CHAPTER XXIII

LEGENDS OF THE OLD STONE HOUSE

The "Old Stone House" on Ware Creek, according to the Virginia historians, was the resort, at three different times, of the disembodied spirits of famous historical characters. "This unfinished stone edifice, evidently designed for a fortification, stands on a hill facing the water, and is difficult of access by reason of the impenetrable thickets and ravines overgrown with mountain laurel by which it is surrounded. Only by following a narrow path on the top of a wooded ridge can it be approached."[86] In consequence of its evil name nobody two hundred years ago ever visited it; and if a belated huntsman stumbled upon it by accident, he made haste to retrace his steps, frightened by the dark corners suggestive of hiding-places, and awed by the warning whispers of the wind as it sighed through the pines.

The country around it is desolate. The ravines are filled with poisonous vines and tenanted by the deadly rattlesnake. The house itself is a roofless ruin, embroidered by ivy and caressed by the Virginia creeper, the long boughs of which, like long arms, wave in the air to warn away all intruders.

The building is small, of solid masonry, the walls two feet thick, pierced with loopholes for musketry. There is one door from which stone steps descend to an underground chamber. This is probably the first stone house ever built by the English colonists, and is generally conceded by historians and antiquarians to be the edifice of which in 1609 Anas Todkill and others wrote to the London Company, "We built a fort for a retreat neere a convenient river, upon a high commanding hill very hard to be assaulted and easie to be defended; but the want of corne occasioned the end of all our worke, it being worke enough to provide victuall."

In this provision of "victuall," the starving colonists, as we have seen, were aided by Pocahontas, who brought, it is supposed, her "wild train" laden with baskets of food as far as this house, and there dismissing them, waited for Captain John Smith. The spot was favourable as a hiding-place from the fury of her father, the old king whose house was not far away, with its substantial chimney built by the treacherous Dutchmen. Here Pocahontas may have rested when she came "through the irksome woods with shining eyes" to warn her hero of danger and treachery from her own people.

These are the bits of folk-lore gleaned by that patient and accurate historian, Charles Campbell. Sixty years ago he visited the Stone House, and verified the existence then in the minds of the common people of three distinct legends belonging to the locality. No one doubts the romantic attachment of the Indian princess to Captain Smith. It sprang into existence perhaps at the heroic moment when she shielded his doomed head with her own bosom, and became the dominant influence of her short and eventful life.

Who can doubt that he early learned enough of her tongue to tell her of his mighty deeds, of the court of the great Sigismund, of his triumphal procession thither preceded by the heads, borne on lances, of the three slaughtered Turks; drawing, the while, pictures in the sand similar to the marvellous creations with which he illustrated the maps with which we are familiar? It is pathetic to know that the time was to him only an episode in a life of adventure. Even the saving of his own life, so often miraculously preserved, was a matter of little importance, remembered only in a generous moment, to secure for her an interest with his Queen. To Pocahontas he was more than a hero--he was little less than the Great Father himself. To him she was an attractive, beautiful child, and yet of a nation despised--"all savage," as he termed them.

One does not like to mar the romance by accepting the story of her marriage to one of Powhatan's captains. So dear is the romance of the Indian girl's devotion to John Smith, that we are tempted to be unjust to John Rolfe and to explain her marriage at Jamestown as the consequence of her longing to belong to the people of her hero,--to be "forever and ever his countrywoman,"--and to find in the Puritanic John Rolfe, with his tiresome throes of conscience and long-drawn apologies for loving her, a counterpart of her gallant captain. When she met John Smith in London, very pitiful must she have appeared to him, as her portrait does to us, in her stiff brocade, high, starched ruff, and English hat; she, the swaying, graceful windflower of the forest!

She must have appeared to him strangely unlike her charming self. Her dark locks, shaven closely on her temples, as was the custom of her people while she was a maid, had been suffered to grow since she had become a matron, and hung rebelliously about her pearl ear-rings; her lithe wrists, primly sustaining her fan of three feathers, were fettered by broad English cuffs. Those feathers were the only familiar connecting links between her past and her present! All else was strange.

