the precise doctor recommenced. "Damn the hospitality!" cried Jacob Dolph: "I mean--oh, doctor--tell me--is anything wrong?" "Should I request of you the cup of amity and geniality, Mr. Dolph, were there cause for anything save rejoicing in this house?" demanded the physician, with amiable severity. "I had thought that my words would have conveyed----" "It's all over?" "And bravely over!" And the doctor nodded his head with a dignified cheerfulness. "And may I go to her?" "You may, sir, after you have given me my glass of port. But remember, sir----" Dolph turned to the sideboard, grasped a bottle and a glass, and thrust them into the doctor's hand, and started for the door. "But remember, sir," went on the unperturbed physician, "you must not agitate or excite her. A gentle step, a tranquil tone, and a cheerful and encouraging address, brief and affectionate, will be all that is permitted." Dolph listened in mad impatience, and was over the threshold before the doctor's peremptory call brought him back. "What is it now?" he demanded, impatiently. The doctor looked at him with a gaze of wonder and reproach. "It is a male child, sir," he said. Jacob Dolph crept up the stairs on tiptoe. As he paused for a moment in front of a door at the head, he heard the weak, spasmodic wail of another Dolph. * * * * * "There's no help for it--I've got to do it," said Jacob Dolph. It was another wintry morning, just after breakfast. The snow was on the ground, and the sleigh-bells up in Broadway sent down a faint jingling. Ten winters had come and gone, and Mr. Dolph was as comfortably stout as a man should be who is well fed and forty. He stood with his back to the fire, pulling at his whiskers--which formed what was earlier known as a Newgate collar--with his right thumb and forefinger. His left thumb was stuck in the armhole of his flowered satin waistcoat, black and shiny. Opposite him sat a man of his own age, clean-shaven and sharp-featured. He had calm, somewhat cold, gray eyes, a deliberate, self-contained manner of speaking, and a pallid, dry complexion that suited with his thin features. His dress was plain, although it was thoroughly neat. He had no flowered satin waistcoat; but something in his bearing told you that he was a man who had no anxiety about the narrow things of the counting-room; who had no need to ask himself how much money was coming in to-morrow. And at the same time you felt that every cent of whatever might be to-morrow's dues would find its way to his hands as surely as the representative figures stood on his ledger's page. It was young Mr. Van Riper--but he, too, had lost his right to that title, not only because of his years, but because, in the garret of the house in Greenwich Village, a cobweb stretched from one of the low beams to the head of old Abram Van Riper's great walking-stick, which stood in the corner where it had been placed, with other rubbish, the day after Abram Van Riper's funeral. "I should not advise it, Dolph, if it can be helped," Mr. Van Riper observed, thoughtfully. "It can't be helped." "I can give you your price, of course," Van Riper went on, with deliberation; "but equally of course, it won't be anything like what the property will bring in the course of a few years." Dolph kicked at the hearthrug, as he answered, somewhat testily: "I'm not making a speculation of it." Mr. Van Riper was unmoved. "And I'm not making a speculation of you, either," he said, calmly: "I am speaking only for your own benefit, Dolph." Mr. Dolph put his hands in his pockets, strode to the window and back again, and then said, with an uneasy little laugh: "I beg your pardon, Van Riper; you're quite right, of course. The fact is, I've got to do it. I must have the money, and I must have it now." Mr. Van Riper stroked his sharp chin. "Is it necessary to raise the money in that particular way? You are temporarily embarrassed--I don't wish to be intrusive--but why not borrow what you need, and give me a mortgage on the house?" Ten years had given Jacob Dolph a certain floridity; but at this he blushed a hot red. "Mortgage on the house? No, sir," he said, with emphasis. "Well, any other security, then," was Van Riper's indifferent amendment. Again Jacob Dolph strode to the window and back again, staring hard at the carpet, and knitting his brows. Mr. Van Riper waited in undisturbed calm until his friend spoke once more. "I might as well tell you the truth, Van Riper," he said, at last; "I've made a fool of myself. I've lost money, and I've got to pocket the loss. As to borrowing, I've borrowed all I ought to borrow. I won't mortgage the house. This sale simply represents the hole in my capital." Something like a look of surprise came into Mr. Van Riper's wintry eyes. "It's none of my business, of course," he observed; "but if you haven't any objection to telling me----" "What did it? What does for everybody nowadays? Western lands and Wall Street--that's about the whole story. Oh, yes, I know--I ought to have kept out of it. But I