Weymer Jay Mills

“ Eleanor Forman was of a type which has always appealed to the poets. Her features were regular, her eyes blue and languishing, and her hair the color of pale sunshine. So fair and lasting was her complexion that, as an old lady, a Freehold gallant compared it to "the lilies and garden pinks." In those long-dead Sabbaths Freneau and his boy [127] friends, home on vacations from the College of New Jersey, no doubt thought her a very attractive picture as she nestled by her mother's rich beflowered brocade, a tiny figure in white muslin and soft ribbons. ”

“ Liberty was a strange and beautiful goddess that those tattered, wearied men knew not, and it was always the memory of the sweetheart's face that spurred them over rock-bound roads filled with multitudinous obstacles in quest [142] of the shadowy creature. When they fell by the wayside or in the trenches, the look of peace on their white faces was not her doing, but the tender vows and the last kisses of the girls they had left behind them.
Soon came peace, and on its trail the last meeting of the lovers in the Forman garden. ”

“ Forman Place, still standing close to the village of Freehold, what a place of memories it is! The tired, weather-beaten old building which the sunshine seems to desecrate was once one of the happiest of homes. Now, like some sleepy antique dame belated after a revelry, it waits despairingly by the turn of the road for Father Time and his band of winds to sweep it away. Broad-shouldered and broad-hearted Samuel Forman, with a rubicund visage made familiar by Hogarth, was an ideal host. ”

“ Fate is a hag old and blind, and Life is a song from a charmed lute.
Soon after his meeting with Nelly Forman, Freneau wrote his tragedy of "Major André," which was never presented before the footlights. It is not known whether he ever gave it to a printer, and only fragments of his manuscript are in existence to-day. A portion of it shows us the unfortunate André pleading for his life before a tribunal, and as we finger the time-stained paper, desecrated by the household accounts of later years, a tearful Eleanor rises up before us, listening to the impassioned reading of her poetic lover. ”

“ As he pictures West flying through the forest pursued by outlaws, but at last outwitting them, her eyes stray to the young painter, who is talking with her sister. She views him with mingled emotions. Brave and valiant, he dashes before her on the charger of courage over the rough and rocky places of life. And then the face of Isaac Hunt comes to her mind in the guise of a handsome weakling. Her foolish infatuation for him is flickering and dying. What has he ever done like this man who has risen from a humble environment to a figure of consequence through the force of his own nature? ”

“ Looking back over the years to-day, he appears to us a paragon. That the "Cher Jean" of that humble home circle at Litchfield should be described by all his faithful biographers in most glowing colors is singular proof that he could not have fallen far short of their eulogiums. Of unusual personal beauty, a poet, artist, linguist, and musician, he lives for us again the handsome limner the belle of Long Island waved to on an early summer's day.
The love-affairs of Major André have always created as much discussion as the justice of his lamented fate. ”

“ AN OLD VIEW OF STATEN ISLAND, ABOUT 1830
At nightfall the mail-coach often drove up before the door with a load of happy guests and bore others away. Those were the days when social intercourse was a feature of tavern life. "Good-by! Good-by!" a dozen feminine voices would call as the gay party of Southerners departed on their long journey to Baltimore. Toasts of Calverts and St. Marys, tears and kisses and fluttering handkerchiefs before the coach rumbled past the little red general store into the darkness. ”

“ A great red brick mansion in Chambers Street, guarded by two sentinel-like elm-trees and a tall iron fence; a sidewalk filled with the fashionables of Gotham starting for the afternoon Battery promenade; and up behind the eye-like panes of one of the haughty, staring windows a maiden dreaming over her pen. There is the picture. A demure little country Phyllis, visiting her august city relatives for the first time, has found herself in two strange worlds—fashion and love. In the extract taken from her letter written to a home confidante is the key to a forgotten romance of old New York. Love! ”

“ Over the memoried voices of violins would come the picture of a score of cavaliers bending low to the belle from a sister isle, and often the face of a boy would haunt her,—a boy more dashing and gayer than all the others. They were in the lantern-hung Watson garden the night the nephew of the old Scotch painter gave a fête when his penurious uncle was away at Woodbridge, and youthful Amboy entered into the frolic with zest. ”

