 | CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURTH.
ADVENTURES OF JACOPO. Paul Ardenheim, the monk of Wissahikon |  |
24. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURTH.
ADVENTURES OF JACOPO.
“Germantown!” soliloquized Jacopo, advancing with a most portentous
stride—“Where witches are plenty as cabbages, and ghosts come thick as
onions. I must break upon the vision of the unsophisticated villagers,
gently, very gent-l-y, and yet imposing as a full moon seen through a fog.”
And he passed rapidly along the lane.
There came green fields, full of the music of bees and the fragrance of
new mown hay. There came gardens too, bordered with fruit trees,—the
cherry, the peach, the apple and the pear,—and with little children and
brown-cheeked peasant girls, singing and laughing among the vine-covered
arbors. There came an old cottage, with the roof bent down by the gnarled
limb of a great oak tree, and its solitary window, adorned with a single
flower, set in a broken pitcher. And on the stone before the low door-way,
underneath the music of the restling leaves, was a gaunt old man,
with a face as brown as a russet apple, hair white as snow, and garb as
poor as very Poverty. And as he turned his face,—for he was startled
by the sound of the coming footstep—the sun shone upon it, and gave a
golden glow to his cold, dead eyeballs.
He was blind, and poor and old, and yet before his cabin door, he sat,
pressing his hands together, and turning his sightless eyes to the sun, as
if tho' he was glad that he was alone, and singing all the while in a
cracked voice, some words of a rude German Song.
Jacopo glanced upon him with grimace,—wondered “what the deuce he
was singing about”—and without a word, passed on his way.
Soon he came to the end of the lane, and stood in the solitary street of
Germantown.
Jacopo sank on a bench, by the roadside, and for some moments contemplated
the novelty and freshness of the scene in silence, and yet with
frequent ejaculations of delight.
He gazed to the south. The dusty road, in some places shadowed by
rows of trees, in others reddened by gleams of sunlight, descended the
slope of a long hill, and far to the south, was lost to view under an arch
of foliage. There were tenements of wood and stone on either hand;
here a cottage, with its gable-end toward the street, and a rustic porch
before the door; there a two-storied edifice with steep roof and narrow
windows, and a cool, quiet garden, sheltered from the roadside dust by
trees. Altogether, that road stretching to the south, presented an impressive
perspective of cottages, gardens and trees, reposing half in shadow,
half in sunlight, with a clear blue sky above.
Jacopo turned his eye to the north. A wide and grassy lawn, seperated
from the road by a stone wall, and dotted with elms and oaks, with a
gray old mansion in the background, slept in the beams of the afternoon
sun.
That lawn, reposing so quietly in the sunlight, was soon destined to become
holy ground—drenched by the blood of martyrs, its grass and
flowers—its dark gray mansion rent by cannon shot, and crowded with
dead—it was soon to be known in history as the Battle-Field of Germantown.
Opposite the bench on which our Philosopher rested, appeared a two-storied
mansion, which seemed invested with a peculiar atmosphere of
silence and isolation. Among the homes of that quiet hamlet, it looked
sad and deserted. The shutters were fast closed; there was grass in the
nooks of the high stone steps before the dusky hall door; the steep roof
was covered with green moss and withered leaves. It looked as though
no foot had passed its threshold for many years.
On the northern side, the foliage of its neglected garden overhung a
high wall, whose gray stones were half-concealed by a wild and luxuriant
vine. And on the south, built half way up the gloomy gable of the mansion,
a one-storied cabin was seen, with a little garden plot between it and
the road, and the wide-spreading branches of a solitary oak stretching
above its roof.
Through the leaves of the oak, the smoke of the cabin chimney wound
into the sky, shining and glowing against the blue heavens as it caught the
radiance of the sun.
“Well!” cried Jacopo, “That cabin under the big tree, looks like a
solitary chicken under the wing of a fat hen, while this gloomy mansion—
ugh! looks like a frozen night-mare.”
Arising from the bench he crossed the road,—surveyed the silent mansion
with a careful scrutiny—and then passed on, until he reached the
neatly white-washed pale fence, in front of the cabin.
