“You shut up,” said the darkey, raising the blind. “It’s only the parrot, Missie; dat bird is most one hundred years old.”
There was something depressing about Number 23—the gloom deepened when I saw Aunt Henry—it is all too intangible to put into words. I was to hear much about her later, and to read in her biography that she was “noted for a remarkable talent for painting, intellectual power and great benevolence!” I never heard her spoken of by her own name, she was always “Aunt Henry” the widow of Mama’s Uncle Henry. He must have been a delightful person; whenever the Three Graces of Bond Street, my mother and her two sisters, wanted to dance or sing, they always sent across the street for Uncle Henry to play for them. All that was long ago, when the parrot, the butler, Aunt Henry herself were young. Uncle Henry had long been dead; Cousin Henry, his son, now lived with Aunt Henry at Number 23. I was curious enough about him. I had heard him spoken of as a “club man”; none of the people who came to our house were exactly “club men”, and I wanted to see one badly. Mama, who was possessed to nickname all her intimates, spoke of him as “poor dear Hutie.”
Did I ever see the heroine of Number 23? I cannot be sure! She was the affianced of Cousin Henry. Their union was opposed by Aunt Henry, though some people believed them to be secretly married. Every day at two o’clock Cousin Henry called upon the lady and passed the afternoon with her. For many years, twenty—perhaps thirty—the lovers were faithful to each other. In Spain such romances are common enough. Cousin Henry was more like a Spanish novio than an American lover. I have known one other such case, of two lives that should have been passed together, divided by the opposition of the lover’s mother: in both cases the mother was able to control the son’s action, not his affections!
When Aunt Henry died at the age of eighty-five the family supposed the lovers would marry, but Cousin Henry, as if still controlled by the stronger will, followed his mother almost immediately. He left Number 23 and all his property to the lady. Then a strange thing happened. My uncle had kept open house; even after he was gone Number 23 was a friendly house, like all the Ward dwellings,—the family has strong traditions of hospitality. The day the house came into the lady’s hands, the family and friends were refused admittance. The old servants were kept on with the parrot and the lap-dogs; everything was maintained exactly as it had been in the lifetime of Aunt and Cousin Henry. At two o’clock, every day in the year, the lady came to the house and spent the afternoon alone there. She lived to be an old woman; when she died she left Number 23 and all the property—even the family miniatures—to her own relations. Perhaps it is not wonderful that to a child, Number 23 was already, in 1863, a house of mystery with a certain creeping sense of hidden secrets, perhaps half divined, between mother and son.
The figures of my grandfather’s generation—even those I have known—glimmer faintly in the background of my memory; they are hardly more real than Grandfather Ward himself, who died before my mother’s marriage and was the most important personage in the family. He was a banker of the firm of Prime, Ward and King, founder and president of the Bank of Commerce, patron of artists, literati, political exiles, and poor relations to the third, fourth and fifth degree.
In calling up the memories of this, my first visit to New York, I touch more solid ground, for I now met for the first time in my memory, my own uncle, Sam Ward, my mother’s only surviving brother, “uncle to half the human race”, as some one once called him. He was so universal and generous a soul that I long confounded him with that greater national figure, “Uncle Sam”, and applied all references in the comic papers to him. My chagrin was poignant on finding out my mistake.
My first impression of Uncle Sam is characteristic of the man. We had come to New York in the hope of distracting my mother from the black grief that consumed her after little Sam’s death. She received a message from her brother that we must all be ready at a certain hour when he would call for us and take us down to Islip, Long Island, to pass a few days at an hotel,—a new experience for me!
Punctual to the minute he arrived in a smart carriage, with a large bouquet for Mama and a small bouquet for me. I have forgotten the name of the hotel, but I remember certain splendors of the table, certain luxuries in the way of handsome carriages, fine horses, and a confusing number of servants. All these seemed in some magical manner to be attached to Uncle Sam, to come and
| UNCLE SAM WARD From a photograph by W. & D. Downey | MY FATHER, DR. SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE From a photograph by Whipple |