The Strollers. Isham Frederic Stewart
but, be that as it may, a child was born unto them who inherited the father’s adventuresome and graceless character, deserted his home, joined hands with some ocean-rovers and sailed for that pasture-ground of buccaneers, the Caribbean sea. Of his subsequent history various stories may be found in the chronicles of New Orleans and Louisiana.
The only other person who might have any pretensions to the estate was a reverend gentleman who had been a missionary among the Indians, preaching from a stump, and called “Little Thunder” by the red men because of his powerful voice; a lineal descendant of the Rev. Doctor Johannes Vanderklonk, the first dominie of the patroons, who served for one thousand guilders, payable in meat or drink, twenty-two bushels of wheat and two firkins of butter. He saved the souls of the savages, while the white men cheated their bodies. Now and then, in those early days, the children of the forest protested against this evangelizing process and carried off the good dominie to the torture stake, where they plucked out his finger nails; but he returned with as much zest to his task of landing these simple souls in Paradise as those who employed him displayed in making an earthly Paradise out of the lands the red men left behind them.
When by this shrewd system the savages were gradually saved, and incidentally exterminated, Little Thunder’s occupation was gone and he became a pensioner of Mynheer the Patroon, earning his bread by an occasional sermon to the tenants, exhorting them to thrift and industry, to be faithful and multiply, and to pay their rents promptly. As Mynheer’s time drew near he sent for his attorney and commanded him to look up the life, deeds and character of Edward Mauville.
“This I did,” said the lawyer, “and here it is.” Waving a roll of papers before his interested listener.
“A nauseating mess, no doubt,” carelessly remarked the land baron.
“Oh, sir!” deprecated the lawyer, opening the roll. “‘Item: Religion; pupil of the brilliant Jesuit, Abbé Moneau. Item: Morals; Exhibit A, the affair with Countess – in Paris, where he was sent to be educated after the fashion of French families in New Orleans; Exhibit B–’”
“Spare me,” exclaimed Mauville. “Life is wearisome enough, but a biography–” He shrugged his shoulders. “Come to your point.”
“Of course, sir, I was only trying to carry out his instructions. The same, sir, as I would carry out yours!” With an ingratiating smile. Whereupon the attorney told how he had furnished the patroon this roll and fastened it to his bed, so that he might wind and unwind it, perusing it at his pleasure. This the dying man did, sternly noting the damaging facts; thinking doubtlessly how traits will endure for generations–aye, for ages, in spite of the pillory!–the while Little Thunder was roaring petitions to divinity by his bedside, as though to bluster and bully the Almighty into granting his supplications. The patroon glanced from his pensioner to the roll; from the kneeling man to that prodigious list of peccadillos, and then he called for a shilling, a coin still somewhat in use in America. This he flipped thrice.
“Roué or sham,” he said the first time.
“Rake or hypocrite,” he exclaimed the second time.
“Devil or Pharisee,” he cried the third time.
He peered over the coin and sent for his attorney. His soul passed away, mourned by Little Thunder until the will was read, when his lamentations ceased; he soundly berated Mynheer, the Patroon, in his coffin and refused to go to his burying. Then he became an ardent anti-renter, a leader of “bolters,” a thunderer of the people’s cause, the devoted enemy of land barons in general, and one patroon in particular, the foreign heir of the manor.
“But let him thunder away, sir,” said Scroggs, soothingly. “The estate’s yours now, for the old patroon can’t come back to change his mind. He’s buried sure enough in the grove, a dark and sombrous spot as befitted his disposition, but restful withal. Aye, and the marble slab’s above him, which reminds me that only a month before he took to his bed he was smoking his pipe on the porch, when his glance fell upon the lifting-stone. Suddenly he strode towards it, bent his back and raised it a full two inches. ‘So much for age!’ said he, scoffing-like. But age heard him and now he lies with a stone on him he can not lift, while you, sir”–to his listener, deferentially–“are sole heir to the estate and to the feud.”
“A feud goes with the property?” remarked Mauville carelessly.
“The tenants object to paying rent,” replied Scroggs, sadly. “They’re a sorry lot!”
“Evade their debts, do they?” said the land baron languidly. “What presumption to imitate their betters! That won’t do; I need the money.”
“They claim the rights of the landlord originated in fraud–”
“No doubt!” Yawning. “My ancestors were rogues!”
“Oh, sir”–deprecatorily.
“If the tenants don’t pay, turn them out,” interrupted Mauville, listlessly, “if you have to depopulate the country.”
Having come to an understanding with his client, the lawyer arose to take his departure.
“By the way,” he said, obsequiously, selecting a yellow, well-worn bit of paper from his bundle of documents, “it may interest you to keep this yourself. It is the original deed for all these lands from the squaw Pewasch. You can see they were acquired for a few shillings’ worth of ‘wet and dry goods’ and seventeen and a half ells of duffels.”
“The old patroons could strike a rare bargain,” muttered the heir, as he casually surveyed the ancient deed, and then, folding it, placed it in his breast pocket. “For a mere song was acquired–”
“A vast principality,” added the solicitor, waving his hand toward the fields and meadows far in the distance.
CHAPTER IX
SAMPLING THE VINTAGES
Having started the wheels of justice fairly moving, with Scroggs at the throttle, the new land baron soon discovered that he was not in consonance with the great commoner who said he was savage enough to prefer the woods and wilds of Monticello to all the pleasures of Paris. In other words, those rural delights of his forefathers, the pleasures of a closer intimacy with nature, awoke no responsive chord in Mauville’s breast, and he began to tire before long of a patriarchal existence and crullers and oly-koeks and playing the fine lord in solitary grandeur.
The very extent of the deserted manor carried an overwhelming sense of loneliness, especially at this season when nature was dying and triumphal tints of decay were replacing the vernal freshness of the forests, flaunting gaudy vestments that could not, however, conceal the sadness of the transition. The days were growing shorter and the leaden-colored vapors, driven by the whip of that taskmaster, the wind, replaced the snow-white clouds becalmed in the tender depths of ether. Soon would the hoar frost crystallize on grass and fence, or the autumn rains descend, dripping mournfully from the water spouts and bubbling over the tubs. Already the character of the dawn was changed to an almost sullen awakening of the day, denoting a seeming uneasiness of the hidden forces, while an angry passing of the glowing orb replaced the Paphian sunset.
In nook and cranny, through the balustrades and woody screens of the ancient house, penetrated the wandering currents of air. The draperies waved mysteriously, as by a hidden hand, and, at nightfall, the floor of satin and rosewood creaked ominously as if beneath the restless footsteps of former inmates, moving from the somber hangings of the windows to the pearl-inlaid harpsichord whose melody was gone, and thence up the broad staircase, pausing naturally at the landing, beneath which had assembled gay gatherings in the colonial days. And such a heedless phantom group–fine gentlemen in embroidered coats, bright breeches, silk stockings and peruke, and, peeping through ethereal lace wristbands, a white hand fit for no sterner toil than to flourish with airy grace a gold-headed cane; ladies with gleaming bare shoulders, dressed in “cumbrous silk that with its rustling made proud the flesh that bore it!” The imaginative listener could almost distinguish these footfalls, as the blind will recognize the tread of an unseen person.
To further add to the land baron’s dissatisfaction over his heritage, “rent-day”–that