Chapter VIII: Foreword (7)

The morning was raw, and the wind from the river was searching. There had been rain during the night, and the ground was slippery with sleet. The principals were equipped with other arms than the duelling pistols.

“Mr. Pleasants put a revolver into the left pocket of his coat; then he took two duelling pistols, one in his right, and the other in his left hand.” At this point the witness interpolates: “I looked away about that time.” (As well he might!) “The next weapon I saw him arm himself with was his sword-cane under his left arm. He had a bowie-knife under his vest.”

Of Mr. Ritchie it was testified:

“He had four pistols and also a revolver. He had the larger pistols in his belt. I did not see his sword until after the rencontre. He had it drawn when I came up to him. I supposed it was a bowie-knife.”

After a brief parley as to the disadvantages of a position first selected, and the choice of a second, the word was given to advance and fire. The principals were two hundred yards apart when the word was given.

“Mr. Ritchie fired at the distance of twenty-five or thirty yards. Mr. Pleasants fired his first pistol within about fifteen or twenty feet of Mr. Ritchie.... At the third shot they were more rapid. Mr. Pleasants advanced. At the third fire Mr. Ritchie’s form became obscure; Mr. Pleasants still advancing, I saw him within six or seven feet of Mr. Ritchie. It was then that Mr. Pleasants fired his second pistol.”

Thus the eminent surgeon, who had refused to come to the field as the friend of both parties, but yielded when asked to serve in his professional capacity. He remarks, parenthetically, here:

“I am now giving my recollection of events transpiring in a short time and under great excitement.”

Perhaps, in spite of the great excitement, the training of his calling held his senses steady, for his story of the fight is graphic and succinct.

“I saw Mr. Pleasants level his second pistol; I heard the report; I saw Mr. Ritchie stagger back, and I remarked to Mr. D.” (the man who had been overpersuaded to witness the murder as a “mutual friend”), “‘Ritchie is a dead man!’ I so inferred, because he had staggered back. Then I heard several discharges without knowing who was firing. I saw Mr. Pleasants striking at Mr. Ritchie with some weapon—whether a cane or a pistol, I do not know. I also saw him make several thrusts with a sword-cane. He gave several blows and two or three thrusts. I do not know if the sword was sheathed. During this part of the affair I saw Mr. Ritchie with his sword in his hand. I did not see him draw it. I saw him in the attitude of one making a thrust, and did see him make one or two thrusts at Mr. Pleasants. I remarked to Mr. D., ‘Let us go up, or he’ll be stabbed!’ Two or three times the cry was made, ‘Stop, Pleasants! Stop, Ritchie!’ We went up. Mr. Pleasants was tottering; Mr. Ritchie was standing a few feet away, the point of his sword on the ground; he was perfectly quiet. Mr. Archer took Mr. Pleasants’ arm and laid him down. He was on the ground when I reached him. Before I got to him I saw Mr. Ritchie leaving the ground. He walked a short distance, and then ran.”

It transpired afterward that not one of Pleasants’s balls had struck Ritchie. The presumption was that the elder man was wounded by his opponent’s first fire, and fired wildly in consequence. He received six balls in various parts of his body. But one of his bullets was found, and that in the gable of a building out of the line of the firing. The ball was embedded in the wood, nine feet above the ground. Mad with pain and blinded by rage, the wounded man struck at the other’s face when they were near together—some said, with the useless pistol, others with his sword-cane or bowie-knife. When the fugitive reached the carriage in waiting at the foot of the hill, his face was covered with blood. His physician was in the carriage, and examined him at once. But for the cut lip he was absolutely uninjured.

The sun was just rising when John Hampden Pleasants was lifted into the carriage and borne back to the city. He knew himself to be mortally wounded from the moment he fell.

This was on Wednesday, February 25th. Before the short winter day neared its noon, the tale was known from one end of Richmond to the other, and the whole population heaved with excitement. Business was practically suspended while men talked over the terrible event; the sidewalks were blocked by gossiping idlers.

Our school was called to order at nine o’clock daily. On this morning, teachers and pupils were unfit for lessons. For Mr. Pleasants’ only daughter was one of us, and a general favorite. His niece was likewise a pupil, and the two had the same desk. Their vacant chairs made the tragedy a personal grief to each of us. When Mrs. Nottingham bade us get our Bibles ready for the morning service, not a girl there could read without a break in her trembling voice, and when the dear old lady made tender mention in her prayer of the “sorrowing,” and for “those drawing near unto death,” our sobs drowned the fervent tones.

I recall, as one of the minor incidents of the dreadful day, that when I went home in the afternoon, my grandmother insisted I should read the newspaper correspondence aloud to her. She was a captious tyrant at times, and, like many another deaf person, sensitive as to the extent of her infirmity. She “was not so very deaf, except in damp weather, or when she had a cold. If people would only speak distinctly, and not mumble, she would have no trouble in understanding what was said.” In this connection she often made flattering exception of myself as the “one girl she knew who could speak English.” In this capacity she summoned me to her side. She had the week’s papers on her lap. I must pick out the articles “that were responsible for this scandalous affair.”

Down I sat, close beside her “good ear,” and read, with precise articulation and right emphasis, the editorials from which I have made excerpts in this chapter.

