The Love-story of the Noted
Nathaniel Moore and "the
Heavenly Ellen," a Belle of
Chambers Street, New York
City

The Love-story of the Noted Nathaniel Moore and "the Heavenly Ellen," a Belle of Chambers Street, New York City

A great red brick mansion in Chambers Street, guarded by two sentinel-like elm-trees and a tall iron fence; a sidewalk filled with the fashionables of Gotham starting for the afternoon Battery promenade; and up behind the eye-like panes of one of the haughty, staring windows a maiden dreaming over her pen. There is the picture. A demure little country Phyllis, visiting her august city relatives for the first time, has found herself in two strange worlds—fashion and love. In the extract taken from her letter written to a home confidante is the key to a forgotten romance of old New York. Love! the key to all the romances since the world began. "He loves me," she writes, the time-worn phrase every true daughter of Eve has hoped to whisper to herself or cry out to the multitudes, and we feel the thrill of those faded but impassioned words as in imagination we open the gates of that old-time mansion and enter into the year of 1807.

New York society, which seems to undergo a complete revision every quarter of a century, has entirely changed since the name of Moore meant as much to the metropolis as that of Biddle to Philadelphia or Carroll to Baltimore. At the time of which I write, when the first numbers of the "Salmagundi Papers" were startling North River aristocrats, fields lay beyond the new St. John's Church, and Canal Street was looked upon by the sagacious as the probable Mecca for retail commerce. Jeremy Cockloft, the younger, gives us a glimpse of the residence portion of the city in "The Stranger at Home, or a Tour of Broadway." "Broadway—great difference in the gentility of streets; a man who resides in Pearl-Street, or Chatham-Row, derives no kind of dignity from his domicile, but place him in a certain part of Broadway—anywhere between the Battery and Wall-Street, and he straightway becomes entitled to figure in the beau monde, and struts as a person of prodigious consequence."

In the new Chambers Street, named after one of Trinity's vestrymen, was the home of Dr. William Moore, then the first physician of old New York. With a wife who was a daughter of Nathaniel Fish, and a brother, the Right Reverend Benjamin Moore, D.D., Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York and Rector of Trinity Church, his right to dose the aristocratic element of the city was undisputed. It is small wonder that his morning parlor was generally filled with patients who, tradition says, sometimes literally fought for admission into the inner room and the presence of their "dear gentlemanly doctor."

William Moore was a physician of the old school, and is remembered as wearing a bob-tailed wig and wrist ruffles long after the fashion was obsolete. No doubt this adherence to the costume of a past régime gave him an additional hold over many of his patrons. Legion were the antique dames struggling against the invasion of demoralizing French fashions who derived momentary satisfaction watching him amble to the family pew in Trinity, followed by numerous exponents of that scapegrace, Napoleon's Empire.

Dr. William Moore, of Chambers Street! A long-dead king of pills and potions. How stern looks the old figure in the bottle-green coat the name conjures up! We can hear the voice of Thomas, the negro valet, call out, "Dis way to de Dochtar's sanctum, missy or madam." "Not you thar, ladies," as the circle rises. Many a humble possessor of a backache or a heartache must have trembled before that roomful of Crœsus's children on hearing a summons to the awesome presence. Just over the office a maiden sat one spring afternoon in the glow of a love-dream. She heard the dull murmur below, but her thoughts were too beautiful to heed an interlude so closely allied to pain. Through the garden gates the people passed in and out, and now and then the voice of Thomas would come floating to her with his "Dis way to de Dochtar's sanctum." Little did she imagine, as she bent over her pen, that she would ever be called there and the closing door shut out her love-dream forever.

Two years before Ellen Conover, the girl of the picture, first came to town a youth had journeyed to her home, Federal Hall, in Monmouth County, New Jersey, on a visit. He was Nathaniel Fish Moore, the son of Dr. Moore. The time was a college vacation, for the young man was a student at Columbia, the institution so closely associated with the Moore name. Mrs. Conover née Anna Fish, his mother's twin sister, was proud of her handsome and high-spirited nephew, and encouraged his intimacy with her sons and daughters.

