The house of five gables

by Mary Johnson Holmes

THE HOUSE OF FIVE GABLES.

BOOK THE FIRST.

CHAPTER I.

Many years ago there stood on a high bluff over-looking the island which is now the site of a portion of Wheeling, West Virginia, a house known far and near as the house of five gables. It was built of sand-stone and brick; the gables were of wood; it was not a thing of beauty, and a beholder seeing it for the first time, was sure to pause and exclaim at its rare ugliness, which enchained the eye; and its quaint irregular shape appealed in a way to one’s feelings, much as a crippled, mishapen being might have done. It had not always been thus. It began life as a modest story-and-a-half cottage, and for several years could only boast of two gables, but with a change of owners there came a change of architecture also, until if old Sir Roger Willing, the original builder, could have risen from his grave he would have found it difficult to have discovered a foot of his own handiwork.

Old Sir Roger’s great-grandfather was one of the hundred settlers sent from England by Sir Thomas Gates in the year 1607, and settled in Jamestown; and rumor whispered that it was he who bought twenty African negroes from a Dutch man-of-war, and so introduced negro slavery into Virginia in the year 1619.

Sir Roger himself was not long behind Governor Spotswood in crossing the Blue Ridge, and forming a home in what, after more than a century, became West Virginia.

There had always been a Roger Willing from that time until now. An elder son, who kept the old ancestral home, adding to it odd corners as the fancy took him, and dying bequeathed it to another Roger, with the solemn injunction never to sell or part with it come what might. There had been some good Rogers, and there had been some very, very bad ones. Strange tales were wont to be whispered of the goings on inside the old gray walls under the reign of “Jolly Prince Roger,” a grandson of old Roger the fourth. That was in 1763, when Benjamin Harrison was Governor, and when Wheeling was known as Fort Henry. Young “Prince Roger” had just come into his kingdom as it were, meaning the old stone house now boasting three gables and numberless added corners; many acres of tobacco, and a prolific bank account. Roger’s father had been a man with one idea; to make money. The idea how to spend it he had never cultivated, therefore Roger upon coming into possession of what his father had so carefully hoarded, speedily set to work to make ducks and drakes of it, and he gathered about him plenty of profligate assistants, who helped him turn night into day, and day into night, until their wild orgies became the talk for miles around.

A beautiful slave girl was installed housekeeper, and she ruled with a high hand. She ordered a new wing to be added to the old house, and another gable. Stained glass, a great rarity in those days, was brought from foreign parts, and fitted as windows in the new gable. Costly carpets, and tapestries of foreign make covered the floors and walls. Rare treasures costing fabulous prices, were scattered lavishly about the rooms; unique chandeliers of brass fishes filled with sperm oil, the light issuing from the fishes’ mouths, were wonders to the class of visitors who worshipped at Bella’s shrine. Here she reigned queen for ten years, until one morning, Roger woke up to find himself at the end of his resources. All his ready money squandered. The old house mortgaged, and a fair prospect of being without a place to lay his head ere many months should pass. He was dazed, bewildered, as the truth became a certainty, and he wandered over the fair lands which any day might be snatched from him, bemoaning his fate, and cursing it as well. His companions in prosperity had all fled at the first hint of adversity, as fair weather friends have a habit of doing, and he had no one to advise him in his hour of trouble.

The man to whom the property was mortgaged called occasionally, “to gloat”—as Roger said—“over the prospect of in time possessing the fair estate.”

“But by heavens! he never shall be master here. Never! Not if I have to sell my soul to the devil to get the money,” was Roger’s cry. He went to Bella for suggestions as to the best course to pursue, but she merely laughed at him.