Philip Winwood Part 3

"'Tis time you were taught your place, young fellow. You're one of my father's servants, that's all; so take in my skates, or I'll show you."

"You're wrong there," said Phil, with forced quietness. "A clerk or messenger, in business, is not a personal servant."

"Take in these skates, or I'll brain you with 'em!" cried Ned, to that.

"Come on and brain!" cried Phil.

"By G----d, I will that!" replied Ned, and made to swing the skates around by the straps. But his arm was, at that instant, caught in a powerful grip, and, turning about in surprise, he looked into the hard, cold eyes of his father, who had come up unseen, having stayed; at the warehouse even later than Phil.

"If any blows are struck here, you sha'n't be the one to strike them, sir," he said to Ned. "What's this I hear, of servants? I'll teach you once for all, young man, that in my house Philip is your equal. Go to your room and think of that till it becomes fixed in your mind."

To go without supper, with such an appet.i.te, on such a cold night, was indeed a dreary end for such a day's sport. I, who knew how chilled and starved Ned must be, really pitied him.

But instead of slinking off with a whimper, he for the first time in his life showed signs of revolt.

"What if I don't choose to go to my room?" he answered, impudently, to our utmost amazement. "You may prefer an outside upstart over your son, if you like, but you can't always make your son a prisoner by the ordering."

Mr. Faringfield showed little of the astonishment and paternal wrath he doubtless felt. He gazed coldly at his defiant offspring a moment; then took a step toward him. But Ned, with the agility of boyhood, turned and ran, looking back as he went, and stopping only when he was at a safe distance.

"Come back," called his father, not risking his dignity in a doubtful pursuit, but using such a tone that few would dare to disobey the command.

"Suppose I don't choose to come back," answered Ned, to whose head the very devil had now certainly mounted. "Maybe there's other places to go to, where one doesn't have to stand by and see an upstart beggar preferred to himself, and put in his place, and fed on the best while he's lying hungry in his dark room."

"If there's another place for you, I'd advise you to find it," said Mr. Faringfield, after a moment's reflection.

"Oh, I'll find it," was the reply; and then came what Master Ned knew would be the crowning taunt and insult to his father. "If it comes to the worst, I know how I can get to England, where I'd rather be, anyway."

There was a reason why Mr. Faringfield's face turned dark as a thunder-cloud at this. You must know, first, that in him alone was embodied the third generation of colonial Faringfields. The founder of the American branch of the family, having gone pretty nearly to the dogs at home, and got into close quarters with the law, received from his people the alternative of emigrating to Virginia or suffering justice to take its course. Tossing up his last sixpence, he indifferently observed, on its coming down, that it lay in favour of Virginia. So he chose emigration, and was s.h.i.+pped off, upon condition that if he ever again set foot in England he should be forthwith turned over to the merciless law. His relations, as he perceived, cherished the hope that he would die of a fever likely to be caught on the piece of marshy land in Virginia which they, in a belief that it was worthless, had made over to him. Pondering on this on the voyage, and perhaps having had his fill of the flesh and the devil, he resolved to disappoint his family. And, to make short a very long story of resolution and toil, he did so, becoming at last one of the richest tobacco-planters in the province.

He might now have returned to England with safety; but his resentment against the people who had exiled him when they might have compounded with justice otherwise, extended even to their country, which he no longer called his, and he abode still by the condition of his emigration. He married a woman who had her own special reasons for inimical feelings toward the English authorities, which any one may infer who is familiar with one phase (though this was not as large a phase as English writers seem to think) of the peopling of Virginia.

Although she turned over a new leaf in the province, and seems to have been a model wife and parent, she yet retained a sore heart against the mother country. The feeling of these two was early inculcated into the minds of their children, and their eldest son, in whom it amounted almost to a mania, transmitted it on to his own successor, our Mr.

Faringfield of Queen Street.

The second Faringfield (father of ours), being taken with a desire for the civilities and refinements of a town life, moved from Virginia to New York, married there a very worthy lady of Dutch patroon descent, and, retaining his Virginia plantation, gradually extended his business, so that he died a general merchant, with a European and a West Indian trade, and with vessels of his own. He it was that built the big Faringfield house in Queen Street. He was of an aspiring mind, for one in trade, and had even a leaning toward book-knowledge and the ornaments of life. He was, moreover, an exceedingly proud man, as if a haughty way were needful to a man of business and an American, in order to check the contempt with which he might be treated as either.

His large business, his pride, his unreasonable hatred of England (which he never saw), and a very fine and imposing appearance, he pa.s.sed down to our Mr. Faringfield, by whom all these inheritances were increased. This gentleman, sensible of the injustice of an inherited dislike not confirmed by experience, took occasion of some business to make a visit to England, shortly after his father's death.

I believe he called upon his English cousins, now some degrees removed, and, finding them in their generation ignorant that there were any American Faringfields, was so coldly received by them, as well as by the men with whom his business brought him in contact, that he returned more deeply fixed in his dislike, and with a determination that no Faringfield under his control should ever again breathe the air of the mother island. He even chose a wife of French, rather than English, descent; though, indeed, the De Lanceys, notwithstanding they were Americans of Huguenot origin, were very good Englishmen, as the issue proved when the separation came.

