University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.
DOMICILIATION.

HAD the reader been in front of the Rockford Hotel
on a certain bright June morning of eighteen hundred
and fifty something, he might have seen a
spruce young man getting into a shabby old barouche. He
was tall and strong in build, with black eyes, long and thick
black hair, aquiline nose, a forehead which seemed to retreat
above because it was so heavy below, a darkly pale complexion
and a moustache as ample and sombre as that of the
immemorial opera brigand. He wore a sober morning dress
of the English fashion, and one of those broad-brimmed soft
hats which the advent of Kossuth had lately made permissible.
Giving the porter thirty cents, which was a compromise
between his natural extravagance as an American and the
economy which he had learned abroad, he leaned back in the
barouche, lit a cigar, and told the negro coachman to drive to
the brown house just below the Westervelt place. If the
reader had asked me who the young man was, I should have
replied (remembering the title-page of Pendennis), that he
was my lifelong enemy, Mr. Louis Fitz Hugh.

A drive of less than three miles took me to my new domicile.
It was a dingy, small-windowed, huge-chimneyed, little
old house, with a short roof before and a long one behind,
reminding me vaguely of a chubby dog sitting on his
haunches. Thirty yards from the front of it rippled the

Sound, and two hundred yards to the eastward rose the low
bluff of Seacliff. In the doorway appeared the landlady, a
tidy housewife of about fifty, thin, angular and stiffish, but
with an eager, fluttered, kindly look which I felt to be a sure
prognosticator of respectful treatment, soft bed and good dinners.
Seeing that she advanced to meet me, I jumped out
hastily, and bowed to her with a more than ordinarily civil
“Good morning.”

“I do believe that is Louis Fitz Hugh,” she replied, running
forward with sudden animation. “I do wonder if it
aint. Now aint you the son of Mr. Charles Fitz Hugh of
New York, perhaps?”

“Not a doubt of it, ma'am,” said I. “Why—Mrs. Treat!
why, is it possible? Is this my old Ma Treat?—my old
nurse?”

“I guess it is, Louis,—I guess it is, if you ever had a Ma
Treat. Why Louis, how you have grown!” she continued,
catching both my hands and looking up at my summits.
“Oh, but you always was one of the tall sort. I almost knew
you couldn't stop short of six feet in your stockings' feet.
Well, you've come back like bread upon the waters, which is
found after many days,—Ecclesiastes, eleventh, first. Now
Mr. Treat will be disappointed. Now he will feel bad to
think he didn't stay to see you. I said it was you, as soon
as ever Mr. Van Leer came down to engage rooms for you
and spoke your name. Mr. Treat said it couldn't be, because
you was in foreign parts, and so he finally went off to
the man-that-makes-the-sailboats'-house, to get his sharpee
tinkered. But now he will feel sorry. Mr. Weston, (to the
negro,) you jest carry up the gentleman's baggage into the
front chamber—you know where—same room where Miss-Phillips-of-Rochester's
daughter stayed. Lewy, we've done
jest the best we could by you, thinking all the time perhaps
'twas you. Now do come in and set down and rest your legs,
while Mr. Weston carries up the baggage.”

Slipping the covenanted pieces of silver into the negro's

hand, I followed Ma Treat into her prim, puritanical little
front parlor; that sacred retreat which no dust or cobwebs
ever deformed, whence flies were daily banished, and
whither the feet of common mortality rarely attained; that
abode of curtained obscurity where the family Bible loomed
largely on the cherry table, and the hereditary brass candlesticks
stood sentinel on the mantel. In this sanctuary we
sat and talked of my early history, while my numerous
pieces of baggage trooped gradually up stairs on the shoulders
of limping Mr. Weston. Our lengthy and rambling
reminiscences amounted to the following commonplace narrative.