In copying them to-day, the strait-laced New-Englander’s classification of the awful event is in my mind and ear. Every detail of the duel and the cold-blooded preparations therefor—the deadly weapons borne by, and girt about the principals; the sang-froid of seconds and attendant “friends”; the savagery of the combat; the tone of public sentiment that made the foul fight within sight of the steeples of the city practicable, although the leading men of the place were cognizant of each step that led to the scene on the river-bank before sunrise that gray morning—can we, in these later times we are wont to compare regretfully with those, sum up the details and the catastrophe in phrase more fit and true?

I resented it hotly, if silently, then. Even my father, who always spoke of duelling as a “remnant of Middle Age barbarism,” shared in the universal grief for his party leader laid low in the prime of his useful manhood, and would suffer no censure of the challenge that had made the fight inevitable.

“Pleasants is a brave man, and a proud. He could not endure to sit down quietly under the aspersion of cowardice.”

Another terrible day of suspense dragged its slow length along. Hourly bulletins from the chamber where the wounded man was making his last struggle with Fate, alternately cheered and depressed us. He was conscious and cheerful; he had exonerated his opponent from blame in the matter of the duel:

“I thought I had run him through. It was providential that I did not. Ritchie is a brave man. I shall not recover. You will be candid with me, Doctor? It is all right.”

These were some of the sentences caught up by young and old, and repeated with tearful pride in the dying hero. That was what they called him; and when on Friday morning the flag on the capitol hung at half-mast, the mourners who went about the streets were his fellow-townsmen, who had no word of condemnation for him and the rash act that ended his career.

On Saturday morning it began to snow. By Sunday afternoon the streets were eighteen inches deep on the level, with the heaviest snow-fall of the season. Mrs. Pleasants, the widow of a governor of Virginia, and the mother of the slain editor, was a member of the Grace Street Presbyterian Church, of which Reverend Doctor Stiles was then pastor. The funeral services were held there on Sunday, at 3 o’clock P.M. By two the sidewalks were blocked by a crowd of silent spectators, and, half an hour later, every seat in the church, except those reserved for the family and immediate friends of the deceased, was filled. After these had taken their places, there was not standing-room in aisles or galleries. The sermon was an eloquent tribute to the private virtues and the public services of the deceased. One memorable extract is inscribed upon the monument erected by admirers and friends over his grave in Shockoe Hill Cemetery:

With a Genius above talent, a Courage
above Heroism

None ever forgot the scene who saw the long line of funeral carriages winding, like a black stream, through streets where the snow came up to the axles, under the low-hanging sky that stooped heavily and gloomed into leaden gray by the time the cortége reached the cemetery. And all the afternoon the brooding air throbbed with the tolling bells.

We said and believed that Richmond had never known so sad a day since she went into mourning for the threescore victims of the burning of the theatre in 1811.

The trial of Thomas Ritchie for murder in the first, and of the seconds as “principals in the second degree,” followed the duel with swiftness amazing to the reader of criminal cases in our age. On March 31, 1846, four of the ablest lawyers in Virginia appeared in court to defend the prisoner.

The old brochure which records the proceedings is curious and deeply interesting reading; in nothing more remarkable than in the defence of what was admitted to be “an unhappy custom” and directly opposed to the laws of the country.

“_The letter of the law is made to yield to the spirit of the times_” is an italicized sentence in the principal speech of the defence. The same speaker dwelt long and earnestly upon precedents that palliated, excused, and warranted the time-honored (although “unhappy”) practice.

Not less than fifteen instances of the supremacy of the higher law of the “spirit of the times” were drawn from English history.

“In not one of which had there been any prosecution.

“And now, gentlemen of the jury, does any one suppose that duelling can be suppressed, or capitally punished, when the first men in the kingdom—such men as Pitt and Fox, and Castlereagh and Canning and Grattan, and Nelson and Wellington, lend the high sanction of their names, and feel themselves justified and compelled to peril their lives upon a point of honor? And I would ask my friend, the Commonwealth’s Attorney, if such men as these constitute the ‘swordsmen of England,’ and were alone worthy of the times of Tamerlane and Bajazet?...

“Was Andrew Jackson regarded as a ‘swordsman’ and duellist because he fought, not one, but three duels, and once shed the blood of a fellow-man in single combat? He was twice elected to the first office in the world, and died a Christian.... How many of Henry Clay’s numerous friends in Virginia, and, especially, the religious portion of them (including ministers of the Gospel), refused to vote for him as President of the United States because he had fought two duels?...

“The coroner’s inquest held on the body of General Hamilton brought in a verdict of wilful murder against Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States.

“Colonel Burr afterward took his seat in the Senate of the United States as Vice-President; his second, afterward, became a judge; and the second of General Hamilton—a most amiable and accomplished man—I served with in Congress, some years ago....

“I call upon you, then, gentlemen, by every motive that can bind you to a discharge of your duty, to do justice to my unfortunate young friend. Bind up the wounds of his broken-hearted parents; carry joy and peace and consolation to his numerous family and friends; wash out the stain that has been attempted upon his character and reputation, and restore him to his country—as, in truth, he is—pure and unspotted.”

