Twice-told tales
the old governors are fit mourners at its funeral.”
With these words Colonel Joliffe threw on his cloak, and, drawing his
granddaughter’s arm within his own, retired from the last festival that
a British ruler ever held in the old province of Massachusetts Bay. It
was supposed that the colonel and the young lady possessed some secret
intelligence in regard to the mysterious pageant of that night. However
this might be, such knowledge has never become general. The actors in
the scene have vanished into deeper obscurity than even that wild
Indian hand who scattered the cargoes of the tea-ships on the waves and
gained a place in history, yet left no names. But superstition, among
other legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale that on the
anniversary night of Britain’s discomfiture the ghosts of the ancient
governors of Massachusetts still glide through the portal of the
Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in a military
cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping his
iron-shod boots upon the broad freestone steps with a semblance of
feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp.
When the truth-telling accents of the elderly gentleman were hushed, I
drew a long breath and looked round the room, striving with the best
energy of my imagination to throw a tinge of romance and historic
grandeur over the realities of the scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a
scent of cigar-smoke, clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way
of visible emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale.
Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were woefully disturbed by the rattling
of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey-punch which Mr. Thomas Waite was
mingling for a customer. Nor did it add to the picturesque appearance
of the panelled walls that the slate of the Brookline stage was
suspended against them, instead of the armorial escutcheon of some
far-descended governor. A stage-driver sat at one of the windows
reading a penny paper of the day—the Boston _Times_—and presenting a
figure which could nowise be brought into any picture of “Times in
Boston” seventy or a hundred years ago. On the window-seat lay a bundle
neatly done up in brown paper, the direction of which I had the idle
curiosity to read: “MISS SUSAN HUGGINS, at the PROVINCE HOUSE.” A
pretty chambermaid, no doubt. In truth, it is desperately hard work
when we attempt to throw the spell of hoar antiquity over localities
with which the living world and the day that is passing over us have
aught to do. Yet, as I glanced at the stately staircase down which the
procession of the old governors had descended, and as I emerged through
the venerable portal whence their figures had preceded me, it gladdened
me to be conscious of a thrill of awe. Then, diving through the narrow
archway, a few strides transported me into the densest throng of
Washington street.
II.
EDWARD RANDOLPH’S PORTRAIT
The old legendary guest of the Province House abode in my remembrance
from midsummer till January. One idle evening last winter, confident
that he would be found in the snuggest corner of the bar-room, I
resolved to pay him another visit, hoping to deserve well of my country
by snatching from oblivion some else unheard-of fact of history. The
night was chill and raw, and rendered boisterous by almost a gale of
wind which whistled along Washington street, causing the gaslights to
flare and flicker within the lamps.
As I hurried onward my fancy was busy with a comparison between the
present aspect of the street and that which it probably wore when the
British governors inhabited the mansion whither I was now going. Brick
edifices in those times were few till a succession of destructive fires
had swept, and swept again, the wooden dwellings and warehouses from
the most populous quarters of the town. The buildings stood insulated
and independent, not, as now, merging their separate existences into
connected ranges with a front of tiresome identity, but each possessing
features of its own, as if the owner’s individual taste had shaped it,
and the whole presenting a picturesque irregularity the absence of
which is hardly compensated by any beauties of our modern architecture.
Such a scene, dimly vanishing from the eye by the ray of here and there
a tallow candle glimmering through the small panes of scattered
windows, would form a sombre contrast to the street as I beheld it with
the gaslights blazing from corner to corner, flaming within the shops
and throwing a noonday brightness through the huge plates of glass. But
the black, lowering sky, as I turned my eyes upward, wore, doubtless,
the same visage as when it frowned upon the ante-Revolutionary New
Englanders. The wintry blast had the same shriek that was familiar to
their ears. The Old South Church, too, still pointed its antique spire
into the darkness and was lost between earth and heaven, and, as I
passed, its clock, which had warned so many generations how transitory
was their lifetime, spoke heavily and slow the same unregarded moral to
myself. “Only seven o’clock!” thought I. “My old friend’s legends will
scarcely kill the hours ’twixt this and bedtime.”