“ From the day of their marriage, when Freneau is recorded as having compared his blushing bride to Fielding's "Amelia," the ideal characterization of womanhood, until one wintry dawn forty-five years later, when a trembling, aged Eleanor bent over the lifeless body of her lover lulled to sleep in a snow-drift, no discordant note entered the sweet harmony of their lives. When shadows dimmed their pathway, they clung [155] closer to each other. Even death could not separate them. ”

“ Although the British officers made New York a theatre of amusement in which the candles never flickered or died out for a space of many months, the dashing André could not have found it as agreeable a spot as Philadelphia. In that city he planned the famous Meschianza in honor of jovial Sir William Howe, and was acclaimed the hero of the hour. Fame to him seems to have [219] been an instinctive passion, and although of a family humbler than most of those of his scarlet-coated compatriots, he rose like a meteor above the shackles of environment and became the favorite of his regiment. ”

“ André stopped speaking. In their midst stood Sally, pale and with anguish in her eyes. Miss Townsend was near her, wringing her hands.
"Sirs," the girl said, "you have been here nigh a month, and we have given you of our best, hiding naught, although you are not of our color." Her voice was breaking. "I," she continued, "have worked for you, amused you, laughed for you, and now I want my pay. You must give me an innocent man's life. The one you have condemned to death is not a spy. ”

“ Freneau to pass the night with his friends before journeying to Monmouth, there was always great excitement in the town. Mrs. Kearny's black Rebecca was sent forth in haste to inform the chosen few of the neighborhood that their leader bade them to her drawing-room. The seven romping Kearny boys were hurried up to the attic to bed, the furniture rearranged, and Madam Scribblerus, as her world called her, slipped on her brocade gown to be in readiness for the battle of wits sure to ensue. A happy woman was this quaint personage when footfalls began to sound on the gallery steps. ”

“ Out on the gallery, in the depths of the old cushioned draught chair, an expectant figure always sat waiting for the near approach of those eager, clattering feet. With the boy's help he rises tremblingly, and we see him there in the sunlight,—a slight, emaciated old man in a Continental blue coat, a thin, worn face which has lost all the beauty of his famous likeness given to the world by Stuart's brush, but eyes still lustrous and ofttimes full of fire. ”

“ No doubt, after Thomas crept down to the servants' quarters to bed and the hall was deserted, they often stole away from the company, opened the massive mahogany door, and gazed off over the patch of garden into the night. Only the garden knew of their first kisses,—the nesting birds and the drowsy flowers. They always seem to keep an eye open for human lovers. The robins and the bluebirds chirp sadly, and the flowers give forth fragrant sighs just as [77] if they knew that the course of "true love never runs smooth." ”

“ A north wind sighed among the wraiths of summer in the garden, a harbinger that the dawn would be fresh and clear.
"I shall never marry any one else," she told him. "My window faces the bend of the road, and there I shall place a candle every night to light your steps when they bring you back to me. ”

“ Life seemed an intangible mystery with labyrinths of intricacies. She had found a lover strangely like Isaac Hunt in appearance, and yet so different. As she mounted the steps of her four-poster a little later she almost pitied her niece Mary.
Philadelphia was a gossipy place in the days before the Revolution, and it soon became noised abroad that the young limner West was paying court to Betsey Shewell. The Bickleys had retired to Penn Rhyn, but the maiden still stayed on at her brother Shewell's abode. ”

“ Probably there is no [36] mansion in Pennsylvania that has had a more interesting history than this pile erected early in the eighteenth century by a pompous Bickley from Buckinghamshire. On the estate is the family tomb guarding the dust of many generations of Bickleys—young Bickleys who faded before their perfect bloom, old Bickleys who were glad enough to lay down the thread of life and rest their tired bones on that moss-grown bank. A long procession of men and women bearing a name that they all were proud of, with but one exception. ”

“ Every great landowner possessed a small army of slaves, and the wheels of life ran smoothly. Heavy silver flagons were on the oaken sideboards, old port and sherry in Mammy Dinah's [73] cellaret, and a strong box overflowing with gold pieces was secreted somewhere behind the Spectators on the library shelves. On the yellow road creeping out from the court-house stood half a hundred happy Jersey homes—Battle Hill, Violet Bank, Cincinnati Hall, Forman Place, Mount Pleasant Hall, Wassung Vale, Shipley, Harmony Hall, Haven Home, Lover's Port. ”