The address of the Commonwealth’s Attorney is comparatively brief and emphatically half-hearted. We are entirely prepared for the announcement in smaller type at the foot of the last page:

“The argument on both sides” (!) “having been concluded, the jury took the case, and, without leaving the box, returned a verdict of ‘Not guilty!’

“The verdict was received by the large auditory with loud manifestations of applause. Order was promptly commanded by the officers of the court.

“Mr. Ritchie then left the court-house, accompanied by the greater portion of the spectators, who seemed eager to shake hands with him and to congratulate him upon his honorable acquittal.”

XVIII

THE MENACE OF SLAVE INSURRECTION

“RICHMOND, _June 8th, 1847._

“DEAR EFFIE,—It is past ten o’clock, and a rainy night.
Just such a one as would make a comfortable bed and a sound
snooze no mean objects of desire.

“George Moody, alias ‘The Irresistible,’ arrived this
afternoon, and will leave in the morning, and I cannot let
so good an opportunity of writing to you escape. I must
scribble a brief epistle.

“The drive down from Powhatan was delightful. I found Mr.
Belt extremely pleasant, full of anecdote, a great talker,
yet, withal—as Mr. Miller had told me—a good listener. A
very necessary qualification, by-the-way, for any one with
whom I may chance to be in company.

“The first thing I heard when I reached home was tidings
of that worst of bugbears to a Southern woman—an impending
insurrection. A double guard was on duty at the capitol,
and a detachment of military from the armory paraded the
streets all night. I was, I confess, somewhat alarmed, and
not a little startled, but gradually my fears wore away, and
I slept as soundly that night as if no such thing were in
agitation.

“‘Puss Sheppard was in to supper, and her parting salutation
to us at going was: ‘Farewell! If I am alive in the morning
I will come and see if you are!’

“The whole matter ended, like Mr. C.’s sermon—‘just where it
began—_viz._, in nothing.’

“Richmond is rather dull at present. The Texas excitement
has subsided almost entirely, and those who gave credence
to the report of the insurrection are desirous to keep as
still as possible.

“_Morning._—I can write no more. I am sure your good-nature
will acquit me of blame so far as matter, chirography,
and quality go, when I tell you that I have written this
partly by the light of a lamp which finally went out,
self-extinguished for want of oil, and partly this morning,
when I am suffering with a sick-headache. I feel more like
going to bed than writing, but ‘The Unexceptionable’ is
about to take his departure, and waits for this. Write soon
and much. I will try to treat you better next time.”

There is much reading between the lines to be done for the right comprehension of that letter. My _genre_ pictures of days that are no more would be incomplete were I to fail to touch upon the “worst of bugbears” I feigned to pass over lightly.

In the debate upon the abolition of slavery in my native State, lost by one vote in the Legislature of 1831-32, while Nat Turner’s insurrection was fresh in the public mind, John Randolph declared, “Whenever the fire-alarm rings in Richmond every mother clasps her baby closer to her breast.”

I cannot recollect when the whisper of the possibility of “Insurrection” (we needed not to specify of what kind) did not send a sick chill to my heart. The menace I here dismiss with a sentence or two was the most serious that had loomed upon my horizon. I could not trust myself to dwell upon it within the two days that had elapsed since my return from a vacation month in Powhatan. How keenly every circumstance attending it was bitten into my mind is proved by the distinctness of the etching preserved by a memory that has let many things of greater moment escape its hold.

My host, Mr. D., had come in to dinner the day before that set for my stage-journey back to town, with the pleasing intelligence that Mr. Lloyd Belt, a former citizen of Powhatan, but for twenty years a resident of Richmond, was “going down”—Richmond was always “down,” as London is “up” from every part of England—the next day, and would be glad to take me in his carriage. As I wrote to Effie, the drive was delightful. My courtly escort took as much pains to entertain me as if I had been a belle and a beauty, instead of an unformed school-girl. It was a way they had—those gentlemen of the Old School—of recognizing the woman in every baby-girl, and doing it honor.

It did not strike me as strange that Mr. Belt beguiled the thirty-mile journey with anecdote and disquisition. He was charming. I never thought that he was likewise condescending. I am quite as sure that the idea did not enter his knightly imagination.

As we drove leisurely up Main Street from the bridge, we noticed that groups of men stood on the street corners and in the doors of stores, chatting gravely, and, it would seem, confidentially.

“There must be news from the seat of war!” opined my companion.

The Mexican War was then in progress, and accompanying raids into the debatable territory of Texas kept public sentiment in a ferment.

My father and the rest of the family, with a couple of neighbors, were enjoying the cool of the day upon our front porch. He came down to the gate to assist me to alight. So did Mr. Strobia, our elderly next-door neighbor, and he handed me up the steps while my father lingered to thank my escort for bringing me safely home. In the joyous confusion of greetings, I had not observed that Mr. Belt was leaning down from the carriage to my father’s ear, and that both were very grave, until Puss Sheppard, like the rattlepate she was, whispered loudly to Mr. Strobia:

“I’m scared to death! What is the latest news? You men won’t tell us.”