“Ho! Ho! A table under the oak—bottles and mugs, and two or
three buglers taking the world easy! I hope I'm not intruding upon a
family party—”
With his hand upon the latch of the gate, he hesitated for a moment,
uncertain whether to enter or pass on, when his eye was arrested by a
board nailed upon the bark of the tree, and bearing in remarkable characters
a most mysterious inscription.
Bier & SiDeR.
These enigmatical characters seemed intended to convey the idea that
Beer and Cider were to be obtained for coin, somewhere in the vicinity
and entered.
The three villagers seated around the table, with pewter mugs in their
hands, did not hear his approach. Bending over the table, their heads
laid together; they maintained a low-toned and earnest conversation.
Our Philosopher paused and listened:
“Chon you may dependt it's a fact,” said one of the three, who appeared
in shirt sleeves and red waistcoat—“Dis house has bin shut up
dese twenty or dirty years. Dey do say, de man as owned it, soldt himself
to de defil.—”
Jacopo started, and drew a step nearer.
“Now Jake, you haint got the rights of the story,” responded “Chon”
or John, whose sharp features were half-hidden by an extensive wool-hat.
—“The house is owned by somebody away there in the old country, and
there's a lawsuit about it afore somebody they call Chancery, or some
sich name, and of course it's shet up until the case is decided. What do
you say, Pete?”
“Pete” was a solemn little man, with an apron on his chest, and some
three or four days beard on his face.—We may here remark, that in our
researches into the Ancient Records, we have never been able to ascertain
the full names of those three respectable individuals; they are simply
called Chon, and Jake, and Peter. It appears however, that “Jake” was
a man of substance, well-to-do in the worldly sense; Pete a shoemaker,
and Chon a man-of-all-work about somebody's farm.
As Pete replied, our friend Jacopo still unobserved, drew a step nearer:
“There's been lights seen in that house. Queer noises heer'd.
Rattlin' of a chain. Say somebody was murdered. Thirty years ago,
come next Christmas. It's his ghost. The man that was murdered.
They say so.”
Lest the remarks of Peter should appear broken or abrupt, it may as
well be stated, that he punctuated with his pewter mug, applying it to his
lips wherever we have placed a full stop.
“Ish it possible!” ejaculated Jake, with eyes like saucers.
“They say so,” whispered Pete, again punctuating with his mug.
It taint,—I tell you, it taint,” remarked Chon, fanning himself with
his wool hat, “As to its bein' ha'nted, I'm not the man to deny that, for
we all know that ghosts in some houses are thick as hops, but as to it's
bein' owned by a man that sold hisself to the Devil, I don't believe it.”
“Rash man!” said a shrill, screeching voice.
With one bound the three started to their feet, and beheld Jacopo
attired in solemn black, with his hands extended in the air, and his mouth
composed in an expression of remarkable severity.
“Rash man!” he continued, while the three stricken into statues, listened
with vacant amazement—“As an humble clergyman, I feel bound
to the devil? My young friend, I pity you! Why in the course of my
journeying around this scene of terrestrial vanity, I have met with no less
than six hundred persons, who acknowledged with tears, that they had
sold themselves to the devil.—They had married old maids,” he said in
an under tone.
“It's a Dominie!” cried Jake.
“I don't deny it,” said Chon, awed and abashed by the reproof of the
reverend man, “But as to this house bein' owned by sich a person—”
“Shet up Chon. Don't you see the Minister's agin you. Take a seat,
sir,—travelled far to day?”
Pete brushed a chair with his apron, and placed it before Jacopo.
That reverend personage was now in his glory. Calmly surveying the
three, he begged them in a pleasant voice to be seated once more, adding
with a sweet smile that he was not at all angry, but felt rather charitable
than otherwise.
“I am on my way to my little flock,” he continued, as he took a seat
at the table—“I have a parish in the back settlements among the Injin's
beyond Carlisle. You never heard of Hog's Run, did you?”
They had never heard of this classic locality; and Jacopo leaning back
in his chair and resting his hands upon his paunch, concluded his remarks
by asking for a little cider.
“Betsy!” exclaimed Jake, “Dis way, dis w-a-y! Dere's a gentleman
here as wants a glass of siter.”
And in a moment “Betsy,” the proprietor of the roadside cottage, appeared
in the doorway, holding a bowl of fragrant October in her hand.
