Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876

"Richard!" returned our hostess, with a half smile.

"Without his pipe," he added; and the unseen demons twitched at the corners of his mouth anew.

Altogether, these seemed to me droll people, they said so little, and, saving the small German, were so serenely grave. I suppose that first evening must have made a deep mark on my memory, for to this day I recall it with the clearness of a picture still before my eyes. Between the windows sat the old dame with hands quiet on her lap now that the twilight had grown deeper—a silent, gray Quaker sphinx, with one only remembrance out of all her seventy years of life. In the open window sat as in a frame the daughter, a woman of some twenty-five years, rosy yet as only a Quakeress can be when rebel Nature flaunts on the soft cheek the colors its owner may not wear on her gray dress. The outline was of a face clearly cut and noble, as if copied from a Greek gem—a face filled with a look of constant patience too great perhaps for one woman's share, with a certain weariness in it also at times, yet cheerful too, and even almost merry at times—the face of one more thoughtful of others than herself, and, despite toil and sordid cares, a gentlewoman, as was plain to see. The shaft of light from the window in which she sat broadened into the room, and faded to shadow in far corners among chairs with claw toes and shining mahogany tables—the furniture of that day, with a certain flavor about it of elegance, reflecting the primness and solidness of the owners. I wonder if to-day our furniture represents us too in any wise? At least it will not through the generations to follow us: of that we may be sure. In the little garden, with red graveled walks between rows of box, walked to and fro Mr. Schmidt, smoking his meerschaum—a rare sight in those days, and almost enough to ensure your being known as odd. He walked about ten paces, and went and came on the same path, while on the wall above a large gray cat followed his motions to and fro, as if having some personal interest in his movements. Against an apricot tree leaned Mr. Wholesome, watching with gleams of amusement the cat and the man, and now and then filliping at her a bit of plaster which he pulled from the wall. Then the cat would start up alert, and the man's face would get to be quizzically unconscious; after which the cat would settle down and the game begin anew. By and by I was struck with the broad shoulders and easy way in which Wholesome carried his head, and the idea came to me that he had more strength than was needed by a member of the Society of Friends, or than could well have been acquired with no greater exercise of the limbs than is sanctioned by its usages. In the garden were also three elderly men, all of them quiet and clerkly, who sat on and about the steps of the other window and chatted of the India ships and cargoes, their talk having a flavor of the spices of Borneo and of well-sunned madeira. These were servants of the great India houses when commerce had its nobles and lines were sharply drawn in social life.

I was early in bed, and rising betimes went down to breakfast, which was a brief meal, this being, as Mr. Wholesome said to me, the short end of the day. I should here explain that Mr. Wholesome was a junior partner in the house in which I was to learn the business before going to China. Thus he was the greatest person by far in our little household, although on this he did not presume, but seemed to me greatly moved toward jest and merriment, and to sway to and fro between gayety and sadness, or at the least gravity, but more toward the latter when Mistress White was near, she seeming always to be a checking conscience to his mirth.

On this morning, as often after, he desired me to walk with him to our place of business, of which I was most glad, as I felt shy and lonely. Walking down Arch street, I was amazed at its cleanliness, and surprised at the many trees and the unfamiliar figures in Quaker dresses walking leisurely. But what seemed to me most curious of all were the plain square meeting-houses of the Friends, looking like the toy houses of children. I was more painfully impressed by the appearance of the graves, one so like another, without mark or number, or anything in the disposition of them to indicate the strength of those ties of kinship and affection which death had severed. Yet I grew to like this quiet highway, and when years after I was in Amsterdam the resemblance of its streets to those of the Friends here at home overcame me with a crowd of swift-rushing memories. As I walked down of a morning to my work, I often stopped as I crossed Fifth street to admire the arch of lindens that barred the view to the westward, or to gaze at the inscription on the 'Prentices' Library, still plain to see, telling that the building was erected in the eighth year of the Empire.

One morning Wholesome and I found open the iron grating of Christ Church graveyard, and passing through its wall of red and black glazed brick, he turned sharply to the right, and coming to a corner bade me look down where under a gray plain slab of worn stone rests the body of the greatest man, as I have ever thought, whom we have been able to claim as ours. Now a bit of the wall is gone, and through a railing the busy or idle or curious, as they go by, may look in and see the spot without entering.