“ The night-shutters before the windows of the Franklin parlor are open, for it is the summer time. About the wide, plain room with its few embellishments the guests are grouped in a circle. The host seems to be in a merry mood, and is strumming away on the famous guitar, a knowledge of which he was always ready to impart to his intimate female acquaintances. The ever-laughing Sarah, who seldom sighed for more than the days brought to her, is in her element. ”

“ Among the guests stopping at the hotel during Burr's last days there was a young man of twenty-four by the name of Olando Buel, from New Preston in Connecticut. The quizzical, genial Olando in his little shop, cutting posies and weeping willows [115] on tombstones or making tall mahogany clocks with wonderful embellishments, still lives in the minds of many of the islanders. In God's acres, which lie north and south and east and west over this isle of the great State of New York, Olando's white blooms cover many and many a green mound. ”

“ Billop. She was leaving her girlhood far behind in her walk with Time. Each year was a repetition of the one past. The plantation of one thousand five hundred acres was a little world of its own, and she rarely went beyond its gates. Most of her working hours she spent in her garden, and under her fostering care it became a spot of loveliness. In the circles of roses flanked by humbler flowers and the tall line of lilies that crept like a stately band of pure-souled fairy sentinels down to the riverside she planted some of her own fragrant heart. ”

“ Later in the day André sat at the feet of Sally Townsend, as she shelled peas in a grotto at the back of the house. Almost up to the entrance of the spot which she herself had planned in imitation of a Ranleagh grotto marched an army of radiant blooms. Over their fragrant faces hovered a band of butterflies, and now and then a brigand bee droned of his thefts to a heedless world. Every Simcoe redcoat was away drilling in a distant field. The house seemed like some great white bird asleep in the sun. The man and the girl under the cool arch of [229] cedar boughs were facing each other. ”

“ Palais Royal made them long for "Armid" and "Alcestio," there was always a dame to finger a spinet. Old citizens of the past generation used to tell of window-panes in the Vernon mansion covered with the names of Newport's femininity. With the same spirit which later led their compatriots to jest and dance amid the grim shadows of the Conceirgerie, they made the best of a changed life. ”

“ The noise of the arrival soon brought the whole of the Bickley household to the door.
"'Tis an honor, sir, to see you here," Abram Bickley said, as he helped Benjamin Franklin from his seat.
"There is naught of an honor about it," Sarah Franklin whispered mockingly in Betsey Shewell's ear. "We have come for a play; but keep it to thyself," she added, [46] as if afraid of her words. Then she took off her long black mitts and twirled them in the other's face.
"Won't thee make a sweet actor lady," she said, to the other girl's wonderment, as they walked together. ”

“ Their little beech-tree in the garden seemed to be aware of impending disaster, and the dreary sighing of its leaves suddenly fell upon the two by the fire. The night was nearly dead.
"Perhaps, after all, Jane, we have been premature with our worrying and there is nothing between them," the weary father said. "I will see Nathaniel in the morning. [85] Now go to bed, dear; you know to-morrow is your ball, and that will bring you many duties."
The mystical to-morrow. Like some wan and beggared guest, it tapped on the panes of the great Moore mansion. ”

“ Although she was a lover of nature, she too could have said with Mr. Robinson, the father of Mrs. Montagu, that living in the country was like sleeping with one's eyes open. Each breath of the world beyond Amboy brought new life to her.
We can picture to ourselves the evening. About the oddly-shaped room, on hard-seated, fiddle-backed chairs, sits Pinderina's little court. By the wide fireplace on the settle old Judge Nevill, the editor of the first American magazine, is blinking at the embers. Mr. Freneau has finished telling some of his recent adventures in New York City. ”

“ Tommy, the lad who kept the garden path clean for the soft crinolines that caressed it in the late [117] afternoon and early evening, never neglected an opportunity to leave the slouching weeds for the excitement of running up the steep steps and hammering the heavy knocker, calling out in the shrill trumpet tones of youth, "Here's the chaise for Colonel Burr! Here's the chaise." The buxom calico-clad figure of one of the Misses Winant would open the door, and through the hall and up the narrow winding staircase would rush the boy. ”