Betsy was by no means old or thin, or ugly. A bouncing dame of some
thirty-five years, with very small bright eyes shining in a face round as
the full moon, and blooming as a garden of roses. Her capacious bust
was enveloped in a snow-white handkerchief, and her dark linsey skirt
descending but half way below the knee, left exposed to view a pair of
ankles, which encased in home-spun stockings, seemed altogether too
slender for her luxuriant form. Her feet, too, enveloped in course leather
shoes, did not seem at all adapted to bear the weight of so much substantial
womanhood, and as for her hands, small and white and fat, with dimples
sprinkled all over the joints, they were altogether too diminitive in
comparison with her arms, which bared from the shoulder, showed their
clear skin and full round outline freely to the sunlight.
On Betsy's chesnut-brown hair, parted neatly over her full moon face
a small muslin cap nestled like a bird in its nest; her cheeks, her chin,
—her neck—whiter even than the snowy handkerchief which bound her
bust—were scattered with dimples, every one of which laughed like a
sunbeam.
Betsy was a widow; she sheltered her sorrows in the cottage by the
on festival occasions; in the summer she bloomed and flourished like the
bee in its hive, or the seed in an apple, selling `Bier & Sider' to thirsty
villagers, or dusty travellers.—So runs the quaint portraiture of the Ancient
Records.—
Jacopo opened his eyes; he was astounded by the display of so many
charms—charms at once compact and luxuriant.
Springing from his seat he darted toward the door, and took the bowl
from her hand.
“And this is Betsy!” he said, meditatively shutting one eye, as he suffered
his fingers to linger upon the hand which held the cup. “My name
is James, Betsy, the Reverend Jacob James. A friend of mine, who
passed this way last year, spoke of you, and of your—cider. You have
been well, Betsy?”
Betsy laughed. Oh, the Poverty of language! Had you seen her
white teeth gleam out from her red lips, while her eyes danced, and the
dimples on her cheeks and chin and throat laughed in chorus! In fact,
she laughed all over. Then, when she spoke, every word touched with
a scarcely perceptible German accent, how the white of her teeth and the
red of her lips seemed to play bo-peep with each other!
“Ha, ha! Excuse me—you must n't think anythin' of me laughin',
but—but—”
And away she went again. We cannot aver that Jacopo's somewhat
singular figure excited her merriment, for a black coat and white cravat,
will turn the eye away at any time from physical or moral deformity.
Jacopo as Jacopo might have been simply ridiculous; but, Jacopo as a
Reverend was decidedly respectable.
Betsy laughed for the same reason that the ripe peach looks beautiful
in the sun,—or the bird sings, when perched on the topmost bough—she
laughed because she was full of life.
Betsy was a widow; Betsy had no care; Betsy had teeth like pearls;
therefore Betsy laughed.
“Don't mindt te gal, Dominie,” exclaimed Jake, “It's her way. Always
grinnin' like a chessy-cat.”
“Mind her? Bless my soul, I love to see young persons enjoy themselves.
Laugh, my child, laugh. It expands the muscles, throws out the
chest, and clears the cobwebs out of the brain. Laugh, my child, laugh!”
And the venerable Jacopo, in a fit of paternal feeling, laid his hand upon
the round arm of the Widow Betsy.
“`Young persons,' ha, ha, ha! Gott bless us! Ha! Ha! I'm an
oldt woman—ha! ha!”
And as if to prove it, she folded her white arms over her capacious
bust, while the dimples went rioting her cheeks, and the ring of her
laugh pealed on the air, mellow and musical, as the note of a bird.
“Twenty-one,” said Jacopo, “Twenty-one. Not a year older. Quite
a child—a little girl, in fact.”
And the good man patted her playfully on the downy cheek.
“Tont!” said the widow with a simper and a blush, that would have
done honor to a lady of fashion—“Be gwit tat!”
Jacopo warmed into a playful humor—Reverend men will be playful
sometimes—attempted to seize her hand. You should have seen Betsy
as she stood in the cabin door, laughing all over, as a stray sunbeam fell
on her dimples, and danced about her throat, where it began to widen into
the expansive bust!
