As we two children became slowly transformed into youths, the Valley with no less steadiness developed in activity, population, and wealth. Good roads were built; new settlements sprang up; the sense of being in the hollow of the hand of savagery1 wore off. Primitive2 conditions lapsed3, disappeared one by one. We came to smile at the uncouth4 dress and unshaven faces of the "bush-bauer" Palatines--once so familiar, now well nigh outlandish. Families from Connecticut and the Providence5 Plantations6 began to come in numbers, and their English tongue grew more and more to be the common language. People spoke7 now of the Winchester bushel, instead of the Schoharie spint and skipple. The bounty8 on wolves' heads went up to a pound sterling9. The number of gentlemen who shaved every day, wore ruffles10, and even wigs11 or powder on great occasions, and maintained hunting with hounds and horse-racing, increased yearly--so much so that some innocent people thought England itself could not offer more attractions.
There was much envy when John Johnson, now twenty-three years old, was sent on a visit to England, to learn how still better to play the gentleman--and even more when he came back a knight12, with splendid London clothes, and stories of what the King and the princes had said to him.
The Johnsons were a great family now, receiving visits from notable people all over the colony at their new hall, which Sir William had built on the hills back of his new Scotch13 settlement. Nothing could have better shown how powerful Sir William had become, and how much his favor was to be courted, than the fact that ladies of quality and strict propriety14, who fancied themselves very fine folk indeed, the De Lanceys and Phillipses and the like, would come visiting the widower15 baronet in his hall, and close their eyes to the presence there of Miss Molly and her half-breed children. Sir William's neighbors, indeed, overlooked this from their love for the man, and their reliance in his sense and strength. But the others, the aristocrats16, held their tongues from fear of his wrath17, and of his influence in London.
They never liked him entirely18; he in turn had so little regard for them and their pretensions19 that, when they came, he would suffer none of them to markedly avoid or affront20 the Brant squaw, whom indeed they had often to meet as an associate and equal. Yet this bold, independent, really great man, so shrewdly strong in his own attitude toward these gilded21 water-flies, was weak enough to rear his own son to be one of them, to value the baubles22 they valued, to view men and things through their painted spectacles--and thus to come to grief.
Two years after Johnson Hall was built, Mr. Stewart all at once decided23 that he too would have a new house; and before snow flew the handsome, spacious24 "Cedars," as it was called, proudly fronted the Valley highway. Of course it was not, in size, a rival of the Hall at Johnstown, but it none the less was among the half-dozen best houses in the Mohawk Valley, and continued so to be until John Johnson burned it to the ground fifteen years later. It stood in front of our old log structure, now turned over to the slaves. It was of two stories, with lofty and spacious rooms, and from the road it presented a noble appearance, now that the old stockade25 had given place to a wall of low, regular masonry26.
With this new residence came a prodigious27 change in our way of life. Daisy was barely twelve years old, but we already thought of her as the lady of the house, for whom nothing was too good. The walls were plastered, and stiff paper from Antwerp with great sprawling28 arabesques29, and figures of nymphs and fauns chasing one another up and down with ceaseless, fruitless persistency30, was hung upon them, at least in the larger rooms. The floors were laid smoothly31, each board lapping into the next by a then novel joiner's trick.
On the floor in Daisy's room there was a carpet, too, a rare and remarkable32 thing in those days, and also from the Netherlands. In this same chamber33, as well, were set up a bed of mahogany, cunningly carved and decorated, and a tall foreign cabinet of some rich dark wood, for linen34, frocks, and the like. Here, likewise, were two gilt35 cages from Paris, in which a heart-breaking succession of native birds drooped36 and died, until four Dublin finches were at last imported for Daisy's special delight; and a case with glass doors and a lock, made in Boston, wherein to store her books; and, best of all, a piano--or was it a harpsichord37?--standing on its own legs, which Mr. Stewart heard of as for sale in New York and bought at a pretty high figure. This last was indeed a rickety, jangling old box, but Daisy learned in a way to play upon it, and we men-folk, sitting in her room in the candle-light, and listening to her voice cooing to its shrill38 tinkle39 of accompaniment, thought the music as sweet as that of the cherubim.
