The Belle of Bowling Green
“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?”
“There is always Jose Westervelt.”
“He will not do at all. He is too troublesome. He thinks I ought not to
dance with any one but him; actually he objects to my speaking to some
people, or even looking at them. It is too uncomfortable. I do not like
tyranny--no American girl does.”
“So you rebelled. But then, do you expect to catch fish without wetting
yourself?”
“It has been done.” She was putting on her grandmother’s feet the cloth
slippers she usually wore in the house, and as she rose she perceived
with a smile the delicious odour of the roasted pigeons which a negro
slave was just bringing to the table.
“I told Commenia to roast them, grandmother. I knew you would want
something nice when you got back.”
“Before the fire did she roast them?”
“Yes--on skewers, and basted them with fresh butter. I found enough peas
on the vines, and I pulled and shelled them myself, for it was next to
impossible to keep the blacks off the streets.”
“Thank you, dear one.”
“I have had such a happy year, grandmother, and now, I suppose, all our
gaieties will be ended.”
“Come, come, there will be more gaieties than ever. I am sure that the
Battery will be put in fighting trim; then the Bowling Green, with
soldiers, will be alive. What will follow? Drills and parades, and what
not; and in all the houses round about the Green the women will make
idols of the men in uniform. And to be sure they will show their
adoration by meat offerings and drink offerings; ceremonies, Annette,
which generally end in dancing and love-making.”
“You notice everything, grandmother.”
“I have been young and now I am old; but love never gets a day older.
What love was in the beginning, he is now, and ever shall be. These
pigeons are very good. You said you had some at the Radcliffes’
yesterday--what kind of a dinner did they give?”
“It was a good dinner, but not a dinner to be asked out to; you and I
often have a better one--and there was no dancing, only cards and
games--and Jose Westervelt.”
“Poor Jose!”
“Grandmother, he is so magisterial. He sets up his opinions as if they
were a golden image; and I am not the girl to fall down before them.”
“He is a distinguished mathematician already.”
“And looks it: besides he knows no more of dancing than a Hindoo knows
of skating. Also, since he came back from England, he is so cold and
positive in his views, and so stiff and rigid in his London-made
clothes, that I cannot endure him. Did you see Sapphira, grandmother?”
“Yes. With some hair work she was busy--a finger ring, or brooch or some
such trifle. There will be other work soon, I think. In the last war we
had to make all our own clothing and most of our household necessities.
The last war! Oh, Annette, dear one, I lost everything in the last war!”
“But you are now a rich woman, grandmother.”
“I mean not that. I lost your grandfather; he was everything to me.
There was money, yes; and there was property; but all in a bad way then.
Now; well, it is a little different.”
“However did you manage?”
“I worked and hoped and helped myself and others, and left the rest to
God. While I slept He made things to grow and prosper. And when this war
is over we shall have settled our standing among the nations beyond all
dispute, and New York will stride forward as if she wore the
seven-leagued boots.”
“Then, grandmother, you will build a fine house past Trinity Church--a
good deal past it--perhaps half a mile, or even a mile, and we shall
have a carriage of our own and be among the quality.”
“I shall never leave this house, Annette. But I tell you, my dear
one--you shall go to Washington every season. If your uncle and aunt
Bloommaert go there, that will be sufficient; if not, I have friends who
will see to it. Sapphira grows wonderfully handsome.”
“And I, grandmother?”
“You have your own beauty. You need not to envy any one. Now I am tired
and I will go to my room. I want to take some better counsel than my
own.”
“May I not go to see Sapphira, grandmother? I want to see her very
much.”
“You may not go to-day. Listen; the constant tramp of feet and the noise
of men shouting and gathering grows louder. Stay in your home.”
“It is very tiresome! Men are always quarrelling about something. What
is the use of governments if they can’t prevent war? Any one can settle
a quarrel by fighting over it. I do not see what good fighting does. The
drums parading round will give us headaches, and the men will go
swaggering from one day to another after them. I am in a passion at
President Madison--just too when summer is here, and we were going to
the Springs, and I was sure to have had an enchanting time.”
“Thou little good-for-nothing! Hold thy foolish tongue! If our men are
going to fight it is for thy liberty and thy honour and thy happiness.
Sit still an hour and think of that.”
She shut the door when she had spoken these words, and then went, a
little wearily, upstairs; but if any one had seen her half an hour
afterwards sitting with closed eyes and clasped hands asleep in the
large chair that stood by her bedside, they would have said, “She has
been satisfied.” For though she looked much older when asleep, her face