Part 15

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?...