“To be sung or whistled to the tune of Meadow Brow by the learned; by the unlearned, to the tune of Fortune.
“A tell-tale in their companie
They never could endure,
But whoso kept not secrecy
Their deed was punished sure.
It was a just and Christian deed
To pinch such black and blue.”
Etc., etc., etc.
Poetica Stromata.
As this bore the antique date of 1648, and was written by Corbet,
Bishop of Norwich, it was considered good authority for anything.
This, then, explained the unusual silence of Jans Van Dorp, and it also half-reconciled his gude vrow to endure her unsatisfied curiosity. To wonder and to be afflicted night after night by his truant absence was bad enough, but to have seen him vanish in blue smoke would have been worse.
Things were passing thus in that sequestered little spot, while the great world without was agitated with mightier events—the opening scenes of the Revolutionary war. It is doubtful whether the faint rumors of it which penetrated the seclusion there would have excited the least attention, except for the fact that it was the only earthly topic on which Jans Van Dorp nowadays manifested the least interest. Every Dutch villager, whose business led him to the great cities, was questioned and cross-questioned on his return as to the precise state of things, with a minuteness which would have done honor to that renowned lawyer Heer Adrian Van der Donck, the first who landed in the New Netherlands. The one little gray newspaper that arrived weekly, and had hitherto circulated among his neighbors until it was quite illegible, was now packed immediately in his great-coat pocket and taken to his ghostly partner. All this was a perfect labyrinth of mystery, and furnished texts for many a sage conjecture and dubious shake of the head. Some hinted that Jans Van Dorp might mean to put in execution the threat he had been so often heard to hurl at his irritating helpmate when her vexatious volubility exceeded all bounds of endurance—that he’d be off to some war. But time puts an end to all things, although it does not always explain things to universal satisfaction. What
Jans or the goblin thought or meant can never be fathomed, but some things are matters of history; and it is a testified fact that the very moment this little dingy newspaper brought tidings that the first cannons of battle had boomed, Jansen Van Dorp started as if his doom was somehow connected with it. It was a night, dark and stormy, but he seized his hat, and rushed from the cheerful glow of his own home to the pitchy darkness without, and they whispered he was bound to the haunted hovel! Too probable, for from that hour neither Jans nor spectre was ever seen there more.
It should rather be said, never seen as mortal could be seen, for by many he was still considered an inhabitant of the settlement, although lost for ever to his hapless vrow. He had visited her in dreams, and warned her of something she could not exactly remember, but very terrible, and given on these occasions such
diverse accounts of himself, it was hard to tell what to believe. To Effie he had frequently presented himself. She had seen him in the coffee dregs, in leaves at the bottom of her tea-cup, in a mirror which she had cut triangular for that express purpose, and, finally, in a tremendous thunder-storm, standing close beside her.
As he gave no sign on these occasions, her charitable conclusion was that he had nothing very good to relate of himself.