THE TENANTS

CONTENTS

Page
CHAPTER ONE[3]
CHAPTER TWO[16]
CHAPTER THREE[32]
CHAPTER FOUR[41]
CHAPTER FIVE[52]
CHAPTER SIX[64]
CHAPTER SEVEN[83]
CHAPTER EIGHT[94]
CHAPTER NINE[107]
CHAPTER TEN[128]
CHAPTER ELEVEN[140]
CHAPTER TWELVE[149]
CHAPTER THIRTEEN[164]
CHAPTER FOURTEEN[187]
CHAPTER FIFTEEN[201]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN[213]
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN[225]
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN[248]
CHAPTER NINETEEN[259]
CHAPTER TWENTY[276]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE[287]
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO [302]

CHAPTER ONE

They were tearing down the old Gwynne house the other day as we drove past, and it was not without a twinge of sentimental regret that we beheld the spectacle. The old Gwynne house was what our newspapers delight to honour by referring to as an "historic landmark." In the huge, expensive, devastating, and reconstructing haste of a growing American town—a town of the middle West at that—any building twenty-five years of age is likely to be so described; but this must have numbered all of four-score. Many valiant notable deeds and people were associated with it; it went through a whole epic of adventures like—as one might whimsically fancy—a stationary Odysseus. At the latter end it fell to be that common drudge and slattern among homes, a boarding-house; reached the last sordid depth as a tenement; and now they are abolishing it utterly, and a new subdivision to be called, I believe, Gwynne Park Place, will presently flourish above the grave. Once upon a time there was a park; it lay upon the utmost border of town, and brick walls bound with a ribbon of stone along the top, kept the house and its outlying lawns in a pompous seclusion. That was all swept away long ago; of late the ground has been reclaimed from slums and shanties and laid out in building-lots, curbed, sewered, gas-mained. But you may see here and there a single elm or buckeye, keeping yet amongst the spruce new flower-beds and within call of factory-whistles, some air of its antique dignity, remote and cool. In my time Doctor Vardaman's cottage, hard by where you used to turn into the Gwynne driveway, was the only other dwelling hereabouts; a great, spraddling, staring apartment-house covers the site of it now.

Governor Gwynne built his mansion—as he probably called it—in the year eighteen-thirty or thereabouts; and being an admirer of the classic and a wealthy man for those days, treated himself to a fine Parthenon front, with half a dozen stone pillars in the Doric taste springing from the black-and-white pavement of the veranda to uphold the overreach of the roof, "Governor Gwynne's Attic roof," as some wit of the mid-century once styled it; that wretched pun survives to-day in a kind of deathless feebleness; it will only pass from men's memories with the house itself. Much the same fashion of architecture is popular nowadays, but people pay more attention to comfort. The governor's pillars were ingeniously disposed so as to darken all the windows looking that way, whether in the double parlours on the first floor, the bed-chambers on the second, or the big ballroom over the entire house on the third. It was a rather gloomy splendour in which the old gentleman lived, I think. The rich, ponderous mahogany furniture, the dismal brocade draperies, the hair-cloth and brass nails, the ghastly white marble mantelpieces carved with mortuary-looking urns and cornucopias spilling out cold white marble fruits, with which he embellished his abode, were yet to be seen when I was a child. The hall was decorated with a wall-paper setting forth the wanderings of Aeneas, wherein he and his companions marched, fought, and sailed progressively all about the walls and up the stairs, ending—entirely innocent of any irony—with the descent into hell, and the awful waves of Phlegethon flaming on either side of the double-doors into the ballroom, on the top landing. The sternness of the subject somehow subdued or dominated its brilliant colouring; and I have never been able to divest my mind of that incongruous association. For me the pale helmsman still steers toward that ballroom door; and it is beside Governor Gwynne's ancient black walnut newel-post that I shall always behold the splendid figure of the hero lusty and living amongst the exiguous shadows. In the library the Governor's law-books paraded along the shelves in close order behind the securely locked, shining glass-and-mahogany doors; in the dining-room there stood a grim old mahogany wine-cellaret like a short upright coffin; it was difficult to imagine any sort of good-cheer proceeding from that forbidding receptacle, but out of it Governor Gwynne had entertained Andrew Jackson, Captain Marryat, Henry Clay, a whole long register of celebrities. And I believe—under correction, for the date is cloudy in my recollection—that he was preparing to entertain the Prince of Wales with its help, when that young gentleman visited this country, had not humanity's oldest and best-known guest called upon him earlier. They used to show you the exact spot in the vast darkling front parlour on the south side where his body had lain in state a September afternoon in 1851, and Chase had pronounced the funeral oration over him. There was a full-length portrait of him scowling at a scroll of legal cap, with a big double-inkstand on the table beside him—"handy so he could shy it at you in case you disagreed," Gwynne Peters used profanely to suggest—hanging on the parlour wall just opposite the long mirror between the windows; the chairs and sofas were always shrouded in white linen covers; white net bags swathed the ornate gilt-and-glass chandeliers. It was a ghostly place, that room, with a clock mounted in a kind of Greek temple of alabaster under a glass dome on the mantel sepulchrally ticking out the irrecoverable hours, and Governor Gwynne eyeing you sternly from his elevation. He looked not too well pleased with his canvas immortality and considering what he must see, it was no wonder.