We read that she neither smiled nor spoke for two hours when she was visited by Captain Smith. Presently she said, "They did tell me you were dead, and I knew no other until I came to Plymouth," and then in response to his deferential devoirs to "the Lady Rebekah," indignantly declares that she will have none of such talk! She means always to call him "Father," and be to him a "child," as she had been in Virginia.

And so the legend begins; and when she finds "her grave," as the quaint old writer says, "at Gravesend," she could not rest "in ye chauncell of ye church," but John Rolfe having married another wife, and Captain Smith having died, she was free to return to her old haunts, to meet her hero without let or reproof, and explain all that had been so wrong and so unfortunate. The belated fishermen, returning to their homes on the Ware, grew accustomed to seeing a thin thread of smoke issuing from the Old Stone House, and flitting past the loopholes might sometimes be discerned the dusky form of Pocahontas, with the white plume, the badge of royalty, in her dark hair. Here she awaited as of yore the coming of Captain Smith, and here he came and held converse with her. At last the troubled soul is comforted--the "deare and darling daughter" of Powhatan fades away from the legends of the old Virginians and is seen no more. Let us hope she is happy in a state where there are no separations and no mysteries, and that if she ever revisits the pale glimpses of the moon her errand may be one of beneficence to her many descendants.

The grim old fortress was untenanted, except by this Indian maiden, for nearly a hundred years, and then "the dreadful pyrate Blackbeard" secretes his ill-gotten treasures in the subterranean vault. To and fro he moves with muffled oars, mans the port-holes with his guns, and rests secure from assault. With his rifles he can pick out every man who dares to thread the defile. Presently his outgoing is watched, and one fine day he is assailed, and conquered on board his own sloop. He was a bold buccaneer, and had given orders that at a signal his magazine should be fired and friend and foe perish together. But his followers preferred surrender to death, and were all brought captive to Jamestown. Very brutal was the triumph of his captors. He had given trouble and resisted long, and now they would make sure of him. They returned with his gory head hanging from the prow of their vessel, and out of the skull that had housed his busy brain they fashioned a drinking-cup and rimmed it with silver, after the manner of their fathers in the old days of England. He became the Captain Kidd of Virginia waters. His phantom ship could be seen on moonlight nights on the York River, and his headless body would disembark therefrom and hover over his buried treasure. The treasure was never found; perhaps it is there still under some stone of the old fortress.

After this we hear nothing for many years of the Old Stone House. It crumbled away very little, being so strong; but nobody is tempted to approach it or use it in any way. The luxuriant vines bear great trumpet-shaped flowers, and clothe the walls with a brilliant beauty, seen only by the bats, hanging by crooked black fingers from every projection, and ready to fly in the face of the intruder, or the noxious serpents which wind in and out and increase and multiply with no check from man, their enemy.

Finally, about the year 1776, tenants appear again in the little fortress, ghostly forms throng the wide door, strange sounds of exultation are borne by the winds, and fitful unreal lights flit about or hover over the spot. From a distance these are observed, but there is no investigation, indeed the times are too stirring to admit of investigation. The Governor of Virginia has fled from the irate Commonwealth, and digests his chagrin on board his own sloop, riding at a safe distance near Yorktown. Men are in arms, burning words leap from lip to lip,--a great crisis is at hand, a great cloud is rising, soon to darken the land and break in the thunder and lightning of a mighty tempest.

What wonder, then, that it should be believed that the bugles of the fast-coming Revolution have reached Nathaniel Bacon in his long sleep in the York River, where "thoughtful Mr. Lawrence" had sunk his gallant young body lest it meet with ignominy at the hands of Lord Berkeley; that Drummond and Carver, and Bland and Hansford, and all the grand spirits who, with their leader, had lived a hundred years too soon, should meet him now, to exult and triumph!