My mother falling seriously ill when I was three weeks
old, I was put out to nurse with a plain country couple
named Treat, who had just lost an infant of their own.
They took kindly care of me for two years, and nourished
me into a vigorous small-boyhood. My mother has often
related to me with a vanity for which I must of course pardon
her, how piteously my nurse cried when she was called
on to let me go out of the arms of that affection which had
become a second nature. It seems to me that I can remember
the woful scene, but as I have an equally distinct recollection
of two or three incidents which happened before I
was born, I sometimes doubt whether the picture of a weeping
woman holding a petticoated urchin, which exists in my
imagination, was not painted there altogether from hearsay.
Perhaps it was in some such spiritual manner that Joyce
Heth and all those other colored centenarians, of whom we read
in the papers, dandled the infancy of Washington. Well,
for years after quitting my foster-parents, I used to pay them
annual visits, generally timed to some great change in my
life, as, for instance, the occasion of getting my first pockets,
my first breeches, my first pair of boots. Pa Treat and Ma
Treat I styled them, in distinction from my parents, whom I
dignified with the more awful titles of Father and Mother.
They always had a cake of maple sugar for me, or a card of

gingerbread, or a cutter whittled out by Pa Treat's own jackknife,
or a pair of lambs'-wool stockings from Ma Treat's
own needles, as well as long stories about my wonderful
babyhood, when I bumped my remarkable nose, or cut my
extraordinary teeth. After I got old enough to be sent to
boarding-school, I began to lose sight of Pa and Ma Treat.
Maturer studies, Europe, the pleasures and interests of
opening manhood, broadened the distance between us, until
now, on my visit to Seacliff, it was years since I had seen
them or scarcely thought of them. To my shame be it
spoken, they had been the first to start up in recognition at
the sound of the old familiar name; and now Ma Treat led
me about the house with as much delight as if I were still
the same innocent two-year-old who had toddled away from
her in the lang-syne. She made fifty apologies for a neat
front chamber and convenient closet bedroom which drew
forth my warmest praises. She absolutely wanted to board
me for nothing, and accepted my own price with great reluctance
and mortification. After five minutes of shyness, she
fell back into the old nursery deportment, called me Lewy, as
she had done twenty-two years before, wanted to get me
some milk toast as if I still had my first set of teeth, and
would have held me in lap if I had shown the least desire for
that infantile privilege.

“Well, Lewy, I s'pose I must clear out and give you a
chance to put yourself to rights,” she said at last. “There's
water, and there's soap, and there's towels. If you want
anything, you holler, and I'll fly right up.”

She went out, and I unpacked my trunk. That done, I
consulted my watch to see if it was late enough for a call on
the Westervelts; but as it still lacked a few minutes of ten,
I did not dare to trouble the ladies, and amused myself
with taking a view of Seacliff and its surroundings. The
green bluff, on which stood the Yankee Parthenon, closed
abruptly to the south in a low precipice of awkward, ugly
granite, prevalent along this shore, worn and torn at the bottom

by waves, and stained adown its rough face with the
drizzle of earth and decayed grasses. It was no great affair
of a cliff, but there was enough of it perhaps to justify a
name for a country-house. Outward from it spread the
changeable green of the Sound, terminated southward by the
yellow sand-banks of Long-Island and westward by the verdant
treadings of the Connecticut shore, but stretching eastward
into a watery horizon which recalled the unconfined
sublimities of mid ocean. Other bluffs were sown at wide
intervals along the coast; and behind lay the low, desultory
hillocks of New England. On the east, a quarter of a mile
off, a marshy rivulet strolled indolently into the Sound, forming
a small haven where nestled a sloop yacht, a trivial
fishing-smack or two, and three or four of those fast, light
flat-bottomed sailboats known as sharpees. There were
trees, grass, cattle, houses, and church spires in the landscape,
and white sails in the sea view.

As I made these observations from a dwarfish knoll some
thirty yards to the left of my new residence, I heard the
voice of Ma Treat behind me, calling in impassioned tones,
“Here he is, husband! Here's Lewy Fitz Hugh, as sure
as you're alive. Here's Pa Treat a-coming, Lewy! and
glad enough to see you.”

I turned, and beheld a short, broad, stocky man of fifty-five
trudging hastily along the beach, closely followed by a
duck-legged urchin of six or seven, at full waddle. Pa Treat
stumped up to me with a smile of mingled incredulity and
delight on his weather-beaten face, and, without saying a
word at first, shook hands for a period which, owing to his
tremendous gripe, seemed nearly equal to our separation.
Meantime Ma Treat, dragging duck-legs forward by the
arm, looked on with tears in her eyes and talked for the four
of us.

