CHAPTER VIII. A Hero in snuff-coloured Breeches.
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A few days afterward Sybrandt arrived in his
snuff-coloured suit, which of itself was enough to
ruin the brightest prospects of the most thriving
wooer. Think what a contrast to the splendours
of an aid-de-camp! the scarlet, gold-laced coat, the
bright spurs, and the gorgeous epaulettes. Poor
Sybrandt! what superiority of the inside could
weigh against this outside gear? Catalina received
him, I cannot tell exactly how. She did not know
herself, and how should I? It was an odd, incomprehensible,
indescribable compound of affected indifference,
and affected welcome; fear of showing too
little feeling, and horror of exhibiting too much. In
short, it was an awkward business, and Sybrandt
made it still more so, by being suddenly seized with
an acute fit of his old malady of shyness and embarrassment.
Such a meeting has often been a
prelude to an eternal separation.
The very next evening after his arrival Sybrandt
made his debut in the snuff-coloured suit, at a grand
party given by his excellency the governor, in
honour of his majesty's birthday. All the aristocracy
of the city were collected on this occasion,
and, in order to give additional dignity to the ceremony,
several people of the first consequence delayed
making their appearance till almost seven
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o'clock. The hoops and heads were prodigious;
and it is recorded of more than one lady, that she
went to this celebrated party with her head sticking
out of one of the coach windows, and her hoop
out at the other. Their sleeves it is true were not
quite so exuberant as those of the present graceful
mode; nor was it possible to mistake a lady's arm
for her body, as is sometimes done in these degenerate
days by near-sighted dandies; one of whom,
I am credibly informed, actually put his arm round
the sleeve instead of the waist, in dancing the waltz
last winter with a young belle just from Paris.
Many a little sharp-toed, high-heeled satin shoe,
sparkling in diamond paste buckles, did execution
that night; and one old lady in particular displayed,
with all the pride of conscious superiority, a pair of
gloves her mother had worn at court in the reign of
the gallant Charles the Second, who came very
near asking her to dance, and publicly declared her
to be quite as elegant as Nell Gwyn, and almost
as beautiful as the Dutchess of Cleveland. These
consecrated relics descended in a direct line from
generation to generation in this illustrious family,
being considered the most valuable of its possessions,
until they were sacrilegiously purloined
by a gentleman of colour belonging to the house,
and afterward exhibited during several seasons at
the African balls. “To what vile uses we may
come at last!”
All the dignitaries of the province were present
on this occasion, for their absence would have been
looked upon as a proof of disloyalty that might have
cost them their places. Here were the illustrious
members of the governor's council, who represented
his majesty in the second degree. Next came the
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chief justice, and the puisne justices, all in those
magnificent wigs which, as Captain Basil Hall asserts,
give such superiority to the decisions of the
judges of England,—inasmuch as that when the
head is so full of law that it can hold no more, a
vast superfluity of knowledge may be accommodated
in the curls of the wig. Hence it has been
gravely doubted whether those profound decisions
of my Lord Mansfield and Sir William Scott, which
constitute the law and the profits in our courts, did
actually emanate from the brains or the wigs of the
aforesaid oracles. Here too figured his majesty's
attorney-general and his majesty's solicitor-general,
who also wore wigs, but not so large as those of
the judges, for that would have been considered a
shrewd indication that they thought themselves
equally learned in the law with their betters. Next
came the rabble of little vermin that are farmed out
upon colonies in all ages and nations, to fatten on
the spoils of industry, and tread upon the people
who give them bread. Custom and excise officers,
commissioners and paymasters, and every creeping
thing which had the honour of serving and
cheating his majesty in the most contemptible station,
here took precedence of the ancient and present lords
of the soil, and looked down upon them as inferior
beings. His majesty was the fountain of honour and
glory; and his excellency the governor being his
direct and immediate representative, all claims to
distinction were settled by propinquity to that distinguished
functionary. Whoever was nearest to him in
dignity of office was the next greatest man; and
whatever lady could get nearest the governor's lady
at a party was indubitably ennobled for that night,
and became an object of envy ever afterward.
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Previous to the late Revolution more than one of our aristocratic
families derived their principal distinction
from their grandmothers having once dined with the
governor, and sat at the right hand of his lady at
dinner.