“I have heard no news about anything or anybody!” ejaculated the old gentleman, testily and loudly, glancing over his shoulder at Gilbert, who had my trunk on his shoulder and was carrying it in at the side-gate. “Upon my soul, I haven’t!” And as she caught his arm and swung around to get the truth from his eyes, he bustled down the steps and so on home.

I had the tale in full by the time my bonnet was off. Mea, on one side, and Puss on the other, poured it forth in excited whispers, having closed “the chamber” door. Abolitionists had been at work among the negroes in Henrico and Hanover counties for weeks. There were indications of an organized conspiracy (in scope and detail so like the plot for which John Brown’s blood paid twelve years thereafter, that I bethought me of it when the news from Harper’s Ferry stunned the nation), and the city was under arms. Governor Smith was said to have issued a proclamation to militia and citizens at large in Latin.

I laughed there.

“‘Extra Billy!’ He knows less of Latin than of Choctaw!”

The worthy functionary had earned the _sobriquet_ by superdiligence in the matter of extra baggage while in the service of a stage-coach company, and as he was a Democrat we never forgot it.

“Let that pass!” said Mea, impatiently. “We can’t get away from the fact that where there is so much smoke there must be a little fire. Some evil business is on foot, and all the servants know what it is, whether we do or not.”

I felt that she was right when Mary Anne and “Mammy,” Gilbert, Tom, his assistant, and my little maid Paulina, with black Molly, Percy’s nurse, trooped in, one after the other, to welcome “Miss Firginny” home. They had done the like ever since I was born. I should have felt hurt and angry had they failed in the ceremony. My sharpened senses detected something that was overdone in manner and speech. They were too glad to see me, and while they protested, I discerned sarcasm in their grins, a sinister roll in lively eyeballs.

We talked fast over the supper-table, and of all manner of things irrelevant to the topic uppermost in our thoughts. Once, while Gilbert and his half-grown subaltern were out of the room, I ventured a hasty whisper to my father, at whose right I sat:

“Father, have we any arms in the house if they should come?”

Without turning his head, he saw, out of the tail of his eye, Gilbert on the threshold, a plate of hot waffles in hand, and Tom at his heels bearing a pitcher of fresh water. My father reached out a deliberate hand for a slice of bread from a plate near his elbow.

“All that I have to say, my daughter” (his speech as deliberate as his hand, and every syllable sharp and clear), “is that we are prepared for them, come when and how they may.”

A perceptible shiver, as when one catches breath after an electric shock, ran around the table. All felt that he had thrown down the gauntlet, and was ready to take the consequences. My heart leaped up as an elastic bough from the weight that had bowed it to the earth. It was no effort after that to be gay. I told stories of my country sojourn, retailed the humors of the visit to our old neighborhood, mimicking this and that rustic, telling of comical sayings of the colored people who pressed me with queries as to town life—in short, unbottled a store of fun and gossip that lasted until bedtime. Then, as I told my correspondent, I went to bed and slept the sleep of youth, health, and an easy mind.

And this because he who never lied to me had said that he was “prepared” for the assassins, come when they might.

A week later, when the fireless smoke had vanished quite from the horizon, and we dared jest at the “scare,” I asked my mother what arsenal my father had had in reserve that he could speak so confidently of preparation for midnight attack and domestic treachery.

“Nothing more formidable than a carving-knife,” she answered, merrily, “and courage that has always served him in the hour of peril. He was not alarmed. I believe he would face a hundred negroes with no other weapon than his bare hands.”

I am often asked why, if our family servants were really and warmly attached to us, we should have let the “bugbear” poison our pleasures and haunt our midnight visions. To the present hour I am conscious of a peculiar stricture of the heart that stops my breath for a second, at the sudden blast of a hunter’s horn in the country. Before I was eight years old I had heard the tale of Gabriel’s projected insurrection, and of the bloodier outbreak of murderous fury led by Nat Turner, the petted favorite of a trusting master. Heard that the signal of attack in both cases was to be “a trumpet blown long and loud.” Again and again, on my visits to country plantations, I have been thrown into a paroxysm of terror when awakened from sleep in the dead of night, by the sound of the horns carried by “coon hunters” in their rounds of the woods nearest us. I could not have been over ten, when, on a visit to “Lethe,” a homestead occupied for a while by Uncle Carus, I was rambling in the garden soon after sunrise, picking roses, and let them fall from nerveless fingers at the ringing blast of a “trumpet blown long and loud”, from the brow of a neighboring hill. As it pealed louder and longer, until the blue welkin above me repeated the sound, I fled as fast as my freezing feet would carry me, to the deepest recesses of the graveyard at the foot of the garden, and hid in a tangle of wild raspberry bushes higher than my head. There I lay, wet with the dews of the past night, and my face and hands scratched to bleeding, until the winding horn grew faint and fainter, and the bay of a pack of hounds told me what a fool panic had made of me. We always thought of the graveyard as an asylum in the event of a rising. No negro would venture to enter it by day or night.

