Читать книгу The Tenants: An Episode of the '80s - Mary S. Watts - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Herewith began another volume in the saga of the old Gwynne house. After nearly fifty years of Gwynnes, it must now pass to other ownership. The thing happens every day, and should be no great tragedy; few Americans are born and live and die in the same house, and a building of any sort rarely remains the property of one family for more than a generation. But the Gwynnes, one and all, mourned aloud and refused to be comforted. Governor Gwynne's house, Uncle Samuel's house, the house that great man planned and built, whose hospitalities had been enjoyed by the very best and highest in the land! Why, the State ought to buy that house! The State was of a different opinion, although the house was offered at a ridiculously low price, not more than twice what it was worth. None of the Gwynnes, it appeared, could afford to buy it in, or even rent it, the expense of living there was so terrifying. At that distance from town, one must keep a horse and carriage, the street-cars being so far away; the care of the park and garden required one man's whole time; and there was the huge old house itself. It had at least sixteen rooms, and with its high ceilings, and long rambling hallways, took as much coal to heat it in our winters as three ordinary houses. Besides, it had—ahem—undeniably run down somewhat during poor Harriet's administration, and was in need of costly repairs. No, alack and alas! the house must be sold or leased—dreadful profanation! The furniture was at last cleared out; the Governor's portrait went down to the State-house, and you may see him there at this moment, in line with all the rest of the governors, but in a rather obscure corner—such is the notorious ingratitude of republics. All the Gwynne establishments in town blossomed out with relics, brass andirons, branch candlesticks, horse-hair sofas—people confided to one another that, on the whole, Mrs. Horace Gwynne had made a pretty fair division; she herself sternly declined to take anything but the alabaster clock in the south parlour. That mausoleum-looking engine now ticks out the time from the middle of a charming white wood mantel in her eldest son's "colonial" residence. It long since ticked out eternity for Mrs. Gwynne, as for some of the other friends we met in the last chapter. The Armenians finally accomplished the dismantling of the attic and cellar; the contents, Gwynne Peters once told me, brought just seventy-two dollars. "That was a little less than four dollars all around," he said with a grin. "I spent my four on my first box of cigars, and got awfully sick on the very first one I tried to smoke, I remember—as if it were for a judgment on me!" He went back to college. Old Hannah went, whimpering, to live in the country with a married niece. The windows were boarded up, the old iron gates chained across; and, for a while, an advertisement appeared in our papers, and, I believe, in some of the big New York and Chicago ones: "FOR SALE OR LEASE—Commodious mansion built by the late Governor Gwynne, delightfully situated in the suburbs, within easy walking-distance of two lines of cars.[3] Large grounds, fruit and shade trees, stable, dairy, etc. House of twenty rooms in perfect order with all modern improvements. Suitable for a young ladies' seminary or summer-hotel. For further particulars address Virgil H. Templeton, Agt. for the Gwynne Estate."

There is a peculiar fascination in these artless notices; one may read whole columns of such Paradises awaiting tenants, every morning in the journals. They are so rich in promise, so fertile in pleasant suggestion, it seems as if a person might spend a happy lifetime in the simple pursuit of renting and moving into them one after another. But, strange to say, for many months Mr. Virgil H. Templeton piped and nobody would dance! The causes of both health and education suffered serious neglect; nobody showed the least anxiety to teach young ladies in the commodious mansion built by the late Governor Gwynne; nobody wanted to establish a summer-resort within easy walking-distance of two lines of cars. Once in a while someone would come in, get the keys, and go out to inspect the place; but invariably "they laughed as they rode away," like the false knight in the ballad. It is possible that the disadvantages connected with living in it which the family had noticed, were, by some strange chance, apparent to would-be tenants also. Templeton did his best; he placarded the brick walls of the park; he changed and re-worded his advertisements; he even lowered the terms and promised repairs! All these measures were looked upon with strong disfavour by the family; and it is safe to say that no real-estate dealer before or since has ever come in for the share of bullying and badgering that that well-meaning man received. The two old Misses Gwynne, Arthur's daughters, put on their two old bonnets, and went down to Judge Lewis' office, where the unfortunate agent had a desk, declaiming loudly against the vulgarity of advertising their noble ancestral residence in the common papers where every ragamuffin might read their names shamelessly printed. "Want me to go 'round and whisper it to everybody, I s'pose," said Templeton in a rage, when they had left. He was an excitable little man. Mrs. Horace Gwynne visited him with the information that she, for one, would never consent to the house being rented for less than two hundred. "Cents or dollars, ma'am?" asked Templeton politely sarcastic. "You're quite as likely to get one as the other." Steven Gwynne, as "queer" a body as one commonly sees at large without a keeper—he was a Southern sympathiser, and never cut his hair or beard after the fall of Vicksburg—ambushed Templeton in Judge Lewis' own room, to tell him roundly that what was good enough for Governor Gwynne was good enough for any damned upstart that wanted to rent his house, and that not one square inch of new wall-paper should go on those walls, so help him, if he, Steven Gwynne, had to camp on the doorstep with a shot-gun! The judge witnessed these passages-at-arms with mingled annoyance and amusement; it was a nuisance of course, he said; he was minded to evict Templeton a dozen times—but how it did enliven the dull legal round! The Gwynnes and their agent furnished that jolly and kind-hearted jurist with material for some of the best after-dinner stories he ever told. "By George," he used to say, "it got so that whenever one of my clerks came in and found a Gwynne lying in wait for Templeton and breathing fire and slaughter, he'd post somebody in the hall, and when Templeton came along: 'Hey, go slow, Temp., the enemy's poisoned the well!' and Templeton would shin for the street so fast you could play checkers on his coat-tail!"

