MY mother’s illness of nearly four months deflected the current of our
lives. My father, convinced probably of the peril to her life of a
Western journey, and wrought upon by the persuasions of her relatives,
bought the “good-will and fixtures” of a store at Powhatan Court House,
a village seven miles nearer Richmond than Montrose, and thither we
removed as soon as the convalescent was strong enough.
Her husband wrote to her from Richmond _en route_ for “the North,”
where he was to purchase a stock of the “goods” upon which the
territory environing his new home was dependent for most of the
necessaries and all of the luxuries of life.
“I am very solicitous as to your early restoration to
health. Be careful not to rise too early, and keep a strict
watch over your appetite. It is not safe to indulge it, yet
there is danger in the opposite course....
“I attended a prayer-meeting at Mr. Hutchinson’s on Thursday
evening, and had the pleasure of hearing a lecture from Mr.
Nettleton. It was a pleasant meeting. I wish you had been
with me! To-day (Sunday) I heard Mr. Plumer and Mr. Brown,
both of whom were interesting. Mr. Plumer’s subject was the
young ruler _running_ to Our Saviour and kneeling down with
the inquiry, ‘What must I do to be saved?’...
“Your brother was at church yesterday. His wife has a fine
boy a month old. You have probably heard of the event,
although I did not until my arrival here. I am told he says
it is ‘the prettiest thing that was ever seen,’ and feels
quite proud of this, their first exhibition.
“There is great difficulty in getting to New York this
spring. The Delaware was closed by ice for two months, and
up to the middle of March this was eighteen inches thick.
Merchants have been detained in Baltimore from two to seven
days, waiting for stages to go on. The number of travellers
was so large that they could not be accommodated sooner. The
steamboat runs from Richmond to Baltimore but once a week,
and leaves on Sunday morning. Several of my acquaintances
went on to-day. They were urgent that I should go with them,
but my determination is not to travel on the Sabbath. I
shall, therefore, take the land route to Balto....
“Goods are reported to be very scarce and high in all the
Northern cities. They are high in this place, and advancing
every day. Groceries are dearer than I have seen them since
1815, and it is thought they will be yet dearer.
“‘That will do!’ I hear you say, ‘as I am not a merchant.’
Well, no more of it! I must charge you again to be very,
_very_ careful of yourself. Kiss our little children for
father. I shall hurry through my business here as soon as
possible and hasten my return to my home.
“May the Lord bestow on you His choicest blessings and grant
a speedy return of health! Remember me in your prayers.
Adieu, my Love!
“Your own S.”
The sere and yellow sheet is marked on the outside, in the upper
left-hand corner, “_Single_,” in the lower, “_Mail_,” and in the upper
right-hand, “12 _cents_.”
This was in the dark ages when there was but one steamer per week to
Baltimore, and there were not stages enough to carry the passengers
from the Monument City to New York; when the railway to Fredericksburg
was a dream in the minds of a few Northern visionaries, and the
magnetic telegraph was not even dreamed of. My mother has told me that,
in reading the newspaper aloud to her father in 1824, she happened
upon an account of an invention of one George Stephenson for running
carriages by steam. Captain Sterling laughed derisively.
“What nonsense these papers print! You and I won’t live to see that,
little girl!”
I heard the anecdote upon an express train from Richmond to New York,
his “little girl” being the narrator.
In those same dark ages, strong men, whom acquaintances never
accused of cant, or suspected of sentimentality, went to evening
prayer-meetings, and accounted it a delight to hear two sermons on
Sunday; laid pulpit teachings to heart; practised self-examination, and
wrote love-letters to their own wives. If this were not the “Simple
Life” latter-day philosophists exploit as a branch of the New Thought
Movement, it will never be lived on this low earth.
Our first home in the little shire-town (then “Scottville”) was at
“Bellevue,” a red brick house on a hill overlooking the hamlet.
Separated from Bellevue by two fields and the public highway, was “Erin
Hill,” built by one of the same family, which had, it is needless to
observe, both Irish and French blood in it.
Erin Hill was for rent just when Uncle Carus decided to bring his
family from Montrose—where they had lived for ten years—to the village.
This is the fittest time and place in which to sketch the pastor of
Mount Carmel Church. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was not written until a score
of years later. When it was read aloud in our family circle, there was
not a dissenting voice when my mother uttered, in a voice smothered by
inward mirth, “Mr. Carus!” as Mr. Pecksniff appeared upon the stage.