In any ordinary period of danger or distress, I would have trusted my life in the hands of the men and women who had been born on the same plantation with my mother, and the younger generation, to whom she had been a faithful and benignant friend from their cradles. In fire and flood and tempest; in good report and evil report; in sickness and in health; in poverty, as in riches—they would have stood with, and for us to the death. We knew them to be but children of a larger growth, passionate and unreasoning, facile and impulsive, and fanatical beyond anything conceivable by the full-blooded white. The superstitious savagery their ancestors had brought from barbarous and benighted Africa, was yet in their veins. We had heard how Gabriel, a leader in prayer-meetings, and encouraged by the whites to do Christian evangelization among his own race, had deliberately meditated and written down, as sections of the code to be put into practice, when he should come into his kingdom of Lower Virginia—a plan of murder of all male whites, and a partition of the women and girl-children among his followers, together with arson and tortures exceeding the deviltries of the red Indians. We had heard from the lips of eyewitnesses, scenes succeeding the Southampton massacre of every white within the reach of the murderous horde howling at the heels of the negro preacher whom his master had taught to read and write—how the first victim of the uprising, in the name of God and freedom, was that master as he lay asleep at his wife’s side. Of how coolly—even complacently—Turner recorded: “He sprang up, calling his wife’s name. It was his last word. A single blow was sufficient to kill him. We forgot a baby that was asleep in the cradle, but Hark went back and dispatched it.”

In every plan of rising against their masters, Religion was a potent element. It was, to their excitable imaginations, a veritable Holy War, from which there would be no discharge. The “Mammy” who had nursed her mistress’s baby at her own bosom, would brain it, with the milk yet wet upon its lips, if bidden by the “prophet” to make the sacrifice. Nat Turner split with his axe the skull of a boy he had carried in his arms scores of times, and stayed not his hand, although the little fellow met him with a happy laugh and outstretched arms and the cry, “Uncle Nat, you have come to give me a ride! Haven’t you?”

I repeat, we knew with what elements we should have to deal if the “rising” ever took an organized form. This ever-present knowledge lay at the root of the hatred of the “abolition movement.” To the Northerner, dwelling at ease among his own people, it was—except to the leaders—an abstract principle. “All men are created free and equal”—a slaveholder had written before his Northern brother emancipated his unprofitable serfs. Ergo, reasoned the Northern brother, in judicial survey of the increasing race, whose labor was still gainful to tobacco and wheat planter, the negro slave had a right to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

He did not count the cost of a consummation devoutly to be desired. He had no occasion to meditate upon the bloody steps by which the enslaved and alien race would climb to the height the Abolitionist would stimulate him to attain.

So well was it understood that a mother ran dangerous risks if she put her child into the care of the colored woman who complained that she “was tired of that sort of work,” that neglect of such dislike of a nurse’s duties was considered foolhardy. I heard a good old lady, who owned so many servants that she hired a dozen or so to her neighbors, lament that Mrs. Blank “did not mind what I told her about Frances’ determination not to take care of children. I hired the girl to her as a chambermaid, and gave her fair warning that she just would _not_ be a nurse. A baby was born when Frances had been there four months, and she was set to nurse it. You must have heard the dreadful story? Perhaps you saw it in the papers. When the child was six months old the wretched creature pounded glass and put it in the baby’s milk. The child died, and the girl was hanged.”

Ugly stories, these, but so true in every particular that I cannot leave them out of my chronicle of real life and the workings of what we never thought, then, of calling “the peculiar institution.”

One of my most distinct recollections of the discussions of Slavery held in my hearing is that my saintly Aunt Betsy said, sadly and thoughtfully:

“One thing is certain—we will have to pay for the great sin of having them here. How, or when, God alone knows.”

“We did not bring them to Virginia!” was my mother’s answer. “And I, for one, wish they were all back in Africa. But what can we do, now that they are on our hands?”

Before turning to other and pleasanter themes, let me say that my father, after consultation with the wife who had brought to him eight or ten “family servants” as part of her father’s estate, resolved to free them and send them to Liberia at his own expense. This was in my early childhood, yet I recollect how the scheme failed through the obstinate refusal of the slaves to leave master, home, and country for freedom in a strange land. They clung to my mother’s knees, and prayed her, with wild weeping, not to let them go. They had blood relatives and dear friends here; their children had intermarried with men and women in different parts of the county; their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had left them no legacy of memories that would draw them toward the far-off country which was but the echo of an empty name to their descendants. They were comfortable and happy here. Why send them, for no fault of theirs, into exile?

“There is something in what they say!” my father had said to my mother, in reviewing the scene. “I cannot see that anything is left for us to do except to keep on as we are, and wait for further indications of the Divine will.”

This was in the thirties, not many years after an act of gradual emancipation was lost in the Legislature by the pitiful majority I named in an earlier paragraph. A score of years had passed since that momentous debate in our capitol, and our Urim and Thummin had not signified that we could do anything better than to “keep on as we were.”

It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the Slavery Question, for master, as for slave.

XIX

WEDDING AND BRIDESMAID—THE ROUTINE OF A LARGE FAMILY—MY FIRST BEREAVEMENT

IN the summer of 1851, my grandmother had bought and given to her only child the house which was to be our home as long as we remained a resident family in Richmond. Of this house I shall have a story to tell in the next chapter. It stands upon Leigh Street (named for the distinguished lawyer of whom we have heard in these pages as taking a part in the Clay campaign), and the locality was then quietly, but eminently, aristocratic. There were few new houses, and the old had a rural, rather than an urban, air. Each had its garden, stocked with shrubbery and flowers. Some had encompassing lawns and outlying copses of virgin native growth.

