The Chainbearer: or, The Littlepage Manuscripts

"And my noble, high-spirited, and venerable mother has actually gone to the Nest to face the enemy!" exclaimed my uncle, after a thoughtful pause.

"She has, indeed; and the noble, high-spirited, though not venerable, young ladies have gone with her," returned Mr. Dunning, in his caustic way.

"All three, do you mean?"

"Every one of them – Martha, Henrietta, and Anne."

"I am surprised that the last should have done so. Anne Marston is such a meek, quiet, peace-loving person, that I should think she would have preferred remaining, as she naturally might have done, without exciting remark, with her own mother."

"She has not, nevertheless. Mrs. Littlepage would brave the anti-renters, and the three maidens would be her companions. I dare say, Ro, you know how it is with the gentle sex, when they make up their minds?"

"My girls are all good girls, and have given me very little trouble," answered my uncle, complacently.

"Yes, I dare say that may be true. You have only been absent from home five years this trip."

"An attentive guardian, notwithstanding, since I left you as a substitute. Has my mother written to you since her arrival among the hosts of the Philistines?"

"She has, indeed, Littlepage," answered Dunning, gravely; "I have heard from her three times, for she writes to urge my not appearing on the estate. I did intend to pay her a visit; but she tells me that it might lead to a violent scene, and can do no good. As the rents will not be due until autumn, and Master Hugh is now of age, and was to be here to look after his own affairs, I have seen no motive for incurring the risk of the tarring and feathering. We American lawyers, young gentleman, wear no wigs."

"Does my mother write herself, or employ another?" inquired my uncle, with interest.

"She honors me with her own hand. Your mother writes much better than you do yourself, Roger."

"That is owing to her once having carried chain, as she would say herself. Has Martha written to you?"

"Of course. Sweet little Patty and I are bosom friends, as you know."

"And does she say anything of the Indian and the negro?"

"Jaaf and Susquesus? To be sure she does. Both are living still, and both are well. I saw them myself, and even ate of their venison, so lately as last winter."

"Those old fellows must have each lived a great deal more than his century, Jack. They were with my grandfather in the old French war, as active, useful men – older than my grandfather!"

"Ay! a nigger or a redskin, before all others, for holding on to life, when they have been temperate. Let me see – that expedition of Abercrombie's was about eighty years since; why, these fellows must be well turned of their hundred, though Jaap is rather the oldest, judging from appearances."

"I believe no one knows the age of either. A hundred each has been thought now for many years. Susquesus was surprisingly active, too, when I last saw him – like a healthy man of eighty."

"He has failed of late, though he actually shot a deer, as I told you, last winter. Both the old fellows stray down to the Nest, Martha writes me; and the Indian is highly scandalized at the miserable imitations of his race that are now abroad. I have even heard that he and Yop have actually contemplated taking the field against them. Seneca Newcome is their especial aversion."

"How is Opportunity?" I inquired. "Does she take any part in this movement?"

"A decided one, I hear. She is anti-rent, while she wishes to keep on good terms with her landlord; and that is endeavoring to serve God and Mammon. She is not the first, however, by a thousand, that wears two faces in this business."

"Hugh has a deep admiration of Opportunity," observed my uncle, "and you had needs be tender in your strictures. The modern Seneca, I take it, is dead against us?"

"Seneky wishes to go to the legislature, and of course he is on the side of votes. Then his brother is a tenant at the mill, and naturally wishes to be the landlord. He is also interested in the land himself. One thing has struck me in this controversy as highly worthy of notice; and it is the naïveté with which men reconcile the obvious longing of covetousness with what they are pleased to fancy the principles of liberty! When a man has worked a farm a certain number of years, he boldly sets up the doctrine that the fact itself gives him a high moral claim to possess it forever. A moment's examination will expose the fallacy by which these sophists apply the flattering unction to their souls. They work their farms under a lease, and in virtue of its covenants. Now, in a moral sense, all that time can do in such a case, is to render these covenants the more sacred, and consequently more binding; but these worthies, whose morality is all on one side, imagine that these time-honored covenants give them a right to fly from their own conditions during their existence, and to raise pretensions far exceeding anything they themselves confer, the moment they cease."

"Poh, poh! Jack; there is no need of refining at all, to come at the merits of such a question. This is a civilized country, or it is not. If it be a civilized country, it will respect the rights of property, and its own laws; and if the reverse, it will not respect them. As for setting up the doctrine, at this late day, when millions and millions are invested in this particular species of property, that the leasehold tenure is opposed to the spirit of institutions of which it has substantially formed a part, ever since those institutions have themselves had an existence, it requires a bold front, and more capacity than any man at Albany possesses, to make the doctrines go down. Men may run off with the notion that the tendencies to certain abuses, which mark every system, form their spirit; but this is a fallacy that a very little thought will correct. Is it true that proposals have actually been made, by these pretenders to liberty, to appoint commissioners to act as arbitrators between the landlords and tenants, and to decide points that no one has any right to raise?"

"True as Holy Writ; and a regular 'Star Chamber' tribunal it would be! It is wonderful, after all, how extremes do meet!"

"That is as certain as the return of the sun after night. But let us now talk of our project, Jack, and of the means of getting among these self-deluded men – deluded by their own covetousness – without being discovered; for I am determined to see them, and to judge of their motives and conduct for myself."

