"What a dastardly noise!" cried Jonathan Knickerbocker, throwing his newspaper over his head. "Can this Easter time never be kept without an infernal bell bombilation? I shall call a meeting of the vestry—that idiot Jenkins should be kept at home!" The head of the Knickerbocker family turned irately in his chair and glared at his daughters. Three timid pairs of blinking eyes were raised from short sacks in answer to his challenge, then lowered again over the wool. The fourth and fairest daughter of the house, seated on the walnut sofa in the bow-window, gave no heed to his vehemence but a suppressed sigh. With a final snort the Gazette was picked up again. The Easter melody was waning.
The Knickerbocker parlor—not the state parlor, which had long been closed—was a dismal place—so large that four candles and one Rumford lamp made but a patch of brightness in the gloom. Most of the furniture was ponderous and ugly, with two or three alien little chairs that looked as if they might once have belonged to some light-hearted lover of the Louis. On the almost barren chimney-piece stood a pair of tall nankeen beakers, sepulchrally reminiscent of buried Chinese years. Along the walls hung a score of mediocre portraits, the handiwork of the usurious limner John Watson and his compatriot Hessilius. Spans of sunlit days had stolen every tinge of carmine from their immobile and woodeny faces, leaving them the drab color of time, in keeping with the room.
Above the cornice, near the sofa where Patricia Knickerbocker sat, hung an empty frame. The portrait it contained had been banished to the attic while her three eldest sisters were still in Wellington pantalets.
"The woman looks like a Jezebel," Jonathan had sputtered. "Och! that leering smile." He tried to blot from his mind the stray leaves he knew of her story, and the disturbing thought that she was of his blood. "She shall not remain with the likenesses of my ancestors!" he had told his sisters, who were over from Goby House.
When this descendant of the Knickerbockers spoke of his progenitors he always held his head a trifle more erect, and puffed out his pompous figure, though, strange to relate, like many another worthy man of a later day having the same foible, he knew very little about them. Of course he could have told you that the lady over the east bookcase, wearing a blue tucker and holding a spray of milk-weed in her hand, was his Aunt Jane; and that his father was a noted New York judge, the pride of three circuits. Or if his digression were extended, there was his trump card, one of the first American Knickerbockers, labelled "The Friend of Lord Cornbury!" These were the firmest rocks in his family history, to which he could climb in safety, thence to look down with scorn on those unfortunates beneath his social eminence. He was a Knickerbocker, of Knickerbocker Mansion, Vesey Street, and a member of one of the oldest families in York and America.
Patricia, smiling little Patricia, rummaging one day among the dust-bins under the eaves, had found the banished portrait. Juma, the gray-wooled negro, a comparatively new member of the Knickerbocker household, who had appointed himself her body-servant ever since his arrival at the mansion, was with her.
