FIRST GRIEVING
One spring, when the little Louise was about three, I think, Adèle five,
Fanny seven, Robert nine, Ben eleven, a neighbor wrote from Charleston
to mamma, asking if she would receive her and her two children for a
night. The children had been ill with scarlet fever, but were well
again, and pronounced by the doctor fit to travel; but, in order to
reach their home on Sandy Island in one day they would have to be out
late in the evening; and she feared the night air, so took the liberty
of begging mamma to receive them for the night. My mother wrote she
would be happy to do so, and they came, spent the night, went on their
way the next day. My mother had had no fear and the children played
together. She felt as the doctor had pronounced them fit to travel it
was perfectly safe. A few days after the visit Robert was playing, when
he suddenly dropped his playthings and put his head in mamma’s lap,
saying he felt sick. It was the dread disease. His illness was terrible
from the first, but very short. He died. Then Fanny took it and
followed rapidly, though Robert had been isolated from the moment he was
taken. My poor mother was prostrated with her passionate grief. Every
precaution then known was taken in the way of fumigation and burning up
bedding and clothing, and the plague was stayed.
A great longing to visit the home of her childhood seized my mother, and
my father felt it was a great thing that she should have the desire to
go, as he really feared for her mind and health. So when all possible
danger of contagion was considered over, he took her and the three
children who were left up to Abbeville to the farm called Badwell, where
she was born, and where her beloved mother lay in the family
burying-ground with the pasteur of the desert, Jean Louis Gibert, her
father. My father left them there and returned to his work. In a few
days the beautiful little Louise was taken ill and died, and was laid by
her grandmother in the God’s acre! I cannot bear to think of my mother’s
suffering at this time. The tragedy of it! The child named at last for
her mother, on this much-longed-for visit to her mother’s home. Now her
three beautiful, strong children were gone, leaving only the delicate
Ben and the delicate and tiny seven-months’ child, Adèle. It seems like
the crushing out of some dainty, happy creature, a beautiful, full,
happy life drained of its joy, leaving only stern, exacting duty!
I know my dear father suffered terribly at this time, too, but he never
spoke to me of it. He never found it possible to put his deeper feelings
into words. I think he and my mother were a great comfort to each other
in their grief, and I think it was this summer that my father had the
desperate illness of which my mother has told me, and I believe it was
his return from the jaws of death which made her first feel life held a
future for her.
They were in the same isolated, remote summer house, The Meadows. Papa
came home from his harvest work on the plantation much exhausted, went
at once to bed, and when mamma followed him at midnight she knew he was
desperately ill--a burning, consuming fever, and his rapid whispered
speech showed him delirious. She called the servants, wrote a note to
Doctor Sparkman, asking him to come at once, telling him how suddenly
papa had been taken, put a man on horseback and sent him off in the
night, telling him to go from place to place until he found the doctor.
Then she proceeded to do what she could for the patient to reduce the
awful fever. Cloths wrung out in water fresh from the spring on head and
face and hands was all she could do to cool it, as there was no ice.
Then she had a tub of hot water brought and with the help of Hynes, the
house-servant, put his feet to the knees in that, covering him with
blankets to produce steam. Mercifully this quieted him and the jabbering
ceased and he slept. Daylight came, no doctor, no sound came to her
listening ear of horse-hoofs. The heavy sleep as of one drugged lasted
until she was frightened, but she feared to wake him. She looked after
the children, having Hynes, who was very faithful and intelligent, to
sit by papa and fan him. She gave the children their breakfast and tried
to eat, herself, for she knew she would need all her strength.
Dinner-time came, evening, night. Oh, the long hours, how they dragged!
She thought of her desperate, passionate grief for her children, feeling
she could not bear it. Had God heard her rebellious murmurings, and was
he going to show her now how blessed she had then been, having her
husband left to her! How unutterably worse this grief would be! How
hopeless, indeed, would life be without him!
And so the hours wore on, but she was not idle; she thought of everybody
and did everything for the comfort of the house. Just at midnight the
dogs began to bark. She went on the piazza and heard wheels approaching.
She had kept the dinner-table laid with flowers and silver and candles,
all bright and cheery. As soon as she heard wheels she ordered the
servants to bring in dinner, and when the doctor entered and said, “How
is Colonel Allston?” she said, “Doctor, sit down and dine first, and
then I will take you in to see him.” He sat down, and she went to the
sick-room, where things were unchanged, the same drugged sleep and heavy
breathing. As soon as the doctor had finished, he came and listened to
her accurate account of all the symptoms. Then the fight began. I do not
know what he gave or what he did, but he remained doing all that his
skill and science suggested, for thirty-six hours, and then he felt for
the first time that there was hope, and left to see after his other
patients. He told my mother that he had been with a desperately ill
patient on Santee, thirty miles south of his home, for twenty-four
hours; when he returned to his home he found mamma’s note and the
servant, and without going into the house, though he was famished for
food after a thirty-mile drive, he had had a fresh horse put in and came
right on. Then he said: “Oh, Mrs. Allston, if every one thought of the
doctor as you do, the life of a country doctor would be a different
thing, and fewer of them would become dependent on stimulants. I was
exhausted, but expected to see and prescribe for the patient before
having food. When I saw that delicious dinner of roast duck and
vegetables I was completely surprised, but I blessed you and felt how
much clearer my brain, how much better my condition to prescribe for the
patient, and how much better chance it gave him for life, though, I
confess, when I first saw Colonel Allston I did not feel there was any
chance of saving him.” I tell all this just as my mother told it to me.
