Aaron takes a step toward his slain foe, and looks long and deep, like a man drinking. Van Ness comes up; Aaron tosses him the pistol, as folk toss aside a tool when the work is done—well done. Then he walks down to his barge, and shoves away for Richmond Hill, whose green peaceful cedars are smiling just across the river.
“It was worth the price, Van Ness,” says Aaron. “The taste of that immortal vengeance will never perish on my lips, nor its fragrance die out in my heart.”
CHAPTER XVII—AARON I, EMPEROR OF MEXICO
AARON sits placidly serene at Richmond Hill. Over his wine and his cigar, he reduces those dreams of empire to ink and paper. He maps out his design as architects draw plans and specifications for a house. His friends call—Van Ness, the stubborn Swart-wout, the Irvings, Peter and Washington.
Outside the serene four walls of Richmond Hill there goes up a prodigious hubbub of mourning—demonstrative if not deeply sincere. Hamilton, broken as a pillar of politics, was still a pillar of fashion. Was he not a Schuyler by adoption? Had he not a holding in Trinity? Therefore, come folk of powdered hair and silken hose, who deem it an opportunity to prove themselves of the town’s Vere de Veres. There dwells fashionable advantage in tear-shedding at the going out of an illustrious name. Such tear-shedding provides the noble inference that the illustrious one was “of us.” Alive to this, those of would-be fashion lapse into sackcloth and profound ashes, the sackcloth silk and the ashes ashes of roses. Also they arrange a public funeral at Trinity, and ask Gouverneur Morris, the local Mark Antony, to deliver an oration.
To the delicate sobbing of super-fashionable ones is added the pretended grief of Aaron’s Clintonian foes. They think to use the death of Hamilton for Aaron’s political destruction.
At no time does Aaron, serene with his wine and his cigar and his empire-planning, interpose by word or act to stem the current of real or spurious feeling. He heeds it no more, dwells on it no more than on the ebbing or flowing of the tides, muttering about the lawn’s shaven borders in front of Richmond Hill.
The duel is eleven days old. Aaron, accompanied by the faithful, stubborn Swartwout, takes barge for Perth Amboy. The stubborn, faithful one says “Good-by!” and returns; Aaron is received by his friend Commodore Truxton. With Truxton he talks “empire” all night. He counts on English ships, he says; being promised in secret by British Minister Merry in Washington. Truxton shall command that fleet.