Chapter IX: Foreword (8)

“Neither your mother nor I will speak of it in the hearing of the children and servants. You may, of course, take your sister into your confidence. She may be trusted. But my opinion is that the fewer who know of a thing that seems unaccountable, the better. And your sister is more nervous than you.”

Thus it came about that nothing was said to Mea, and that we three who knew of the visitation did not discuss it, and tried honestly not to think of it.

Until, perhaps a month after my fright, about nine o’clock, one wet night, my mother entered the chamber where my father and I were talking over political news, as we still had a habit of doing, and said, hurriedly, glancing nervously behind her:

“I have seen Virginia’s ghost!”

She saw it, just as I had described, issuing from the closed door and gliding away close to the wall, then vanishing at the Venetian door.

“It was all in gray,” she reported, “but with something white wrapped about the head. It is very strange!”

Still we held our peace. My father’s will was law, and he counselled discretion.

“We will await further developments,” he said, oracularly.

Looking back, I think it strange that the example of his cool fearlessness so far wrought upon me that I would not allow the mystery to prey upon my spirits, or to make me afraid to go about the house as I had been wont to do. Once my father broke the reserve we maintained, even to each other, by asking if I would like to exchange my sleeping-room for another.

“Why should I?” I interrogated, trying to laugh. “We are not sure where _she_ goes after she leaves it. It is something to know that she is no longer there.”

Mea had to be taken into confidence after she burst into the drawing-room at twilight, one evening, and shut the door, setting her back against it and trembling from head to foot. She was as white as a sheet, and when she spoke, it was in a whisper. Something had chased her down-stairs, she declared. The hall-lamp was burning, and she could see, by looking over her shoulder, that the halls and stairs were empty but for her terrified self. But Something—_Somebody_—in high-heeled shoes, that went “Tap! tap! tap!” on the oaken floor and staircase, was behind her from the time she left the upper chamber where she had been dressing, until she reached the parlor door. Her nerves were not as stout as mine, perhaps, but she was no coward, and she was not given to foolish imaginations. When we told her what had been seen, she took a more philosophical view of the situation than I was able to do.

“Bodiless things can’t hurt bodies!” she opined, and readily joined our secret circle.

Were we, as a family, as I heard a woman say when we were not panic-stricken at the rumored approach of yellow-fever, “a queer lot, taken altogether”? I think so, sometimes.

The crisis came in February of that same winter.

My sister Alice and a young cousin who was near her age—fourteen—were sent off to bed a little after nine one evening, that they might get plenty of “beauty sleep.” Passing the drawing-room door, which was ajar, they were tempted to enter by the red gleam of the blazing fire of soft coal. Nobody else was there to enjoy it, and they sat them down for a school-girlish talk, prolonged until the far-off cry “All’s well!” of the sentinel at the “Barrack” on Capitol Square told the conscience-smitten pair that it was ten o’clock. Going into the hall, they were surprised to find it dark. We found afterward that the servant whose duty it was to fill the lamp had neglected it, and it had burned out. It was a brilliant moonlight night, and the great window on the lower landing of the staircase was unshuttered. The arched door dividing the two halls was open, and from the doorway of the parlor they had a full view of the stairs. The moonbeams flooded it half-way up to the upper landing; and from the dark hall they saw a white figure moving slowly down the steps. The mischievous pair instantly jumped to the conclusion that one of “the boys”—my brothers—was on his way, _en déshabillé_, to get a drink of water from the pitcher that always stood on a table in the reception-room, or main hall. To get it, he must pass within a few feet of them, and they shrank back into the embrasure of the door behind them, pinching each other in wicked glee to think how they would tease the boy about the prank next morning. Down the stairs it moved, without sound, and slowly, the concealed watchers imagined, listening for any movement that might make retreat expedient. They said, afterward, that his nightgown trailed on the stairs, also that he might have had something white cast over his head. These things did not strike them as singular while they watched his progress, so full were they of the fun of the adventure.

It crossed the moonlit landing—an unbroken sheet of light—and stepped, yet more slowly, from stair to stair of the four that composed the lowermost flight. It was on the floor and almost within the archway when the front door opened suddenly and in walked the boys, who had been out for a stroll.

In a quarter-second the apparition was gone. As Alice phrased it:

“It did not go backward or forward. It did not sink into the floor. It just was _not_!”

With wild screams the girls threw themselves upon the astonished boys, and sobbed out the story. In the full persuasion that a trick had been played upon the frightened children, the brothers rushed up-stairs and made a search of the premises. The hubbub called every grown member of the household to the spot except our deaf grandmother, who was fast asleep in her bed up-stairs.

Assuming the command which was his right, my father ordered all hands to bed so authoritatively that none ventured to gainsay the edict. In the morning he made light to the girls and boys of the whole affair, fairly laughing it out of court, and, breakfast over, sent them off to school and academy. Then he summoned our mother, my sister, and myself to a private conference in “the chamber.”

He began business without preliminaries. Standing on the rug, his back to the fire, his hands behind him, in genuine English-squirely style, he said, as nearly as I can recall his words:

“It is useless to try to hide from ourselves any longer that there is something wrong with this house. I have known it for a year and more. In fact, we had not lived here three months before I was made aware that some mystery hung about it.

“One windy November night I had gone to bed as usual, before your mother finished her book.”