Mr. Stewart and I lived in far less splendor40. There was no foreign furniture to speak of in our portions of the house; we slept on beds the cords of which creaked through honest American maple41 posts; we walked on floors which offered gritty sand to the tread instead of carpet-stuffs. But there were two great stands laden42 with good books in our living-room; we had servants now within sound of a bell; we habitually43 wore garments befitting men of refinement44 and substance; we rode our own horses, and we could have given Daisy a chaise had the condition of our roads made it desirable.
I say "we" because I had come to be a responsible factor in the control of the property. Mr. Stewart had never been poor; he was now close upon being wealthy. Upon me little by little had devolved the superintendence of affairs. I directed the burning over and clearing of land, which every year added scores of tillable acres to our credit; saw to the planting, care, and harvesting of crops; bought, bred, and sold the stock; watched prices, dickered with travelling traders, provisioned the house--in a word, grew to be the manager of all, and this when I was barely twenty.
Mr. Stewart bore his years with great strength, physically45, but he readily gave over to me, as fast as I could assume them, the details of out-door work. The taste for sitting indoors or in the garden, and reading, or talking with Daisy--the charm of simply living in a home made beautiful by a good and clever young girl--gained yearly upon him.
Side by side with this sedentary habit, curiously46 enough, came up a second growth of old-world, medi?val notions--a sort of aristocratic aftermath. It was natural, no doubt. His inborn47 feudal48 ideas had not been killed by ingratitude49, exile, or his rough-and-ready existence on the edge of the wilderness50, but only chilled to dormancy51; they warmed now into life under the genial52 radiance of a civilized53 home. But it is not my purpose to dwell upon this change, or rather upon its results, at this stage of the story.
Social position was now a matter for consideration. With improved means of intercourse54 and traffic, each year found some family thrifty55 enough to thrust its head above the rude level of settlers' equality, and take on the airs of superiority. Twenty years before, it had been Colonel Johnson first, and nobody else second. Now the Baronet-General was still preeminently first; but every little community in the Valley chain had its two or three families holding themselves only a trifle lower than the Johnsons.
Five or six nationalities were represented. Of the Germans, there were the Herkimers up above the Falls, the Lawyers at Schoharie, the Freys (who were commonly thus classed, though they came originally from Switzerland), and many others. Of important Dutch families, there were the Fondas at Caughnawaga, the Mabies and Groats at Rotterdam, below us, and the Quackenbosses to the west of us, across the river. The Johnsons and Butlers were Irish. Over at Cherry Valley the Campbells and Clydes were Scotch--the former being, indeed, close blood relatives of the great Argyll house. Colonel Isaac Paris, a prominent merchant near Stone Arabia, came from Strasbourg, and accounted himself a Frenchman, though he spoke German better than French, and attended the Dutch Calvinistic church. There were also English families of quality. I mention them all to show how curious was the admixture of races in our Valley. One cannot understand the terrible trouble which came upon us later without some knowledge of these race divisions.
Mr. Stewart held a place in social estimation rather apart from any of these cliques56. He was both Scotch and Irish by ancestry57; he was French by education; he had lived and served in the Netherlands and sundry58 German states. Thus he could be all things to all men--yet he would not. He indeed became more solitary59 as he grew older, for the reasons I have already mentioned. He once had been friendly with all his intelligent neighbors, no matter what their nationality. Gradually he came to be intimate with only the Johnsons and Butlers on the theory that they were alone well born. Hours upon hours he talked with them of the Warrens and the Ormund-Butlers in Ireland, from whom they claimed descent, and of the assurance of Dutch and German cobblers and tinkers, in setting up for gentlemen.
Sir William, in truth, had too much sense to often join or sympathize with these notions. But young Sir John and the Butlers, father and son, adopted them with enthusiasm, and I am sorry to say there were both Dutch and German residents, here and there, mean-spirited enough to accept these reflections upon their ancestry, and strive to atone60 for their assumed lack of birth by aping the manners, and fawning61 for the friendship, of their critics.
But let me defer62 these painful matters as long as possible. There are still the joys of youth to recall.