What matter, now, that they had bled and suffered, and laid down their bright young lives, so full of promise, for a "lost cause"! The _cause_ had lived, and soon the young republic would break its shackles and stand forth with its foot upon the tyrant's neck. The mills of the gods had not been idle, and here in the mysterious Old Stone House, the fortress in which no living man had ever dwelt, they met to plan, to rejoice, to triumph, night after night, until the foes of the country they loved so well should be driven from her shores in disgrace and defeat.

These are the legends--if they are not too recent to be classed as legends--with which, a century ago, Virginians dignified the Old Stone House. The early settlers were firm believers in supernatural influences and warnings. A blazing star had appeared before a storm when the three ships set forth to find this country, another in the year of the massacre of 1622, and yet another on the eve of Bacon's Rebellion. Tongue-like flames flitted to and fro over the early graveyards, and ghostly lights hovered over the undrained marshes. The "boat of birchen bark" lighted by a firefly lamp of the lost lovers in the Dismal Swamp was seen as late as the nineteenth century. Huntsmen in the cold, freezing nights would sometimes find themselves suddenly enveloped in a warm cloud,--this was because a ghost had met them and passed over them in the dark. Sterner than all these was the belief that witches--malignant spirits--were suffered to enter human bodies and bend men and women to their evil purposes.

Ghost stories have long been out of fashion. They have no longer a place in literature or even beside the winter fireside. The American of to-day may be a dreamer of dreams and seer of visions, but they are of the future, not the past. His phantoms are all ahead of him. Perhaps I should apologise for admitting them into a serious work. And yet I think that everything connected with the story of the birth of our nation deserves preservation. I believe, with Carlyle, that "the leafy, blossoming Present Time springs from the _whole_ Past, remembered and unrememberable."

As Time goes on and touches with effacing finger one and another of the events that have marked, like milestones, the onward march of the great Anglo-Saxon race, we may be sure that the birth of this Western nation will ever be "remembered." "We shall not," said Daniel Webster, "stand unmoved on the shore of Plymouth while the sea continues to wash it, nor will our brethren in another early and ancient colony forget the place of its first establishment till their river ceases to flow by it. No vigour of youth, no maturity of manhood, will lead the nation to forget the spots where its infancy was cradled and defended."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Hume's "James I," p. 83.

[2] Hakluyt, III, 174-176.

[3] Stith's "History," p. 25.

[4] Coke, 2 Inst. 729 and 734.

[5] Harleian MS., quoted by Miss Aiken in her "Memoirs of the Court of James I."

[6] "The Accomplished Cook," by Robert May; London 1685.

[7] Letter of Philip Mainwaring to the Earl of Arundel, Lodge's "Illustrations," Vol. III, p. 403.

[8] Cooke's "Virginia," p. 8 _et seq._

[9] Ibid., p. 8 _et seq._

[10] Bancroft's "History of the United States," Vol. I, p. 122.

[11] Purchas's "His Pilgrimes," Vol. VIII, p. 469. The quotations from Purchas in this volume are from the Macmillan edition.

[12] Quoted by Campbell, p. 39, from Stith.

[13] "Site of Old Jamestown," by Samuel Yonge, p. 11.

[14] Stith's "History," p. 46.

[15] Purchas's "His Pilgrimes," Vol. XVIII.

[16] _Passiflora incarnata_ of Linnæus.

[17] _Anchusa Virginiana_ of Linnæus.

[18] Percy's "Narrative," quoted by Campbell, "History," p. 40.

[19] Percy's "Discourse," Smith's "Works," p. lxviii.

[20] Campbell's "History of Virginia," p. 41.

[21] Brown's "First Republic," p. 29.

[22] His true name was Parahunt. This was the birthplace of King Powhatan.

[23] Smith's "Works," p. 93. References to the "Works of John Smith" in this volume are from Professor Edward Arben's edition.

