The Bragg house was roomy and rambling, and nobody troubled herself to
look after me when I would steal away alone to the stairs leading to
the room we had occupied while Mrs. Bragg and Lucy were alive, and sit
on the steps which still bore the stains of the scorching flames that
had licked up poor Lucy’s life, and dreaming over the details as I had
had them, over and over, from my sister and ’Lizabeth, the colored girl
whose life-work was to “look after” us three.
Just opposite the door of our old room was one that was always closed
and locked and bolted. It shared in the ghoul-like interest I gave to
the scorched stairs, and there was reason for this. The furniture of
Mrs. Bragg’s chamber was stored here. Through a wide keyhole I could
espy the corner of a bureau, and all of a Boston rocker, cushioned and
valanced with dark-red calico. This, I assumed in the fancies which
were more real than what I beheld with the bodily eyes, had been the
favorite seat of the dead woman.
One wild March day, when the rain thundered upon the roof over my head,
and the staircase and hall echoed with sighs and whistlings, my eye,
glued to the awful keyhole, saw the chair begin to rock! Slowly and
slightly; but it actually swayed back and forth, and, to the horrified
fancy of the credulous infant without, there grew into view a shadowy
form—a pale lady about whose slight figure flowed a misty robe, and who
held a baby in her arms.
One long, wild look sufficed to show me this. Then I sped down the
stairs like a lapwing, and into the dining-room, where sat ’Lizabeth
holding my baby brother. I rushed up to her and babbled my story
in panting incoherence. I had seen a ghost sitting in Mrs. Bragg’s
rocking-chair, getting a baby to sleep!
The exemplary nurse was adequate to the occasion thrust suddenly upon
her. Without waiting to draw breath, she gave me the lie direct, and
warned me that “Mistis wouldn’t stan’ no sech dreadful stories. Ef so
be you wan’ a whippin’ sech as you never had befo’ in all yer born
days, you jes’ better run into the chamber an’ tell her what you done
tole me, Miss Firginny!”
I did not go. Suppression of the awful truth was preferable to
the certainty of a chastisement. Our parents were strict in their
prohibition of all bugaboo and ghost stories. That may have been the
reason we heard so many. It certainly accounts for our reticence on
subjects that crammed our brains with fancies and chilled the marrow
in our young bones.
The wind, finding its way between sashes and under the ill-fitting
doors of the old house, no doubt set the chair in motion. My heated
imagination did the rest. Five minutes’ talk with my mother or one
hearty laugh from my father would have laid the spectre. She loomed up
more and more distinctly before my mental vision because I kept the
awesome experience locked within my own heaving heart.
Another thrilling incident, framed in memory as a fadeless fresco
upon the wall of a locked temple, is the Bragg burial-lot, in which
lay Lucy, her mother and baby-brother, and Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Bragg’s
mother, who had followed her daughter to the grave a few weeks before
we returned to the house. A low brick wall enclosed the plot, which was
overgrown with neglected shrubbery and briers. On a certain day I set
my small head like a flint upon the execution of no less an enterprise
than a visit to the forbidden ground and a peep through the gates at
the _graves_! I had never seen one. I do not know what I expected to
behold of raw-head-and-bloody-bones horror. But ’Lizabeth’s hobgoblin
and vampire recitals had enkindled within me a burning curiosity to
inspect a charnel-house. Visions of skeletons lying on the bare ground,
of hovering spectres and nameless Udolphian marvels, wrought me up to
the expedition. The graveyard was a long way off—quite at the bottom
of the garden, and the walk thither was breast-high in dead weeds. I
buffeted them valiantly, striding ahead of my companions—my protesting
sister, ’Lizabeth, and the baby borne upon her hip—and was so near the
goal that a few minutes would show me all there was to see, when I
espied _Something_ gliding along the top of the wall! Something that
was white and stealthy; something that moved without sound, and that
wore projecting ribbon bows upon a snowy head!
’Lizabeth emitted a bloodcurdling shriek:
“Ole Mis’ Moore! Sure’s you born! Don’ you see her cap on her hade?”
We fled, helter-skelter, as for our four lives, and never stopped to
look behind us.
The apparition did resemble the crown of a mob-cap with knots of black
ribbons at the sides. I saw, almost as plainly as I had beheld her
daughter’s wraith, the form hidden by the wall, picking her way over
the brier-grown enclosure.
I do not know how much longer we lived at the Bragg house. Sure am I
that I never paid a second call upon the denizens of the half-acre
defended by the brick wall.
