The Duke of Stockbridge by Edward Bellamy
E >>
Edward Bellamy >> The Duke of Stockbridge
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 Produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, Robert Shimmin
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE DUKE OF STOCKBRIDGE
A ROMANCE OF SHAYS' REBELLION
BY EDWARD BELLAMY
CHAPTER FIRST
THE MARCH OF THE MINUTE MEN
The first beams of the sun of August 17, 1777, were glancing down the
long valley, which opening to the East, lets in the early rays of
morning, upon the village of Stockbridge. Then, as now, the Housatonic
crept still and darkling around the beetling base of Fisher's Nest,
and in the meadows laughed above its pebbly shoals, embracing the
verdant fields with many a loving curve. Then, as now, the mountains
cradled the valley in their eternal arms, all round, from the Hill of
the Wolves, on the north, to the peaks that guard the Ice Glen, away
to the far south-east. Then, as now, many a lake and pond gemmed the
landscape, and many a brook hung like a burnished silver chain upon
the verdant slopes. But save for this changeless frame of nature,
there was very little, in the village, which the modern dweller in
Stockbridge would recognize.
The main settlement is along a street lying east and west, across the
plain which extends from the Housatonic, northerly some distance, to
the foot of a hill. The village green or "smooth" lies rather at the
western end of the village than at the center. At this point the main
street intersects with the county road, leading north and south, and
with divers other paths and lanes, leading in crooked, rambling lines
to several points of the compass; sometimes ending at a single dwelling,
sometimes at clusters of several buildings. On the hill, to the north,
somewhat separated from the settlement on the plain, are quite a number
of houses, erected there during the recent French and Indian wars, for
the sake of being near the fort, which is now used as a parsonage by
Reverend Stephen West, the young minister. The streets are all very wide
and grassy, wholly without shade trees, and bordered generally by rail
fences or stone walls. The houses, usually separated by wide intervals
of meadow, are rarely over a story and a half in height. When painted,
the color is usually red, brown, or yellow, the effect of which is a
certain picturesqueness wholly outside any design on the part of the
practical minded inhabitants.
Interspersed among the houses, and occurring more thickly in the south
and west parts of the village, are curious huts, as much like wigwams
as houses. These are the dwellings of the Christianized and civilized
Stockbridge Indians, the original possessors of the soil, who live
intermingled with the whites on terms of the most utter comity, fully
sharing the offices of church and town, and fighting the battles of
the Commonwealth side by side with the white militia.
Around the green stand the public buildings of the place. Here is the
tavern, a low two-story building, without porch or piazza, and entered
by a door in the middle of the longest side. Over the door swings a
sign, on which a former likeness of King George has, by a metamorphosis
common at this period, been transformed into a soldier of the revolution,
in Continental uniform of buff and blue. But just at this time its
contemplation does not afford the patriotic tipler as much complacency
as formerly, for Burgoyne is thundering at the passes of the Hoosacs,
only fifty miles away, and King George may get his red coat back again,
after all. The Tories in the village say that the landlord keeps a pot
of red paint behind the door, so that the Hessian dragoons may not take
him by surprise when they come galloping down the valley, some afternoon.
On the other side [of] the green is the meeting-house, built some thirty
years ago, by a grant from government at Boston, and now considered
rather old-fashioned and inconvenient. Hard by the meeting-house is the
graveyard, with the sandy knoll in its south-west corner, set apart for
the use of the Indians. The whipping-post, stocks, and cage, for the
summary correction of such offences as come within the jurisdiction of
Justice Jahleel Woodbridge, Esquire, adorn the middle of the village
green, and on Saturday afternoon are generally the center of a crowd
assembled to be edified by the execution of sentences.
On the other side [of] the green from the meeting-house stands the
store, built five years before, by Timothy Edwards, Esquire, a structure
of a story and a half, with the unusual architectural adornment of a
porch or piazza in front, the only thing of the kind in the village.
The people of Stockbridge are scarcely prouder of the divinity of their
late shepherd, the famous Dr. Jonathan Edwards, than they are of his
son Timothy's store. Indeed, what with Dr. Edwards, so lately in their
midst, Dr. Hopkins, down at Great Barrington, and Dr. Bellamy, just
over the State line in Bethlehem, Connecticut, the people of Berkshire
are decidedly more familiar with theologians than with storekeepers,
for when Mr. Edwards built his store in 1772, it was the only one in
the county.
