Part 6

Then she told me the history of the room, explaining that she objected to any talk about it because she dreaded the suspicion of superstition. Briefly the story was that several generations earlier, an old man almost blind, had died there; that during his last illness he had had his lawyer prepare his will there; that he was too feeble, when the lawyer finished, even to sign the document; that he placed it under his pillow; that during the night his daughter abstracted and copied it, changing only one clause in such fashion as to defeat the long cherished purpose of the dying man; that she placed her new draft under the pillow where the old one had been and that in the morning the nearly blind old man executed that instead of the other.

"Now I'm not superstitious, you know," said Cousin Mary very earnestly, "but it is a fact that from that day to this there has been something the matter with that room. During the time of my great uncle, who brought me up, you know, and from whom I inherited the plantation, many persons tried to sleep in it but none ever stayed there more than an hour or two. They always fled in terror from the chamber, until at last my uncle forbade any further attempt to occupy the room lest this should come to be called a haunted house. Since I became mistress here three persons have tried the thing, all of them with the same result."

"It's stuff and nonsense," I interposed, "but what yarns did they tell?"

"They one and all related the same singular experience," she answered, "though neither of them knew what the experience of the others had been."

"What was it?" I asked with resolute incredulity.

"Why, each of them went to the room in full confidence that nothing would happen. Each went to bed and to sleep. After a while he waked to find the whole room pervaded by a dim, yellowish gray or grayish yellow light. Some of them used one combination of words and some the other, but all agreed that the light had no apparent source, that it was all-pervasive, that it was very dim at first, but that it steadily increased until they fled in panic from its nameless terror. For ten years we permitted no repetition of the experiment, but a year ago my brother--he's an army officer, you know--insisted upon sleeping in the room. He remained there longer than anybody else ever had done, but between two and three o'clock in the morning he came down the stairs with barely enough strength to cling to the balustrades, and in such an ague fit as I never saw any one else endure in all my life. He had served in the Florida swamps and was subject to agues, but for several months before that he had been free from them. I suppose the terror attacked his weakest point and brought the chills on again."

[Sidenote: A Challenge to the Ghosts]

"Did he have the same experience the rest had had?" I asked.

"Yes, except that he had stayed longer than any of them and suffered more."

"Cousin Mary," I said, "I am going to sleep in that room to-night, with your permission."

"You can't have it," she answered. "I've seen too much of the terror to permit a further trifling with it."

"Then I'll sleep there without your permission," I answered. "I'll break in if necessary, and I'll prove by a demonstration that nobody can question, what nonsense all these imaginings have been."

Cousin Mary was determined, but so was I, and at last she consented to let me make the attempt. She and I decided to keep the matter to ourselves, but of course it leaked out and spread among all the guests in the house. I suppose the negro servants who were sent to make up the bed and supply bath water told. At any rate my coming adventure was the sole topic of conversation at the supper table that night.

I seized upon the occasion to give a warning.

"I have borrowed a six-shooter from our host," I announced, "and if I see anything to shoot at to-night I shall shoot without challenging. So I strongly advise you fellows not to attempt any practical jokes."

The response convinced me that nothing of the kind was contemplated, but to make sure, our host, who perhaps feared tragedy, exacted and secured from each member of the company, old and young, male and female, a pledge of honor that there should be no interference with my experiment, no trespass upon my privacy.

"With that pledge secured," I said, perhaps a trifle boastfully, "I shall stay in that room all night no matter what efforts the spooks may make to drive me out."

It was about midnight, or nearly that, when I entered the room. It was raining heavily without, and the wind was rattling the stout shutters of the eight great windows of the room.

I went to each of those windows and minutely examined it. They were hung with heavy curtains of deep red, I remember, for I observed every detail. Four of them were in the north and four in the south wall of the wing. The eastern wall of the room was pierced only by the broad doorway which opened at the head of the great stairs. The door was stoutly built of oak, and provided with a heavy lock of iron with brass knobs.

The western side of the room held a great open fireplace, from which a paneled oaken wainscot extended entirely across the room and up to the ceiling. Behind the wainscot on either side was a spacious closet which I carefully explored with two lighted bedroom candles to show me that the closets were entirely empty.

Having completed my explorations I disrobed, double-locked the door, and went to bed, first placing the six-shooter handily under my pillow. I do not think I was excited even in the smallest degree. My pulses were calm, my imagination no more active than a young man's must be, and my brain distinctly sleepy. The great, four-poster bed was inexpressibly comfortable, and the splash and patter of the rain as it beat upon the window blinds was as soothing as a lullaby. I forgot all about the experiment in which I was engaged, all about ghosts and their ways, and went to sleep.