He glanced smilingly at her. Her proclivity for reading into the small hours was a family joke.

“It was a stormy night, as I said, and I lay with closed eyes, listening to the wind and rain, and thinking over next day’s business, when somebody touched my feet. Somebody—not something! Hands were laid lightly upon them, were lifted and laid in the same way upon my knees, and so on until they rested more heavily on my chest, and I felt that some one was looking into my face. Up to that moment I had not a doubt that it was your mother. Like the careful wife she is, she was arranging the covers over me to keep out stray draughts. So, when she bent to look into my face, I opened my eyes to thank her.

“She was not there! I was gazing into the empty air. The pressure was removed as soon as I lifted my eyelids. I raised myself on my elbow and looked toward the fireplace. Your mother was deep in her book, her back toward me. I turned over without sound, and looked under the bed from the side next the wall. The firelight and lamplight shone through, unobstructed.

“I speak of this now for the first time. I have never opened my lips about it, even to your mother, until this moment. But it has happened to me, not once, nor twice, nor twenty—but fifty times—maybe more. It is always the same thing. The hands—I have settled in my mind that they are those of a small woman or of a child, they are so little and light—are laid on my feet, then on my knees, and travel upward to my chest. There they rest for a few seconds, sometimes for a whole minute—I have timed them—and _something_ looks into my face and is gone!

“How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all! I know that it _is_! That is all. Shakespeare said, long before I was born, that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’ This is one of them. You can see, now, daughter”—turning to me—“why I was not incredulous when you brought your ghost upon the scene. I have been on the lookout for what our spiritualistic friends call ‘further manifestations.’”

“You believe, then,” Mea broke in, “that the girls really saw something supernatural on the stairs last night? That it was not a trick of moonlight and imagination?”

“If we can make them think so, it will be better for them than to fill their little brains with ghostly fears. That was the reason I took a jesting tone at breakfast-time. I charged them, on the penalty of being the laughing-stock of all of us, not to speak of it to any one except ourselves. I wish you all to take the cue. Moreover, and above everything else, don’t let the servants get hold of it. There would be no living in the house with them, if they were to catch the idea that it is ‘haunted.’”

He drew his brows into the horseshoe frown that meant annoyance and perplexity. “How I hate the word! You girls are old enough to understand that the value of this property would be destroyed were this story to creep abroad. I would better burn the house down at once than to attempt to sell it at any time within the next fifty years with a ghost-tale tagged to it.

“Now, here lies the case! We can talk to outsiders of what we have seen and felt and heard in this, our home, where your grandmother, your mother and father have hoped to live comfortably and to die in peace, or we can keep our own counsel like sensible, brave Christians. ‘Bodiless spirits cannot hurt bodies,’ and”—the frown passing before a humorous gleam—“the little gray lady seems to be amiable enough. I can testify that her hands are light, and that they pet, not strike. She is timid, too. What do you say—all of you? Can we hold our tongues?”

We promised in one voice. We kept the pledge so well that both the girls and the boys were convinced of our incredulity. Our father forbade them positively to drop a hint of their foolish fancies in the hearing of the servants. Young as they were, they knew what stigma would attach to a haunted house in the community. As time passed, the incident faded from their minds. It was never mentioned in their hearing.

A year went by without further demonstration on the part of the little gray lady, except for two nocturnal visitations of the small, caressing hands. My father admitted this when we questioned him on the subject; but he would not talk of it.

The one comic element connected with the bodiless visitant was introduced, oddly enough, by our sanctimonious clerical uncle-in-law, who now and then paid us visits of varying lengths. As he came unannounced, it was not invariably convenient to receive him. On one occasion his appearance caused dismay akin to consternation. We were expecting a houseful of younger friends within two days, and needed the guest-room he must occupy. He was good for a week at the shortest.

True to the Arab-like traditions of hospitality that pervaded all ranks of Old Dominion society, we suffered nothing of this to appear in our behavior. Nor could he have heard the anguished discussion of ways and means that went on between Mea and myself late that night. It was, therefore, a delightful surprise when he announced, next morning, his intention of going out to Olney that day, and to remain there for—perhaps a week. He “had let too long a time elapse since he had paid the good people there a visit. He didn’t want them to think he had forgotten them.”

One of the “good people,” the wife of my mother’s brother, drove into town to spend the day with us, a week after the close of his stay at Olney. “Aunt Sue” was a prime favorite with us all, and she was in fine feather to-day, full of fun and anecdote. She interrupted a spicy bit of family news to say, by-and-by:

“Did any of you ever suspect that your house is haunted?”

“How ridiculous!” laughed my mother. “Why do you ask?”

The narrator laughed yet more merrily.

“The funniest thing you ever heard! The old gentleman had an awful scare the last night he was here. I asked him what he had eaten—and drunk—for supper that evening. But he stuck to it that he was standing at his window, looking out into the moonlight in the garden, when somebody came up behind him, and took him by the elbows and turned him clear around! He felt the two hands that grabbed hold of him so plainly that he made sure Horace had hidden under the bed and jumped out to scare him. So he looked under the bed and in the wardrobe and the closet, and, for all I know, in the bureau drawers and under the washstand, for the boy. There was nobody in the room but himself, and the door was locked. He says he wouldn’t sleep in that room another night for a thousand dollars.”