Sometimes, too, we came home together, Wholesome and I, and then I found he liked to wander and zigzag, not going very far along a street, and showing fondness for lanes and byways. Often he would turn with me a moment into the gateway of the University Grammar School on Fourth street, south of Arch, and had, I thought, great pleasure in seeing the rough play of the lads. Or often, as we came home at noon, he liked to turn into Paradise alley, out of Market street, and did this, indeed, so often that I came to wonder at it, and the more because in an open space between this alley and Commerce street was the spot where almost every day the grammar-school boys settled their disputes in the way more common then than now. When first we chanced on one of these encounters I was surprised to see Mr. Wholesome look about him as if to be sure that no one else was near, and then begin to watch the combat with a strange interest. Indeed, on one occasion he utterly astonished me by taking by the hand a small boy who had been worsted and leading him with us, as if he knew the lad, which may well have been. But presently he said, "Reuben thee said was thy name?"—"Yes, sir," said the lad.—"Well," said Mr. Wholesome, after buying him a large and very brown horse gingerbread, two doughnuts and a small pie, "when you think it worth while to hit a fellow, never slap his face, because then he will strike you hard with his fist, which hurts, Reuben. Now, mind: next thee strikes first with thee fist, my lad, and hard, too." If I had seen our good Bishop White playing at taws, I could not have been more overcome, and I dare say my face may have shown it, for, glancing at me, he said demurely, "Thee has seen in thy lifetime how hard it is to get rid of what thee liked in thy days of boyhood." After which he added no more in the way of explanation, but walked along with swift strides and a dark and troubled face, silent and thoughtful.

Sometimes in the early morning I walked to my place of business with Mr. Schmidt, who was a man so altogether unlike those about him that I found in him a new and varied interest. He was a German, and spoke English with a certain quaintness and with the purity of speech of one who has learned the tongue from books rather than from men. I learned after a while that this guess of mine was a good one, and that, having been bred an artist, he had been put in prison for some political offence, and had in two years of loneliness learned English from our older authors. When at last he was set free he took his little property and came away with a bitter heart to our freer land, where, with what he had and with the lessons he gave in drawing, he was well able to live the life he liked in quiet ease and comfort. He was a kindly man in his ways, and in his talk gently cynical; so that, although you might be quite sure as to what he would do, you were never as safe as to what he would say; wherefore to know him a little was to dislike him, but to know him well was to love him. There was a liking between him and Wholesome, but each was more or less a source of wonderment to the other. Nor was it long before I saw that both these men in their way were patient lovers of the quiet and pretty Quaker dame who ruled over our little household, though to the elder man, Mr. Schmidt, she was a being at whose feet he laid a homage which he felt to be hopeless of result, while he was schooled by sorrowful fortunes to accept the position as one which he hardly even wished to change.

It was on a warm sunny morning very early, for we were up and away betimes, that Mr. Schmidt and I and Wholesome took our first walk together through the old market-sheds. We turned into Market street at Fourth street, whence the sheds ran downward to the Delaware. The pictures they gave me to store away in my mind are all of them vivid enough, but none more so than that which I saw with my two friends on the first morning when we wandered through them together.

On either side of the street the farmers' wagons stood backed up against the sidewalk, each making a cheap shop, by which stood the sturdy owners under the trees, laughing and chaffering with their customers. We ourselves turned aside and walked down the centre of the street under the sheds. On either side at the entry of the market odd business was being plied, the traders being mostly colored women with bright chintz dresses and richly-colored bandanna handkerchiefs coiled turban-like above their dark faces. There were rows of roses in red pots, and venders of marsh calamus, and "Hot corn, sah, smokin' hot," and "Pepperpot, bery nice," and sellers of horse-radish and snapping-turtles, and of doughnuts dear to grammar-school lads. Within the market was a crowd of gentlefolks, followed by their black servants with baskets—the elderly men in white or gray stockings, with knee-buckles, the younger in very tight nankeen breeches and pumps, frilled shirts and ample cravats and long blue swallow-tailed coats with brass buttons. Ladies whose grandchildren go no more to market were there in gowns with strangely short waists and broad gypsy-bonnets, with the flaps tied down by wide ribbons over the ears. It was a busy and good-humored throng.

"Ah," said Schmidt, "what color!" and he stood quite wrapped in the joy it gave him looking at the piles of fruit, where the level morning sunlight, broken by the moving crowd, fell on great heaps of dark-green watermelons and rough cantaloupes, and warmed the wealth of peaches piled on trays backed by red rows of what were then called love-apples, and are now known as tomatoes; while below the royal yellow of vast overgrown pumpkins seemed to have set the long summer sunshine in their golden tints.

"If these were mine," said Schmidt, "I could not for ever sell them. What pleasure to see them grow and steal to themselves such sweet colors out of the rainbow which is in the light!"

"Thee would make a poor gardener," said Wholesome, "sitting on thee fence in the sun and watching thee pumpkins—damn nasty things anyhow!"

I looked up amazed at the oath, but Schmidt did not seem to remark it, and went on with us, lingering here and there to please himself with the lovely contrasts of the autumn fruit.

"Curious man is Schmidt," remarked Wholesome as we passed along. "I could wish thee had seen him when we took him this way first. Old Betsey yonder sells magnolia flowers in June, and also pond-lilies, which thee may know as reasonably pleasant things to thee or me; but of a sudden I find our friend Schmidt kneeling on the pavement with his head over a tub of these flowers, and every one around much amazed."