"Take care of the tar-barrel, and of the pillow-case of feathers, Roger!"

"I shall endeavor so to do."

We then discussed the matter before us at length and leisurely. I shall not relate all that was said, as it would be going over the same ground twice, but refer the reader to the regular narrative. At the usual hour, we retired to our beds, retaining the name of Davidson, as convenient and prudent. Next day Mr. John Dunning busied himself in our behalf, and made himself exceedingly useful to us. In his character of an old bachelor, he had many acquaintances at the theatre; and through his friends of the greenroom he supplied each of us with a wig. Both my uncle and myself spoke German reasonably well, and our original plan was to travel in the character of immigrant trinket and essence pedlers. But I had a fancy for a hand-organ and a monkey; and it was finally agreed that Mr. Hugh Roger Littlepage, senior, was to undertake this adventure with a box of cheap watches and gilded trinkets; while Mr. Hugh Roger Littlepage, junior, was to commence his travels at home, in the character of a music-grinder. Modesty will not permit me to say all I might, in favor of my own skill in music in general; but I sang well for an amateur, and played both on the violin and flute, far better than is common.

Everything was arranged in the course of the following day, our wigs of themselves completely effecting all the disguises that were necessary. As for my uncle, he was nearly bald, and a wig was no great encumbrance; but my shaggy locks gave me some trouble. A little clipping, however, answered the turn; and I had a hearty laugh at myself, in costume, that afternoon, before Dunning's dressing-room glass. We got round the felony law, about being armed and disguised, by carrying no weapons but our tools in the way of trade.

CHAPTER V

"And she hath smiles to earth unknown —
Smiles, that with motion of their own
Do spread, and sink, and rise:
That come and go with endless play
And ever, as they pass away,
Are hidden in her eyes."

    – Wordsworth.
I was early in costume the following morning. I question if my own mother could have known me, had she lived long enough to see the whiskers sprout on my cheeks, and to contemplate my countenance as a man. I went into Dunning's library, drew the little hurdy-gurdy from its hiding-place, slung it, and began to play "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning," with spirit, and, I trust I may add, with execution. I was in the height of the air, when the door opened, and Barney thrust his high-cheeked-bone face into the room, his mouth as wide open as that of a frozen porker.

"Where the divil did ye come from!" demanded the new footman, with the muscles of that vast aperture of his working from grin to grim, and grim to grin again. "Yee's wilcome to the tchune; but how comes ye here?"

"I coomes vrom Halle, in Preussen. Vat isht your vaterland?"

"Bee yees a Jew?"

"Nein – I isht a goot Christian. Vilt you haf Yankee Tootle?"

"Yankee T'under! Ye'll wake up the masther, and he'll be displaise'd, else ye might work on that tchune till the end of time. That I should hear it here, in my own liberary, and ould Ireland t'ree thousand laigues away!"

A laugh from Dunning interrupted the dialogue, when Barney vanished, no doubt anticipating some species of American punishment for a presumed delinquency. Whether the blundering, well-meaning, honest fellow really ascertained who we were that breakfasted with his master, I do not know; but we got the meal and left the house without seeing his face again, Dunning having a young yellow fellow to do the service of the table.

I need scarcely say that I felt a little awkward at finding myself in the streets of New York in such a guise; but the gravity and self-possession of my uncle were a constant source of amusement to me. He actually sold a watch on the wharf before the boat left it, though I imputed his success to the circumstance that his price was what a brother dealer, who happened to be trading in the same neighborhood, pronounced "onconscionably low." We took a comfortable state-room between us, under the pretence of locking up our property, and strolled about the boat, gaping and looking curious, as became our class.

"Here are at least a dozen people that I know," said my uncle, as we were lounging around – loafing around is the modern Doric – about the time that the boat was paddling past Fort Washington; "I have reconnoitred in all quarters, and find quite a dozen. I have been conversing with an old school-fellow, and one with whom I have ever lived in tolerable intimacy, for the last ten minutes, and find my broken English and disguise are perfect. I am confident my dear mother herself would not recognize me."

"We can then amuse ourselves with my grandmother and the young ladies," I answered, "when we reach the Nest. For my part, it strikes me that we had better keep our own secret to the last moment."

"Hush! As I live, there is Seneca Newcome this moment! He is coming this way, and we must be Germans again."

Sure enough, there was 'Squire Seneky, as the honest farmers around the Nest call him; though many of them must change their practices, or it will shortly become so absurd to apply the term "honest" to them, that no one will have the hardihood to use it. Newcome came slowly toward the forecastle, on which we were standing; and my uncle determined to get into conversation with him, as a means of further proving the virtue of our disguises, as well as possibly of opening the way to some communications that might facilitate our visit to the Nest. With this view, the pretended pedler drew a watch from his pocket, and offering it meekly to the inspection of the quasi lawyer, he said —

"Puy a vatch, shentlemans?"

"Hey! what? Oh a watch," returned Seneca, in that high, condescending, vulgar key, with which the salt of the earth usually affect to treat those they evidently think much beneath them in intellect, station, or some other great essential, at the very moment they are bursting with envy, and denouncing as aristocrats all who are above them. "Hey! a watch is it? What countryman are you, friend?"