“Nobody is likely to offer it!” retorted Mea, dryly. “I have slept there nearly a thousand nights, and nothing ever caught hold of me.”

Passing over what might or might not have been a link in the true, weird history of our bodiless tenant, I leap a chasm of a dozen years to wind up the tale of the “little gray lady,” so far as it bears directly upon our family. After the death of her husband and the marriages of sons and daughters left my mother alone in the old colonial homestead, she decided to sell it and to live with my youngest sister.

The property was bought as a “Church Home”—a sort of orphanage, conducted under the patronage of a prominent Episcopal parish renowned for good works. In altering the premises to adapt buildings to their new uses, the workmen came upon the skeleton of a small woman about four feet below the surface of the front yard. She lay less than six feet away from the wall of the house, and directly under the drawing-room window. There was no sign of coffin or coffin-plate. Under her head was a high, richly carved tortoise-shell comb, mute evidence that she had not been buried in cap and shroud, as was the custom a hundred years agone. The oldest inhabitant of a city that is tenacious of domestic legends, had never heard of an interment in that quarter of a residential and aristocratic district. The street, named for the eminent lawyer, must have been laid out since the house was built, and may have been cut right through grounds, then far more spacious than when we bought the place. Even so, the grave was dug in the front garden, and so close to the house as to render untenable the theory that the plot was ever part of a family burying-ground.

The papers took inquisitive note of all these circumstances, and let the matter drop as an unexplained mystery. Within the present occupancy of the house, I have heard that the gray lady still walks on moonlight nights, and, in gusty midnights, visits the bedside of terrified inmates to press small, light hands upon the feet, and so passing upward, to rest upon the chest of the awakened sleeper. I was asked by one who had felt them, if I had “ever heard the legend that a bride, dressed for her wedding, fell dead in that upper chamber ages ago.”

My informant could not tell me from whom she had the grewsome tale, or the date thereof. “Somebody had told her that it happened once upon a time.” She knew that the unquiet creature still “walked the halls and stairs.”

She should have been “laid” by the decent ceremony of burial in consecrated ground, awarded to the exhumed bones.

I have talked with a grandson of our former next-door neighbor, and had from him a circumstantial account of the disinterment of the nameless remains. They must have lain nearer the turf above them, a century back, than when they were found. The young man was a boy when he ran to the hole made by the workmen’s spades, and watched the men bring to light the entire skeleton. He verified the story of the high, carved comb. He told me, too, of a midnight alarm of screaming children at the vision of a little gray lady, walking between the double row of beds in the dormitory, adding:

“I told those who asked if any story was attached to the house, that I had lived next door ever since I was born, and played every day with your sisters and brothers, and never heard a whisper that the house was haunted.”

So said all our neighbors. We kept our own counsel. It was our father’s wise decree.

I have told my ghost-story with no attempt at explanation of psychical phenomena. After all these years I fall back, when questioned as to hypotheses, upon my father’s terse dicta:

“How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all!”

XXI

TWO MONUMENTAL FRIENDSHIPS

EVEN at that period, when I visited my father’s Northern kindred, I failed to bring them to a right comprehension of the frank, and oftentimes intimate, relations existing between the young people of both sexes in my Virginia home. I have marvelled within myself since, how these relations came to be established at the first. We brought to the New World, and retained, scores of English customs of domestic management, and traditions of social obligations. It was never the fashion in England, or in her Northern colonies, for boys to begin “visiting the young ladies” before they discarded roundabouts, and to keep up the fascinating habit until they tottered into the grave at fourscore. For the same dozen young fellows to call at least once a week upon as many young girls; to read, chat, jest, flirt, drive, ride, and walk with them, month after month, and year after year, perhaps choosing one of the dozen as a lifelong partner, and quite as often running off for a season to another county or State, and bringing home a wife, with whom the philosophic coterie speedily got acquainted amiably, widening the circle to take her in, with never a thought of chagrin.

The thumbnail sketches I have jotted down in my “purposeful” chapter, bring in the same names, again and again. They were, indeed, and in truth, household words. None of the young men and maidens catalogued in the Christmas doggerel I shall speak of, presently, intermarried. Two—perhaps four—had secret intentions that tended toward such a result in the fulness of time. Intentions, that interfered in nowise with their participation in the general hilarity. If there were any difference in the demeanor of the engaged, or partially betrothed, pairs from the behavior of the fancy-free, it was in a somewhat too obvious show of impartiality. Engagements were never “announced,” and if suspected, were ignored in general society. Thus it often happened that a direct proposal took a girl utterly by surprise.

I was but sixteen, and on a summer vacation in Albemarle County, when a collegian of nineteen, who was swinging me “under green apple boughs”—lazily, because the rapid rush through the air would interfere with the chat we were carrying on, in full sight of groups scattered on the porch steps and about the lawn—brought down my thoughts—which had strayed far afield under the influence of the languorous motion, the sunset and the soft mingling of young voices—with stunning velocity, by declaring that he adored me, and “couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.”

With never the suspicion of a blush, I looked him straight in the eyes and begged him not to make a goose of himself, adding: “I didn’t think you mistook me for a girl who enjoys that kind of badinage. It is not a bit to my taste. And we have been such good friends!”

