Chapter 14

A ONE-ENGINE RUN AND A FOREST TOMB

By the time we had finished our visit at Brandon, we were in the midst of the beautiful Virginia autumn. Though much of the warmth of summer was yet in the midday hours, the mornings were often crisp and the evenings seemed to lose heart and grow chill as they saw the sun go down.

Part of the houseboat was heated by oil stoves, but the forward cabin had a wood stove, and above it on the upper deck was our little sheet-iron chimney. It had a hood that turned with the wind and creaked just enough for company. So, during mornings and evenings and wet days, Gadabout smoked away, cozy and comfortable.

She was smoking vigorously on the day that we bade good-bye to Chippoak Creek. That was a glorious morning--one of those mornings when the sun tries to warm the northwest wind and the northwest wind tries to chill the sun, and between the two a tonic gets into the air and people want to do things. We wanted to "see the wheels go round" (not knowing then that only one would go round); and we prepared to start for Kittewan Creek, a few miles farther up the James.

Kittewan Creek is no place in particular, but near it are two old plantations that historians and story-writers have talked a good deal about. These two estates, Weyanoke and Fleur de Hundred, having no longer pretentious colonial mansions, are often overlooked by the traveller on the James, who thereby loses a worthy chapter of the river story.

When our anchors came up out of the friendly mud of Chippoak Creek, we let the northwest wind push us across the flats and into the channel. Then we summoned the engines to do their duty. The port one responded promptly, but the other would do nothing; and as we ran out of the creek and headed up the river, the Commodore was appealing to the obdurate machine with a screwdriver and a monkey-wrench.

The tide was hurrying up-stream and the wind was hurrying down-stream, and old Powhatan was much troubled. Gadabout rolled awkwardly among the white-caps but continued to make headway. Pocahontas, the big river steamer, was coming down-stream. We could see her making a landing at a wharf above us where a little mill puffed away and a barge was loading. Evidently, the steamer was to stop next at a landing that we were just passing, for there men and mules were hurrying to get ready for her. Now the starboard bank of the river grew high and sightly, but on the port side there was only a great waste of marsh.

The Commodore spent much time with the ailing motor. Once he lost a portion of the creature's anatomy in the bottom of the boat. Nautica found him, inverted and full of emotion, fishing about in the bilge-water for the lost piece. She offered him everything from the toasting-rack to the pancake-turner to scrape about with; but he would trust nothing of the sort, and kept searching until he found the piece with his own black, oily fingers.

"I believe the man that built this boat was a prophet!" he exclaimed as his face, flushed with triumph and congestion, appeared above the floor. "He said that if we put gasoline motors in, we should have more fun and more trouble than we ever had in our lives before; and we surely are getting all he promised."

As we rounded the next bend in the river, we got the full force of the wind and, with but one engine running, it was a question for a while whether we were going to go on up the river or to drift back down stream. Fortunately, the James narrowed at this point, thus increasing the sweep of the tide that was helping us along, and slowly Gadabout pushed on, slapping down hard on the big waves and holding steady.

A short distance beyond Sturgeon Point was the indentation in the shore marking the mouth of Kittewan Creek. Old cypress trees stepped out into the river on either side, while a row of stakes seemed to indicate the channel of the little waterway. Sounding along we went in with four feet of water under us.

Our plan was to find an anchorage a little way up the creek, and then next day to start with the rising tide for a run on up to Weyanoke. Of course Weyanoke fronted upon the James, but our idea was to make a sort of back-door landing by running up this stream and in behind the plantation. There was no sheltering cove to lie in on the river front; and besides, to make the visit at the regular pier was so hopelessly commonplace. Any of the ordinary palace yachts could do the thing that way. But it took a gypsy craft like Gadabout to wriggle up the little back-country creek and to land among the chickens and the geese and--bulls perhaps; but then all explorers must take chances.

Kittewan Creek is a marsh stream; yet for some distance in from the mouth tall cypresses stand along the reedy banks. These trees protected us from the high wind and made it easy for us to take Gadabout up the narrow watercourse.

As she moved slowly along, we were looking for an ancient tomb that we had been told stood on the left bank of the stream not far from the mouth--"the mysterious tomb of the James" some one had called it. While we could see nothing of it then, we resolved to search for it upon returning from our run up the creek to visit Weyanoke. But we were destined to see the tomb before seeing Weyanoke.

Upon reaching the first bend in the stream, our tree-protection failed us and Gadabout became so absorbed in the antics of wind and tide that she paid no further heed to any suggestions on our part as to the proper way to navigate Kittewan Creek. Her notion seemed to be to run down a few fish-nets whose corks were bobbing about on the water, and then to go over and hang herself up on some cypress stumps at the edge of the marsh. We insisted upon her going a little way farther up the creek. But a compromise was all that could be effected; anchors were dropped and operations temporarily suspended on both sides.