didn't. I was nothing better than a fool at such business. I'm properly punished." He sighed as he stood on the hearthrug, his hands under his coat-tails, and his head hanging down. He looked as though many other thoughts were going through his mind than those which he expressed. "I wish," he began again, "that my poor old father had brought me up to business ways. I might have kept out of it all. College is a good thing for a man, of course; but college doesn't teach you how to buy lots in western cities--especially when the western cities aren't built." "College teaches you a good many other things, though," said Van Riper, frowning slightly, as he put the tips of his long fingers together; "I wish I'd had your chance, Dolph. My boy shall go to Columbia, that's certain." "Your boy?" queried Dolph, raising his eyebrows. Van Riper smiled. "Yes," he said, "my boy. You didn't know I had a boy, did you? He's nearly a year old." This made Mr. Jacob Dolph kick at the rug once more, and scowl a little. "I'm afraid I haven't been very neighborly, Van Riper--" he began; but the other interrupted him, smiling good-naturedly. "You and I go different ways, Dolph," he said. "We're plain folks over in Greenwich Village, and you--you're a man of fashion." Jacob Dolph smiled--not very mirthfully. Van Riper's gaze travelled around the room, quietly curious. "It costs money to be a man of fashion, doesn't it?" "Yes," said Dolph, "it does." There was silence for a minute, which Van Riper broke. "If you've got to sell, Dolph, why, it's a pity; but I'll take it. I'll see Ogden to-day, and we can finish the business whenever you wish. But in my opinion, you'd do better to borrow." Dolph shook his head. "I've been quite enough of a fool," he replied. "Well," said Mr. Van Riper, rising, "I must get to the office. You'll hear from Ogden to-morrow. I'm sorry you've got in such a snarl; but--" his lips stretched into something like a smile--"I suppose you'll know better next time. Good-day." * * * * * After Mr. Dolph had bowed his guest to the door, Mrs. Dolph slipped down the stairs and into the drawing-room. "Did he take it?" she asked. "Of course he took it," Dolph answered, bitterly, "at that price." "Did he say anything," she inquired again, "about its being hard for us to--to sell it?" "He said we had better not sell it now--that it would bring more a few years hence." "He doesn't understand," said Mrs. Dolph. "He couldn't understand," said Mr. Dolph. Then she went over to him and kissed him. "It's only selling the garden, after all," she said; "it isn't like selling our home." He put his arm about her waist, and they walked into the breakfast-room, and looked out on the garden which to-morrow would be theirs no longer, and in a few months would not be a garden at all. High walls hemmed it in--the walls of the houses which had grown up around them. A few stalks stood up out of the snow, the stalks of old-fashioned flowers--hollyhock and larkspur and Job's-tears and the like--and the lines of the beds were defined by the tiny hedges of box, with the white snow-powder sifted into their dark, shiny green. The bare rose-bushes were there, with their spikes of thorns, and little mounds of snow showed where the glories of the poppy-bed had bloomed. Jacob Dolph, looking out, saw the clear summer sunlight lying where the snow lay now. He saw his mother moving about the paths, cutting a flower here and a bud there. He saw himself, a little boy in brave breeches, following her about, and looking for the harmless toads, and working each one into one of the wonderful legends which he had heard from the old German gardener across the way. He saw his father, too, pacing those paths of summer evenings, when the hollyhocks nodded their pink heads, and glancing up, from time to time, at his mother as she sat knitting at that very window. And, last of all in the line, yet first in his mind, he saw his wife tripping out in the fresh morning, to smile on the flowers she loved, to linger lovingly over the beds of verbena, and to pick the little nosegay that stood by the side of the tall coffee-urn at every summer-morning breakfast. And the wife, looking out by his side, saw that splendid boy of theirs running over path and bed, glad of the flowers and the air and the freedom, full of young life and boyish sprightliness, his long hair floating behind him, the light of hope and youth in his bright face. And to-morrow it would be Van Riper's; and very soon there would be houses there, to close up the friendly window which had seen so much, which had let so much innocent joy and gladness into the old breakfast-room; and there would be an end of flower-bordered paths and nodding hollyhocks. She put her face upon her husband's shoulder, and cried a little, though he pretended not to know it. When she lifted it, somehow she had got her eyes dry, though they were painfully bright and large. "It isn't like selling our house," she said. _ |
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