When he suffocated himself dangerously with protestations that actually brought tears to his eyes, I represented that lookers-on would think we had quarrelled if I left the swing and his society abruptly, as I certainly should do if he did not begin to talk sensibly, out of hand. I set the example by calling to a boy who was passing with a basket of apples, and calmly selecting one, taking my time in doing it.

Coquetry? Not a bit of it! I liked the lad too well to allow him to make a breach in our friendship by love-making. When he came to his senses (four years later!) he thanked me for not taking the matter seriously.

We gave, and attended, few large parties. But there were no dead calms in our intercourse. Somebody was always getting up a frolic of some sort. Tableaux, musicales, “sociables,” where, in Christmas week, and sometimes at other times, we played old-fashioned games, such as “Consequences” upon slips of paper, and “Kings of England” with cards, and “What is my thought like?” _viva voce_. We had picnics in warm weather. Richmond College boys invited us out to receptions following orations on February 22d, and we had Valentine parties, with original verses, on February 14th.

Nowhere, and at no time, was there romping. Still less would kissing-games be allowed among really “nice” young people. This was deemed incredible by my Boston cousins, and yet more strange the fact that we kept up among ourselves decorous conventions that appeared stiff and inconsistent to those not to the manor born and bred. For example, while I might, and did, name our most intimate masculine visitors, “Tom,” “Dick,” or “Harry” in chat with my girl friends, I addressed them as “Mr. Smith,” “Jones,” or “Robinson,” and always spoke of them in the same manner in mentioning them to strangers. For a man to touch a lady’s arm or shoulder to attract her attention, was an unpardonable liberty. If a pair were seen to “hold hands,” it was taken for granted that they were engaged or—as I heard a matron say, when she had surprised a couple walking in the moonlight, the fair one’s hand on the swain’s arm, and his laid lightly upon it—“they ought to be.”

The well-bred girl of the fifties might be a rattle; she might enjoy life with guileless abandon that earned her the reputation of “dashing”; she parried shaft of teasing and badinage with weapons of proof; but she was never “fast.” She kept her self-respect, and challenged the reverent respect of the men who knew her best.

To this code of social and ceremonial ethics, and to the ban put upon dancing and card-playing by church and parents, is undoubtedly due the fact that Southern women of that generation were almost invariably what we would call, “good talkers.” In the remembrance, and in contrasting that all-so-long-ago with the times in which we live, I could write a jeremiade upon “Conversation as a Lost Art.”

From the list of names drawn into line by some Yule-tide rhymes of my own, bearing the date of “1852,” I single two that must have more than a passing notice if I would write the true story of my threescore-and-ten years.

Mary Massie Ragland was, at that Christmas-tide, twenty-two years of age. I had liked and admired her from the first. In time she grew into a place in my heart no other friend had ever held, and which, left vacant by her death six years later, has never been taken. I think no man or woman has more than one complete, all-satisfying friendship in a lifetime. Her portrait hangs against the wall in my bedchamber now. I awake each morning to meet her gaze bent, as in life, on mine. In sorrow and in joy, I have gone secretly to my room, as to an oratory, to seek in the depths of the beautiful eyes the sympathy never denied while she was with me, and visible to my dull vision. To a mind stored richly with the best literature, eager to acquire and faithful to retain, she added exquisite fancies, poetic tastes, and love for the beautiful that was a passion. Her heart was warm, deep, tender, and true. It well-nigh breaks mine in remembering _how_ true! In all the ten years in which we lived and loved together in closest intimacy, not a cloud ever crossed the heaven of our friendship.

One remark, uttered simply and with infinite gentleness by her, after a great loss had chastened her buoyant spirits, stands with me as the keynote to action and character.

I was commenting somewhat sharply upon my disappointment in not meeting, from one whom I loved and trusted, the fulness of sympathy I thought I had a right to expect in what was a genuine trial to myself.

“She was hard and critical!” I moaned. “You saw it, yourself! You cannot deny it! And she was absolutely rude to _you_!”

“Dear!” The stroking fingers upon my bowed head were a benediction; the sweet voice was eloquent with compassion. “Don’t judge her harshly! She is _good_, and true to you and to the right. But she has never had sorrow to make her tender.”

How boundless was the tenderness, my mentor, who comforted while she admonished, learned in the school of pain in which she studied until Death dismissed her spirit, was fully known to Him alone whose faithful disciple she was to the end.

To the world she showed a smiling front; her merry laugh and ready repartee were the life of whatever company she entered, and over and through it all, it might be reverently said of the true, heroic soul, that, to high and humble, “her compassions failed not.”

“Refined by nature and refined by grace!” said one above her coffin.

I added, inly: “And by sorrow!”

“The kind of woman to whom a fellow takes off his hat when he thinks of her,” a young cousin, who had been as a brother to her, wrote to me after her death. “It took six thousand years to make one such. I shall never know another.”

While on a visit to my old and beloved preceptors, Mrs. Nottingham and her daughters, then resident in Lexington, Virginia, I met Junius Fishburn, lately graduated from Washington College—now Washington and Lee. He was an early and intimate friend of the “Ragland girls,” and in a way (according to Virginia ways of reckoning kinship) a family connection of theirs, too remote to deserve recognition in any other region or society. But he claimed through this the right to omit the initial steps of acquaintanceship, and I recognized the right. We were quickly friends—so quickly, that it was no surprise to me when he enclosed a note to me in a letter to one of the Ragland sisters, shortly after my return home. I answered it, and thus was established a correspondence continued through a term of years, without serious interruption, up to the day when, in the second year after my marriage, my husband entered my room with a paper in his hand, and a grave look on his face.