The portrait was absurdly striking. The Yankee Pecksniff was
good-looking after his kind, which was the dark-eyed, well-featured,
serenely-sanctimonious type. He wore his hair longer than most laymen
cut theirs, and it curled naturally. His voice was low and even, with
the pulpitine cadences hit off, and at, cleverly by Doctor Holmes as “a
tone supposed by the speaker to be peculiarly pleasing to the Almighty.”
His smile was sweet, his gait was felinely dignified, and a pervasive
aroma of meekness tempered his daily walk and conversation. His wife,
“Aunt Betsy,” was the saintliest soul that ever rated herself as the
least important of God’s creatures, and cared with motherly tenderness
for everything else her Creator brought within her modest sphere of
action. In all the years of our intimate association I never saw her
out of temper or heard a harsh word from the lips in which nestled
and abode the law of kindness. She brought him a tidy little slice of
her father’s estate, which he husbanded wisely. He was economical to
parsimony, and contrived to imbue wife and children with a lively sense
of the need of saving in every conceivable way “against a rainy day.”
At ten years of age I asked my mother, point-blank, what salary the
church paid Uncle Carus. She answered as directly:
“Three hundred dollars a year. But he has property of his own.”
Whereupon, without the slightest idea of being pert, I remarked, “If
we were to get a _really_ good preacher, I suppose he would have to
be paid more.” And my mother responded as simply: “No doubt. But your
Uncle Carus is a very faithful pastor.”
I put no questions, but I pondered in my heart the purport of a
dialogue I got in snatches while reading on the back porch one
afternoon, when a good-hearted neighbor and my mother were talking of
the school to be opened in the village under the tuition of Cousin
Paulina, the eldest daughter of Aunt Betsy and her second husband.
She was now in her eighteenth year, a graduate of a somewhat noted
“female” seminary, decidedly pretty, with a quick temper and a talent
for teaching.
“It is a pity,” said the friendly visitor, “to tie her down to a
school-room when she is just at the age when girls like to see company
and go round with other young people. It isn’t as if they were obliged
to put her to work.”
My mother replied discreetly, yet I detected a sympathetic tone in her
speech.
The talk came into my mind many a time after the sessions of the school
began, and I saw, through the window, young men and girls walking,
riding, and driving past, the girls in their prettiest attire, the
young men gallantly attentive, and all enjoying the gala-time of life
that comes but once to any of us.
If the dark-eyed, serious, eighteen-year-old teacher felt the
deprivation, she never murmured. I think her mother had taught her,
with her first word and trial-step, to believe that her “father knew
best.”
The school—the first I ever attended—was in the second story of an
untenanted house on a side-street, rented from a villager. It was kept
for ten months of the year. A vacation of a month in May, and another
in September, divided two terms of five months each. I climbed the
carpetless stairs to the big upper room six or eight times daily for
five days a week, for forty weeks, and never without a quailing of
nerve and sinking of heart as I strode past a locked door at the left
of the entrance.
Inside of that door I had had my first view of Death.
I could not have been six years old, for it was summer, or early
autumn, and I was walking my doll to sleep up and down the main alley
of the garden, happy and bareheaded, and unconsciously “feeling my life
in every limb,” when my mother called to me from the window to “come
and be dressed.”
“I am going to take you and your sister to a funeral,” she continued,
as a maid buttoned me up in a clean white frock, put on my Sunday
shoes, and brushed the rebellious mop of hair that was never smooth for
ten minutes in the day.
“May I take my doll?” asked I, “sh-sh-ing” her in a cuddling arm. I was
trying very hard to love lifeless dolls.
“Shame on you, Miss Firginny!” put in the maid, for all the world as if
I had spoken in church. “Did anybody ever see sech another chile fur
sayin’ _things_?” she added to my mother.
Mea looked properly shocked; my mother, ever light of heart, and
inclined to let unimportant mistakes pass, smiled.
“We don’t take dolls to funerals, my daughter. It would not be right.”
I did not push inquiries as to the nature of the entertainment to
which we were bound, albeit the word, already familiar to me by reason
of two or three repetitions, was not in my vocabulary an hour ago.
Content and pleased in the knowledge that an outing was on foot, I put
my doll to bed in a closet under the stairs used by Mea and myself
as a “baby-house,” shut the door to keep Argus and Rigo—sprightly
puppies with inquisitive noses—from tearing her limb from limb, as they
had rent her immediate predecessor, and sallied forth. The roadside
was thick with sheep-mint and wild hoarhound and tansy. I bruised
them in dancing along in front of my mother and my sober sister.