Miss De Lancey, however, at that time, had no views or feelings as between the colonies and England; or if she had any, scarcely knew what they were. She was a pretty, innocent, small-minded woman; with no very large heart either, I fancy; and without force of character; sometimes a little shrewish when vexed, and occasionally given to prolonged whining complaints, which often won the point with her husband, as a persistent mosquito will drive a man from a field whence a giant's blows would not move him. She heard Mr. Faringfield's tirades against England, with neither disagreement nor a.s.sent; and she let him do what he could to instil his own antagonism into the children. How he succeeded, or failed, will appear in time. I have told enough to show why Master Ned's threatening boast, of knowing how to get to England, struck his father like a blow in the face.

I looked to see Mr. Faringfield now stride forth at all risk and inflict upon Master Ned some chastis.e.m.e.nt inconceivable; and Ned himself took a backward step or two. But his father, after a moment of dark glowering, merely answered, though in a voice somewhat unsteady with anger:

"To England or the devil, my fine lad, before ever you enter my door, until you change your tune!"

Whereupon he motioned the rest of us children to follow him into the house, leaving his eldest son to turn and trudge defiantly off into the darkness. From Ned's manner of doing this, I knew that he was sure of shelter for that night, at least. Noah, the old black servant, having seen his master through the panel windows, had already opened the door; and so we went in to the warm, candle-lit hall, Mr.

Faringfield's agitation now perfectly under control, and his anger showing not at all upon his surface of habitual sternness.

As for the others, Phil walked in a kind of deep, troubled study, into which he had been thrown by Ned's words regarding him; I was awed into breathless silence and a mouse-like tread; and kind little f.a.n.n.y went gently sobbing with sorrow and fear for her unhappy brother--a sorrow and fear not shared in the least degree by her sister Madge, whose face showed triumphant approval of her father's course and of the outcome.

CHAPTER III.

_Wherein 'tis Shown that Boys Are but Boys._

The Faringfield house, as I have said, was flanked by garden s.p.a.ce on either side. It was on the Eastern side of the street, and so faced West, the next house Southward being ours. The wide hall that we entered ran straight back to a door opening from a wooden veranda that looked toward the rear garden. At the right of this hall, as you went in, a broad oak stairway invited you to the sleeping floor above. But before you came to this stairway, you pa.s.sed a door that gave into the great parlour, which ran the whole length of the hall, and, being used only on occasions of festivity or ceremony, was now closed and dark.

At the left of the hall, the first door led to the smaller parlour, as wide but not as long as the great one, and in daily use as the chief living-room of the house. Its windows were those through which the candle-light within had welcomed us from the frosty, snowy air that evening. Behind this parlour, and reached either directly from it, or by a second door at the left side of the hall, was the library, so-called although a single case of eight shelves sufficed to hold all the books it contained. Yet Philip said there was a world in those books. The room was a small and singularly cosy one, and here, when Mr. Faringfield was not occupied at the mahogany desk, we children might play at chess, draughts, cards, and other games. From this room, one went back into the dining-room, another apartment endeared to me by countless pleasant memories. Its two windows looked Southward across the side grounds (for the hall and great parlour came not so far back) to our house and garden. Behind the dining-room, and separating it from the kitchen and pantry, was a pa.s.sage with a back stairway and with a bench of was.h.i.+ng-basins, easily supplied with water from a cistern below, and from the kettle in the adjacent kitchen. To this place we youngsters now hastened, to put ourselves to rights for supper. The house was carpeted throughout. The great parlour was panelled in wood, white and gold. The other chief rooms were wainscoted in oak; and as to their upper walls, some were bright with French paper, while some shone white with smooth plaster; their ceilings and borders were decorated with arabesque woodwork. There were tiled fireplaces, with carved mantels, white, like the rectangular window-frames and panelled doors. Well, well, 'twas but a house like countless others, and why should I so closely describe it?--save that I love the memory of it, and fain would linger upon its commonest details.

Mighty snug was the dining-room that evening, with its oaken sideboard, its prints and portraits on the wall, its sputtering fire, and its well-filled table lighted from a candelabrum in the centre.

The sharp odour of the burning pine was keen to the nostrils, and mingled with it was the smell of the fried ham. There was the softer fragrance of the corn meal mush or porridge, served with milk, and soft was the taste of it also. We had sausage cakes, too, and pancakes to be eaten either with b.u.t.ter or with the syrup of the maple-tree; and jam, and jelly, and fruit b.u.t.ter. These things seem homely fare, no doubt, but there was a skill of cookery in the fat old negress, Hannah--a skill consisting much in the plentiful use of salt and pepper at proper stages--that would have given homelier fare a relish to more fastidious tongues. I miss in the wholesome but limited and unseasoned diet of the English the variety and savouriness of American food (I mean the food of the well-to-do in the large towns), which includes all the English and Scotch dishes, corrected of their insipidity, besides countless dishes French, German, and Dutch, and many native to the soil, all improved and diversified by the surprising genius for cookery which, in so few generations, the negro race has come to exhibit. I was a busy lad at that meal; a speechless one, consequently, and for some minutes so engrossed in the business of my jaws that I did not heed the unwonted silence of the rest. Then suddenly it came upon me as something embarra.s.sing and painful that Mr. and Mrs. Faringfield, who usually conversed at meals, had nothing to say, and that Philip Winwood sat gloomy and taciturn, merely going through a hollow form of eating. As for f.a.n.n.y, she was the picture of childish sorrow, though now tearless. Only Madge and little Tom, who had found some joke between themselves, occasionally spluttered with suppressed laughter, smiling meanwhile knowingly at each other.