We had a much belated dinner, and then all went ashore to make inquiries and to get supplies at a house that stood on a bluff above the bend in the stream. It proved to be a very old building and quite a landmark. It was called the Kittewan house. There, we learned that the tomb we were looking for was on the bank almost opposite where our houseboat lay.

We found it close to the creek. It was an altar-tomb, broken and timeworn and almost covered with an accumulation of earth and moss and leaves. One corner support and one side of the caving base were gone, letting ferns and lichens find a home within, tender green fronds touching the shadowing slab above them.

The strange, unremembered grave was that of a woman. For, when we had scraped clear a little of the slab, we came upon the name Elizabeth. Our floating home was near enough to lend shovel and broom; and we undertook to free the tomb (that was itself being slowly buried) and to bring to light again the chiseled story of the long-ago Elizabeth who lay in this lonely place.

When the granite slab was uncovered and swept clean, we were able to read most of the words upon it, although the stone was cut almost as deep by the little fingers of rain and of frost as by the graver's heavy hand that had itself gone to dust long ago. Slowly we found the words telling that there rested the body of Elizabeth Hollingshorst, whose husband, Thomas Hollingshorst, was a shipmaster; that her father was Mr. Piner Gordon of the family of Tilliangus in Aberdeenshire, Scotland; and that she died November 30, 1728.

The father's name, Gordon (so proud a one in Aberdeenshire), and the use before it of the prefix Mr. (a term then synonymous with "gentleman" and never lightly given in those days of well-defined rank) show that this Elizabeth was of gentle birth. The words "Ship Master" tell of how the breath of the old North Sea had called Thomas Hollingshorst from the banks and braes and led him to point the bow of his merchant ship across seas, bound for England's far-away colony. Little would he dream--crowding canvas to speed his cargo to the Virginia plantations--that his gentle-born Elizabeth was to find a grave in that feared American wilderness.

The longer we worked over the ancient stone the more we came to feel the pitiful meaning of it.

We felt that this Elizabeth was a true heart and a brave one, who ventured the perilous sea-voyage of the early days with her shipmaster husband. She did not come as other women came--to make a home in the new land and to have friends and neighbours there. She came, a passing stranger, upon her husband's trading ship; a ship that would anchor but to exchange its English wares for the planter's tobacco, and then turn prow again to the perils of the sea. When illness came in the new, wild land, how distant must have seemed Aberdeenshire in those days of the little ship and the slow sail! And here, longing for one more sight of Scottish heather, this Elizabeth died.

Seeking for her a last resting-place, the stranger ship moved up the river and came to anchor at the mouth of this creek. They lowered her gently over the ship's side into a long-boat and then rowed up the stream into the forest. Here by the creek's side they buried her, and (doubtless by the ship's own compass) they orientated the forest grave. Then again the ship sailed across seas and bore sad tidings to some family of Gordons in Aberdeenshire.

In those days it must have been long before the returning vessel could sail up the James, this time bearing the graven tomb from Scotland. For a little while, the stillness of the forest was once more broken, startling the timid woodland folk; and then these strangers from overseas were gone. Again the great silence fell and the wilderness took the grave to itself. Slowly it set upon the tomb its seal of moss and lichen and vine. Unmindful of the mark of human loss and grief, the wild folk came and went. Joyously the cardinal flashed his crimson wing above the darkening stone; the deer came to drink from the stream and lifted their heads to scent the breeze that came with the dawn through the cypress trees, across a forgotten grave; hard and incurious, the Weyanoke Indians slipped by like darker shadows in the forest gloom; and only the little night birds seemed to know or to care as they called plaintively in the marshes at twilight.

As we were about to leave the tomb, we bethought us that the anniversary of the death of this Elizabeth was drawing near. We heaped the holly with its glowing berries above the crumbling stone. And still we lingered; for the Gordons of Tilliangus seemed very far away from this daughter of their house. As the sunset lights were fading, we saw a new moon pale on the tinted sky; and we thought of how for almost two centuries crescent moons had trembled from silver to gold above this forlorn grave on the bank of the Kittewan.

A short row in the dusk out upon the stream, and we stepped aboard Gadabout. She never seemed more cozy and homelike. A great bowl of pink and yellow chrysanthemums from Brandon's old garden and trailing cedar and ferns and red-berried holly added to the cheer. Soon our home-lights streamed from the broad windows out across the water, and some faint glow must have touched that lonely tomb on shore.