On the outskirts of Marlboro, where Federal Hall lifted its white head above the low stretches of verdant country, Ellen first met the youth who was to be her future lover. When the great coach rounded the turnpike curve with rumbles and groans, and the foam-flecked horses were becoming mere specks in the gray distance, did any of that merry party realize that in the infrangible twilit silence of an early summer's eve two kindred souls had found each other? Up the hilly meadow whose multitude of young green things seem awed at the shadowy approach of night the family trudges, followed by slaves carrying the horse-hair trunks! What a peaceful pastoral scene it is! The spring and all her delicate children are dead, and in her place have come the thousand charms of happier summer. We hear the mother's tender voice, the father's deep tones, and now and then the eager questions of the boy as he helps the maiden through tangles and over stones. The arms of the darkness are encircling them and shutting them away. Soon they will reach that great hall door which no longer guards the welcoming glow of a high-piled hearth. Before it every year the summer comes and goes. The flowers creep up to it, the wind and the rain sigh against it, but the old-time lovers long ago joined the silent company in God's immutable garden of rest.

Freehold, the next town to Marlboro, was the county-seat and the resort of a gentry which closely modelled itself after the country families of England. Racing, hunting, shooting, and fishing then comprised a large part of the sum of existence for the Jersey squire. Every great landowner possessed a small army of slaves, and the wheels of life ran smoothly. Heavy silver flagons were on the oaken sideboards, old port and sherry in Mammy Dinah's cellaret, and a strong box overflowing with gold pieces was secreted somewhere behind the Spectators on the library shelves. On the yellow road creeping out from the court-house stood half a hundred happy Jersey homes—Battle Hill, Violet Bank, Cincinnati Hall, Forman Place, Mount Pleasant Hall, Wassung Vale, Shipley, Harmony Hall, Haven Home, Lover's Port. Only a few of them are left to-day. Mornings spent in following the hounds through dewy coverts, afternoons in spinning or visiting, and evenings in dancing or reading Goldsmith with some favored companion in the englenook by the hall fire composed the daily and nightly curriculum that Ellen Conover and the Jersey girls of her class knew.

It is said that the portrait of Ellen Conover, by the elder Jarvis, in a white empire gown against a dull pink background, was more like a caricature of her than a faithful rendering of her charms. Her eyes were deep blue, her hair of a gold-brown color, and her complexion had that fresh soft tint only to be compared to wild roses. Clement Moore, a son of Bishop Moore, who wrote "'Twas the Night before Christmas," a poem which has delighted so many generations of children, used to dwell with rapture on the beauty of her arms and neck. He was one of the gay young city sparks who looked with favor on the little country girl when she first appeared in town, and lost his heart in the bargain, too, if tradition does not err. This we know, that the Knickerbocker belles were palling upon him at that period, and his muse hurled fiery diatribes at the modish nakedness of his young country-women.

After the stately dinners were over in the Moore mansion, and the hour for stray patients past, the parlors became scenes of revelry. Eight o'clock was then the usual calling time in the city, and when the voice of the old clock had finished welcoming in that portion of the evening dear to feminine hearts, Thomas had answered the knock of many a beau. These were the good old days when jolly Colonel Marinus Willet, the city's mayor, was the model of every smooth-faced buck, and sweet Anne Bankhead, coming to town with her fair tresses arranged in the Paris mode resembling the comb of a rooster, started a fashion which made the fortune of the "Empereur des Barbieres Frizzing Palace on de Brudeway." We know the names of many of the Moore girls' callers. Among the favored were Henry Major, who married Jane Moore on August 2, 1808, in St. John's Church, still standing on Varick Street. Then there was Henry de Rham, who married her sister Maria; John Titus, engaged in business with Mr. Major; John Swartwout, the loyal friend of Colonel Burr; Theodore Frelinghuysen, and many others.