Of course this depression was due to the absence of Ned, regarding the cause of which his mother was still in the dark. Not missing him until we children had filed in to supper after tidying up, she had then remarked that he was not yet in.

"He will not be home to supper," Mr. Faringfield had replied, in a tone that forbade questioning until the pair should be alone, and motioning his wife to be seated at the table. After that he had once or twice essayed to talk upon casual subjects, as if nothing had happened, but he had perceived that the attempt was hopeless while Mrs. Faringfield remained in her state of deferred curiosity and vague alarm, and so he had desisted.

After supper, which the lady's impatience made shorter than my appet.i.te would have dictated, the husband and wife went into the small parlour, closing the door upon us children in the library. Here I managed to make a pleasant evening, in games with Madge and little Tom upon the floor. But Philip, though he came in as was his wont, was not to be lured into our play or our talk. He did not even read, but sat silent and pondering, in no cheerful mood. I, not reading him as Madge did, knew not what the matter was, and accused him of having vapours, like a girl. He looked at me heedlessly, in reply, as if he scarce heard. But Madge, apparently, divined his feeling, and at times respected it, for then she spoke low, and skilfully won me back from my efforts to enliven him. At other times, his way seemed to irritate her, and she hinted that he was foolish, and then she was extraordinarily smiling and adorable to me (always, I now suspect, with the corner of her eye upon him) as if to draw him back to his usual good-fellows.h.i.+p by that method. But 'twas in vain. I left at bedtime, wondering what change had come over him.

That night, I learned afterward, Philip slept little, debating sorrowfully in his mind. He kept his window slightly open at night, in all weather; and open also that night was one of the windows of Mr.

and Mrs. Faringfield's great chamber below. A sound that reached him in the small hours, of Mrs. Faringfield whimpering and weeping, decided him. And the next morning, after another silent meal, he contrived to fall into Mr. Faringfield's company on the way to the warehouse, which they had almost reached ere Phil, very down in the mouth and perturbed, got up his courage to his unpleasant task and blundered out in a boyish, frightened way:

"If you please, sir, I wished to tell you--I've made up my mind to leave--and thank you very much for all your kindness!"

Mr. Faringfield stared from under his gathered brows, and asked Phil to repeat the strange thing he had said.

"Leave what, sir?" he queried sharply, when Phil had done so.

"Leave your warehouse, sir; and your house; and New York."

"What do you mean, my boy?"

And Phil, thankful that Mr. Faringfield had paused to have the talk out ere they should come among the men at the warehouse, explained at first in vague terms, but finally in the explicit language to which his benefactor's questions forced him, that he seemed, in Master Ned's mind, to be standing in Ned's way; that he would not for the world appear to supplant any man's son, much less the son of one who had been so kind to him; that he had unintentionally been the cause of Ned's departure the evening before; and that he hoped his going would bring Ned back from the absence which caused his mother grief. "And I wouldn't stay in New York after leaving you, sir," he said, "for 'twould look as if you and I had disagreed."

To all this Mr. Faringfield replied briefly that Ned was a foolish boy, and would soon enough come back, glad of what welcome he might get; and that, as for Philip's going away, it was simply not to be heard of. But Phil persisted, conceding only that he should remain at the warehouse for an hour that morning and complete a task he had left unfinished. Mr. Faringfield still refused to have it that Phil should go at all.

When Philip had done his hour's work, he went in to his employer's office to say good-bye.

"Tut, tut," said Mr. Faringfield, looking annoyed at the interruption, "there's no occasion for goodbyes. But look you, lad. I don't mind your taking the day off, to put yourself into a reasonable state of mind. Go home, and enjoy a holiday, and come back to your work to-morrow, fresh and cheerful. Now, now, boy, I won't hear any more.

Only do as I bid you." And he a.s.sumed a chilling reserve that indeed froze all further possible discussion.

"But I do say good-bye, sir, and mean it," said Phil, tremulously.

"And I thank you from my heart for all you've done for me."

And so, with a lump in his throat, Phil hastened home, and sped up the stairs unseen, like a ghost; and had all his things out on his bed for packing, when suddenly Madge, who had been astonished to hear him moving about, from her mother's room below, flung open his door and looked in upon him, all amazed.

"Why, Phil, what are you doing home at this hour? What are you putting your things into your valise for?"

"Oh, nothing," said Phil, very downcast.