I had grown now into a tall, strong young man, and I was in the way of meeting no one who did not treat me as an equal. It seems to me now that I was not particularly popular among my fellows, but I was conscious of no loneliness then. I had many things to occupy my mind, besides my regular tasks. Both natural history and botany interested me greatly, and I was privileged also to assist Sir William's investigations63 in the noble paths of astronomy. He had both large information and many fine thoughts on the subject, and used laughingly to say that if he were not too lazy he would write a book thereon. This was his way of saying that he had more labor64 to get through than any other man in the Colony. It was his idea that some time I should write the work instead; upon the Sacondaga hills, he said, we saw and read the heavens without Old-World dust in our eyes, and our book that was to be should teach the European moles65 the very alphabet of planets. Alas66! I also was too indolent--truly, not figuratively; the book was never written.
In those days there was royal sport for rod and gun, but books also had a solid worth. We did not visit other houses much--Daisy and I--but held ourselves to a degree apart. The British people were, as a whole, nearer our station than the others, and had more ideas in common with us; but they were not of our blood, and we were not drawn67 toward many of them. As they looked down upon the Dutch, so the Dutch, in turn, were supercilious68 toward the Germans. I was Dutch, Daisy was German: but by a sort of tacit consent we identified ourselves with neither race, and this aided our isolation69.
There was also the question of religion. Mr. Stewart had been bred a Papist, and at the time of which I write, after the French war, Jesuit priests of that nation several times visited him to renew old European friendships. But he never went to mass, and never allowed them or anybody else to speak with him on the subject, no matter how deftly70 they approached it. This was prudent71, from a worldly point of view, because the Valley, and for that matter the whole upper Colony, was bitterly opposed to Romish pretensions, and the first Scotch Highlanders who brought the mass into the Valley above Johnstown were openly denounced as idolaters. But it was certainly not caution which induced Mr. Stewart's backsliding. He was not the man to defer in that way to the prejudices of others. The truth was that he had no religious beliefs or faith whatever. But his scepticism was that of the French noble of the time, that of Voltaire and Mirabeau, rather than of the English plebeian72 and democrat73, Thomas Paine.
Naturally Daisy and I were not reared as theologians. We nominally74 belonged to the Calvinistic church, but not being obliged to attend its services, rarely did so. This tended to further separate us from our neighbors, who were mainly prodigious church-goers.
But, more than all else, we lived by ourselves because, by constant contact with refined associations, we had grown to shrink from the coarseness which ruled outside. All about us marriages were made between mere75 children, each boy setting up for himself and taking a wife as soon as he had made a voyage to the Lakes and obtained a start in fur-trading. There was precious little sentiment or delicacy76 in these early courtships and matches, or in the state of society which they reflected--uncultured, sordid77, rough, unsympathetic, with all its elementary instincts bluntly exposed and expressed. This was of course a subject not to be discussed by us. Up to the spring of 1772, when I was twenty-three years of age and Daisy was eighteen, no word of all the countless78 words which young men and women have from the dawn of language spoken on this great engrossing79 topic had ever been exchanged between us. In earlier years, when we were on the threshold of our teens, Mr. Stewart had more than once thought aloud in our hearing upon the time when we should inherit his home and fortune as a married couple. Nothing of that talk, though, had been heard for a long while.
I had not entirely forgotten it; but I carried the idea along in the attic80 of my mind, as a thing not to be thrown away, yet of no present use or value or interest.
Occasionally, indeed, I did recall it for the moment, and cast a diffident conjecture81 as to whether Daisy also remembered. Who shall say? I have been young and now am old, yet have I not learned the trick of reading a woman's mind. Very far indeed was I from it in those callow days.
And now, after what I fear has been a tiresome82 enough prologue83, my story awaits.