Years afterward, my mother told me the true tale of the old lady’s
pet cat that would not leave her mistress’s grave, having followed
in the funeral train down the long alley, and seen the coffin laid
in the ground on the day of the funeral. The dumb beast haunted the
burying-ground ever after, living on birds and field-mice, and starved
to death in a deep snow that lay long on the frozen ground the second
winter of her watch.
Why the four-year-old child did not lose what wits were hers by nature,
or become a nerveless coward for the rest of her days, under the stress
of influences never suspected by her parents, was due, probably, to
a strain of physical and mental hardihood inherited from a dauntless
father.
It must have been shortly after this incident that, coming into the
dining-room one morning, I heard my mother say to my father:
“My dear, Frank has the Western fever!”
Frank Wilson, a nice boy, the son of a neighboring planter, was my
father’s bookkeeper and an inmate of our house. He was very kind to
me, and had won a lasting place in my regard as the maker of the
very best whistles and fifes of chincapin bark of any one I had ever
known. They piped more shrilly and held their shape longer than those
turned out by my father and by various visitors who paid court to my
young lady cousins through me. So I looked anxiously at the alleged
sufferer, startled and pained by the announcement of his affliction.
He was eating his breakfast composedly, and answered my father’s
“Good-morning—and is that true, my boy?” with a pleasant laugh. There
was not a sign of the invalid in look, action, or tone.
“I can’t deny it, sir!”
I slipped into my chair beside him, receiving a caressing pat on the
hand I laid on his arm, and hearkened with greedy ears for further
particulars of the case, never asking a question. Children of that
generation were trained to make their ears and eyes do duty for the
tongue. I comprehended but a tithe of the ensuing conversation. I
made out that the mysterious fever did not affect Frank’s appetite
and general health, but that it involved the necessity of his leaving
us for a long time. He might never come back. His proviso in this
direction was, “If I do as well as I hope to do out there.”
When he had excused himself and left the table, my father startled me
yet more by his answer to my mother’s remark: “We shall miss him. He is
a nice boy!”
Her husband stirred his coffee meditatively for a moment before saying,
without looking up:
“I am not sure that I have not a touch of that same fever myself.”
With the inconsequence of infancy, I did not connect the speech with
our breaking up the Lunenburg home the next autumn and setting out
for what was explained to us girls as a round of visits to friends in
Richmond and Powhatan.
We call ours a restless age, and the modern American man a predatory
animal, with an abnormal craving for adventure. Change and Progress are
the genii who claim his allegiance and sway his destiny. In sighing for
the peace and rest of the “former times” we think were “better than
these,” we forget (if we ever knew) that our sires were possessed by,
and yielded to, unrest as intense and dreams as golden as those that
animate the explorer and inventor of the twentieth century. My father
was in no sense a dreamer of day dreams of the dazzling impossible.
He was making a fair living in the heart of what was, even then, “Old
Virginia.” He had recouped his shattered fortunes by judicious business
enterprise, and the neat share of her father’s estate that had fallen
to my mother at his demise in 1829, placed her and her children beyond
the reach of poverty. The merchant was respected here as he had been in
Amelia, for his intelligence, probity, courtesy, and energy. His place
in society and in church was assured. Yet he had caught the Western
fever. And—a mightier marvel—“Uncle Carus,” the clerical Connecticut
Yankee, the soul of conservatism, who had settled in the downiest of
nests as the incumbent of Mount Carmel, a Presbyterian church built
upon the outskirts of the Montrose plantation, and virtually maintained
by that family—sober, ease-loving Uncle Carus—had joined hands with his
wife’s brother-in-law in the purchase of Western lands and the scheme
of emigration.
The two men had travelled hundreds of miles on horseback during
the last year in quest of a location for the new home. My
father’s letters—worn by many readings, and showing all over the
odd and unaccountable brown thumbmarks of time—bear dates of
wayside post-offices as well as of towns—Lynchburg, Staunton, and
Charlottesville. Finally they crossed the Ohio line, and after
due deliberation, bought a farm in partnership. The letters are
interesting reading, but too many and too long to be copied in full.
Every detail of business and each variation of plans were communicated
as freely as if the wife were associated with him in commercial as in
domestic life.
Once, when he is doubtful what step to take next, he writes, playfully:
“Some men need a propelling power. It might be well for you to exert a
little of the ‘government’ with which some of our friends accredit you,
and move _me_ in the right direction.”
When, the long journey accomplished and the purchase of the farm
completed, he returned home, he encountered no opposition from his
wife, but much from neighbors and friends. A letter written to her from
Lunenburg, whither he had returned to close up his affairs, leaving
her with her brother at Olney, describes the numerous tokens of regret
and esteem of which he is the recipient. The climax of the list comes
in the humorous tale of how an old-fashioned neighbor, Mrs. L——, “says
it troubled her so much on New Year’s night that she could not sleep.