At such a time it may be readily inferred that a commercial occupation
serves rather as a distinction than otherwise. Squire Edwards is
moreover chairman of the selectmen, and furthermore most of the
farmers are in his debt for supplies, while to these varied elements
of influence, his theological ancestry adds a certain odor of
sanctity. It is true that Squire Jahleel Woodbridge is even more
brilliantly descended, counting two colonial governors and numerous
divines among his ancestry, not to speak of a rumored kinship with the
English noble family of Northumberland. But instead of tending to a
profitless rivalry the respective claims of the Edwardses and the
Woodbridges to distinction have happily been merged by the marriage of
Jahleel Woodbridge and Lucy Edwards, the sister of Squire Timothy, so
that in all social and political matters, the two families are closely
allied.
The back room of the store is, in a sense, the Council-chamber, where
the affairs of the village are debated and settled by these magnates,
whose decisions the common people never dream of anticipating or
questioning. It is also a convivial center, a sort of clubroom. There,
of an afternoon, may generally be seen Squires Woodbridge, Williams,
Elisha Brown, Deacon Nash, Squire Edwards, and perhaps a few others,
relaxing their gravity over generous bumpers of some choice old
Jamaica, which Edwards had luckily laid in, just before the war
stopped all imports.
In the west half of the store building, Squire Edwards lives with his
family, including, besides his wife and children, the remnants of his
father's family and that of his sister, the widowed Mrs. President
Burr. Young Aaron Burr was there, for a while after his graduation at
Princeton, and during the intervals of his arduous theological studies
with Dr. Bellamy at Bethlehem. Perchance there are heart-sore maidens
in the village, who, to their sorrow, could give more particular
information of the exploits of the seductive Aaron at this period,
than I am able to.
Such are the mountains and rivers, the streets and the houses of
Stockbridge as the sun of this August morning in the year 1777,
discloses them to view. But where are the people? It is seven, yes,
nearly eight o'clock, and no human being is to be seen walking in the
streets, or travelling in the roads, or working in the fields. Such
lazy habits are certainly not what we have been wont to ascribe to our
sturdy forefathers. Has the village, peradventure, been deserted by
the population, through fear of the Hessian marauders, the threat of
whose coming has long hung like a portentous cloud, over the Berkshire
valley? Not at all. It is not the fear of man, but the fear of God,
that has laid a spell upon the place. It is the Sabbath, or what we
moderns call Sunday, and law and conscience have set their double seal
on every door, that neither man, woman nor child, may go forth till
sunset, save at the summons of the meeting-house bell. We may wander
all the way from the parsonage on the hill, to Captain Konkapot's hut
on the Barrington road, without meeting a soul, though the windows
will have a scandalized face framed in each seven by nine pane of
glass. And the distorted, uncouth and variously colored face and
figure, which the imperfections of the glass give the passer-by, will
doubtless appear to the horrified spectators, but the fit typical
representation of his inward depravity. We shall, I say, meet no one,
unless, as we pass his hut by Konkapot's brook, Jehoiachim
Naunumpetox, the Indian tithing man, spy us, and that will be to our
exceeding discomfiture, for straightway laying implacable hands upon
us, he will deliver us to John Schebuck, the constable, who will
grievously correct our flesh with stripes, for Sabbath-breaking, and
cause us to sit in the stocks, for an ensample.
But if so mild an excursion involve so dire a risk, what must be the
desperation of this horseman who is coming at a thundering gallop
along the county road from Pittsfield? His horse is in a foaming
sweat, the strained nostrils are filled with blood and the congested
eyes protrude as if they would leap from their sockets to be at their
goal.
It is Squire Woodbridge's two story red house before which the horseman
pulls rein, and leaving his steed with hanging head and trembling knees
and laboring sides, drags his own stiffened limbs up the walk and enters
the house. Almost instantly Squire Woodbridge himself, issues from the
door, dressed for church in a fine black coat, waistcoat, and
knee-breeches, white silk stockings, a three-cornered black hat and
silver buckles on his shoes, but in his hand instead of a Bible, a
musket. As he steps out, the door of a house further east opens also,
and another man similarly dressed, with brown woolen stockings, steps
forth with a gun in his hand also. He seems to have interpreted the
meaning of the horseman's message. This is Deacon Nash. Beckoning him
to follow, Squire Woodbridge steps out to the edge of the green, raises
his musket to his shoulder and discharges it into the air. Deacon Nash
coming up a moment later also raises and fires his gun, and e'er the
last echoes have reverberated from the mountains, Squire Edwards,
musket in hand, throws open his store door and stepping out on the
porch, fires the third gun.
