Kitabı oku: «An American Patrician, or The Story of Aaron Burr», sayfa 14
CHAPTER XXV – THE SERENE LAST DAYS
AARON goes forward with his business – his cases in court, his conferences with clients. Accurate as an Alvan-ley in dress, slim, light, with the quick step of a boy, no one might guess his years. The bar respects him; his friends crowd about him; his enemies shrink away from the black, unblinking stare of those changeless ophidian eyes. And so with his books and his wine and his pipe he sits through the serene evenings in his rooms by the Bowling Green. He is a lion, and strangers from England and Germany and France ask to be presented. They talk – not always wisely or with taste.
“Was Hamilton a gentleman?” asks a popinjay Frenchman.
Aaron’s black eyes blaze: “Sir,” says he, “I met him!”
“Colonel Burr,” observes a dull, thick Englishman, who imagines himself a student of governments – “Colonel Burr, I have read your Constitution. I find it not always clear. Who is to expound it?”
Aaron leads our student of governments to the window, and points, with a whimsical smile, at the Broadway throngs that march below.
“Sir,” he remarks, “they are the expounders of our Constitution.”
Aaron, at seventy-eight, does a foolish thing; he marries – marries the wealthy Madam Jumel.
They live in the madam’s great mansion on the heights overlooking the Harlem. Three months later they part, and Aaron goes back to his books and his pipe and his wine, in his rooms by the Bowling Green.
It is a bright morning; Aaron and his friend Van Ness are walking in Broadway. Suddenly Aaron halts and leans against the wall of a house – the City Hotel.
“It is a numbness,” says he. “I cannot walk!”
The good, purple, puffy Dr. Hosack comes panting to the rescue. He finds the stricken one in his rooms where Van Ness has brought him.
“Paralysis!” says the good anxious Hosack.
Aaron is out in a fortnight; numbness gone, he says. Six months later comes another stroke; both legs are paralyzed.
There are to be no more strolls in the Battery Park for Aaron. Now and then he rides out. For the most part he sits by his Broadway window and reads or watches the world hurry by. His friends call; he has no lack of company.
The stubborn Swartwout looks in one afternoon; Aaron waves the paper.
“See!” he cries. “Houston has whipped Santa Ana at San Jacinto! That marks the difference between a Jefferson and a Jackson in the White House! Sir, thirty years ago it was treason; to-day, with Jackson, Houston and San Jacinto, it is patriotism.”
Winter disappears in spring, and Aaron’s strength is going. The hubbub, the bustle, the driving, striving warfare of the town’s life wearies. He takes up new quarters on Staten Island, and the salt, fresh air revives him. All day he gazes out upon the gray restless waters of the bay. His visitors are many. Nor do they always cheer him. It is Dr. Hosack who one day brings up the name of Hamilton.
“Colonel, it was an error – a fearful error!” says the doctor.
“Sir,” rejoins Aaron, the old hard uncompromising ring in his tones, “it was not an error, it was justice. When had his slanders rested? He heaped obloquy upon me for years. I stood in his way; I marred his prospects; I mortified his vanity; and so he vilified me. The man was malevolent – cowardly! You have seen what he wrote the night before he fought me. It sounds like the confession of a sick monk. When he stood before me at Weehawken, his eye caught mine and he quailed like a convicted felon. They say he did not fire! Sir, he fired first. I heard the bullet whistle over my head and saw the severed twigs. I have lived more than eighty years; I dwell now in the shadow of death. I shall soon go; and I shall go saying that the destruction of Hamilton was an act of justice.”
“Colonel Burr,” observes the kindly doctor, “I am made sorry by your words – sorry by your manner! Are you to leave us with a heart full of enmity?”
The black eyes do not soften.
“I shall die as I have lived – hating where I’m hated, loving where I’m loved.”
The last day breaks, and Aaron dies – dies
“What lies beyond?” asks one shortly before he goes.
“Who knows?” he returns.
“But do you never ask?”
“Why ask? Who should reply to such a question? – the old, old question ever offered, never answered.”
“But you have hopes?”
“None,” says Aaron steadily. “And I want none. I am resolved to die without fear; and he who would have no fear must have no hope.” So he departs; he, of whom the good Dr. Bellamy said: “He will soar as high to fall as low as any soul alive.”