She actually got up after trying vainly to court slumber, _lighted her
pipe_, and smoked and thought the matter over. She was not reconciled,
after all.... When I take my departure it will be with feelings of
profound regret, and full confidence in the friendship of those I leave
behind.”
The land bought in Ohio by the two victims of the “Western fever” is
now covered by the city of Cleveland. If the two New-Englanders could
have forecast the future, their heirs would be multi-millionaires.
Behold us, then, a family of two adults and three babies—the eldest not
yet seven years old—_en route_ from Richmond to Montrose, travelling in
a big barouche, with a trunk strapped on the rack behind, in lumbering
progress over thirty-seven miles of execrable roads, just now at their
worst after a week of autumnal rains.
The damp discomfort of the journey is present with me now. The sun did
not shine all day long; the raw air pierced to the bones; the baby was
cross; my mother was not well, and my sister and myself were cramped by
long sitting upon the back seat. Our horses were strong, but mud-holes
were deep, the red clay was adhesive, and the corduroy causeways jarred
us to soreness. It was late in the day when we turned from the highway
toward the gate of the Montrose plantation. We were seen from the
house, and a colored lad of fifteen or thereabouts ran fleetly down the
avenue to open the great outer gate. He flung it wide with a hospitable
intent that knocked poor Selim—the off-horse—flat into the mud. Once
down, he did not offer to arise from the ruddy ooze that embedded
one side. He had snapped the harness in falling, but that made no
difference to the fagged-out beast. The accident was visible from the
porch of the house, an eighth of a mile away, and four men hastened to
the rescue.
The foremost was, I thought, the handsomest man I had ever seen.
He was tall, young, as dark as a Frenchman (having Huguenot blood
in his veins), and with a marvellously sweet smile. Coming up to
my pale mother, as she stood on the miry roadside, he kissed her,
picked up the baby, and bade “Cousin Anna” lean upon his other arm.
My father insisted upon relieving him of the child; but the picture
of my delicate mother, supported in the walk up the drive by the
gallant youth—her favorite cousin of all the clan—Josiah Smith, of
Montrose—will never leave the gallery of pictures that multiplied fast
from this date.
I did him loving honor to the best of my poor ability as the “Uncle
Archie” of “Judith.” I cannot pass him by without this brief tribute.
A second and younger cousin, who seemed uninteresting beside my new
hero, took charge of my sister and myself, and we trudged stiffly on
to the ancient homestead. An avalanche of feminine cousins descended
upon us as we entered the front gate, and swept us along through
porch and hall and one room after another, to the “chamber,” where a
beautiful old lady lay in bed.
Her hair was dark as midnight; so were her eyes; her cap, pillows,
gown, and the bed-coverings were snowy white. Her face was that of a
saint. This was “Aunt Smith,” the widowed mistress of Montrose. She
was of the Huguenot Michaux stock, the American founders of a colony
on James River. During a widowhood of twenty years she had, by wise
management, relieved the estate from embarrassment, brought up and
educated six children, and established for herself a reputation for
intelligence, refinement, and piety that is yet fragrant in the minds
of those who recollect Montrose as it was in its palmy days.
She was often ailing, as I saw her now. Accustomed as I am to the
improved physical condition of American women, I wonder _what_ was
amiss with the gentlewomen of that generation; how they lived through
the protracted seasons of “feeling poorly,” and their frequent
confinement to bed and bed-chambers. The observation of that winter
fixed in my imagination the belief that genteel invalidism was the
normal state of what the colored servants classified as “real ladies.”
To be healthy was to approximate vulgarity. Aunt Smith was as much
in her bed as out of it—or, so it seemed to me. Her eldest child, a
daughter and the most brilliant of the family, had not had a day of
perfect health since she had an unhappy love-affair at twenty. She was
now nearly forty, still vivacious, and the oracle of the homestead. My
dearest “Cousin Mary,” resident for the winter at Montrose with her
mother, was fragile as a wind-flower, and my own mother fell ill a few
days after our arrival at her mother’s birthplace, and did not lift her
head from the pillow for three months.
I have no data by which to fix the relative times of any happenings
of that long, long, dreary winter. It dragged by like an interminable
dream. My father was absent in Ohio for some weeks of the first month.
He had set out on a second journey to his Promised Land when his wife
fell ill. He hurried back as soon as the news overtook him. But it took
a long time for the letter of recall to find him, and as long for him
to retrace his steps—or his horse’s.