A moment ago hundreds of faces were smiling, hundreds of eyes were
bright, hundreds of cheeks were flushed. Now there is not a single
smile or a trace of brightness, or a bit of color on a face in the
valley. Such is the woful change wrought in every household, as the
successive reports of the heavily-charged pieces sound through the
village, and penetrate to the farthest outlying farmhouse. The first
shot may well be an accident, the second may possibly be, but as the
third inexorably follows, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters,
parents and sons, look at each other with blanched faces, and instantly
a hundred scenes of quiet preparation for meeting, are transformed into
the confusion of a very different kind of preparation. Catechisms are
dropped for muskets, and Bibles fall unnoticed under foot, as men
spring for their haversacks and powder-horns. For those three guns
summon the minute men to be on the march for Bennington. All the
afternoon before, the roar of cannon has faintly sounded from the
northward, and the people knew that Stark was meeting Baum and his
Hessians, on the Hoosac. One detachment of Stockbridge men is already
with him. Does this new summons mean disaster? Has the dreaded foe made
good his boasted invincibility? No one knows, not even the exhausted
messenger, for he was sent off by Stark, while yet the issue of
yesterday's battle trembled in the balance.
"It's kinder suddin. I wuz in hopes the boys wouldn' hev to go, bein
as they wuz a fightin yisdy," quavered old Elnathan Hamlin, as he
trotted about, helplessly trying to help, and only hindering Mrs.
Hamlin, as with white face, but deft hands, and quick eyes, she was
getting her two boys ready, filling their haversacks, sewing a button
here, tightening a buckle there, and looking to everything.
"Ye must tak keer o' Reub, Perez. He ain't so rugged 'zye be. By
rights, he orter ha stayed to hum."
"Oh, I'm as stout as Perez. I can wrastle him. Don't fret about me,"
said Reuben, with attempted gayety, though his boyish lip quivered as
he looked at his mother's face, noting how she did not meet his eye,
lest she should lose her self-control, and not be able to do anything
more.
"I'll look after the boy, never fear," said Perez, slapping his brother
on the back. "I'll fetch him back a General, as big a man as Squire
Woodbridge."
"I dunno what 'n time I shall dew 'bout gittin in the crops," whimpered
Elnathan. "I can't dew it 'lone, nohow. Seems though my rheumatiz wuz
wuss 'n ever, this las' spell o' weather."
"There goes Abner Rathbun, and George Fennell," cried Perez. "Time we
were off. Good-bye mother. There! There! Don't you cry, mother. We'll
be back all right. Got your gun, Reub? Good-bye father. Come on," and
the boys were off.
In seeming sympathy with the sudden grief that has fallen on the
village, the bright promise of the morning has given place in the last
hour to one of those sudden rain storms to which a mountainous region
is always liable, and a cold drizzle is now falling. But that does not
hinder every one who has friends among the departing soldiers, or
sympathy with the cause represented, from gathering on the green to
witness the muster and march of the men. All the leading men and the
officials of the town and parish are there, including the two Indian
selectmen, Johannes Metoxin and Joseph Sauquesquot. Squire Edwards,
Deacon Nash, Squire Williams and Captain Josiah Jones, brother-in-law
of Squire Woodbridge, are going about among the tearful groups, of one
of which each soldier is a centre, reassuring and encouraging both
those who go, and those who stay, the ones with the promise that their
wives and children and parents shall be looked after and cared for,
the others with confident talk of victory and speedy reunions.
Squire Edwards tells Elnathan, who with Mrs. Hamlin has come down to
the green, that he needn't fret about the mortgage on his house, and
Deacon Nash tells him that he'll see that his crops are saved, and
George Fennell, who, with his wife and daughter, stands by, is assured
by the Squire, that they shall have what they want from the store.
There is not a plough-boy among the minute men who is not honored
today with a cordial word or two, or at least a smile, from the
magnates who never before have recognized his existence.