[24] Brown's "The First Republic," p. 43 _et seq._

[25] Possibly "Pamunkey" was meant.

[26] Smith's "Works," p. 957.

[27] John Smith, quoted in Campbell's "History," p. 382.

[28] Cooke's "Virginia," p. 20.

[29] Living in the region now known as Prince George and Surry. Their chief was Pepisco--otherwise Pepiscumah.

[30] "Newes from Virginia," quoted in E. Arber's "Works of John Smith," p. 14.

[31] Strachey.

[32] "Newes from Virginia," by John Smith.

[33] Other historians place his age at eighty years.

[34] "Newes from Virginia."

[35] A district near the mouth of James River, on which now stands the town of Hampton.

[36] Smith's "Works," p. 400.

[37] Brown's "First Republic in America," p. 82.

[38] Campbell's "History of Virginia," p. 49.

[39] The matches were long coils of cord, chemically treated to burn slowly, and kept lighted at both ends. The coils were hung over the shoulder or hooked to the bandolier.

[40] Prince or chief.

[41] Purchas, Vol. XVIII, p. 477.

[42] Smith's "Works," p. 39.

[43] John Smith, in his letters to Queen Anne, gave her age as "twelve or thirteen yeares."

[44] Cooke's "Virginia," p. 44.

[45] Smith's "Works," p. 436.

[46] Smith's "Works," p. 123.

[47] Smith's "Works," pp. 124-125.

[48] Purchas's "His Pilgrimes," Vol. XVIII, p. 449 _et seq._

[49] "The First Republic," p. 131.

[50] The present county of Isle of Wight.

[51] The colonists wished to send silk grass for a robe to Queen Anne. Queen Elizabeth had worn such a robe--made of Virginia grass.

[52] Purchas, p. 507 _et seq._

[53] Smith's "Works," p. 455.

[54] "The First Republic," p. 73 _et seq._

[55] Campbell's "History of Virginia," p. 76 _et seq._

[56] "The First Republic," p. 76.

[57] Campbell's "History of Virginia," p. 77. "The First Republic" gives a later date.

[58] Cooke's "Virginia," p. 63.

[59] Smith's "Works," p. 480.

[60] Smith's "Works," p. 486.

[61] Smith's "Works," p. 168.

[62] Grahame's "History of North America," Vol. I, p. 70.

[63] "The First Republic."

[64] Smith's "Works," p. 487.

[65] Delaware's Report, in "Virginia Britannia," p. xxvi; Cook's "Virginia," p. 79.

[66] Smith's "Works," p. 635.

[67] "The First Republic," p. 128 _et seq._

[68] Virginia Britannia, p. xiii.

[69] "The First Republic," pp. 285, 329, 612.

[70] Campbell's "History of Virginia," p. 103.

[71] "Virginia Britannia," p. 53 _et seq._

[72] _Ibid._, p. 54.

[73] _Ibid._, p. 109.

[74] Spelman's "Relation"--Smith.

[75] "Virginia Britannia," p. 57.

[76] Campbell's "History of Virginia," p. 107.

[77] Cooke's "Virginia," pp. 97-98.

[78] Smith's "Works," p. 517 _et seq._

[79] Smith, pp. 533-534.

[80] One of her descendants, Mr. Robert Bolling of Chelowe, thus annotated those words in his "Smith": "To find Smith and inquire of him whether he was dead! A very comical commission, Grand-mama!"

[81] Smith's "Works," p. 533.

[82] Campbell's "History of Virginia," p. 122.

[83] Address of Hon. Roger A. Pryor before the Virginia Bar Association, 1895.

[84] "The Cradle of the Republic," p. 51.

[85] "The Site of old 'James Towne,'" by Samuel H. Yonge, p. 8.

[86] Howe's "History of Virginia," p. 390.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Birth of the Nation, by Mrs. Roger A. Pryor