On the Orleans claw-footed sofas, then humiliated by chintz covering depicting the Corsican's bees, the Misses Moore would sit with their swains. There were four of these ponderous pieces of furniture in the large room, so that there was never any danger of crowding. We can picture to ourselves Ellen and her lover taking part in the gayety and longing to be by themselves in some quieter spot. In Monmouth her heart would not tell her that she loved him, but here she had discovered the sweet secret.

How beautiful was their blossoming love-dream! No doubt, after Thomas crept down to the servants' quarters to bed and the hall was deserted, they often stole away from the company, opened the massive mahogany door, and gazed off over the patch of garden into the night. Only the garden knew of their first kisses,—the nesting birds and the drowsy flowers. They always seem to keep an eye open for human lovers. The robins and the bluebirds chirp sadly, and the flowers give forth fragrant sighs just as if they knew that the course of "true love never runs smooth."

Under the little beech-tree, with his arm about her, he told her of the humble home he hoped to rent in Gansevoort Street when she would say "Yes." He would not be dependent on his father. His office down on Nassau Street was no longer always deserted.

"I will bring mammy from the country," she would whisper. "And Ned."

"Yes, dear," he would answer.

"I shall cook the breakfast for you with my own hands every morning."

Little white hands. How he pressed them!

"Isn't it beautiful just to be here together?" her lips would falter, as if afraid of the words.

Poor little old-time lovers! Poor little fluttering hearts! There are steps on the pavement outside the gates, for the watch have started on the weary walk with night.

The Moore girls who decorously occupied the Orleans sofas all through the calling hours soon began to notice the couple who so often left the circle. In the morning at the breakfast-table there were often sly innuendoes that Dr. Moore, absorbed in his Herald, never paid any attention to and Mrs. Moore could not understand. She would have, though, if she had observed the burning roses in a maiden's cheeks and the angry eyes of the youth opposite glaring at his tormentors.

"Oh, girls, did you observe the new moon last night?" Jane Moore would innocently ask. "Ellen, you must have." Then how they would giggle.

"Hush, girls!" Mrs. Moore would say as she poised her Wedgwood coffee-cup and gazed around the table. "Young ladies in your station of life should never laugh so loudly; it is not genteel."

Some of the young fellows who called at the house were not so observing as the Moore girls. Freddy Frelinghuysen used to try and keep the pretty country cousin by his side on one of the sofas when the sparking hour was on. Captain William Montgomery, just home from the West Indies, professed open admiration for a New York maiden who could spin.

"If you will spin me a shirt in an afternoon like the girls in Melrose used to make I will give you the handsomest lace dress to be found in the city," he once said.

"Agreed," she answered. "And if I fail I will give you the finest dress suit a tailor can make."

You may be sure that the proud sister-in-law of a bishop never heard of this wager. The girls kept it a secret.

"It is not anything, after all," Jane said to her sisters. "Ellen not being town bred, it will exonerate her."

Ned did not like the idea very much, but Ellen seemed so delighted at the chance to show her skill that he did not have the heart to dampen her pleasure with a lecture on the improprieties.

"I must remember that she is a bloom of the fresh free countryside, where life is broader and less restrained by convention," he said to himself. So Ellen was left to win her wager with happiness.

One morning Mrs. Moore announced from behind the George III. coffee-urn bearing the arms of the Fish family that she had decided to give a ball. "As the wife of a physician and the sister of a bishop, I feel it my duty to do something for society. Not a bread-and-butter affair like old Mrs. Hone gives; nor should I care to entertain the mob of vulgarians Mrs. Van Pelt does. Something elegant for the representative families, William," she said, giving her spouse's coffee-cup a conciliatory dash of cream.