And proud in her tears, to-day, is the girl who has a sweetheart among
the soldiers. Shy girls, who for fear of being laughed at, have kept a
secret of their inclinations, now grown suddenly bold, cry, as they
talk with their lovers, and refuse not the parting kiss. Desire
Edwards, the Squire's daughter, as she moves among the groups, and
sees these things, is stirred with envy and thinks she would give
anything if she, too, had a sweetheart to bid good-bye to. But she is
only fifteen, and Squire Edwards' daughter, moreover, to whom no
rustic swain dares pretend. Then she bethinks herself that one has
timidly, enough, so pretended. She knows that Elnathan Hamlin's son,
Perez, is dreadfully in love with her. He is better bred than the
other boys, but after all he is only a farmer's son, and while pleased
with his conquest as a testimony to her immature charms, she has
looked down upon him as quite an inferior order of being to herself.
But just now he appears to her in the desirable light of somebody to
bid good-bye to, to the end that she may be on a par with the other
girls whom she so envies. So she looks about for Perez.
And he, on his part, is looking about for her. That she, the Squire's
daughter, as far above him as a star, would care whether he went or
stayed, or would come to say good-bye to him, he had scarcely dared to
think. And yet how deeply has that thought, which he has scarcely
dared own, tinged all his other thinking! The martial glory that has
so dazzled his young imagination, how much of its glitter was but
reflected from a girl's eyes. As he looks about and not seeing her,
says, "She does not care, she will not come," the sword loses all its
sheen, and the nodding plume its charm, and his dreams of self-devotion
all their exhilaration.
"I came to bid you good-bye, Perez," says a voice behind him.
He wheels about, red, confused, blissful. Desire Edwards, dark and
sparkling as a gypsy, stands before him with her hand outstretched. He
takes it eagerly, timidly. The little white fingers press his big
brown ones. He does not feel them there; they seem to be clasping his
heart. He feels the ecstatic pressure there.
"Fall in," shouts Captain Woodbridge, for the Squire himself is their
captain.
There is a tumult of embraces and kisses all around. Reuben kissed his
mother.
"Will you kiss me, Desire?" said Perez, huskily, carried beyond
himself, scarcely knowing what he said, for if he had realized he
never would have dared.
Desire looked about, and saw all the women kissing their men. The air
was electric.
"Yes," she said, and gave him her red lips, and for a moment it seemed
as if the earth had gone from under his feet. The next thing he knew
he was standing in line, with Reub on one side, and George Fennell on
the other and Abner Rathbun's six feet three towering at one end of
the line, while Parson West was standing on the piazza of the store,
praying for the blessing of God on the expedition.
"Amen," the parson said, and Captain Woodbridge's voice rang out
again. The lines faced to the right, filed off the green at quick
step, turned into the Pittsfield road, and left the women to their
tears.
CHAPTER SECOND
NINE YEARS AFTER
Early one evening in the very last of August, 1786, only three years
after the close of the Revolutionary war, a dozen or twenty men and
boys, farmers and laborers, are gathered, according to custom, in the
big barroom of Stockbridge tavern. The great open fireplace of course
shows no cheery blaze of logs at this season, and the only light is
the dim and yellow illumination diffused by two or three homemade
tallow candles stuck about the bar, which runs along half of one side
of the apartment. The dim glimmer of some pewter mugs standing on a
shelf behind the bar is the only spot of reflected light in the room,
whose time-stained, unpainted woodwork, dingy plastering, and low
ceiling, thrown into shadows by the rude and massive crossbeams, seems
capable of swallowing up without a sign ten times the illumination
actually provided. The faces of four or five men, standing near the
bar, or lounging on it, are quite plainly visible, and the forms of
half a dozen more who are seated on a long settle placed against the
opposite wall, are more dimly to be seen, while in the back part of
the room, leaning against the posts or walls, or lounging in the open
doorway, a dozen or more figures loom indistinctly out of the
darkness.
The tavern, it must be remembered, as a convivial resort, is the social
antipodes of the back room of Squire Edwards' "store." If you would
consort with silk-stockinged, wigged, and silver shoe-buckled gentlemen,
you must just step over there, for at the tavern are only to be found
the hewers of wood and drawers of water, mechanics, farm-laborers, and
farmers. Ezra Phelps and Israel Goodrich, the former the owner of the
new gristmill at "Mill Hollow," a mile west of the village, the other
a substantial farmer, with their corduroy coats and knee-breeches, blue
woolen hose and steel shoe buckles, are the most socially considerable
and respectably attired persons present.
Perhaps about half the men and boys are barefooted, according to the
economical custom of a time when shoes in summer are regarded as
luxuries not necessities. The costume of most is limited to shirt and
trousers, the material for which their own hands or those of their
women-folk have sheared, spun, woven and dyed. Some of the better
dressed wear trousers of blue and white striped stuff, of the kind
now-a-days exclusively used for bed-ticking. The leathern breeches
which a few years before were universal are still worn by a few in
spite of their discomfort in summer.