“Here is sad, sad news for you,” he said, gently. “Professor Fishburn is dead!”

The beautiful young wife, to whom he had been married less than two years, was a sister of “Stonewall Jackson’s” first wife, a daughter of Dr. George Junkin, then President of Washington College, and sister of the poet, Margaret Junkin Preston. After “June’s” death, Mrs. Preston, my dear friend, wrote to me of a desire her widowed sister hesitated to express directly to me. Her husband had told her that more of his early and inner life was told in this series of letters to me than he could ever relate to any one else. Would I be willing to let her read a few selected by myself? I had known him before he met her. If the request were unreasonable, she would withdraw it.

There could have been no surer proof of the sincerity, the purity, and absolute absence of everything pertaining to love-making and flirtation in our ten-year-long friendship, than was offered in the circumstance that, without a moment’s hesitation or the exclusion of a single letter, I made up a parcel of the epistles, and sent it, with my fond love, to the widow of my lamented friend.

His letters were but a degree less charming than his conversation. I considered him, then, and I have not changed my opinion after seeing much more of the world of society men and brilliant women, one of the best talkers I have known.

“You have hit it off happily there,” said Mary, at the jolly reading of the lines on New-Year’s Day, to “us girls.”

And she repeated:

“Social and witty, kind and clever;
His chat an easy, pleasant flow,
A thread you’d never wish to sever.”

He was all this, and more. Our correspondence was a stage, and an important, in my education. We discussed books, authors, military and political heroes, psychology, philology, theology, and, as time made us more intimate with the depths underlying the dancing waves of thought and fancy, we talked much of religious faith and tenets.

On August 26, 1850, I wrote to Effie:

“My long neglect of correspondents (for you are not the
only neglected one) has caused letters in abundance to
accumulate. Among others there lies before me one from my
friend, Junius F., a full sheet, bearing a date anterior to
your last, and requesting an ‘immediate reply.’ He is a fine
fellow—one of my ‘literary’ friends. Have you chanced to see
anything of his published work? His poems, essays, etc.,
would reflect credit upon any one. I give you the preference
to-day because it will not hurt him to wait.”

The same calm confidence in the liking we bore one another prevailed throughout our intercourse. Untimely storms and sudden gusts belong to the tropics of passion, not to the temperate zone of Platonic affection.

It was about this time that my presumptuous brain conceived the thought that my friend should be in the pulpit, instead of in the professorial chair to which he was appointed after winning his degree from the University of Virginia, whither he had gone from Washington College for a post-graduate course, and a more thorough equipment for his chosen life-work. With the Brahmin traditions strong upon me, and the blue blood of Presbyterianism seething in my veins, I forthwith made out a “call,” amplified through six pages of Bath post, and dispatched it to Lexington.

The nearest approach to tenderness in any of our many letters, came out in his reply:

“A brother’s fondness gushed up in my heart as I read your earnest pleadings,” was the opening sentence of a masterly exposition of the reasons that, as he phrased it, “forbid my unhallowed feet to stand within the sacred desk.” I was wrong, and he was right. His fearless utterance of the faith which was the mainspring of life and action, carried force a licensed clergyman seldom gains.

He fought the good fight in the ranks, refusing the commission that had not, as he believed, the King’s seal.

I had no living elder brother. I hardly felt the loss while Junius lived. In 1855 he took a year’s leave of absence, and spent it in a German university. My father and myself were just setting out for Boston and the White Mountains, and accompanied him as far as New York. Junius and I were promenading the deck of the Potomac steamer when I showed him an ambrotype given me by “a friend whom I am sorry you have never met.”

He looked at it intently for a moment, and, in closing the case, searched my face with eyes at once smiling and piercing.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” he asked, in the gentlest of tones.

I answered honestly: “No; there is nothing to tell. We are warm friends—no more.”

We were interrupted, and had no more opportunity for confidential chat until that evening, when we strolled from the hotel along the moonlighted streets to the Capitol. He alluded playfully, in a German letter, to the never-to-be-forgotten excursion—our last moonlit ramble, although we did not dream of it then—as “my walk with Corinne to the Capitol.”

(Men took time and pains to say graceful things, then-a-days!)

He told me that night—what he had already written in brief in a late letter—of his betrothal, of his happiness, and his ambition to make the best of himself for the dear sake of the woman who was waiting for him in the college town engirdled by the blue Virginian mountains.

The next day but one he sailed. My father and myself bade him “God-speed!” I was glad it so happened.

If I had fewer causes for devout thanksgiving to the Giver of every good and perfect joy than have crowned my life, I should still account myself rich in the memory of these two perfect friendships. In my ignorance of the world that lay without, and far beyond my small circle of thought, and what I believed were activities, I did not rightly appreciate the rarity of the gifts. I did know that they were passing sweet, and longed to prove myself worthy of holding them.

This chapter of my humble record is a sprig of rosemary laid upon Friendship’s Shrine.