“Mindt yer own pizness!” she said, with an air of offended dignity
some what modified by her dimpled visage.
Encouraged by the good humor of the buxom dame, Jacopo grew familiar—nay,
paternal, is the word. He took her hand, he rolled it gently
within his own, as a child plays with a piece of stolen dough; his small
eyes begin to sparkle in his comely visage.
“You must be careful of your health, my dear,”—her voice sinking
into a persuasive whisper—“Avoid the night air. Eschew wet feet. Your
health is delicate—your form fragile—the slightest puff of air might blow
you into a gallopin' consumption. Ah, me! What a tender flower!”
Jacopo cast his eyes to heaven, and fashioned his mouth into a grimace
of frightful solemnity.
“Delicate? Me!” cried Betsy—“O Lordt!” and then in the serene
amplitude of her charms, she laughed and shook, shook and laughed again,
until she looked like an immense flower, blossoming in the frame of that
cabin door, with its leaves tost to and fro, by a sudden blast.
And all the while, the sunbeam went dancing over her face now tinting
her warm lip, now lingering about her white round throat, now nestling in
a dimple of her joyous cheek.
“By the bye my dear child,” continued Jacopo still kneading the plump
hand of the good Betsy: “They say that it is haunted.”
“It?” and Betsy's eyes expanded while something like a cloud came
over her laughing face.
“The house next door. The old house. Owned by a gentleman who
sold himself to the devil. Tenanted by spooks—eh, Betsy?”
Just as you have seen a sheet of clear and spotless letter paper, suddenly
made hideous by a blot from an upturned ink bottle, so the face of
Betsy, round and joyous, grew black with a cloud of indignation.
“Spooks?” she cried—and her voice grew shrill—“Who says it?
You, Jake? Or, Chon? Or, was it you, Pete?”
The three dropped their mugs, and started backward with one impulse.
Not a word was said. Betsy stood in the doorway clenching her small
hand, while her face flashed, and her eyes shone with anger. Jacopo with
though he had suddenly stepped upon a rattle-snake.
“Who says so?” continued the indignant dame—“A pack of idle, goot-for-nothing
vagapones to go apout tellin' lies apout a decent oldt house!
Aint ye ashamed o'yerselfs? Nefer show yer ugly mugs inside of my
toors agin. Ha'nted in-t-e-e-d!”
Betsy paused for breath, and shook her clenched hand in the faces of
the affrighted villagers, who looked into each others faces, and kept steal-thily
retreating toward the gate.
“But Betsy, dey do say, dat te tefil—” begun Jake.
“Betsy spooks has been seen thar”' cried Chon.
“An' noises heer'd—dev'lish noises—” suggested Pete.
Betsy seized her broom. The affair grew solemn.
The broom, that peculiar weapon of all lonely and afflicted women, from
the trembling virgin who grasps it to immolate a spider to the injured wife
who rears it to admonish a drunken husband—the Broom! It was the
sight of this formidable missile that made the pot-companions tremble.
Their retreat became a route. With one brilliant attack, Betsy worried
them over the grass plot and charged them through the gate.
“Now ye ornery fystes ever say tat house is hanted agin if ye dare!”
They went their ways, Jake cursing, Pete blowing and Chon endangering
his blood vessels by a smothered fit of laughter.
“Te ornery fystes!” panted Betsy as she flung the broom away, and
sank exhausted into a chair, beside the wondering Jacopo.
“Ornery fystes!” This phrase looks mysterious. The first word is a
modification of “Ordinary” and is much used in the Land of Penn, to
express the last extreme of worthlessness. A spavined horse; a Bank
Director `found out' in his little speculations; a lady of fashion, whose
husband and lover come to fisty-cuffs, about her damaged reputation; a
lawyer who pockets fees from both sides, and drives a smart trade between
the Thief and the Bailiff; a sheriff elected to office by a certain party
and sharing all the plunder with the hungry ones of the opposite party
—these all, in Pennsylvania language are “Ornery.”
As to the cabalistic word, “Fyste” we know not whether it is German,
Greek or Indian. Possibly it is Choctaw. It was once much in vogue
in the German districts of Pennsylvania. It is said to have been applied
in the first place, to those benevolent pilgrims, who journeying from the
land of Plymouth Rock, enlightened the benighted Germans by a severe
course of wooden nutmegs, horn flints and patent medicines.