I have but a hazy recollection of his telling me one day that I was
five years old. I had had other birthdays, of course, but this was the
first I remember. It was equally, of course, the 21st of December.
There was no celebration of the unimportant event. If anybody was
glad I was upon the earth, I had no intimation of the fact. I should
not mark the anniversary as of any note, now, had not it been fixed
in my brain by a present from my father of _The New York Reader_, a
hideous little volume, with stiff covers of straw pasteboard pasted
over with blue paper. My father took me upon his knee, and talked to
me, seriously and sorrowfully, of my crass ignorance and disinclination
to “learn.” I was five years old, and—this low and mournfully, as one
might state a fact disgraceful to the family connection—I “did not even
know my letters!” The dear mother, who lay sick up-stairs, had tried,
over and over, to teach me what every big girl of my age ought to know.
He did not believe that his little daughter was a dunce. He hoped that
I loved my mother and himself well enough to try to learn how to read
out of this nice, new book. Cousin Paulina Carus—a girl of sixteen, at
home from school on sick-leave, indefinitely extended—had offered to
teach me. He had told her he was sure I would do better than I had done
up to this time. He was mortified when people asked him what books I
had read, and he had to tell the truth. He did not believe there was
another “nice” child in the county, five years old, who did not know
her a, b, c’s.
I was wetting his frilled shirt-front with penitential tears long
before the sermon was finished. He wiped them with a big silk
handkerchief—red, with white spots scattered over the expanse—kissed
me, and set me down very gently.
“My little girl will not forget what father has been saying. Think how
pleased mother will be when she gets well to find that you can read a
chapter in the Bible to her!”
The story went for fact in the family that I set myself zealously about
the appointed task of learning the alphabet in consequence of this
lecture. I heard it told, times without number, and never contradicted
it. It sounded well, and I had a passion for heroinism, on never so
small a scale. And grown people should know what they were talking of
in asserting that “Virginia made up her mind, the day she was five
years old, that she would turn over a new leaf, and be no longer a
dunce at her books.” It may be, too, as I now see, that the solemn
parental homily (I always dreaded the lecture succeeding a whipping
more than the stripes)—it may be, I grant, that something was stirred
in my fallow intellect akin to the germination of the “bare grain”
under spring showers. If this were true, it was a clear case of what
theologians term “unconscious conversion.” Were I to trust to my own
judgment, based upon personal reminiscence, I should say that I went to
bed one night not—as the phrase goes—“knowing B from a bull’s foot,”
and awoke reading. Perhaps Dogberry was nearer right than we think in
averring that “reading and writing come by nature.” And that my time
was ripe for receiving them.
I had outgrown my dislike of _The New York Reader_, wearing most of the
blue paper off the straw, and loosening not a few of the tiny fibres
beneath; I could read, without spelling aloud, the stories that were
the jelly to the pill of conning the alphabet and the combinations
thereof; the spring had really come at last on the tardy heels of that
black winter. The grass was lush and warm under my feet; the sweetbrier
and multiflora roses over the Montrose porches were in bloom, and the
locust-trees were white with flowers and resonant with the hum of bees,
when, one day, as I played in the yard, I heard a weak, sweet voice
calling my name.
Looking up, I saw my mother in a white gown, a scarlet shawl wrapped
about her shoulders, leaning from her bedroom window and smiling down
upon me.
I screamed with ecstasy, jumping up and down, clapping my hands, and
crying to my dusky playfellows, Rose and Judy:
“Look! Oh, look! I have a mother again—as well as anybody!”
Close upon the blessed apparition came her championship of her
neglected “middle child,” against the impositions of “Mea,” Anne Carus,
and a bigger niece of Aunt Smith who was much at the homestead. On a
happy forenoon the mother I had received back from the edge of the
grave called me to her bedside, for, although convalescent, she did not
rise until noon.
Pointing to a covered basket that stood by her bed, she bade me lift
the lid. Within, upon white paper, lay a great handful of dried
cherries, a sheet of “peach leather,” and four round ginger-cakes, the
pattern and taste of which I knew well as the _chef d’œuvre_ of the
“sweeties” manufactured by Mam’ Peggy, the Montrose cook.
“I heard that the bigger children had a tea-party last night after
you had gone to bed,” she said, smilingly tender. “It isn’t fair that
my little daughter should not have her share. So I sent Jane”—her
maid—“down for these, and saved them for you.”
No other “goodies” were ever so delicious, but their finest flavor was
drawn from the mental repetition of the exultant: “I have a mother
again—as well as anybody!”
V