"Was it not seemly?" said Schmidt, joining us. "There are who like music, but to me what music is there like the great attunement of color? and mayhap no race can in this rise over our black artists hereabout the market-ends."

"Thee is crazed of many colors," said Wholesome laughing—"a bull of but one."

Schmidt stopped short in the crowd, to Wholesome's disgust. "What," said he, quite forgetful of the crowd, "is more cordial than color? This he recalleth was a woman black as night, with a red turban and a lapful of magnolias, and to one side red crabs in a basket, and to one side a tubful of lilies. Moss all about, I remember."

"Come along," said Wholesome. "The man is cracked, and in sunny weather the crack widens."

And so we went away down street to our several tasks, chatting and amused.

Those were most happy days for me, and I found at evening one of my greatest pleasures when Schmidt called for me after our early tea and we would stroll together down to the Delaware, where the great India ships lay at wharves covered with casks of madeira and boxes of tea and spices. Then we would put out in his little rowboat and pull away toward Jersey, and, after a plunge in the river at Cooper's Point, would lazily row back again while the spire of Christ Church grew dim against the fading sunset, and the lights would begin to show here and there in the long line of sombre houses. By this time we had grown to be sure friends, and a little help from me at a moment when I chanced to guess that he wanted money had made the bond yet stronger. So it came that he talked to me, though I was but a lad, with a curious freedom, which very soon opened to me a full knowledge of those with whom I lived.

One evening, when we had been drifting silently with the tide, he suddenly said aloud, "A lion in the fleece of the sheep."

"What?" said I, laughing.

"I was thinking of Wholesome," he replied. "But you do not know him. Yet he has that in his countenance which would betray a more cunning creature."

"How so?" I urged, being eager to know more of the man who wore the garb and tongue of Penn, and could swear roundly when moved.

"If it will amuse," said the German, "I will tell you what it befell me to hear to-day, being come into the parlor when Mistress White and Wholesome were in the garden, of themselves lonely."

"Do you mean," said I, "that you listened when they did not know of your being there?"

"And why not?" he replied. "It did interest me, and to them only good might come."

"But," said I, "it was not—"

"Well?" he added as I paused. "—'Was not honor,' you were going to say to me. And why not? I obey my nature, which is more curious than stocked with honor. I did listen."

"And what did you hear?" said I.

"Ah, hear!" he answered. "What better is the receiver than is the thief? Well, then, if you will share my stolen goods, you shall know, and I will tell you as I heard, my memory being good."

"But—" said I.

"Too late you stop me," he added: "you must hear now."

The scene which he went on to sketch was to me strange and curious, nor could I have thought he could give so perfect a rendering of the language, and even the accent, of the two speakers. It was a curious revelation of the man himself, and he seemed to enjoy his power, and yet to suffer in the telling, without perhaps being fully conscious of it. The oars dropped from his hands and fell in against the thwarts of the boat, and he clasped his knees and looked up as he talked, not regarding at all his single silent listener.

"When this is to be put upon the stage there shall be a garden and two personages."

"Also," said I, "a jealous listener behind the scenes."

"If you please," he said promptly, and plunged at once into the dialogue he had overheard:

"'Richard, thee may never again say the words which thee has said to me to-night. There is, thee knows, that between us which is builded up like as a wall to keep us the one from the other.'

"'But men and women change, and a wall crumbles, or thee knows it may be made to. Years have gone away, and the man who stole from thee thy promise may be dead, for all thee knows.'

"'Hush! thee makes me to see him, and though the dead rise not here, I am some way assured he is not yet dead, and may come and say to me, "'Cilla"—that is what he called me—"thee remembers the night and thy promise, and the lightning all around us, and who took thee to shore from the wrecked packet on the Bulkhead Bar." The life he saved I promised.'

"Well, and thee knows—By Heaven! you well enough know who tortured the life he gave—who robbed you—who grew to be a mean sot, and went away and left you; and to such you hold, with such keep faith, and wear out the sweetness of life waiting for him!'

"'Richard!'

"'Have I also not waited, and given up for thee a life, a career—little to give. I hope thee knows I feel that. Has thee no limit, Priscilla? Thee knows—God help me! how well you know—I love you. The world, the old world of war and venture, pulls at me always. Will not you find it worth while to put out a hand of help? Would it not be God taking your hand and putting it in mine?'

"'Thee knows I love thee.'

"'And if the devil sent him back to curse you anew—'

"'Shame, Richard! I would say, God, who layeth out for each his way, has pointed mine.'

"'And I?'

"'Thee would continue in goodness, loving me as a sister hardly tried.'

"'By God! I should go away to sea.'