XXII

THE “OLD AFRICAN CHURCH”

NO description of the Richmond of the forties and fifties would be complete without a sketch of what was, if I mistake not, the first Baptist Church erected in the city. The white congregation that occupied it for some years had built a large, handsome church farther up the hill, and the squat, but spacious, house on the lower slope of Broad Street, was made over to the colored population.

I say “population” advisedly. For perhaps half a century, the Richmond negroes had no other place of public worship, and the communicants in that denomination were numbered by the thousand. They are an emotionally religious race, and I doubt if there were, all told, one hundred colored members of any other sect in the length and breadth of the county of Henrico.

The low-browed, dingy, brick edifice surrendered to their use was said to have a seating capacity of two thousand. It was therefore in demand when mass political meetings were convened. When John B. Gough lectured in our city, no other building could accommodate the crowds that flocked to see and hear him.

Big as it was, the house was filled every Sunday. There was a regular church organization in which deacons and ushers were colored. Of course the Pastor was a white. And oddly enough, or so it seemed to outsiders, the shepherd of the black flock was the President of Richmond College and Divinity School, situated upon the outskirts of the city.

His pastoral duties outside of his pulpit ministrations were not onerous. The Daughters of Zion, a flourishing society, looked after the sick and afflicted. There were no colored paupers under the slave system, except, once in a great while, “a no ‘count free nigger.” This last word was never applied to a fellow-servant, but freely and disdainfully fitted to the unfortunate freedman.

I was never able to disabuse my mind of appreciation of the comic element in viewing the Rev. Robert Ryland, D.D. (and I am not sure but “LL.D.” as well), in his position as Pastor of the First African Church. He was a staid personage of middle age, who may have been learned. If he were, the incongruity was the more absurd. He was never brilliant. Nor had he the power of adapting himself to his audience that might have saved the situation in some measure. I heard him preach once to his dusky cure of souls. He began by saying, apropos to his text from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:

“Shortly after the Apostle’s departure from that place, there arose dissensions in the church at _Co_-rinth.”

A preamble that was greeted by appreciative groans from the women in the audience. As was the assertion, later on, in the same discourse, that—

“Christ may be called the Concrete Idea of our most holy Faith.” Still more pronounced was the murmured applause that succeeded the remark—“This may be true in the Abstract. It is not true in the Concrete.”

“Concrete” was a new word in philosophers’ mouths just then, and he worked it hard.

The anecdote of the parishioner who found “that blessed word ‘Mesopotamia’” the most comforting part of her minister’s sermon, is entirely credible if she were of African descent. Polysyllables were a ceaseless feast to their imaginations. Sesquipedalian periods were spiritual nectar and ambrosia. The barbaric and the florid were bound up in their nature, and the rod of an alien civilization could not drive it far from them.

In church relations, they recognized and revelled rankly in the levelling principle of Christianity which, within the sacred circle of the bonds of a common faith, made no invidious distinctions between bond and free. The staid D.D. was to them “Brer Ryland” on week-days, as on Sundays. I am sure it never occurred to the humblest of them that whatever of dignity pertained to the relation was his, by virtue of his holy calling, and they were honored in that their spiritual guide belonged to a superior race and was at the head of an institution of learning.

How freely they discussed him and his teachings, will be illustrated by a dialogue overheard by me in my early school-days.

I was walking behind two colored women one Sunday on my way home from church. They were evidently ladies’ maids, from their mincing speech and affected gait, and were invested with what was, as palpably, their mistresses’ discarded finery.

“Brer Rylan’ was quite too severe ’pon dancin’,” was the first sentence that caught my ear. “He is kinder hard ’pon innercint aversions, oncet in a while. You know we read in the Bible that the angels in heaven dance ’round the throne.”

“Yes,” assented the elder of the two, “an’ play ’pon jewsharps! But I’ve been heard that they don’ cross they feet, and that makes a mighty difference in the sin o’ dancin’. Of course, we all of us knows that it’s a sin for a Christyun to dance; but, as you say, Brer Rylan’ is downright oncharitable sometimes in talkin’ ’bout young folks’ ways and frolickin’. He will let them promenade to the music of the band when the students has parties at the college, but never a dancin’ step!”

“Not even,” with a shrill giggle, “if they don’t cross they feet?”

As time whitened the good man’s hair and brought heavier duties to his head and hands, he fell into the habit of delegating the afternoon service at the “Old African” to his neophytes in the Divinity School. He may have judged rightly that it was excellent practice for the ’prentice hand of embryo pulpit orators. One of the brightest of these, who afterward made good the promise of distinguished usefulness in the Southern Church, was the officiating evangelist on a certain Sunday afternoon, when a lively party of girls and collegians planned to attend the “Old African,” in a body, and witness his maiden performance.

He knew we were coming, and why, but he uttered not a word of protest. As he said afterward, “The sooner he got used to mixed audiences, the better.”

What were known as the “Amen benches,” at the left of the pulpit, were reserved for white auditors. They were always full. On this afternoon they were packed tightly. The main body of the church was also filled, and we soon became aware that an unusual flutter of solemn excitement pervaded the well-dressed throng. The front block of seats on each side of the middle aisle was occupied by women, dressed in black, many of them closely veiled, and pocket-handkerchiefs were ostentatiously displayed, generally clasped between black-gloved hands folded upon the pit of the stomach.

