TWO PEERS SANS PEERAGE Sir John had arrived and I caught sight of his heavy, expressionless face, which seemed more colourless than ever in the candle light. Consternation reigned in the Hall,--a vast tumult of whispering and guarded gabble among servants, checked by sobs,--and I saw officers come and go, and the tall forms of Mohawks still as pines on a summer night. The entire household was there--all excepting only Michael Cardigan and Felicity Warren. The two score farm slaves were there huddled along the wall in dusky clusters, and their great, dark eyes wet with tears. I saw Sir William's lawyer, Lafferty, come in with Flood, the Baronet's Bouw-Meester.[1] [Footnote 1: Farm overseer.] His blacksmith, his tailor, and his armourer were there; also his gardener; the German, Frank, his butler; Pontioch, his personal waiter; and those two uncanny and stunted servants, the Bartholomews, with their dead white faces and dwarfish dignity. Also I saw poor Billy, Sir William's fiddler, gulping down the blubbers; and there was his personal physician, Doctor Daly, very grave; and the servile Wall, schoolmaster to Lady Molly's brood; and I saw Nicholas, his valet, and black Flora, his cook, both sobbing into the same bandanna. The dark Lady Johnson was there, very quiet in her grief, slow-moving, still beautiful, having by the hands the two youngest girls and boy, while near her clustered the older children, fat Peter and Betsy and pretty Lana. A great multitude of candles burned throughout the hall; Sir William's silver and mahogany sparkled everywhere; and so did the naked claymores of the Highlanders on guard where the dead man lay in his own chamber, done, at last, with all perplexity and grief. * * * * * In the morning came the quality in scores--all the landed gentry of Tryon County, Tory and Whig alike, to show their reverence:--old Colonel John Butler from his seat at Butlersbury near Caughnawaga, and his dark, graceful son Walter,--he of the melancholy golden eyes--an attorney then and sick of a wound which, some said, had been taken in a duel with Michael Cardigan near Fort Pitt. Colonel Claus was there, too, son-in-law to Sir William, and battered much by frontier battles: and Guy Johnson, a cousin, and a son-in-law, too, had come from his fine seat at Guy Park to look upon a face as tranquil in death as a sleeping child's. The McDonald, of damned memory, was there in his tartan and kilts and bonnet; and the Albany Patroon, very modest; and God knows how many others from far and near, all arrived to honour a man who had died very tired in the service of our Lord, who knows and pardons all. The pretty lady of Sir John, who was Polly Watts of New York, came to me where I stood in the noon breeze near the lilacs; and I kissed her hand, and, straightening myself, retained it, looking into her woeful face of a child, all marred with tears.