Part 17

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?”