"Oh, you lovely, lovely mamsey!" the Moore girls chorus. "No, we can't sit still," they cry, heedless of her admonishment. About the table they pirouette and out into the hall, almost knocking over the haughty, stout Miss Rattlebones whom Thomas is leading to the doctor's office.

"Won't it be simply perfect?" they keep asking Ellen. "We will have the waltz,—the new dance so fashionable abroad, you know."

"And 'The Devil among the Tailors' they had at Matilda Hoffman's the other night," Jane added.

"The what? The devil something do I hear you say?" asks Mrs. Moore, rolling her eyes in a horrified fashion. "We will never have that indecent dance in my abode."

What happy days followed Mrs. Moore's announcement, with the hundred things to be planned and finished! Every gallant who shared the Orleans sofas with the Misses Moore during those evenings before the great event was asked whether he preferred white or blue bunting for the parlor ceiling. Did he like the idea of pink roses in the Nast vases on the chimney-piece? Could he imagine the room lighted by five hundred candles? Wasn't it shocking that mother was contemplating serving five kinds of punch? The parlor was becoming a huge question mark and the Moore ball the talk of the city.

Ellen and her lover shared in all the preparations for the affair, but very often they stole out to their trysting-spot of an evening to be alone.

The fateful night before the ball the Argus eyes of Mrs. Moore descried them from her bedroom window seated under their favorite beech-tree. At first she thought the figures were Jane and Mr. Major. Then, blowing out her candle, the cruel spring starlight helped her to make out the forms of Nathaniel and Ellen. Like one fascinated, she watched them. The wind blew the silver leaves of the beech-tree and she learned their secret. He had kissed her. "Oh, it is dreadful!" she whispered to herself, murmuring like one who has received a shock. "They are first cousins. My Nathaniel loves her. I have been blind." The memory of the bantering words passed at table came back to her with a new meaning. Why, only the other day William, her younger son, had told her that Nathaniel was in Brooke's getting the rents of Gansevoort Street houses. The ball had driven everything else from her mind. The affair must be broken off at once. She would seek William.

Doctor Moore was seated by a hickory-wood fire in an adjoining apartment, ensconced in a flowered chintz dressing-gown. The bustle of preparation for the past few days had annoyed him, but the spirit of peace now seemed to have found a place in the wide firelit room. A negress was passing a warming-pan lightly over the lavender-scented sheets of the high four-poster. It was an old-fashioned winter custom that the doctor demanded all through the spring. The air was filled with the dreamy scents of lavender and the pungent odor of the hickory boughs. The fire made the tired man close his eyes, and the ponderous medical treatise dropped to the floor. Morpheus was wooing him when the startling figure of Mrs. Moore, with her nightcap awry and her hair falling over her shoulders, entered the room, bringing him back to the world he was trying to forget. The walls of the old room heard sad things that night. Young hearts that had blossomed out like twin buds on a stem were to be torn asunder. Their little beech-tree in the garden seemed to be aware of impending disaster, and the dreary sighing of its leaves suddenly fell upon the two by the fire. The night was nearly dead.

"Perhaps, after all, Jane, we have been premature with our worrying and there is nothing between them," the weary father said. "I will see Nathaniel in the morning. Now go to bed, dear; you know to-morrow is your ball, and that will bring you many duties."

The mystical to-morrow. Like some wan and beggared guest, it tapped on the panes of the great Moore mansion. The cold starlight had not fulfilled its promise, and the face of the day was old before the world was up to see it. Outside the Moore gates it was all gray mist, and yet many of the household looked at it happily. The cooks sang as they worked over the breakfast by candle-light. In a week's time they had prepared a roomful of good things for the children of pleasure to eat that night.

Thomas chuckled gleefully as he showed his new red-and-gold party livery to the company below stairs. He knew that he was a very handsome nigger, and many a lady's maid would smile at him as she followed her mistress through the hall when the ball commenced. None of the ladies appeared at breakfast, and after the last dish was removed Doctor Moore asked Nathaniel to follow him to the office.