The new home held a large family. The stately old dame who had settled us for life, occupied a sunny front chamber, and in addition to our household proper, we had had with us, for two years, my mother’s widowed brother-in-law, “Uncle” Cams, and the stepdaughter for whose sake we had consented to receive him. My aunt had died soon after her youngest child (Anne) was taken to a Better Country; Cousin Paulina went a year later, and as the mother’s parting request to the eldest of her flock was that she would “take care of her father,” separation was not to be thought of. None of us loved the lonely old man. One and all, we loved her who was a younger sister to our mother, and a second mother to her children.

So we sat down to our meals every day, a full dozen, all told, and as we were seldom without a visitor, we must have been “thirteen at table”, times without number. If we had ever heard the absurd superstition that would have forbidden it, we never gave it a thought. I should not have liked to meet my father’s frown and hear his comment, had the matter been broached in his hearing.

The modern (nominal) mistress would be horrified at the thought of twelve eaters, drinkers, and sleepers under the roof of a private house. We descried nothing out of the way in it, and fared exceeding comfortably from year’s end to year’s end. Large families were still respectable in the public eye, and an increase in the number of domestics kept the addition to the white family from bearing hard upon the housemother.

How gayly and smoothly the little craft of my life moved on up to the middle of ’53, let a few passages from a letter dated July 23d of that year, testify:

“I came back from the mountains on the 2d of this month.
I had a charming visit at Piedmont. I believe I left warm
friends behind me when I reluctantly said ‘Good-bye’ to
the hospitable abode. I was the only young lady on the
plantation, and there were four grown brothers and a cousin
or two. Each had his pet riding-horse, which he ‘must have
me try.’ I had rides, morning and evening, and once at
_high noon_. In June! Think of it! I won’t tell you which
Rosinante I preferred. You might have a notion that his
master shared his honors, and these shrewd guesses are
inconvenient sometimes. The very considerate gallants found
out, ‘by the merest chance,’ that it made me sick to ride in
a closed carriage, and, of course, as there were two buggies
on the place, there was ‘tall’ bidding as to which I should
distinguish by accepting a seat in it. Sarah C., her mother,
and sister were kindness itself to me. I was quite ashamed
of my unworthiness of such petting....

“I got home just in time to help Mea with the preparations
for her Northern trip, and to get ready for Sarah Ragland’s
wedding—an event that had its influence in shaping my summer
plans.

“We enjoyed the ‘occasion’ heartily. How could I do
otherwise when my attendant groomsman was ordered for the
affair from Charlottesville?—the very youth who smote my
already beriddled heart when I was up in that region. He
is a cousin of the Raglands—Charley Massie by name—and the
arrangement was Mary’s (bless her heart!). Mr. Budwell,
the bridegroom, was indisputably the handsomest man in the
room. This was as it should be; but I never attended another
wedding where this could be said with truth. My knight was
the next best-looking, and for once I was content with a
second-best article.”

I allude in this letter to “Cousin Mollie’s” illness, but with no expression of anxiety as to the result. She had been delicate ever since I could recollect anything. She went to Saratoga every summer, and now and then to Florida in the winter. The only intimation I ever had from her as to the cause of her continued singlehood was in answer to the girlish outburst: “Cousin Mary, you must have been beautiful when you were young! You will always be charming. I can’t comprehend why you have never married!”

Her speech was ever even and sweet. I detected a ring of impatience or of pain in it, as she said: “Why should I marry, Namesake? To get a nurse for life?”

I had suspected all along that she had a history known to none of us. After that I knew it, and asked no more questions.

Patient, brave, unselfishly heroic—

“The sweetest soul
That ever looked with human eyes,”

—she lingered day after day, now weaker, now rallying, until she spoke her own conviction to me one day in late July, as I sat by, fanning her, and no one else was present.

I smiled as she opened her large dark eyes, the only beauty left in the wasted face, and saw me.

“You are better, dear! We shall have you up and out driving before long.”

“No, dear child!”—infinite weariness in tone and look. “The old clock has run clean down!”

I did not believe it, and I said it stoutly aloud, and to myself.

She seemed no more languid—only drowsy—the next afternoon, as I fluttered into the room and leaned over her in a glow of excitement:

“Cousin Mollie, darling! I have come in to say that Junius Fishburn is down-stairs. He is in town for a day on his way to Newport.”

The great eyes opened wide, a smile lighted them into liveliness.

“Oh, I am so glad!” she gasped.

She was “glad” of everything that gave me pleasure. I had never doubted that. I had never gone to her with a pain or a pleasure without getting my greedy fill of sympathy.

When I had said a hearty “_bon voyage!_” to my caller, I went back to tell her of the interview. She was dying. We watched by her from evening to morning twilight.

Ned Rhodes, who was in Boston when he got my letter, telling briefly what had come to us, sent me lines I read then for the first time. Had the writer shared that vigil with us, he could not have described it more vividly:

“We watched her breathing thro’ the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.
Our very hopes belied our fears;
Our fears our hopes belied:
We thought her dying while she slept,
And sleeping when she died.”