“Ain't he a tall one!” said Pa Treat, at last. “Who'd
a thought it! Why, Lewy,—Mr. Fitz Hugh, I mean,—
come in and set down. Dreadful sorry now I didn't stay

and help get up your thingumbobs. Had to hurry off,
though, hot-foot, down to the what-dye-callums.”

Pa Treat was a silent man of old, as my mother had often
informed me; and years, it appeared, had not added much
to his capacities for oratory. After the first outburst of excitement,
he subsided into a smiling taciturnity, only diversified
by an occasional friendly grunt of immense significance,
over and around which Ma Treat's conversation babbled like
a brooklet among pebbles. Into the little prim parlor I went
again, and epitomized my life since we last parted. So
prodigious was their interest in the narrative, that I half felt
for the time as if no man before me had ever got an education,
or steamed across the Atlantic, or landed at Liverpool,
or made the grand tour of Europe.

“Well, that's a great ways to travel,” observed Pa Treat,
taking a long breath as if he had just arrived, “hot-foot,”
from performing the whole immense journey in person.
“And here we've been doing nothing but sit round the same
old fireplace. Had troubles, though, if we han't travelled,”
he added gravely. “John's dead.”

“Yes, John's dead,” said Ma Treat, shaking her head
and winking watery eyes. “The Lord gave, and the Lord
hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord; Job,
first, twenty-first. Sally died, you know, Lewy, when you
was at school; and two years ago last winter, John's wife
died in childbed; and then, the summer after, John he died
of a lung fever; and now, Lewy, we're all alone except little
Johnny here.”

She reached her hand behind her and gently drew forward
the urchin whom I have already noticed. He had been sitting
on a low wooden cricket in the rear of her skirts, his
chubby face very solemn, and a trifle stupefied with awe, not
a leg, arm, or finger stirring, and his whole childish vivacity,
if he had any, quite extinguished for the time by bashfulness.
He was a broad-bottomed, high-shouldered, thick-limbed,
younker, the exact reproduction on a small scale of his

grandfather. At first sight he seemed a mere tadpole, whose
principal characteristics were a big belly and means of locomotion;
though afterwards, when I came to know him better,
I discovered that he had a soul as well as another. A painful
blush overspread his tanned features, extending from
forehead to throat, and very possibly down to his toes, as he
advanced in front of Ma Treat's knee, and speechlessly made
his short-necked manners. I patted his spacious back encouragingly,
and asserted my belief that he was a nice boy,
and a great comfort to his grandparents.

“Oh Lewy! we should be awful lonesome without him,”
said Ma Treat, much moved. “We bless the Lord-that-is-on-high's
great mercies for preserving him to us. He is, indeed,
a monstrous comfort to us. That is, when he's a good
boy,” she added in a solemn aside. “But sometimes his sinful
heart gets the upper hands; and then he's a great grief
to his poor old granpa and granma. A foolish son is a grief
to his father; Proverbs, seventeenth, twenty-fifth.”

Nothing could be more sepulchral than the tone with which
she thus alluded to the lad's natural, and occasionally, it
seems, ungovernable wickedness of soul. Johnny's small
flicker of self-righteousness went out under it, like a candle
in the breath of a mephitic cavern, and he drooped upon
his cricket again in a state of the gloomiest spiritual humiliation.
It was evident that if his brief legs were not early
trained to walk in the way they should go, it would not be
for lack of orthodox reproof and instruction on the part of
his grandmother. By way of changing a subject which
stung so sharply through the rents in Johnny's conscience,
I remarked that the old house still stood in spite of winter
winds.

“Yes; it's used to 'em I reckon,” said Pa Treat. “It's an
antic old house, and no mistake.”

“Antic?” inquired I, with some amazement, at the same
time picturing to myself a venerable brown dwelling dancing
madly up and down the shore to the tune of some ocean

hornpipe, or skurrying away over land to some witch revel
on the wings of a January gale.