If Sybrandt, the humble and obscure Sybrandt,
who had nothing to recommend him but talents,
learning, and intrepidity of soul—if he was awed by
the majesty of this illustrious assemblage of dignitaries,
almost all of whom tacked honourable to their
names, who can blame him? And if, as he contrasted
his snuff-coloured dress with the gorgeous
military costumes of the aids-de-camp and officers,
he felt, in spite of himself, a consciousness of inferiority,
who can wonder? And if, as he gazed on
the big wigs of the judges, and the vast circumference
of those hoops in which the beauties of New-York
moved and revolved as in a universe of their
own, he trembled to his inmost heart, who shall dare
to question his courage?
To the weight of this feeling of inferiority,
which pressed upon the modesty of his nature,
and, as it were, enveloped his intellects in a fog
of awkward embarrassment, were added various
other causes of vexation. When it was whispered
about that he was the country beau, the accepted
one of the belle of New-York, the scrutiny he underwent
would have quailed the heart of a roaring lion.
The young ladies, who envied Catalina the conquest
of the two aids, revenged themselves by tittering at
her beau behind their fans.
“Lord,” whispered Miss Van Dam to Miss Twentyman,
“did you ever see such an old-fashioned
creature? I declare, he looks frightened out of his
wits.”
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“And then his snuff-coloured breeches!” said the
other. “He is handsome, too; but what is a man
without a red coat and epaulettes!”
My readers will excuse the insertion of a certain
obnoxious word in the reply of the young lady, when
they understand it was uttered in a whisper. I am
the last man in the world to commit an outrage upon
female decorum, and am not so ignorant of what is
due to the delicacy of the sex as not to know that
though it is considered allowable for young ladies
now-a-days to expose their persons in the streets
and at parties in the most generous manner, as well
as to permit strangers to take them round the waist
in a waltz, it would be indelicate in the highest
degree to mention such matters in plain English.
In fashionable ethics, indelicacy consists not so
much in the thing itself as in the words used in describing
it.
While the young ladies were criticising the merits
of our hero's snuff-coloured costume, the mothers
were investigating his other capabilities.
“They say he will be immensely rich,” quoth
Mrs. Van Dam.
“You don't say so?” cried Mrs. Van Borsum.
“Yes, he has two old bachelor uncles, as rich as
Crœsus.”
“Crœsus? who is he? I don't know him.”
“A rich merchant in London, I believe.”
“Well, but is it certain he will have the fortunes
of both the old bachelors?”
“O, certain. One of them has adopted him, and
the other made his will and left him all he has.”
“What a pity he should marry such a flirt as that
Miss Vancour!”
“O, a very great pity. Really I am sorry for the
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young fellow; he deserves a better wife.” And she
thought of her daughter.
“Indeed he does—so he does,” echoed the other
lady; and she thought of her daughter. They both
began to despair of the aids, and the military and
the civil dignitaries; and the next object of their
ambition was a rich provincial.
It was not many hours after this conversation before
our friend Sybrandt was introduced to these
good ladies, at their particular instance, and by them
to their daughters.
“Is he rich enough to take me home?” whispered
Miss Van Borsum to her mother—home being the
phrase for Old England at that time, when it was
considered vulgar to belong to a colony.—“Is he
rich enough to take me home?”
“As rich as Crœsus, the great London merchant.”
“Then I am determined to set my cap at him in
spite of his snuff-coloured —,” thought Miss
Van Borsum. By one of those inextricable manoeuvres
with which experienced dames contrive arrangements
of this sort, Sybrandt was actually forced into
dancing a minuet with Miss Van Borsum, although
he would almost have preferred dancing a jig upon
nothing. The young lady nearly equalled Catalina
in this the most graceful and ladylike of all dances;
and having a beautiful little foot et cetera, many were
the keen darts she launched from her pointed satin
shoes and diamond buckles at the hearts of the
beholders. The dancing of our hero was not altogether
despicable; but the snuff-coloured —!
they did his business for that night with all the
young ladies and their mothers who did not know
he was the heir of two rich old bachelors.
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Paulding, James Kirke, 1778-1860 [1831], The Dutchman's fireside, volume 2 (J. & J. Harper, New York) [word count] [eaf308v2].