Behind the bar sits Widow Bingham, the landlady, a buxom, middle-aged
woman, whose sharp black eyes have lost none of their snap, whether
she is entertaining a customer with a little pleasant gossip, or
exploring the murky recesses of the room about the door, where she
well knows sundry old customers are lurking, made cowards of by
consciousness of long unsettled scores upon her slate. And whenever
she looks with special fixity into the darkness there is soon a
scuttling of somebody out of doors.
She pays little or no attention to the conversation of the men around
the bar. Being largely political, it might be expected to have the
less interest for one of the domestic sex, and moreover it is the same
old story she has been obliged to hear over and over every evening,
with little variation, for a year or two past.
For in those days, throughout Massachusetts, at home, at the tavern,
in the field, on the road, in the street, as they rose up, and as they
sat down, men talked of nothing but the hard times, the limited
markets, and low prices for farm produce, the extortions and
multiplying numbers of the lawyers and sheriffs, the oppressions of
creditors, the enormous, grinding taxes, the last sheriff's sale, and
who would be sold out next, the last batch of debtors taken to jail,
and who would go next, the utter dearth of money of any sort, the
impossibility of getting work, the gloomy and hopeless prospect for
the coming winter, and in general the wretched failure of the triumph
and independence of the colonies to bring about the public and private
prosperity so confidently expected.
The air of the room is thick with smoke, for most of the men are
smoking clay or corncob pipes, but the smoke is scarcely recognizable
as that of tobacco, so largely is that expensive weed mixed with dried
sweet-fern and other herbs, for the sake of economy. Of the score or
two persons present, only two, Israel Goodrich and Ezra Phelps, are
actually drinking anything. Not certainly that they are the only ones
disposed to drink, as the thirsty looks that follow the mugs to their
lips, sufficiently testify, but because they alone have credit at the
bar. Ezra furnishes Mrs. Bingham with meal from his mill, and drinks
against the credit thus created, while Israel furnishes the landlady
with potatoes on the same understanding. There being practically
almost no money in circulation, most kinds of trade are dependent on
such arrangements of barter. Meshech Little, the carpenter, who lies
dead-drunk on the floor, his clothing covered with the sand, which it
has gathered up while he was being unceremoniously rolled out of the
way, is a victim of one of these arrangements, having just taken his
pay in rum for a little job of tinkering about the tavern.
"Meshech hain't hed a steady job sence the new meetin-haouse wuz done
las' year, an I s'pose the critter feels kinder diskerridged like,"
said Abner Rathbun, regarding the prostrate figure sympathetically.
Abner has grown an inch and broadened proportionally, since Squire
Woodbridge made him file leader of the minute men by virtue of his six
feet three, and as he stands with his back to the bar, resting his
elbows on it, the room would not be high enough for his head, but that
he stands between the cross-beams.
"I s'pose Meshech's fam'ly 'll hev to go ontew the taown," observed
Israel Goodrich. "They say ez the poorhouse be twicet ez full ez't
orter be, naow."
"It'll hev more intew it fore 't hez less," said Abner grimly.
"Got no work, Abner? I hearn ye wuz up Lenox way a lookin fer suthin
to dew," inquired Peleg Bidwell, a lank, loose-jointed farmer, who was
leaning against a post in the middle of the room, just on the edge of
the circle of candlelight.
"A feller ez goes arter work goes on a fool's errant," responded
Abner, dejectedly. "There ain' no work nowhar, an a feller might jess
ez well sit down to hum an wait till the sheriff comes arter him."
"The only work as pays now-a-days is pickin the bones o' the people.
Why don't ye turn lawyer or depity sheriff, an take to that, Abner?"
said Paul Hubbard, an undersized man with a dark face, and thin,
sneering lips.
He had been a lieutenant in the Continental army, and used rather
better language than the country folk ordinarily, which, as well as a
cynical wit which agreed with the embittered popular temper, gave him
considerable influence. Since the war he had been foreman of Colonel
William's iron-works at West Stockbridge. There was great distress
among the workmen on account of the stoppage of the works by reason of
the hard times, but Hubbard, as well as most of the men, still
remained in West Stockbridge, simply because there was no
encouragement to go elsewhere.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24