The fact is the poor old house was going to rack and ruin as rapidly as so solid and substantial a structure could go; the wonder was that Mrs. Peters had managed to get along at all in that comfortless monument to the Gwynne family-pride, but living there was probably a point of honour with her, that fantastic standard of honour, to which all the race of Gwynnes clung with a fanatic tenacity. No single member of the family could afford to spend any money on the house, and concerted action among fifteen or twenty Gwynne heirs was, as their agent speedily found out, next to an impossibility. The only thing about which they were in entire concord was the glory past, present, and to come of their name; they saw desecration in laying hands upon the torn and mildewed wall-paper, the blistered varnish, the leaking roofs of Uncle Samuel's shrine. It would have taken twelve or fifteen hundred dollars to put the place in order, at the least; and indeed as time went on, it promised to take more. The viewless forces of destruction invade an empty house, and lay it waste like a devastating army. "If they would just let me shingle the roof anyhow," said Templeton in despair. "But the only one of 'em all that has any sense is that young Peters fellow—not the queer one, you know, the one that's on the ranch in New Mexico, but that other, that nice tall red-haired boy. Trouble is, he's a minor. You just wait a couple of years or so till he's twenty-one and through college, and I'll bet he makes 'em all stand 'round!"

The stout, excitable little man displayed more penetration than one would have supposed he possessed. Gwynne did make them stand 'round. When he came home on his vacations, you might see him prowling about the place with a delegation of unwilling relatives, arguing, explaining, persuading. Being a Gwynne himself, the boy knew how to get at his kin, upon what side to take them without offence. There was very little boyishness about his weary, anxious, gently humorous face, and the family all knew, that, young as he was, he already had one grave and bitter care. Perhaps that made them respect him; there are some people that never grow up, and, conversely, there are some who never seem to have any youth. When Gwynne came home, the estate's property all at once took on a smiling look of change. Sidewalks were mended and shutters painted; the grass was cut in the park and the rubbish cleared away; he even got them to consent to putting a furnace in the house! Templeton went about in jubilant relief at having someone to share his responsibilities. "Told you so! That boy has a head! All Peters and mighty little Gwynne, that's what he is!"

In spite of their efforts, however, the house, as Templeton pointed out with a solemn wagging of the head, "was not a paying proposition." Going away to boarding-school at this time with Kitty Oldham and others of about our age, we heard and saw less and less of it. Nobody of our acquaintance would risk the experiment of living in it; it was only strangers who fitfully came and went as tenants of the old Gwynne house. Sometimes there would be curtains at the windows, and smoke hanging from the chimneys; on our next return it would be again shut and deserted. Those people? Oh, yes, they were in some railroad position, and they've been moved to Indianapolis. No, no one called on them, it's so hard to get out there, you know, and they were only here a few months. Once the tenants scuttled out in a dreadful state of scare, declaring that Arthur Gwynne's ghost came down and paraded the ballroom o' nights, with his head on one side, and the rag of sheet dangling from his twisted neck! "I do hope poor Cousin Eleanor and Cousin Mollie won't hear that story," said Gwynne, in concern, and painstakingly invented and retailed to them another excuse for the sudden cessation of rent. Once, in the summer vacation, the Board of Lady Managers of the Home for Incurables gave a lawn-party on the grounds for the benefit of their charity. There were booths set up and Japanese lanterns swinging under the beeches, and a deal of noise beneath Caroline Gwynne's windows where we children had been obliged to go so sedately in the old days. People who had no carriages came in long weary procession from the Lexington and Amherst Street cars—within easy walking-distance—bearing their contributions of bowls of salad and chocolate-cakes shrouded in their oldest napkins. The house was opened, and the ladies of the committee heated coffee on the crippled old built-in range in Hannah's kitchen. They every one agreed in buzzing whispers that the place was a perfect rattle-trap, and they could not imagine how any people could move out leaving a house so dirty as the last inmates had done. The young men gaily took turns drawing water from the ancient clanking pump outside the kitchen-door, and bringing in armfuls of firewood. Children raced and romped with a thunderous uproar in the big echoing rooms. In the evening there was a curtain rigged between the Parthenon pillars, and a play was given in which Teddy Johns appeared and sang the kind of topical song popular in those days, of which I remember one verse: