General Saxton was a man of fine military bearing and a most kindly and agreeable face. Social in his habits, he was able to go about freely for the rest of his life in the pleasant circle of retired military men and their families in Washington. He and his wife had always the dream of retiring from the greater gayety of the national metropolis to his birthplace at Deerfield, Massachusetts. Going there one beautiful day in early summer, with that thought in mind, they sat, so he told me, on the peaceful piazza all the morning and looked out down the avenue of magnificent elms which shade that most picturesque of village streets. During the whole morning no wheels passed their place, except those belonging to a single country farmer’s wagon. Finding the solitude to be somewhat of a change after the vivacity of Washington, they decided to go down to Greenfield and pass the afternoon. There they sat on a hotel piazza under somewhat similar circumstances and saw only farmers’ wagons, two or three. Disappointed in the reconnoissance, they went back to Washington, and spent the rest of their days amid a happy and congenial circle of friends. He died there February 23, 1908. To the present writer, at least, the world seems unquestionably more vacant that Saxton is gone.
XIV
ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN
ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN
Some years since, there passed away, at Newport, Rhode Island, one who could justly be classed with Thackeray’s women; one in whom Lady Kew would have taken delight; one in whom she would have found wit and memory and audacity rivaling her own; one who was at once old and young, poor and luxurious, one of the loneliest of human beings, and yet one of the most sociable. Miss Jane Stuart, the only surviving daughter of Gilbert Stuart, the painter, had dwelt all her life on the edge of art without being an artist, and at the brink of fashion without being fashionable. Living at times in something that approached poverty, she was usually surrounded by friends who were rich and generous; so that she often fulfilled Motley’s famous early saying, that one could do without the necessaries of life, but could not spare the luxuries. She was an essential part of the atmosphere of Newport; living near the “Old Stone Mill,” she divided its celebrity and, as all agreed, its doubtful antiquity; for her most intimate friends could not really guess within fifteen years how old she was, and strangers placed her anywhere from sixty to eighty. Her modest cottage, full of old furniture and pictures, was the resort of much that was fashionable on the days of her weekly receptions; costly equipages might be seen before the door; and if, during any particular season, she suspected a falling off in visitors, she would try some new device,—a beautiful girl sitting in a certain carved armchair beneath an emblazoned window, like Keats’s Madeline,—or, when things grew desperate, a bench with a milk-pan and a pumpkin on the piazza, to give an innocently rural air. “My dear,” she said on that occasion, “I must try something: rusticity is the dodge for me”; and so the piazza looked that summer like a transformation scene in “Cinderella,” with the fairy godmother not far off.
She inherited from her father in full the Bohemian temperament, and cultivated it so habitually through life that it was in full flower at a time when almost any other woman would have been repressed by age, poverty, and loneliness. At seventy or more she was still a born mistress of the revels, and could not be for five minutes in a house where a charade or a mask was going on without tapping at the most private door and plaintively imploring to be taken in as one of the conspirators. Once in, there was nothing too daring, too grotesque, or too juvenile for her to accept as her part, and successfully. In the modest winter sports of the narrowed Newport circle, when wit and ingenuity had to be invoked to replace the summer resources of wealth and display, she was an indispensable factor. She had been known to enact a Proud Sister in “Cinderella,” to be the performer on the penny whistle in the “Children’s Symphony,” to march as the drum major of the Ku-Klux Klan with a muff for a shako, and to be the gorilla of a menagerie, with an artificial head. Nothing could make too great a demand upon her wit and vivacity, and her very face had a droll plainness more effective for histrionic purposes than a Grecian profile. She never lost dignity in these performances, for she never had anything that could exactly be described by that name; that was not her style. She had in its stead a supply of common sense and ready adaptation that took the place, when needed, of all starched decorum, and quite enabled her on serious occasions to hold her own.
But her social resources were not confined to occasions where she was one of an extemporized troupe: she was a host in herself; she had known everybody; her memory held the adventures and scandals of a generation, and these lost nothing on her lips. Then when other resources were exhausted, and the candles had burned down, and the fire was low, and a few guests lingered, somebody would be sure to say, “Now, Miss Jane, tell us a ghost story.” With a little, a very little, of coy reluctance, she would begin, in a voice at first commonplace, but presently dropping to a sort of mystic tone; she seemed to undergo a change like the gypsy queen in Browning’s “Flight of the Duchess”; she was no longer a plain, elderly woman in an economical gown, but she became a medium, a solemn weaver of spells so deep that they appeared to enchant herself. Whence came her stories, I wonder? not ghost stories alone, but blood-curdling murders and midnight terrors, of which she abated you not an item,—for she was never squeamish,—tales that all the police records could hardly match. Then, when she and her auditors were wrought up to the highest pitch, she began to tell fortunes; and here also she seemed not so much a performer as one performed upon,—a Delphic priestess, a Cassandra. I never shall forget how she once made our blood run cold with the visions of coming danger that she conjured around a young married woman on whom there soon afterwards broke a wholly unexpected scandal that left her an exile in a foreign land. No one ever knew, I believe, whether Miss Stuart spoke at that time with knowledge; perhaps she hardly knew herself; she always was, or affected to be, carried away beyond herself by these weird incantations.