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1
savagery
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| n.野性 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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lapsed
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| adj.流失的，堕落的v.退步( lapse的过去式和过去分词 )；陷入；倒退；丧失 | |
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uncouth
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| adj.无教养的，粗鲁的 | |
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providence
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| n.深谋远虑，天道，天意；远见；节约；上帝 | |
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plantations
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| n.种植园，大农场( plantation的名词复数 ) | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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bounty
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| n.慷慨的赠予物，奖金；慷慨，大方；施与 | |
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sterling
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| adj.英币的(纯粹的，货真价实的)；n.英国货币(英镑) | |
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ruffles
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| 褶裥花边( ruffle的名词复数 ) | |
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wigs
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| n.假发，法官帽( wig的名词复数 ) | |
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knight
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| n.骑士，武士；爵士 | |
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scotch
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| n.伤口，刻痕；苏格兰威士忌酒；v.粉碎，消灭，阻止；adj.苏格兰(人)的 | |
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propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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widower
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| n.鳏夫 | |
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aristocrats
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| n.贵族( aristocrat的名词复数 ) | |
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wrath
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| n.愤怒，愤慨，暴怒 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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pretensions
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| 自称( pretension的名词复数 )； 自命不凡； 要求； 权力 | |
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affront
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| n./v.侮辱，触怒 | |
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gilded
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| a.镀金的，富有的 | |
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baubles
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| n.小玩意( bauble的名词复数 )；华而不实的小件装饰品；无价值的东西；丑角的手杖 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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stockade
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| n.栅栏，围栏；v.用栅栏防护 | |
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masonry
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| n.砖土建筑；砖石 | |
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prodigious
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| adj.惊人的，奇妙的；异常的；巨大的；庞大的 | |
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sprawling
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| adj.蔓生的，不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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arabesques
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| n.阿拉伯式花饰( arabesque的名词复数 )；错综图饰；阿拉伯图案；阿拉贝斯克芭蕾舞姿（独脚站立，手前伸，另一脚一手向后伸） | |
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persistency
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| n. 坚持(余辉, 时间常数) | |
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smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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gilt
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| adj.镀金的；n.金边证券 | |
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drooped
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| 弯曲或下垂，发蔫( droop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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harpsichord
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| n.键琴（钢琴前身） | |
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shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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tinkle
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| vi.叮当作响；n.叮当声 | |
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splendor
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| n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌 | |
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maple
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| n.槭树，枫树，槭木 | |
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laden
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| adj.装满了的；充满了的；负了重担的；苦恼的 | |
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habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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refinement
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| n.文雅；高尚；精美；精制；精炼 | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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inborn
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| adj.天生的，生来的，先天的 | |
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feudal
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| adj.封建的，封地的，领地的 | |
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ingratitude
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| n.忘恩负义 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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dormancy
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| n.睡眠，冬眠，隐匿 | |
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genial
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| adj.亲切的，和蔼的，愉快的，脾气好的 | |
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civilized
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| a.有教养的，文雅的 | |
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intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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thrifty
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| adj.节俭的；兴旺的；健壮的 | |
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cliques
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| n.小集团，小圈子，派系( clique的名词复数 ) | |
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ancestry
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| n.祖先，家世 | |
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sundry
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| adj.各式各样的，种种的 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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atone
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| v.赎罪，补偿 | |
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fawning
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| adj.乞怜的，奉承的v.（尤指狗等）跳过来往人身上蹭以示亲热( fawn的现在分词 )；巴结；讨好 | |
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defer
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| vt.推迟，拖延；vi.(to)遵从，听从，服从 | |
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investigations
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| （正式的）调查( investigation的名词复数 )； 侦查； 科学研究； 学术研究 | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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moles
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| 防波堤( mole的名词复数 )； 鼹鼠； 痣； 间谍 | |
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alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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supercilious
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| adj.目中无人的，高傲的；adv.高傲地；n.高傲 | |
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isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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deftly
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| adv.灵巧地，熟练地，敏捷地 | |
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prudent
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| adj.谨慎的，有远见的，精打细算的 | |
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plebeian
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| adj.粗俗的；平民的；n.平民；庶民 | |
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democrat
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士；民主党党员 | |
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nominally
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| 在名义上，表面地； 应名儿 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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76
delicacy
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| n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴 | |
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sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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78
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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engrossing
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| adj.使人全神贯注的，引人入胜的v.使全神贯注( engross的现在分词 ) | |
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attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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81
conjecture
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| n./v.推测，猜测 | |
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82
tiresome
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| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
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prologue
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| n.开场白，序言；开端，序幕 | |
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