[Sidenote: The Yellow-Gray Light]

After a time I suddenly waked to find the room dimly pervaded by that yellowish-gray or grayish-yellow light that had so disturbed the slumbers of others in that apartment. My awakening was so complete that all my faculties were alert at once. I felt under my pillow and found my weapon there. I looked to its chambers and found the charges undisturbed. The caps were in place, and I felt myself armed for any encounter.

But I had resolved in advance, to be deliberate, self-possessed, and calm, whatever might happen, and I kept faith with myself. Instead of hastily springing from the bed I lay there for a time watching the weird light as it slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in intensity, and trying to decide whether they were right who had described as "yellowish gray" or they who had called it "grayish yellow." I decided that the gray distinctly predominated, but in the meanwhile the steady increase in the light and in its pervasiveness warned me, and I slipped out of bed, taking my pistol with me, to the dressing case on the other side of the room--the side on which the great oaken door opened.

The rain was still beating heavily against the window blinds, and the strange, yellowish gray light was still slowly but steadily increasing. I was resolute, however, in my determination not to be disturbed or hurried by any manifestation. In response to that determination I glanced at the mirror and decided that the mysterious light was sufficient for the purpose, and I resolved I would shave.

Having done so, I bathed--a little hurriedly, perhaps, because of the rapidly increasing light. I was deliberate, however, in donning my clothing, and not until I was fully dressed did I turn to leave the room. Glancing at every object in it--all now clearly visible, though somewhat shadowy in outline--I decided at last upon my retreat. I turned the key, and the bolt in the lock shot back with sound enough to startle calmer nerves than mine.

I turned the knob, but the door refused to open!

For a moment I was puzzled. Then I remembered that it was a double lock. A second later I was out of that chamber, and the oaken door of it was securely shut behind me.

I went down the great stairway, slowly, deliberately, in pursuance of my resolution; I entered the large hallway below, and thence passed into the oak-wainscoted dining-room, where I sat down to breakfast with the rest of the company.

It was nine o'clock of a dark, rainy morning.

XXV

In Virginia at the time of which I am writing, everybody, men, women, and children, read books and talked about them. The annual output of the publishers was trifling then, as compared with the present flood of new books, and as a consequence everybody read all the new books and magazines, and everybody talked about them as earnestly as of politics or religion. Still more diligently they read old books, the classics of the language. Literature was regarded as a vital force in human affairs, and books which in our time might relieve the tedium of a railway journey and be forgotten at its end, were read with minute attention and discussed as earnestly as if vital interests had depended upon an accurate estimation of their quality.

As a consequence, authorship was held in strangely glamorous esteem. I beg pardon of the English language for making that word "glamorous"; it expresses my thought, as no other term does, and it carries its meaning on its face.

[Sidenote: The "Solitary Horseman"]

I remember that in my student days in Richmond there came a visitor who had written one little book--about Rufus Choate, I think, though I can find no trace of it in bibliographies. I suspect that he was a very small author, indeed, in Boston, whence he came, but he was an AUTHOR--we always thought that word in capital letters--and so he was dined and wined, and entertained, and not permitted to pay his own hotel bills or cab charges, or anything else.

Naturally a people so disposed made much of their own men of letters, of whom there was quite a group--if we reckon their qualifications as generously as the Virginians did. Among them were three at least whose claim to be regarded as authors was beyond dispute. These were John Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and the English novelist, G. P. R. James, who at that time was serving as British consul at Richmond. And there was Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, who played the part of literary queen right royally.

Mr. James was a conspicuous figure in Richmond. He was a robust Englishman in his late fifties, rather short and rather stout. The latter impression was aided by the fact that in his afternoon saunterings about the town, he usually wore a sort of roundabout, a coat that ended at his waist and had no tails to it. To the ribald and the jocular he was known as "the Solitary Horseman" because of his habit of introducing novels or chapters with a lonely landscape in which a "solitary horseman" was the chief or only figure. To those of us who were disposed to be deferential he was known as "the Prince Regent," in memory of the jest perpetrated by one of the wits of the town. Mr. James's three initials, which prompted John G. Saxe to say that he "got at the font his strongest claims to be reckoned a man of letters"--stood for "George Payne Rainsford," but he rarely used anything more than the initials--G. P. R. When a certain voluble gentlewoman asked Tom August what the initials stood for he promptly replied:

"Why, George Prince Regent, of course. And his extraordinary courtesy fully justifies his sponsors in baptism for having given him the name."

The lady lost no time in telling everybody of the interesting fact--and the novelist became "Prince Regent James" to all his Richmond friends from that hour forth.

