Part 3

Georgina, brave and intrepid, was still nursing her wrath when a mist came before her eyes. "I see! I feel queer!" she cried. Her companions were shaking like autumn leaves. "Oh, don't pause, sister!" squeaked terrified Julie, "here's where that picaroon in the black mask was wont to hide. A Dick Turpin may be concealed yonder!"

"Hist!" called Georgina, as if speaking to some vermin of the night. A shadowy mocking face was rising up before her. She began to tremble--where had she seen it? Yes, 'twas the face of the ancestress whose portrait Jonathan took down from the line of Knickerbockers in the parlor. "My nerves," she gasped. "Come, let us haste, you trembling fools!" Once in the driveway to the house she denied her fright. Betty was scolded for stumbling over a brier-bush. When the long flight of steps was reached, she rushed at them boldly. "Knock, Jerusalem," she commanded.

The little woman tried to sound the clapper, then fell back exhausted. Georgina, enraged, seized it and thumped violently upon the plate. The sounds reverberated through the night, clashing against the bell-notes and the sound of the swaying elms.

Jonathan and his daughters sprang from their seats. The Santa Cruz 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!"

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.

* * * * *

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.

"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.

_Chapter Four_

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.