The bitter-sweet smell arose to my nostrils to be blent forever in
imagination with the event of the day.
A dozen or more carriages were in the road before the shabby frame
house I had heard spoken of as “old Mrs. O’Hara’s,” but which I had
never entered. Eight or ten horses were tethered to the fence, and a
group of men loitered about the door. As we went up the steps I saw
that the parlor was full of villagers. Some were sitting; more were
standing in a kind of expectant way; all were so grave that my spirits
fell to church-temperature. Something solemn was going on. Just inside
of the parlor door the mother of my most intimate girl-friend sat in
a rocking-chair. She had on a black silk dress and her best bonnet.
Every woman present wore black. I saw Mrs. D. beckon up Major Goode, an
elderly beau who was a notable figure in the neighborhood, and whisper
audibly to him, “If you want more chairs, you may send over to our
house for them.”
It was evidently a great function, for Mrs. D. was a notable
housekeeper, and her furniture the finest in the place. Her
drawing-room chairs were heavy mahogany, and upholstered with black
horsehair. Her house, altogether the best within a radius of several
miles, was not a hundred yards from the O’Hara cottage; but that she
should make the neighborly offer thrilled me into nameless awe.
My mother moved forward slowly, holding my hand fast in hers, and I
was led, without warning, up to a long, black, open box, set upon two
chairs, one at each end. In the long, black box lay a woman I had never
seen before. She was awfully white; her eyes were shut; she looked
peaceful, even happy; but she was not asleep. No sleeping creature was
ever so moveless and marble-pale. Her terrible stillness impressed me
most painfully by its very unlikeness to the heaving, palpitating crowd
about her. A mob-cap with a closely fluted border framed the face; she
was dressed in a long cambric gown of a pattern entirely new to me. It
lay in moveless plaits as stiff as paper from her chin to her feet,
which it hid; it was pinked in tiny points at the bottom of the skirt
and the cuffs; the hands, crossed at the wrists as no living hands are
ever laid, were bound at the crossing with white satin ribbon. Under
the moveless figure was a cambric sheet, also pinked at the edges, that
fell straight to the floor over the sides of the coffin.
I must have pinched my mother’s hand with my tightening fingers, for
she eyed me in grave surprise, not unmixed with reproof, in taking a
seat and drawing me to her side. There was no place for children to sit
down. I am sure that she had not an inkling of the unspeakable fright
that possessed my ignorant mind.
From that day to this I have never gone to a funeral when I could
possibly keep away from it upon any decent pretext. When constrained
by circumstance to be one of the party collected about a coffin, I
invariably have a return, in some measure, of the choking horrors of
that awful day. For days, sometimes for weeks afterward, the dread is
an obsession I cannot dispel by any effort of will. Argue and struggle
as I may, I am haunted night and day by the memory of the woman whom I
never saw while she lived.
As if the brooding hush, so deadly to my childish senses; the funeral
sermon, delivered in Uncle Carus’s most sepulchral chest tones, and the
wild, wailing measures of
“Why should we mourn departing friends?”
sung to immemorial “China”—were not enough to rivet the scene forever
upon my soul, a final and dramatic touch was superadded. Two men
brought forward a long, black top, which they were about to fix in
place upon the dreadful box, when a young woman in black rushed from a
corner, flung herself upon her knees beside the coffin, and screamed:
“Mother, mother! You sha’n’t take her away!” making as if she would
push back the men.
“Harriet! Harriet!” remonstrated a deep voice, and Major Goode, the
tears rolling down his cheeks, stooped and lifted the daughter by main
force. “This won’t do, child!”
Fifteen years later, sitting in the calm moonlight upon the porch-steps
at “Homestead,” the dwelling of my chum, Effie D., I heard from Mrs.
D.’s lips the story of Mrs. O’Hara. Her cottage, subsequently our
school-house, had been pulled down long ago as an eyesore to the
fastidious mistress of Homestead. At least I got that section of the
old lady’s life that had to do with the gray-haired Major Goode, a
veteran of the War of 1812. Both the actors in the closing scene
seemed, in the review of my childish impressions of the funeral, to
have been too old to figure in the tale.
“You can understand why nobody in the village could visit her,”
concluded the placid narrator to whom I am indebted for numberless
traditions and real life-romances. “The funeral was another matter.
Death puts us all upon a level.”
There was the skeleton of a _chronique scandaleuse_ in the bit of
exhumed gossip.