John R. Thompson was the editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_. Scholar, poet, and man of most gentle mind, it is not surprising that in later years, when the old life was war-wrecked, Mr. William Cullen Bryant made him his intimate friend and appointed him to the office of literary editor of the _Evening Post_, which Mr. Bryant always held to be the supreme distinction possible to an American man of letters. I being scarcely more than a boy studying law in the late fifties, knew him only slightly, but my impression of him at that time was, that with very good gifts and a certain charm of literary manner, he was not yet fully grown up in mind. He sought to model himself, I think, upon his impressions of N. P. Willis, and his aspiration to be recognized as a brilliant man of society was quite as marked as his literary ambition. He was sensitive to slights and quite morbidly apprehensive that those about him might think the less of him because his father was a hatter. Socially at that time and in that country men in trade of any kind were regarded as rather inferior to those of the planter class.

When I knew Thompson better in after years in New York he had outgrown that sort of nonsense, and was a far more agreeable companion because of the fact.

[Sidenote: John Esten Cooke--Gentleman]

Chief among the literary men of Richmond was John Esten Cooke. His novel "The Virginia Comedians" had made him famous in his native state, and about the time I write of--1858-9--he supplemented it with another story of like kind, "Henry St. John, Gentleman." As I remember them these were rather immature creations, depending more upon a certain grace of manner for their attractiveness than upon any more substantial merit. Certainly they did not compare in vigor or originality with "Surrey of Eagle's Nest" or any other of the novels their author wrote after his mind had been matured by strenuous war experience. But at the time of which I write they gave him a literary status such as no other Virginian of the time could boast, and for a living he wrote ceaselessly for magazines and the like.

The matter of getting a living was a difficult one to him then, for the reason that with a pride of race which some might think quixotic, he had burdened his young life with heavy obligations not his own. His father had died leaving debts that his estate could not pay. As the younger man got nothing by inheritance, except the traditions of honor that belonged to his race, he was under no kind of obligation with respect to those debts. But with a chivalric loyalty such as few men have ever shown, John Esten Cooke made his dead father's debts his own and little by little discharged them with the earnings of a toilsome literary activity.

His pride was so sensitive that he would accept no help in this, though friends earnestly pressed loans upon him when he had a payment to meet and his purse was well-nigh empty. At such times he sometimes made his dinner on crackers and tea for many days together, although he knew he would be a more than welcome guest at the lavish tables of his many friends in Richmond. It was a point of honor with him never to accept a dinner or other invitation when he was financially unable to dine abundantly at his own expense.

The reviewer of one of my own stories of the old Virginia life, not long ago informed his readers that of course there never were men so sensitively and self-sacrificingly honorable as those I had described in the book, though my story presented no such extreme example of the man of honor as that illustrated in Mr. Cooke's person and career.

I knew him intimately at that time, his immediate friends being my own kindred. Indeed, I passed one entire summer in the same hospitable house with him.

Some years after the war our acquaintance was renewed, and from that time until his death he made my house his abiding place whenever he had occasion to be in New York. Time had wrought no change in his nature. He remained to the end the high-spirited, duty-loving man of honor that I had known in my youth; he remained also the gentle, affectionate, and unfailingly courteous gentleman he had always been.

He went into the war as an enlisted man in a Richmond battery, but was soon afterward appointed an officer on the staff of the great cavalier, J. E. B. Stuart.

"I wasn't born to be a soldier," he said to me in after years. "Of course I can stand bullets and shells and all that, without flinching, just as any man must if he has any manhood in him, and as for hardship and starvation, why, a man who has self-control can endure them when duty demands it, but I never liked the business of war. Gold lace on my coat always made me feel as if I were a child tricked out in red and yellow calico with turkey feathers in my headgear to add to the gorgeousness. There is nothing intellectual about fighting. It is the fit work of brutes and brutish men. And in modern war, where men are organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is really nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination. As an old soldier, you know how small a part personal gallantry plays in the machine work of war nowadays."

[Sidenote: How Jeb Stuart Made a Major]

Nevertheless, John Esten Cooke was a good soldier and a gallant one. At Manassas I happened to see him at a gun which he was helping to work and which we of the cavalry were supporting. He was powder-blackened and he had lost both his coat and his hat in the eagerness of his service at the piece; but during a brief pause in the firing he greeted me with a rammer in his hand and all the old cheeriness in his face and voice.

On Stuart's staff he distinguished himself by a certain laughing nonchalance under fire, and by his eager readiness to undertake Stuart's most perilous missions. It was in recognition of some specially daring service of that kind that Stuart gave him his promotion, and Cooke used to tell with delight of the way in which the great boyish cavalier did it.

"You're about my size, Cooke," Stuart said, "but you're not so broad in the chest."