“Tat Yankee fyste!” was the exclamation of a Berks County farmer
who had been persuaded to purchase a Patent-Right of an Improved
Wheel-barrow which was to go of itself; by gravitation as the Yankee
candidly observed.
But those days are passed. New England from the fountain of her
former goodly offering of Pedlars and Horse-Jockies. She sends us
Preachers, Editors and Lawyers. They do not peddle—not they! Nor
jockey? No, Sir! Why our souls could not be saved, nor our minds
enlightened, nor the course of Justice go forward, were it not for these
Missionaries, sent to our benighted clime, by Old New England. In fact,
every path that leads to eminence or pennies, is macadamized by flints
from Plymouth Rock. They preach our sermons, they do our law, they
publish our papers, they write our histories. Pennsylvania could not get
on without them. And once a year they get together in some cozy hotel
—as many of them as Society can spare—and amid a wilderness of
chowder and punkin-pie, they drench themselves with Cider from Jersey
and Blarney from Plymouth Rock. Persons there are, who pretend that
New England keeps her Religion, her Intellect, her Liberality at Home,
and only sends abroad her Fanaticism, her Stupidity and Meanness. These
persons grossly err; we all know that Pennsylvania like a worn out clock
would stop forever, were she not wound up by a key, fashioned from the
iron bolt of that New England gibbet on which they hung Quakers in
good old times. Was it not a Boston Historian who told us the other
day, that William Penn was only great, because he came of true blue
Yankee stock; a kind of Quaker mastodeon from the fossil region of Ply-mouth
Rock?
The word “Fyste!” was once applied to the Pedlar and Jockey; now—
In this modern day, the word has undergone strange modifications.
It has become a word of honor. It is no longer applied to the cheat, the
blackguard and the vagabond. It is now used to designate the learned
Judge who preaches Temperance from the Bench and sells licenses at the
Back-Door. Or, the honorable Sheriff who distributes “Tracts” before
he is elected, and after his election pounces upon the possessions of the
unfortunate debtor, feeding and gorging himself, even to the last shred, until
you are reminded of a buzzard perched upon its festering prey. Or,
the Politician who hungry for office, and sworn to have it at all hazards,
prepares himself for his grave duties by a series of arduous exercises,
such as Obscenity from the stump, Libel in the newspaper and Perjury
everywhere.
These gentlemen are all known as “Fystes;” some of them, truth to
tell, well deserve the full force of the vernacular,—“Ornery Fystes.”
“My dear child,” whined Jacopo, as the dame sat panting and blowing
in the chair, whose capacious arms might scarce contain her bulky
loveliness—“Be calm!”
He handed her a mug of cider, and fanned her heated visage with his
three-cornered hat.
“Be calm!” echoed the panting dame—“It's very easy to talk! But to
and all tat!”
“Then the house is not haunted,” suggested Jacopo very mildly.
“Good Lordt! N-o-o!” and the Widow burst into a laugh.
“No spooks there? Eh?”
“Spooks? Not even the spook of a cat,”—Betsy laughed until she
shook again.
“Then tell me, my child, why it is shut up so closely, like a grave
vault, or a bottle of old wine, with its red cork covered with cobwebs?”
The Reverend man, in the warm impulse of paternal feeling, seized her
hand, and looked quite tenderly into her eyes.
“Because to folks who owns it is away in Englandt or Chiney,” replied
Betsy, with sudden gravity—“Do you think tat I'd live next toor
to a ha'nted house? I vos brought up rispectable, I vos. And I've
lived rispectable tis eighteen year, since I lost my huspand, poor Adam,
Gott bless him. A purty shtory inteed! Tat in my oldt tays I should
live next toor to a house wit spooks and tevils in it!”
“It is ridiculous, Betsy, nay it is infamous!” cried Jacopo, with becoming
gravity. “For one I don't believe it. Get me a pipe, my dear.”
Betsy rose in order to comply with this request, when a harsh deep
voice broke suddenly upon the evening stillness.
| CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURTH.
ADVENTURES OF JACOPO. Paul Ardenheim, the monk of Wissahikon | |