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To the north was the mansion where Colonel Morris had lived before the Revolution; where Madame Jumel in later days had married Aaron Burr. To the south was the square frame building, close by a clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where his widow stayed on after his death.
He sighed, and the past rose for a moment; but it seemed a century behind him. "Will you not sit down?" he asked. "Can I fetch you a glass of wine? I remember you never liked it, but perhaps, after so long a drive " "I do not wish any wine," said Madame Jumel, shortly. She was nonplussed by this matter-of-fact acceptance of a situation which she had intended should be intensely dramatic.
"You flatter yourself," he retorted. "You'd not be known. Old Jumel will give you the pick of the larder for a kiss," he roared in my sullen face, and added, relenting: "Well, then, I will send one of the lackeys up with a salver. The lazy beggars have naught else to do." I bolted the door after him, and when the man brought my tray, bade him set it down outside.
Jumel returned to New York, bringing with her a great amount of furniture and paintings, with which she decorated the historic house still standing in the upper part of Manhattan Island a mansion held by her in her own right. She managed her estate with much ability; and in 1828 M. Jumel returned to live with her in what was in those days a splendid villa.
Some months passed on without his again meeting Madame Jumel. At the suggestion of the student, who felt exceedingly grateful to Burr for the solicitude with which he assisted in his studies, Madame Jumel invited Colonel Burr to dinner. It was a grand banquet, at which he displayed all the charms of his manner, and shone to conspicuous advantage.
The speculation turned out to be a loss, however, and this made Mrs. Burr extremely angry, the more so as she had reason to think that her ever-youthful husband had been engaged in flirting with the country girls near the Jumel mansion. She was a woman of high spirit and had at times a violent temper. One day the post-master at what was then the village of Harlem was surprised to see Mrs.
A Frenchman, M. Jumel, introduced improvements in the production of cotton, whilst M. Drovetti, the pasha's tried friend, helped to further the establishment of manufactories by his advice and great experience of men and things. Before long, cotton mills were built, cloth factories, a sugar refinery, rum distillery, and saltpetre works erected.
In his long life of plottings and failures, from his sympathy with the Conway Cabal to his desperate old age, there were no depths of blackguardism that he did not touch. Whether Madame Jumel spoke the truth or not to Hamilton on that night of their last interview, it was entirely in keeping with his life and character that he should kill for hire.
"Neither my hate nor my love has ceased for a second. I married Jumel for these jewels, for the courts of Europe, for a position in this country which the mighty Schuylers cannot take from me again. But I would fly with you to-morrow, and live with you in a hole under ground.
It is probable that, owing to inherent fickleness and Betsey's gentle manipulation, his affairs rarely lasted long enough to attract attention. It is one of the accidents of life that the world barely knew of his acquaintance with Eliza Croix, she who has come down to us as Madame Jumel; and such a thing could not happen twice.
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