Passing through the narrow arch, I crossed the courtyard, the confined
precincts of which were made visible by a lantern over the portal of
the Province House. On entering the bar-room, I found, as I expected,
the old tradition-monger seated by a special good fire of anthracite,
compelling clouds of smoke from a corpulent cigar. He recognized me
with evident pleasure, for my rare properties as a patient listener
invariably make me a favorite with elderly gentlemen and ladies of
narrative propensites. Drawing a chair to the fire, I desired mine host
to favor us with a glass apiece of whiskey-punch, which was speedily
prepared, steaming hot, with a slice of lemon at the bottom, a dark-red
stratum of port wine upon the surface and a sprinkling of nutmeg strewn
over all. As we touched our glasses together, my legendary friend made
himself known to me as Mr. Bela Tiffany, and I rejoiced at the oddity
of the name, because it gave his image and character a sort of
individuality in my conception. The old gentleman’s draught acted as a
solvent upon his memory, so that it overflowed with tales, traditions,
anecdotes of famous dead people and traits of ancient manners, some of
which were childish as a nurse’s lullaby, while others might have been
worth the notice of the grave historian. Nothing impressed me more than
a story of a black mysterious picture which used to hang in one of the
chambers of the Province House, directly above the room where we were
now sitting. The following is as correct a version of the fact as the
reader would be likely to obtain from any other source, although,
assuredly, it has a tinge of romance approaching to the marvellous.
In one of the apartments of the province-house there was long preserved
an ancient picture the frame of which was as black as ebony, and the
canvas itself so dark with age, damp and smoke that not a touch of the
painter’s art could be discerned. Time had thrown an impenetrable veil
over it and left to tradition and fable and conjecture to say what had
once been there portrayed. During the rule of many successive governors
it had hung, by prescriptive and undisputed right, over the mantel
piece of the same chamber, and it still kept its place when
Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson assumed the administration of the
province on the departure of Sir Francis Bernard.
The lieutenant-governor sat one afternoon resting his head against the
carved back of his stately arm-chair and gazing up thoughtfully at the
void blackness of the picture. It was scarcely a time for such inactive
musing, when affairs of the deepest moment required the ruler’s
decision; for within that very hour Hutchinson had received
intelligence of the arrival of a British fleet bringing three regiments
from Halifax to overawe the insubordination of the people. These troops
awaited his permission to occupy the fortress of Castle William and the
town itself, yet, instead of affixing his signature to an official
order, there sat the lieutenant-governor so carefully scrutinizing the
black waste of canvas that his demeanor attracted the notice of two
young persons who attended him. One, wearing a military dress of buff,
was his kinsman, Francis Lincoln, the provincial captain of Castle
William; the other, who sat on a low stool beside his chair, was Alice
Vane, his favorite niece. She was clad entirely in white—a pale,
ethereal creature who, though a native of New England, had been
educated abroad and seemed not merely a stranger from another clime,
but almost a being from another world. For several years, until left an
orphan, she had dwelt with her father in sunny Italy, and there had
acquired a taste and enthusiasm for sculpture and painting which she
found few opportunities of gratifying in the undecorated dwellings of
the colonial gentry. It was said that the early productions of her own
pencil exhibited no inferior genius, though perhaps the rude atmosphere
of New England had cramped her hand and dimmed the glowing colors of
her fancy. But, observing her uncle’s steadfast gaze, which appeared to
search through the mist of years to discover the subject of the
picture, her curiosity was excited.
“Is it known, my dear uncle,” inquired she, “what this old picture once
represented? Possibly, could it be made visible, it might prove a
masterpiece of some great artist; else why has it so long held such a
conspicuous place?”
As her uncle, contrary to his usual custom—for he was as attentive to
all the humors and caprices of Alice as if she had been his own
best-beloved child—did not immediately reply, the young captain of
Castle William took that office upon himself.
“This dark old square of canvas, my fair cousin,” said he, “has been an
heirloom in the province-house from time immemorial. As to the painter,
I can tell you nothing; but if half the stories told of it be true, not
one of the great Italian masters has ever produced so marvellous a
piece of work as that before you.”
Captain Lincoln proceeded to relate some of the strange fables and
fantasies which, as it was impossible to refute them by ocular
demonstration, had grown to be articles of popular belief in reference
to this old picture. One of the wildest, and at the same time the
best-accredited, accounts stated it to be an original and authentic
portrait of the evil one, taken at a witch-meeting near Salem, and that
its strong and terrible resemblance had been confirmed by several of
the confessing wizards and witches at their trial in open court. It was
likewise affirmed that a familiar spirit or demon abode behind the
blackness of the picture, and had shown himself at seasons of public
calamity to more than one of the royal governors. Shirley, for
instance, had beheld this ominous apparition on the eve of General
Abercrombie’s shameful and bloody defeat under the walls of
Ticonderoga. Many of the servants of the province-house had caught
glimpses of a visage frowning down upon them at morning or evening
twilight, or in the depths of night while raking up the fire that
glimmered on the hearth beneath, although, if any were, bold enough to
hold a torch before the picture, it would appear as black and
undistinguishable as ever. The oldest inhabitant of Boston recollected
that his father—in whose days the portrait had not wholly faded out of
sight—had once looked upon it, but would never suffer himself to be
questioned as to the face which was there represented. In connection
with such stories, it was remarkable that over the top of the frame
there were some ragged remnants of black silk, indicating that a veil