"Nathaniel," the father said, motioning his son to a seat, "your mother saw your conduct in the garden last night with Miss Conover, and I wish to know its meaning."

The young man had refused to be seated, and stood by one of the windows gazing out into the mist. The grayness filled him with a vague intimation of approaching trouble. Ellen's name was its first sense of realization. "I love Miss Conover," he answered, almost unconsciously.

The old physician in the stiff-backed desk-chair knit his brow and pulled his stock up higher about his throat, an action familiar to his patients. He seemed lost in thought. In front of him was his desk covered with medicine phials, but here was a case that no medicine he could give would help.

"My son," he said, and the clock accentuated the huskiness of his voice. "My son, you have no right to love Miss Conover. She is your first cousin, and you can never marry her. It is a hopeless love."

"Other men have married their cousins, sir. There are Jonathan Kortright and Hulda Reid, and Chauncey Prince——"

"Yes, Nathaniel," the doctor's voice interrupted his passionate speech, "the world is full of law-breakers; but it is the edict of God that two of one flesh cannot marry. I should never countenance such a union. Your children would be accursed."

The glowing eyes of the young man were riveted on those older eyes drooping beneath the gray wig. Why didn't he storm and rage as he used to in the old days when a lad in torn nankeens and begrimed face was brought to that desk like a culprit before a tribunal of justice? He could see that his father pitied him. In the next room they were tacking up the wall decorations for the ball, and a monotonous tap, tap was joined to the maddening ticking of the clock.

Suddenly the youth rose to his full height before the old man and caught his weary eyes. "I shall marry her," he said. "I defy you, God, or the devil to stop me!"

The wrinkled, passive face before him seemed dazed and blurred. There was no answer. Oh, how cold and dreary the room looked! Life, after all, held very little. The fire died out in the youth's eyes. "My God, what a hell you have given me!" he cried. There was a knock at the door and the father rose to open it. In the middle of the floor he stopped and went up to his son. Upon the strong young arms he placed his feeble hands. "Be a brave man, my son," he said. "May God help you!"

In her aunt's room overhead Ellen was humming an air she remembered Miss Trelawny singing a week before at the Park, when Nathaniel had given a gay little theatre party to celebrate the winning of Captain Montgomery's gown. It had arrived only that morning from Madame Bouchard's on Cortlandt Street, and the black maid had spread it on a bed where the young ladies could admire it. Very beautiful were its soft folds of Machlin lace.

"You will be more like a partner of the fashionable Madame Moreau than a country girl to-night," Jane Moore told Ellen, as she and her sisters hurried off to deliver some of their mother's orders.

"Watch Ned's eyes, Jane, when he first sees her," Maria whispered, as she closed the bedroom door softly.

Ellen gazed out into the street. The mist was rising. Perhaps, after all, it would be a clear night. Through the gates came a ceaseless stream of flower men and women carrying wicker baskets piled high with early blooms; Fly-Market dealers with bundles of provisions; Mrs. Leach and some of the girls from the Broadway Frozen Cream Parlor to make the sherbets and syllabubs. A group of urchins and older busybodies were standing in the middle of the street gazing up at the windows.

"It would be grand to be rich and give parties like them foine birds," a chimney-sweep's wife remarked to the woman next to her.

"Now, don't ye envy them, miss," her companion replied. "Ye never can tell when ye look at a big house what's hiding behind the velvets afore the windows."

The grim Pompeys on the gates seemed to smile at her logic. And yet, after all, the darkness overhead was breaking away, and from out the sombre clouds the sky was spilling pale new-born sunshine over roofs and steeples and despairing streets.