It shows what a woman she was. My father recovered slowly, and it was
the last summer they spent at The Meadows, the distance from all help in
illness being too great.
The next May, 1845, they again moved to Canaan Seashore, where my mother
had spent her first summer of married life. They went early in May and I
was born on the 29th of that month. Naturally, I suppose, after all the
sorrow and anxiety mamma had had, I was a miserably delicate, nervous
baby, and I have heard mamma say that for months they were afraid to
take me out of the house at all. At the end of that time the house which
papa was building on Pawley’s Island, just across the marsh and creek
from Canaan, was finished, and they determined to move the household
over to the island for the rest of the summer. That was my first outing,
and the times I was taken out of the room afterward were few and far
between, for it seems after going out I never closed my eyes at all that
night. I was a poor sleeper at any time, but after going out I was no
sleeper at all. The floor of my dear mother’s room on the beach is
seamed all over by the marks of the rocking-chair in which I was
eternally rocked! They had a hard struggle to keep me alive. Both mamma
and papa wanted me named for the dear old aunt who had been such a
blessing to everybody, so I was named Elizabeth Waties, mamma with
tender sympathy giving me the name she would have borne had her dream of
love materialized. I seemed to be marked for sadness, with deep lines
under my eyes, as though I had already wept much, which I certainly had,
only with a baby it is not weeping, but crying, with the accompaniment
of much noise.
The winter I was two years old, one Sunday mamma had gone with papa in a
boat to All Saints’ Church, seven miles away on the Waccamaw. She looked
out of the window as she listened to dear, saintly Mr. Glennie’s sermon,
and across her vision passed a young man walking in the churchyard,
holding by the hand little Ben, who had been allowed to go out when the
sermon began. She was much excited, because she could not imagine what
stranger could possibly be there. As he passed a second time she
recognized her beloved brother Charles, whom she had not seen for
several years. One can understand that the rest of Mr. Glennie’s
excellent discourse was lost to her, and she could scarcely wait for the
blessing, to rush out and meet the stranger.
He was in the army, having graduated from West Point in 1829. He told
her he was on his way to Florida, and had managed to arrange to spend
one day with her, but it could only be one. So when he reached the
plantation and found she had gone by water to church so far away, he
ordered a boat, and followed her, so as to lose nothing of his time with
her. This visit was the greatest joy to my mother. He was her youngest
brother and her special favorite. She was distressed when he told her
where he was going and why. The U. S. post at Tampa, Florida, had proved
a very deadly one. One officer after another who had been sent there in
command had contracted the terrible malarial fever of the country and
died soon after getting there. His friend Ramsay had been ordered there,
and he found him in despair one day, having just received his orders. He
said he had a wife and a mother, both dependent on him, and it was awful
to him to be going to certain death when he thought of them and what
would become of them. Uncle Charles said at once: “Ramsay, I will take
your place; if I apply for the exchange, I can get it, and I have no one
dependent upon me, so I have the right to do it.” The exchange had been
effected and Uncle Charles was on his way to take the place which West
Point for years sang of in their class song, “Benny Havens, Oh!” as
“Tampa’s deadly shore.” Uncle Charles left early the next morning. By
the time my next little brother came, a boy born the 31st of the next
July, Uncle Charles had accomplished his sacrifice and fallen a victim
to the fever, so the baby was named Charles Petigru; and everybody
always loved him more than any of the other children. He was so
beautiful and so sweet and good that we all expected him to die, but he
didn’t, but grew up to be a man and always a blessing to all around him.
Mamma’s grief at her brother’s death was great, but she had learned to
suffer without rebellion, and as some wise one has written, “there is
great peace and strength in an accepted sorrow.” She always felt very
proud of the heroism and self-sacrifice of Uncle Charles’s death. “No
greater love is there than that a man give his life for his friend”;
that is not quoted exactly, but it sets a man very high. Now we are
living in such a heroic time, with men giving their lives on the
battle-field to save one another, every hour, that perhaps it does not
seem as grand a thing. But when one thinks of a very young, handsome,
popular man deliberately giving up a choice army post to take one which
meant certain, unheroic, painful, and obscure death, it seems to me
very, very heroic and beautiful. After Uncle Charles’s death--I think he
was the seventh commanding officer of the Tampa post who died in quick
succession--the post was given up. Wonderful to say, now since the
science of stamping out disease has reached such a height, Tampa is a
health resort! and one wonders what was the cause of that death-dealing
miasma which made the place so fatal. On our way to the Chicago
Exposition, having to be some hours in Atlanta, we visited the military
station there, and I met a Captain Ramsay, who told me he was the son of
the officer whose life had been saved by my Uncle Charles Petigru’s
generous heroism, and seemed quite excited to meet two nieces and three
great-nieces of the heroic young lieutenant to whom his family owed so
much.
_PART III_
MYSELF