At midnight there was a rally for a few minutes. I was wetting the dry lips, leaning over the pillow, so that she looked into my eyes in unclosing hers. A smile of heavenly sweetness played over her face—a ray that irradiated, without moving a feature or line. The poor mouth stirred ever so slightly. I bent closer to it to hear the whisper:

“I’m almost there!”

Two months later I wrote to my old friend:

“Our great sorrow in July was my first affliction. Yet I
was wonderfully supported under it, and the _terrible_
desolation that has grown upon us, instead of lessening. I
say ‘supported,’ for not once have I wished her back; but I
miss her—oh, so sadly!

“‘I cannot make her dead!’

“Then mother went to the country for a month, and I was
left as housekeeper, with the whole care of the family
on my hands. Rising betimes to preside at father’s early
breakfast, pickling, preserving, sewing, overseeing the
servants, etcetera.

“Enough of this! Although the little girls’ lessons begin
again to-day, and I have my sister’s domestic and social
duties to perform in addition to my own, I have more leisure
than you might think, and you shall have the benefit of
a spare half-hour on this bright Monday morning. (Alice
practising, meanwhile, in the same room!)

“Mea is still in Boston and the vicinity, and will not
return for a month or more. Lizzie M. is to be married late
in October or early in November, and wishes to have Mea with
her. Another of the three Lizzies, and the prettiest—Lizzie
N.—married last week a Mr. L.—a nice young man, Mea says. I
have never seen him, although they have been engaged for
some time. He has taken up his abode in Boston, to keep his
lovely wife with her invalid mother.

“And while upon marriage—E. G. is to wed on October 11th,
Mr. R. H., one of _ten_ brothers. She is ‘doing very well,’
say the gossips.

“Sarah and Mr. Budwell are at home again, he handsomer than
ever, while she looks prettier and happier than she ever was
before.

“While retailing news, let me chronicle the arrival of
Master Robert Wallace Courtney, an interesting youth, who—as
father dryly remarked, when I said that he ‘came from a
foreign shore’—‘speaks the language of the Cry-mea.’

“Heigho! so goes this mad world of ours: death; marriage;
birth. Ranks are mowed down, and filled up as soon. Few
of us appreciate what a fearful thing it is to die, and
fewer yet how awful it is to live—writing our histories by
our actions in the Book of God’s Remembrance, a stroke for
every word, movement, and thought! Again I say, if Death be
fearful, Life is awful!

“We are prone to forget, as one and another fall, and the
chasm is closed up and Life seems the same—except within
the bleeding hearts of mourners—that our day is coming as
surely as those others have gone. In effect, we arrogate
immortality for ourselves.

“The longer I live, and the more I see of the things that
perish with the using, the more firmly persuaded am I that
there is but one reality in life, and that is Religion. Why
not make it an every-day business? Since the loving care of
the Father is the only thing that may not be taken from us,
why do we not look to it for every joy, and cling to it for
every comfort?...

“Write soon. Will you not _come_ to me? I am very lonely at
times. One sister _gone_! Another absent!

“I am wondering if you have changed as much as I feel
that I have? It is not natural to suppose that you have.
You have not the same impression of added responsibility,
the emulation to throw yourself into the breach made by
the removal of one so beloved, and, in her quiet way,
exercising so much influence. If I could but hope that
patience and prayerful watchfulness would ever make me
‘altogether such an one’ as she was!

“How many and how happy have been the meetings in heaven
since I last saw you! Dear little Sallie B.! How often in
fancy do I see her walk away in the moonlight night of our
parting! I never look from the front window in the evening
without recalling that hour.”

XX

OUR TRUE FAMILY GHOST-STORY

ONE evening of the winter following the events recorded in the last chapter, “Ned” Rhodes and I had spent a cosey two hours together. My parents never did chaperon duty, in the modern acceptation of the word. They made a habit, without hinting at it as a duty, of knowing personally every man who called upon us. When, as in the present case, and it was a common one, the visitor was well known to them, and they liked him, both of them came into the drawing-room, sat for a half-hour or longer, as the spirit moved them, then slipped out, separately, to their own sitting-room and books.

I have drawn Ned Rhodes’s picture at length as “Charley” in _Alone_. I will only say here that he was my firm and leal friend from the time I was twelve years old to the time of his death, in the early eighties.

He had a piece of new music for me to-night, and we fell to work with piano and flute soon after my father’s exit. It was not difficult. The songs and duets that followed were familiar to us both. We chatted by the glowing grate when we left the piano—gayly and lightly, of nothing in particular—the inconsequent gossip of two old and intimate acquaintances that called for no effort from either.

I mention this to show that I carried a careless spirit and a light heart with me, as I went off in the direction of my bedroom, having extinguished the hanging lamp in the hall, and taking one of the lamps from the parlor to light myself bedward.

It was a big, square Colonial house, with much waste of space in the matter of halls and passages. The entrance-hall on the first floor was virtually a reception-room, and nearly as large as any apartment on that level. It was cut across the left side by an archway, filled with Venetian blinds and door. Beyond these was a broad, easy stairway, dropping, by a succession of landings, to the lower from the upper story. Directly opposite the front door was a second and narrower arch, the door in which was, likewise, of Venetian slats. This led to the rooms at the back of the house. The plan of the second floor was the same. On this eventful night I passed through the smaller archway, closing the door behind me. It had a spring latch that clicked into place as I swung it to. The bedroom I shared with my sister, who was not at home that night, was directly across the passage from that occupied by our parents. A line of light under their door proved that they were still up, and I knocked.

