The Ancient City

The Ancient City
Constance Woolson

Constance Fenimore Woolson

The Ancient City

IN TWO PARTS. – PART I

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by Harper and Brothers, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Vol. L – no. 295 – 1

“The world is far away; the broad pine-barrens
Like deserts roll between;
Be then our mother – take us for thy children,
O dear St. Augustine!”

It was a party of eight, arranged by Aunt Diana. She is only my aunt by marriage, and she had with her a bona fide niece, Iris Carew, a gay school-girl of seventeen, while I, Niece Martha, as Aunt Diana always calls me, own to full forty years. Professor Macquoid went for two reasons – his lungs, and the pleasure of imparting information. It was generally understood that Professor Macquoid was engaged upon a Great Work. John Hoffman went for his own amusement; with us, because he happened to sail on the same steamer. He had spent several winters in Florida, hunting and fishing, and was in his way something of a Thoreau, without Thoreau’s love of isolation. Mr. Mokes went because Aunt Diana persuaded him, and Sara St. John because I made her. These, with Miss Sharp, Iris Carew’s governess, composed our party.

We left New York in a driving January snow-storm, and sailed three days over the stormy Atlantic, seeing no land from the winter desolation of Long Branch until we entered the beautiful harbors of Charleston and Savannah, a thousand miles to the south. The New York steamer went no farther; built to defy Fear, Lookout, and the terrible Hatteras, she left the safe, monotonous coast of Georgia and Upper Florida to a younger sister, that carried us on to the south over a summer sea, and at sunrise one balmy morning early in February entered the broad St. Johns, whose slow coffee-colored tropical tide, almost alone among rivers, flows due north for nearly its entire course of four hundred miles, a peculiarity expressed in its original name, given by the Indians, Il-la-ka – “It hath its own way, is alone, and contrary to every other.”

“The question is,” said Sara St. John, “is there any thing one ought to know about these banks?”

“ ‘Ye banks and bray-aas of bon-onny Doo-oon,’ ” chanted Iris, who, fresh as a rose-bud with the dew on it, stood at the bow, with the wind blowing her dark wavy hair back from her lovely face; as for her hat, it had long ago found itself discarded and tied to the railing for safe-keeping.

“The fresh-water shell heaps of the St. Johns River, East Florida,” began the Professor, “should be – should be somewhere about here.” He peered around, but could see nothing with his near-sighted eyes.

“Iris,” called Aunt Diana through the closed blinds of her state-room, “pray put on your hat. Miss Sharp! Where is Miss Sharp?”

“Here,” answered the governess, emerging reluctantly from the cabin, muffled in a brown veil. Sunrise enthusiasm came hard to her; she knew that hers was not the beauty that shines at dawn, and she had a great longing for her matutinal coffee. Miss Sharp’s eyes were faintly blue, she had the smallest quantity of the blondest hair disposed in two ringlets on each side of her face, a shadowy little figure, indistinct features, and a complexion that turned aguish on the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, equal to the emergency, she immediately superintended the tying down of Iris’s little round hat, and then, with her heelless prunella gaiters fully revealed by the strong wind, and her lisle-threaded hands struggling to repress the fluttering veil, she stood prepared to do her duty by the fresh-water shell heaps or any other geological formation. John Hoffman was walking up and down smoking a Bohemian-looking pipe. “There is only one item, Miss St. John, in all the twenty-five miles between the mouth of the river and Jacksonville,” he said, pausing a moment near the bench where Sara and I sat as usual together. “That headland opposite is St. Johns Bluff, the site of old Fort Caroline, where, in 1564, a colony of French Huguenots established themselves, and one year later were massacred, men, women, and children, by the cut-throat Menendez, who took the trouble to justify his deed by an inscription hung up over the bodies of his victims, ‘No por Franceses, sino por Luteranos’ – ‘Not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans.’ It is a comfort to the unregenerate mind to know that three years later a Frenchman sailed over and took his turn at a massacre, politely putting up a second inscription, ‘Not as Spaniards, but as traitors, thieves, and murderers.’ ”

“That was certainly poetic justice,” I said. “Who would imagine that such a drama had been enacted on that innocent hillside? What terrible days they were!”