“Reminds one of a rising thundercloud!” whispered a graceless youth behind me.

Presently a deacon, likewise lugubrious in aspect, tiptoed into the pulpit, where sat the young theologue, and, holding his silk hat exactly upon the small of his back in the left hand, bent low in offering the right to the preacher.

The subdued rustle and shuffling, incident to the settling into place of a large congregation, prevented us from hearing the low colloquy that succeeded the handshake. We had it in full from one of the actors, that evening.

The functionary began by expressing the gratification of the congregation that “Brer Rylan’ had sent such a talentable young gentleman to ’ficiate ’pon dis occasion.

“We been heerd a-many times of what a promisin’ young gentleman Brer W. is, an’ we is certainly mightily flattered at seein’ him in our midst ’pon dis occasion. I jes’ steps up here, suh, to say dis, an’ to arsk is dere anything any of us ken do to resist Brer W. ’pon dis occasion.”

“Thank you, nothing!” responded the other, courteously. “You are very kind. The choir will take care of the music, as usual, I suppose?”

“Suttinly, suh, suttinly! De choir am always dependable ’pon every occasion. An’ dey has prepared special music for dis solemn occasion.”

Reiteration of the word had not aroused the listener’s curiosity. The last adjective, and the tone in which it was brought out, awoke him wide.

“Solemn!” he re-echoed. “Is there anything special in the services of to-day?”

The hand grasping the silk hat executed a half-circle in the air that seemed to frame the black-robed block of sitters for the startled youth.

“Yaas, suh! Surely Brer Rylan’ must ’a’ told Brer W. de nature of our comin’ togedder to-day! It’s a funeral, suh. De dear departed deceasted nigh ’pon two mont’ ago, but we haven’t foun’ it agreeable, as you mought say, to all parties concerned, fur to bring all de family an’ frien’s together tell ter-day. But dey are here now, suh, as you may see fur yourself. An’ we are moughty pleased dat Brer Rylan’ has sont sech a ’sponsible preacher to us as Brer W.”

“Mercy, man!” gasped the affrighted novice, clutching frantically at the notes he had been conning when the deacon accosted him. “I knew nothing of the funeral when I came. I can’t preach a funeral sermon out of hand! There isn’t anything about death in my notes.”

His distress wrought visibly upon the deacon’s sympathies. The hat described a reassuring parabola.

“There, there! It ain’t necessary for Brer W. to discombobberate himself ’pon dat account. A young gentleman of Brer W.’s talents needn’t get skeered at a little thing like an ev’ry-day funeral. All dat Brer W. has to do is to say a few words ’bout de dear deceasted; ’bout de loss to de church, an’ de family, an’ frien’s, an’ de suttinty o’ death, an’ de las’ change. An’ den a few rousements, you know, throwed in at de end. Law! I ken hear Brer W. doin’ it up fine, when I think on it!

“Dar! de choir is a-startin’ de funeral anthim. Thank you, suh, fur comin’ to us, and don’t give yo’self no oneasiness! Sling in dem remarks ’spectin’ de dear deceasted, and you’ll be all right.”

I forget the text of the sermon that followed the anthem and the prayer. I but know that neither it, nor the introduction, had any relevancy to the “occasion.” Our friend became a brilliant speaker in later life. Now, he was no more sophomoric than are nine-tenths of seminary students. But as he went on, we—in the slang of this era—began to sit up and take notice; for with dexterity remarkable in a tyro, he switched off from the main line into a by-road that led, like the paths of glory, to the grave. He had fine feeling and a lively imagination, and the scene and the music had laid hold upon both. As he confessed, subsequently, he surprised himself by his intimate acquaintance with the departed brother. He dwelt upon his fidelity to duty, his devotion to the Church of his love, and what he had done for her best interests. Singling out, as by divination, the widow, whose long crêpe veil billowed stormily with audible sobs, he referred tenderly to her loneliness, and committed her and the fatherless children to the Great Father and Comforter of all. By this time the congregation was a seething mass of emotion. Fluttering handkerchiefs, sighs that swept the church like fitful breezes, and suppressed wails from the central block of reserved seats, drowned the feeling peroration, but we guessed the purport from the speaker’s face and gestures.

As he sat down, the audience arose, as one woman, and broke into a funeral chant never written in any music-book, and in which the choir, who sang by note, took no part:

“We’ll pass over Jordan, O my brothers, O my sisters! De water’s chilly an’ cold, but Hallelujah to de Lamb! Honor de Lamb, my chillun, honor de Lamb!”

This was shouted over and over, with upraised arms at one portion, and, as the refrain was repeated, all joined hands with those nearest to them and shook from head to foot in a sort of Dervish dance, without, however, raising the feet from the floor. It was such an ecstatic shiver as I saw thirty-odd years thereafter, when a Nubian dancer gave an exhibition in a private house in the suburbs of Jerusalem.

I shall have more to say of that chant presently. Return we to the orator of the occasion, whose extemporaneous “effort” had stirred up the pious tumult.

As soon as his share of the service was over, he slipped out of the box-pulpit and sidled through the throng to the corner where we were grouped, watching for a chance to make our exit without attracting the attention of the worshippers. He had just reached us when the quick-eyed, fleet-footed deacon was at his side. We overheard what passed between them.