"Yes, I am," answered Cooke.

"Let's see if you are," said Stuart, taking off his coat as if stripping for a boxing match. "Try that on."

Cooke donned the coat with its three stars on the collar, and found it a fit.

"Cut off two of the stars," commanded Stuart, "and wear the coat to Richmond. Tell the people in the War Department to make you a major and send you back to me in a hurry. I'll need you to-morrow."

When I visited him years afterwards at The Briars, his home in the Shenandoah Valley, that coat which had once been Stuart's, hung upon the wall, as the centerpiece of a collection of war relics, cherished with pride of sentiment but without a single memory that savored of animosity. The gentle, courteous, kindly man of letters who cherished these things as mementoes of a terrible epoch had as little in his bearing to suggest the temper of the war time as had his old charger who grazed upon the lawn, exempt from all work as one who had done his duty in life and was entitled to ease and comfort as his reward.

XXVI

The old life of the Old Dominion is a thing of the dead past, a memory merely, and one so different from anything that exists anywhere on earth now, that every reflection of it seems the fabric of a dream. But its glamor holds possession of my mind even after the lapse of half a century of years, and the greatest joy I have known in life has come from my efforts to depict it in romances that are only a veiled record of facts.

It was not a life that our modern notions of economics can approve, but it ministered to human happiness, to refinement of mind, to culture, and to the maintenance of high ideals of manhood and womanhood. It bred a race of men who spoke the truth, lived uprightly, and met every duty without a shadow of flinching from personal consequences. It reared a race of women fit to be the wives and mothers of such men. Under its spell culture was deemed of more account than mere education; living was held in higher regard than getting a living; refinement meant more than display; comfort more than costliness, and kindliness in every word and act more than all else.

[Sidenote: A Plantation Modernized]

I know an old plantation where for generations a family of brave men and fair women dwelt in peace and ministered in gracious, hospitable ways to the joy of others. Under their governance there was never any thought of exploiting the resources of the plantation for the sake of a potential wealth that seemed superfluous to people of contented mind who had enough. The plantation supported itself and all who dwelt upon it--black and white. It educated its sons and daughters and enabled them to maintain a generous hospitality. More than this they did not want or dream of wanting.

There are twenty-two families living on that plantation now, most of them growing rich or well-to-do by the cultivation of the little truck farms into which the broad acres have been parceled out. The woodlands that used to shelter the wild flowers and furnish fuel for the great open fireplaces, have been stripped to furnish kindling wood for kitchen ranges in Northern cities. Even the stately locust trees that had shaded the lawns about the old mansion have been converted into policemen's clubs and the like, and potatoes grow in the soil where greensward used to carpet the house grounds.

Economically the change means progress and prosperity, of course, but to me the price paid for it seems out of proportion to the goods secured. But then I am old-fashioned, and perhaps, in spite of the strenuous life I have led, I am a sentimentalist,--and sentiment is scorned as silly in these days.

There is another aspect of the matter that deserves a word, and I have a mind to write that word even at risk of anathema from all the altars of sociology. At seventy years of age one is less sensitive to criticism than at thirty.

All the children of the twenty-two truck farming families on that old plantation go to school. They are taught enough to make out bills, add up columns of figures, and write business letters to their commission merchants. That is what education means now on that plantation and on hundreds of others that have undergone a like metamorphosis. No thought or dream of culture enters into the scheme. Under the old system rudimentary instruction was merely a stepping stone by which to climb up to the education of culture. Under the theories of economics it is a great gain thus to substitute rudimentary instruction for all in the place of real education and culture for a class. But is it gain? Is the world better off with ten factory hands who can read, write, and cipher, than with one Thomas Jefferson or George Wythe or Samuel Adams or Chancellor Livingston who knows how to think? Are ten factory girls or farmers' wives the full equivalent of one cultured gentlewoman presiding gracefully and graciously over a household in which the amenities of life are more considered than its economics?

Meanwhile the education of the race of men and women who once dwelt there has correspondingly lost its culture aspect. The young men of that old family are now bred to be accountants, clerks, men of business, who have no time to read books and no training that leads to the habit of thinking; the young women are stenographers, telegraph operators, and the like. They are estimable young persons, and in their way charming. But is the world richer or poorer for the change?

It is not for me to answer; I am prejudiced, perhaps.

However it may be, the old life is a thing completely dead and done for, and the only compensation is such as the new affords. Everything that was distinctive in that old life was burned out by the gunpowder of the Civil War. Even the voices of the Virginia women--once admired throughout the land--are changed. They still say "right" for "very," and "reckon" for "think," and their enunciation is still marked by a certain lack of emphasis, but it is the voice of the peacock in which they speak, not that of the dove.