“Terrible, perhaps, but at least far more earnest as well as more picturesque than our commonplace era,” said Sara, with her indifferent air. She was generally either indifferent or defiant, and Aunt Diana regarded her with disfavor as “a young person who wrote for the magazines.” Sara was twenty-eight years old, a woman with pale cheeks, weary eyes, a slight frown on her forehead, clear-cut features, and a quantity of pale golden hair drawn rigidly back and braided close around the head with small regard for fashion’s changes. I had met her in a city boarding-house, and, liking her in spite of herself, we grew into friendship; and although her proud independence would accept nothing from me save liking, I was sometimes able to persuade her into a journey, which she always enjoyed notwithstanding the inevitable descriptive article which she declared lurked behind every bush and waved a banner of proof-sheets at her from every sunshiny hill.

At Jacksonville the St. Johns bends to the south on its long course through the chain of lakes and swamps that leads to the mysterious Okeechobee land, a terra, or rather aqua incognita, given over to alligators and unending lies. The last phrase was added by Miss Sharp, who laboriously wrote down the Okeechobee stories current on the St. Johns, about buried cities, ruins of temples on islands, rusty convent bells, and the like, only to have them all demolished by the stern researches of the Professor. The Professor was not romantic.

“A buried city on the brim
Of Okeechobee was to him
A lie, and nothing more!”

We found Jacksonville a thriving, uninteresting brick-and-mortar town, with two large hotels, from whence issued other tourists and invalids, with whom we sailed up the river as far as Enterprise, and then on a smaller steamer up the wild, beautiful Ocklawaha, coming back down the St. Johns again as far as Tocoi, where, with the clear consciences of tourists who have seen every thing on the river, we took the mule train across the fifteen miles to the sea, arriving toward sunset at the shed and bonfire which form the railroad dépôt of St. Augustine. This shed has never been seen open. What it contains no one knows; but it has a platform where passengers are allowed to stand before their turn comes to climb into the omnibus. The bonfire is lighted by the waiting darkies as a protection against the evening damps. But they builded better than they knew, those innocent contrabands; their blazing fire only mildly typifies the hilarious joy of the Ancient City over the coming of its annual victim, the gold-bearing Northern tourist.

“But where is the town?” demanded Aunt Diana.

“ ‘Cross de ribber, mistis. De omnibuster waitin’,” replied a colored official, armed with a bugle. John Hoffman, having given directions as to his trunks, started off on foot through the thicket, with an evening cigar for company. Aunt Diana, however, never allowed desertion from her camp, whether of regulars or volunteers. She had her eye upon Mokes; she knew he was safe; so she called after the retreating figure, “Mr. Hoffman! Mr. Hoffman! We shall not know where to go without you.”

“St. Augustine Hotel,” replied Hoffman, over his shoulder.

“But you?”

“Oh, I never ride in that omnibus;” and the tall figure disappeared among the trees. He was gone; but Mokes remained, eyes and all. Mokes had large eyes; in fact very large, and pale green; but his fortune was large also, and Aunt Diana had a prophetic soul. Was not Iris her dear sister’s child? So she marshaled us into the omnibus, which started off across the thicket, through the ever-present and never-mended mud hole, and out into a straight road leading toward the town through the deep white sand, which, logged over with the red legs of the saw-palmetto, forms the cheerful soil of Eastern Florida. The road was built on a causeway over a river and its attendant salt marshes; on the east side we could see two flags and the two spires of the city rising above the green.

“What river is this?” asked Aunt Diana, as we rolled over a red bridge.

“The San Sebastian,” replied Miss Sharp, reading slowly from her guide-book in the fading light. “ ‘After three hours and one-half of this torture the exhausted tourist finds himself at the San Sebastian River, where a miserable ferry conveys him, more dead than alive, to the city of St. Augustine.’ ”

“But here is no ferry,” I said.

“The ‘exhausted tourist,’ however, is here,” observed Sara, wearily.

“The guide-book is at least so far correct that we may reasonably conclude this to be the St. Sebastian – so called, I presume, from the mythical saint of that name,” remarked the Professor, peering out over his spectacles.

