We picture them together when he homeward walks beside her chair, the
constant lover, to her very gate. With the memory of the music in her
ears, the stars overspreading the sky a dazzling canopy, and a cavalier
by her side, could she ask for more? And yet she did, and, alack-a-day,
as she herself would have said, the stream of her life was not always
so fresh and frolicking. Could the chairmen tell us more? No doubt; but
leave the door tight shut and spare a lady's blushes.
The day came when the Chevalier de Silly sailed away to Yorktown, and
the maiden was left to work her witcheries on her townsmen. Newport
was a changed place after the French departed. Many a true heart
was exchanged that morning for a golden button or some other token.
The mothers only were happy, and back to households came a troop of
long-exiled femininity, free from the fret of love. Twelve years later,
it is said, one summer dawn in Paris there rolled through the streets
a tumbril on its way to a guillotine erected near the gardens of the
Luxembourg. One of its occupants was De Silly. In the hush which always
fell on the mob when a victim reached the last step of the stairway
of death we wonder whether the fair face of Sally Church came before
the eyes of her poor Chevalier. The answer is lost in the length of
long-dead years. Over the cries of that surging mass of humanity when
the blade snapped the thread of his life we see them once again living
out their Newport romance.
SUSANNA ROWSON, OF
"CHARLOTTE TEMPLE" FAME,
AND HER BRITISH GRENADIER
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
SUSANNA ROWSON, OF "CHARLOTTE TEMPLE" FAME, AND HER BRITISH GRENADIER
Overlooking Nantasket's white beach, and guarded, as it were, by the
little hills of Hull, is a dwelling, now entirely changed, where
Susanna Haswell spent her girlhood. A quarter of a century ago it was
still as the Haswells left it when they were forced to remove to the
neighboring town of Hingham, practically prisoners of war. Then it was
described as a large one-story wooden building with a huge chimney in
the centre, one of a type to be found in hundreds of old New England
villages. In the days when the English maiden conned her lessons as her
father painted quaint stilted landscapes on the doors and mantel-pieces
of his abode the house was approached through a line of fruit-trees,
and close to the gray walls that the sea-mist loved to kiss grew
the multitude of flowers that flourished in the sweet plots of the
descendants of the Puritans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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