“The blood of New York is always boiling, mother. When Gerardus comes he will tell us if it be war. I shall not be sorry if it is. When one has been waiting for a blow five long years, it is a relief to have it fall. Who is to blame? The administration, or the people?”
“As well may you ask whether it is the fiddle, or the fiddlestick, that makes the tune.”
“At any rate we shall give England a good fight. Our men are not cowards.”
“Carlita, all men would be cowards--if they durst.”
“Mother!”
“If they durst disobey the nobler instincts which make the lower ones face their duty.”
“Oh!”
“Carlita, you have no ideas about humanity.”
“I think mother I, at least, understand my husband and sons--as for Sapphira----”
“More difficult she will be--and more interesting. Peter and Christopher are all Dutch; they that run may read them, but in Sapphira the Dutch and French are discreetly mingled. She has tithed your French ancestors, Carlita--take good heed of her.”
“They were of noble strain.”
“Surely, that is well known. Now I must go home, for I know that Annette is already afraid, and there is the dinner to order. Pigeons do not fly into the mouth ready roasted, and Commenia is getting old. She is lazy, too; but so! The year goes round and somehow we do not find it all bad.”
As she finished speaking, Sapphira came hastily into the room. Her face was flushed, her eyes flashing, and she cried out with unrestrained emotion: “Mother! Mother! We must put out our flags! All the houses on the Green are flagged! Kouba has them ready. He will help me. And you too, mother? Certainly you will help? Kouba says we are going to fight England again! I am so proud! I am so happy! Come, come, mother!”
“My dear one, wait a little. Your father will be here soon, and----”
“Oh, no, no! Father may be in court. He is likely with the mayor. Perhaps he is talking to the people. We can not wait. We must put out the flags--the old one that has seen battle, and the new one that is to see it.”
“But Sapphira----”
“I have the flags ready, mother. Come quickly,” and without further parley she ran with fleet, headlong steps to the upper rooms of the house. Madame, her grandmother, smiled knowingly at her daughter-in-law.
“The will that is your will?” she asked; “where is it? You can see for yourself, Carlita.”
“The news seems to be true at last. You had better wait for Gerardus, mother. He will tell us all about it.”
“The news will find me out in Nassau Street.”
“Commenia can manage without you for one day.”
“There are strawberries to preserve. I like to manage my affairs myself. I have my own way, and some other way does not please me.”
“Well, then, I shall go to Sapphira. My hands are itching for the flags. I am sure you understand, mother.”
“Understand! If it comes to that, I made up my mind many years ago about those English tyrants--and I have not to make it over. I think about them and their ways exactly as I did when I sent my dear Peter with Joris Van Heemskirk’s troops to fight them. Gerardus was but a boy then--ten years old only--but he cried to go with his father. God be with us! Wives and mothers don’t forget, _O wee! O wee!_”
Her voice softened, she looked wistfully backward and, with outstretched hand, waved her daughter-in-law upstairs. Then she opened for herself the wide, front entrance. The door was heavy, but it swung easily to her firm grip. And yet she was in the seventy-fourth year of her life days.
With a slow but imperious step she took the road to her own home. She was not afraid of the crowd, nor of the enthusiasm that moved it. At every turn she was recognised and saluted, for Madame Bloommaert was part and parcel of the honour of the city, and her bright, handsome face with its coal-black eyes and eyebrows, and snow-white hair lying like mist upon its brown temples, was a familiar sight to old and young. She was rather small of stature, but so disdainfully erect that she gave the impression of being a tall woman--an illusion aided by the buoyancy of her temper and the definite character of her movements.
Her home was on lower Nassau Street between Beaver and Marketfield. It had been her residence for fifty years, and was as perfectly Dutch as herself in its character. Nothing in the street, however, was more interesting than this human habitation. It appeared to have created for itself a sort of soul, so instinct with personality was it. A large garden surrounded it, though its space had been slowly curtailed as land in the vicinity became valuable; yet there was still room enough for some fine shrubbery, a little grass plot, beds of flowers, strawberry and other vines, and the deep, cool well, with its antique shed full of bright pewter dishes.
The house itself was of red brick, mellow and warm, and soft to the eyes with the rains and sunshine of half a century; and nothing could be finer than its front, sending up sharp points to the sky, with a little boat weathercock on the tallest point boxing about in the wind. Over the wide casements a sweetbrier climbed, and nodded its tiny flower; and the veranda, cunningly carved along the bottom railing in an open leaf pattern, was a perfect bower of Virginia creeper.
She opened the garden gate, and its mingled perfumes made her sigh with pleasure. Such boxwood borders, such gay, sweet flowers, such brick walks laid in zig-zag pattern, and shaded by elm and maple trees are not to be found in New York city now, but to madame they were only the beautiful frame of her daily life. She cast her eyes down to see if the walk had been swept, and then looked up at the house as if it were a friend. The flag she loved, the flag under which her young husband had died fighting for liberty, was floating from her window. She stood still and gazed at it. Without words it spoke to her, and without words she answered its claim. In a moment she had accepted whatever of trial or triumph it might bring her.
She went forward more hastily, but, ere she reached the entrance, a very pretty girl came running to meet her. “Have you heard the news, grandmother?” she cried. “Are you not very happy? What did Sapphira say? And Aunt Carlita?--and uncle?--and all of them?”
Madame was unable to answer her questions. She clasped her hand firmly, and went with her into the house. Straight to the main living room she went, an apartment in which the dearest portion of her household gods were enshrined: massive silver services on a richly carved sideboard; semi-lucent china in the corner cupboard; three pictures of Teniers that one of her husband’s ancestors had bought from the hands of the great painter himself; and chairs of antique workmanship that had crossed the ocean with Samuel Bloommaert in 1629 when he bought Zwanendael, the Valley of the Swans. The wide, open fireplace of this room was in itself a picture. The deep cavity at the back and the abutting jambs were coloured a vivid scarlet, with a wash made from iron dust; the hearthstone was white as snow with pipeclay, and in front of the heavy brass irons was a tall blue and white jar with dragons for handles, holding a bunch of red roses, mingled with green asparagus branches. The broad chimney piece above this home picture had also its distinctive charm. It shone with silver candlesticks, their snuffers, and little trays. It kept the silver posset pan that had made the baby’s food half a century ago; the christening cups of her son Gerardus and her daughter Elsie; and two beautiful lacquered tea-caddies from India and China.
Opposite the fireplace, at the end of the room, there was a long table black with age and heavy with Nuremburg carving; but it was on a small round one which stood by an open window that a dinner service for two persons was very prettily laid. Madame sat down in a chair near it, and Annette took off her scarf and bonnet and long gloves, and chattered volubly as she did so:
“I know you would like our flag to be out as soon as the rest, grandmother, and the Yates’ flag was flying, and the Vanderlyns’, and I had hard work to get ours flying before the Moores’ and the Rivingtons’. I thought the whole city had gone mad, and I sent Mink and Bass to find the reason out. They stopped so long! and when they came back, they said it was because we are going to fight England again. How men do love to fight, grandmother!”
“When for their liberty and their homes men fight they do well, do they not?”
“If you had heard Peter Smith talking to a little crowd at our very gate, you would think men found the reason for their existence in a gun or a sword. He said we should whip England in about six weeks, and----”
“That is enough, Annette. The sort of rubbish that Peter talks and simpletons believe I know. We shall win our fight, no doubt of that; but in six weeks! No, it may as likely be six years.”
“Grandmother! Six years! And will there be no balls, and suppers, and no lovers for six years? Of course, all the young men who are to be noticed will prefer fighting to anything else; and what shall I do for a lover, grandmother?”