“Allow me,” said Miss Sharp, eagerly producing a second small volume from her basket. “This saint was, I believe, thrown into a well – no, that isn’t it. He was cast into a dungeon, and rescued by – by flying dragons – ”

“Oh no, Miss Sharp,” said Iris, as the baffled governess wrestled with the fine print. “Sebastian was the one noted for his arrows; don’t you remember the picture in my hand-book?”

Leaving the causeway, the omnibus entered the town through a gate of foliage, great pride-of-India-trees mingling their branches over the street for some distance, forming a green arched way whose vista made beautiful the entrance to the Ancient City, like the shaded pathway that led to the lovely land of Beulah in the old pictures of Pilgrim’s Progress. On each side we could see a residence back among the trees – one of stone, large and massive, with an orange grove behind, the golden fruit gleaming through the glossy foliage, and protected by a picturesque hedge of Spanish-bayonets; the other a wide house surrounded by piazzas overhung with ivy and honeysuckle, a garden filled with roses and every variety of flower, gray moss drooping from the trees at the gate, and a roof painted in broad stripes which conveyed a charming suggestion of coolness, as though it were no roof at all, but only a fresh linen awning over the whole, suited to the tropical climate. Sara said this, and added that she was sure there were hammocks there too, hanging somewhere in shady places.

“Really, very meritorious,” remarked Aunt Diana, inspecting the houses through her glasses, and bestowing upon them, as it were, her metropolitan benediction.

In the mean while the colored official was gayly sounding his bugle, and our omnibus rolled into the heart of the city – a small square, adorned with a monument. We noticed the upturned faces of the people as we passed; they were all counting. “One, two, three – only seven in all,” said a young girl, with the beautiful hopeless hectic on her cheek. “One, two – seven, only seven,” said a gentleman leaning on the railing near the post-office, with the weary invalid attitude we knew so well, having seen it all along the St. Johns. We learned afterward that one of the daily occupations of the invalids of St. Augustine is to watch this omnibus come in, and count the passengers, invariably announcing the number with a triumphant “only,” as much as to say, “Aha! old town!” thus avenging themselves for their enforced stay. It makes no difference how many come; the number may be up in the hundreds, but still the invalids bring out their “only,” as though they had confidently expected thousands.

“Oh, the water, the blue water!” cried Iris, as we turned down toward the harbor. “Shall I not sail upon you, water? Yea, many a time will I!”

“Are you fond of aquatic excursions, Mr. Mokes?” inquired Aunt Diana, taking out her vinaigrette. “What an overpowering marshy odor!”

“Oh, the dear salt, the delicious salt breath of the sea!” murmured Sara, leaning out with a tinge of color in her cheeks.

No, Mokes was not fond of aquatic excursions in the sort of craft they had about here: if he had his yacht, now!

“Voilà,” exclaimed Iris, “an officer! ‘Ah, ah, que j’aime un militaire, j’aime un militaire, j’aime un – ’ ”

“Iris,” interrupted Aunt Di, “pray do not sing here in the street.”

“Oh, aunt, you stopped me right on the top note,” said Iris, glancing down the street after the uniform.

Arrived at the hotel, Aunt Diana began inspecting rooms. Sara wished to go to one of the boarding-houses, and John Hoffman, who met us on the piazza, proposed his. “I have staid there several times,” he said. “The Sabre-boy waits on the table, and a wild crane lives in the back-yard.”

“The crane, by all means,” said Sara, gathering together her possessions. I preferred to be with Sara; so the three of us left the hotel for Hospital Street, passing on our way Artillery Lane, both names belonging to the British occupancy of the venerable little city.

“This is the Plaza,” said John, as we crossed the little square; “the monument was erected in 1812, in honor of the adoption of a Spanish constitution. The Spanish constitution, as might have been expected, died young; but St. Augustine, unwilling to lose its only ornament for any such small matter as a revolution away over in Spain, compromised by taking out the inscribed tablets and keeping the monument. They have since been restored as curiosities. Castelar ought to come over and see them.”

The house on Hospital Street was a large white mansion, built of coquina, with a peaked roof and overhanging balcony. We knocked, and a tall colored youth opened the door.

“The ‘Sabre,’ ” said John, gravely introducing him.

“Why ‘Sabre?’ ” I said, as we waited for our hostess in the pleasant parlor, adorned with gray moss and tufted grasses; “to what language does the word belong?”