“Come in!” called both, in unison.

My mother, wrapped in her dressing-gown, lay back in her rocking-chair, her book closed upon her finger. My father had laid aside his coat, and stood on the rug, winding his watch.

“I was hoping that you would look in,” he said. “I wanted to ask what that new piano-and-flute piece is. I like it!”

We exchanged a few sentences on the subject; I kissed both good-night, and went out into the hall, humming, as I went, the air that had caught his fancy.

The lamp in my hand had two strong burners. Gas had not then been introduced into private dwellings in Richmond. We used what was sold as “burning fluid,” in illuminating our houses—something less gross than camphene or oil, and giving more light than either. I carried the lamp in front of me, so that it threw a bright light upon the door across the passage, here a little over six feet wide. As I shut the door of my mother’s room, I saw, as distinctly as if by daylight, a small woman in gray start out of the opposite door, glide noiselessly along the wall, and disappear at the Venetian blinds giving upon the big front hall.

I have reviewed that moment and its incident a thousand times, in the effort to persuade myself that the apparition was an optical illusion or a trick of fancy.

The thousandth-and-first attempt results as did the first. I shut my eyes to see—always the one figure, the same motion, the same disappearance.

She was dressed in gray; she was small and lithe; her head was bowed upon her hands, and she slipped away, hugging the wall, as in flight, vanishing at the closed door. The door I had heard latch itself five minutes ago! Which did not open to let her through! I recall, as clearly as I see the apparition, what I thought in the few seconds that flew by as I stood to watch her. I was not in the least frightened at first. My young maid, Paulina, a bright mulatto of fifteen, had more than once that winter fallen asleep upon the rug before my fire, when she went into the room to see that all was in readiness for my retiring. The servants slept in buildings detached from the main residence, a custom to which I have referred before.

“The house” was locked up by my father’s own hands at ten o’clock, unless there were some function to keep one or more of the servants up and on duty. Therefore, when I had twice awakened Paulina from her unlawful slumber, I had sent her off to the “offices”—in English parlance—with a sharp reproof and warning against a repetition of the offence. My instant thought now was:

“The little minx has been at it again!” The next, “She went like a cat!” The third, in a lightning flash, “She did not open the door to go through!” Finally—“Nor did she open the door when she came out of my room!”

I had never, up to that instant, known one thrill of supernatural dread since I was old enough to give full credence to my father’s assurances that there were no such things as ghosts, and to laugh at the tales told by ignorant negroes to frighten one another, and to awe white children. I had never been afraid of the darkness or of solitude. I would take my doll and book to the graveyard and spend whole happy afternoons there, because it was quiet and shady, and nobody would interrupt study or dream.

It was, then, the stress of extraordinary emotion which swept me back into the room I had just quitted, and bore me up to the table by which my mother sat, there to set down the lamp I could scarcely hold, enunciating hoarsely:

“I have seen a ghost!”

My father wheeled sharply about.

“_What!_”

At that supreme moment, the influence of his scornful dislike to every species of superstition made me “hedge,” and falter, in articulating, “If there is such a thing as a ghost, I have seen one!”

Before I could utter another sound he had caught up the lamp and was gone. Excited, and almost blind and dumb as I was, I experienced a new sinking of heart as I heard him draw back the bolt of the door through which the Thing had passed, without unclosing it. He explored the whole house, my mother and I sitting, silent, and listening to his swift tramp upon floor and stairs. In a few minutes the search was over.

He was perfectly calm in returning to us.

“There is nobody in the house who has not a right to be here. And nobody awake except ourselves.”

Setting down the lamp, he put his hand on my head—his own, and almost only, form of caress.

“Now, daughter, try and tell us what you think you saw?”

Grateful for the unlooked-for gentleness, I rallied to tell the story simply and without excitement. When I had finished, he made no immediate reply, and I looked up timidly.

“I really saw it, father, just as I have said! At least, I believe I did!”

“I know it, my child. But we will talk no more of it to-night. I will go to your room with you.”

He preceded me with the lamp. When we were in my chamber, he looked under the bed (how did he guess that I should do it as soon as his back was turned, if he had not?). Then he carried the light into the small dressing-room behind the chamber. I heard him open the doors of a wardrobe that stood there, and try the fastenings of a window.

“There is nothing to harm you here,” he said, coming back, and speaking as gently as before. “Now, try not to think of what you believe you saw. Say your prayers and go to bed, like a good, brave girl!”

He kissed me again, putting his arm around me and, holding me to him tenderly, said “Good-night,” and went out.

I was ashamed of my fright—heartily ashamed! Yet I was afraid to look in the mirror while I undid and combed my hair and put on my night-cap. When, at last, I dared put out the light, I scurried across the floor, plunged into bed, and drew the blankets tightly over my head.

My father looked sympathizingly at my heavy eyes next morning when I came down to prayers. After breakfast he took me aside and told me to keep what I had seen to myself.