“Brer W., suh, I come to thank you in the name o’ de bereaved fam’ly of de dear deceasted, suh, for yo’ powerful sermon dis arternoon. Nothin’ could ’a’ been better an’ mo’ suitabler. Dey all agree on dat ar’ p’int, suh. Every one on ’em is _puffickly_ satisfied! You couldn’t ’a’ done no better, suh, ef you ’a’ had a year to get ready in.”

Poor W., red to the roots of his fair hair, murmured his thanks, and the sable official was backing away when he recollected something unsaid:

“Dar was jes’ one little matter I mought ’a’ mentioned at de fust, suh (not dat it made no difference whatsomever; de fam’ly, maybe, wouldn’t keer to have me speak o’ sech a trifle), _but de dear deceased was a sister_!”

Then it was that W. turned an agonized face upon our convulsed group:

“For Heaven’s sake, is there a back door or window by which a fellow can get out of this place?”

The choir of the “Old African” was one of the shows of the city. Few members of it could read the words of the hymns and anthems. Every one of them could read the notes, and follow them aright. The parts were well-balanced and well-sustained. Those who have heard the Fisk University Jubilee singers do not need the assurance that the quality of the negro voice is rarely sweet and rich, and that, as a race, they have a passion for music. Visitors from Northern cities who spent the Sabbath in Richmond seldom failed to hear the famed choir of the Old African. On this afternoon, the then popular and always beautiful _Jerusalem, My Happy Home_, was rendered with exquisite skill and feeling. George F. Root, who heard the choir more than once while he was our guest, could not say enough of the beauty of this anthem-hymn as given by the colored band. He declared that one soloist had “the finest natural tenor he ever heard.”

But these were not the representative singers of the race. Still less should airs, composed by white musicians and sung all over the country as “negro melodies,” pass as characteristic. They are the white man’s conception of what the expatriated tribes should think and feel and sing.

More than thirty years after the maiden sermon of which I have written, our little party of American travellers drew back against the wall of the reputed “house of Simon the Tanner” in Jaffa (the ancient Joppa), to let a funeral procession pass. The dead man, borne without a coffin, upon the shoulders of four gigantic Nubians, was of their race. Two-thirds of the crowd, that trudged, barefooted, through the muddy streets behind the bier, were of the same nationality. And as they plodded through the mire, they chanted the identical “wild, wailing measure” familiar to me from my infancy, which was sung that Sunday afternoon to the words “We’ll pass over Jordan”—even to the oft-iterated refrain, “Honor, my chillun, honor de Lamb!”

The gutterals of the outlandish tongue were all that was unlike. The air was precisely the same, and the time and intonations.

We have taken great pains to trace the negro folk-lore back to its root. The musical antiquarian is yet to arise who will track to their home the unwritten tunes and chants the liberated negro is trying to forget, and to which his grandparents clung lovingly, all unaware that they were an inheritance more than a dozen generations old.

Trained choirs might learn “book music,” and scorn the airs crooned over their cradles, and shouted and wailed in prayer and camp meetings, by mothers and fathers. The common people held obstinately to their very own music, and were not to be shaken loose by the “notions” of “young folks who hadn’t got the egg-shells offen they hades.”

I asked once, during a concert given by students from Hampton Institute, if the leader would call upon them for certain of the old songs—naming two or three. I was told that they objected to learning them, because they were associated with the days of their bondage. I did not take the trouble to convince the spruce _maestro_ that what I wished to hear were memorials of the days of wildest liberty, when their forbears hunted “big game” in their tangled native forests, and paddled their boats upon rivers the white man had never explored.

XXIII

HOW “ALONE” CAME TO BE

“_June 5th, 1854._

“... You anticipate from this formidable array of duties,
hindrances, etc., that it will be some time, yet, before I
can avail myself of your bewitching invitation. I doubt if
I shall be ready to accept Powhie’s gallant offer of his
escort, although it is tempting. But—

“‘I’m coming! yes, I’m coming!’

in July, wind, weather, and all else permitting.

“You will probably see a more august personage next Sunday.
I cannot resist the temptation to let you into the secret
of a little manœuvring of my own. I had an intimation a few
weeks ago that Miss L. and poor lonely Mr. S., her near
neighbor, were nodding at each other across the road. There
was an allusion to horseback rides, and a less fertile
imagination could have concocted a very tolerable story out
of the facts (?) in hand.

“But _didn’t_ I make it tell? The plausible tale crashed
into the peaceful brain of our worthy uncle-in-law like
a bomb-shell into a quiet chamber at midnight. How he
squirmed, and fidgeted, and tried to smile! ’Twas all a
ghastly grin! I winked at Herbert, who chanced to come in
while the narrative was in progress. The rogue had heard
but the merest outline, and paid no attention to that;
but he made a ‘sight draught’ upon his inventive talents,
and—adding to the rides, ‘moonlight walks, afternoon strolls
to the tobacco patch, and along the road toward the big
gate to see whether the joint-worm was in the wheat,’ and
insinuations that these excursions were more to the lady’s
taste than ‘sanctuary privileges’—almost drove the venerable
wooer crazy.

“‘Yes!’ said he, bitterly, pushing back his chair from the
table. ‘_He_ has a house and plantation. A land-rope is a
strong rope! Women look at these things.’