“Yes; right down antic; my grandfather built it; much
as a hundred years old,” explained Pa Treat.

I saw that he meant antique. “And who built the house
on the hill?” I asked. “Mr. Westervelt?”

“No; another New Yorker,—Mr. Nathan Skelton,—
awful great bank and railroad man,—regular stiffy. I tell
you, he cut a swath. But he busted.”

“Some speculator tickled him into swelling and then
cracked him open, I suppose, as boys serve a bladder-fish.”

“No tellin'. Most all them New Yorkers do bust. I expect
it's their company ruins 'em.”

“Their company? Oh, you mean their visitors. So
Skelton had a great many visitors?”

“Acre lots full. Then such goings on! Such eating and
drinking! Such jigs and jigamarees! People driving up
night and day. But they dwindled down finally to pretty
much nothing but sheriffs.”

“And how do you like the Westervelts?” I inquired,
hoping, perhaps, that he would say something of the young
ladies or of the mystery.

“A good deal better. Ma Treat knows more about 'em
than I do.”

“Well, Lewy,” said Ma Treat, thus appealed to, “they are
pretty nice folks, though ruther curious. Mr. Westervelt's a
mild, meeching sort of a man, with no more harm in him
than a blind kitten. He makes me think of a lame rooster,
keeping away by himself and not crowing any, for fear the
others will peck at him. Mrs. Westervelt is mighty genteel,
but a leetle too lofty to suit me. Pride's a dreadful sin,
Lewy; and I, for one, can't bear it. Pride ruined Satan,
and pride can ruin you and I. Pride goeth before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall; Proverbs, sixteenth,
eighteenth. Remember that, Johnny. Sometimes Johnny's
proud, and then he's a naughty boy. (This in the glum,

funeral aside which usually italicized her allusions to Johnny's
moral baseness.) But the girls are real little darlings;
and Miss Mary especially is the sweetest creetur that ever I
saw, or Pa Treat either. Some folks think she ain't so handsome
as her sister; but handsome is, that handsome doos,
Lewy; and that sets Miss Mary on high. That's Mr.-Jacobs-that-preaches-in-Rockford's
opinion, too, I reckon; and glad
enough he'd be to get her, I know; and a splendid minister's
wife she'd make. Now Miss Genevieve ain't a bad little
thing, neither, and beautiful she is, to be sure. But then
she's mighty uncertain; you don't know what she'll do next;
you can't calculate on her, as you can on her sister. One
day she's as friendly and cosy as a robin-redbreast, and the
next she chatters and snaps about like a sassy cat-bird. If
one thing don't suit, nothing suits, and she has a peck for
everything. I guess she means to be kind-hearted, but don't
realize other people's feelings. Now Mary is quite different,
because she considers that there may be two sides to a question,
and that her neighbors have a right to their opinion as
well as she to hers. Then she's such a charitable, forethoughted
one! Whenever there's any sick folks to be
watched with, or any poor folks to be fed and sewed for, you
may cut around as fast as ever you can, and you'll find that
Miss Mary has been everywhere before you. Ain't it so, Pa
Treat?”

“Ex—actly!” said my foster-father with great emphasis.
“Always fixing up soups and jellies, and crinkum-crankums,
and what-nots, for somebody. The best, handiest, puttiest
little angel that ever I see or heerd of.”

“Well, I must go up and make a call on the little angel,”
said I, looking at my watch and rising.

“Do, Lewy!” urged Ma Treat. “Go right up, and ask
to see her particular. And if you can court her and get her
for a wife, Lewy, don't fail to do it. Ma Treat recommends
her, and she's a good one. She is the daughter who has done
virtuously and excelled them all; Proverbs, thirty-first,

twenty-ninth. I had sot my heart on having her for Mr.
Jacobs-our-minister's wife; but I'd ruther by a great sight see
you carry her off; and so had Pa Treat. Good-bye, Lewy.”

Smiling in my sleeve at the eagerness with which my old
nurse plunged into the matrimonial question, I ran up stairs
to get a fresh pair of gloves, and take a precautionary survey
of myself in the twelve-by-twenty looking-glass which
adorned my mantel.