Those who heard of the glories of the Moore ball in their youth are not likely ever to forget it: the music, the supper, the graciousness of host and hostess, and the company. There was a new Astor piano borrowed from the bishop to mingle its fresh voice with that of the tired Moore spinet and the playing of the Park's four violinists. The people who attended it, whose names were as well known then as the pure tones of Trinity's bells,—Le Roys, Rutgers, Gouverneurs, Beekmans, Jays, de Lanceys, Wilcoxes, Livingstons, Kissams, Kortrights, Clarksons, Schermerhorns, Van Pelts, Clarks, Varicks, Waddingtons, Van Santvoorts, Van Nests, Pells, Kembles, Fairlees, and Waters,—they were the great of 1807.

In the largest parlor, where the Orleans sofas are pushed ignominiously against the wall, youthful New York is whirling about to the strains of the Corporal Listnor waltz. Two belles of the evening the room contains,—Maria Mayo, of Virginia and New Jersey, who married General Winfield Scott, and Matilda Hoffman, the love of gay young Washington Irving. A third, and the most remarked of all that large company,—Ellen Conover,—has just passed through the doorway on the arm of Nathaniel Moore. A handsome couple they make,—she in her lace gown and he in dark plum-colored evening clothes. She is smiling, for she does not see the look of misery in his eyes.

"The stars are out, dear; shall we go into the garden and sit under our own little beech-tree?" she asks.

Our beech-tree! How the words sink into his soul and cut like knives!

"No, Ellen," he answers; "the leaves of the tree, so tender and young, are old and seared for us."

"Why, Nathaniel, how strange you talk!" she says. Then she looks into his white face and begins to understand.

Oh, the anguish of his drawn young face, as he folds her in his arms and tells her to be brave. Into the library she follows him. Her step has lost its buoyancy and the roses have died in her cheeks. A woman's intuition has guessed what he has to tell her. Something has come between them. Softly he closes the door on the lights, the music, and the babble of happy voices.

"Kiss me and never let me speak again, darling," he whispers. But she lets him speak—and break her heart.

Almost a century has passed since the dawn after the Moore ball when a girl stole down the slender staircase of that proud mansion. It was Ellen Conover garbed for a journey. Like the ghost of pleasure, she crept through the trellis-work of faded flowers which adorned the landing and hurried noiselessly over the slippery hall. No one was about but Thomas, who was picking up some of the motto papers and dead flowers strewn over the dining-room floor. Hearing the rustle of a woman's dress, he came to the door of that room and looked out with startled eyes.

"Why, missy, is you going abroad so early?" he asked, incredulously.

"Yes, Tom, I'm going back to Monmouth."

Seeing a question in his eyes, she continued,—

"Aunt will understand. I have left a note by her door."

In her hand she held a square deerskin bag, and the negro, not forgetting his manners in his bewilderment, asked whether he could carry it for her.

"Thanks, Tom," she said, wearily, as he relieved her of the heavy burden. "Colonel Montgomery is to be at the Broadway corner for me. He is going to Englishtown, and has promised to see me home. The Paulus Hook coach passes at seven, you know."

Beside the lyre-shaped hat-rack Ellen paused for a moment. Thomas thought that she was going to faint, but she beckoned for him to go on. Before her was Nathaniel's gray beaver, the one she had liked him in so much. She remembered he wore it that happy day they wandered down to Gansevoort Street to look at their little dream-house. Dear dream-house, that would never be theirs. The wistaria vine that twined so lovingly about the stoop-rail high up to the dormer window would never purple for them. Was he asleep now? She wondered what he would think of her running off in this fashion. "Perhaps it is foolish, but I could never stand seeing him again," she murmured to herself. On the floor were his riding-gloves, swept off the hat-rack by some heedless reveller of the night before. Like one lingering in a dream, she picked them up and tenderly put them in the pocket of her coat. For a moment she stood silent with her hand on the door in the attitude of one listening to a benediction. Outside a soughing wind was sweeping through the deserted street and the dark hall was full of its whispered sighs. Softly she opened the door on the new day, and then, as if speaking to an invisible presence, she said, "May you sometimes think of me as I shall always think of you, dear heart." And the sweetest part of the story is, he was faithful to her memory until death.