OLD-FASHIONED HUSBAND’S LOVE-LETTER—AN ALMOST HOMICIDE—“SLAUGHTERED
MONSTER”—A WESLEYAN SCHOOLMISTRESS.
“ROXBURY, _July 26th, 1838._
“MY DEAR WIFE,—Your esteemed letter of the 20th is at
hand, and it has relieved my mind to hear that you are
all doing so well. I suppose you expect a history of my
movements here. Well, on Saturday morning went to Boston;
in the evening took mother and called on all my Dorchester
friends—stayed with some five minutes, with others fifteen,
etc. Sunday, went to church; very dry sermon in morning;
evening attended Mr. Abbot’s church; was much pleased with
the preaching—text—‘And there came one running and kneeling
to Him, and said,’ etc. At night attended at same place
what they call a ‘Conference Meeting’—quite an interesting
time. Monday, went to Brookline—visited sisters. Tea at
Mr. Davis’s; music of the best kind in abundance. Tuesday
to Boston in morning, evening at home to receive company.
Quite a pleasant afternoon; a good many Dorchester friends
calling. Wednesday morning as usual in the city; evening
held a grand _levee_: the street filled with chaises and
carriages; some twenty or more to tea. Really, my visit has
created quite a sensation among our good friends; some met
yesterday afternoon who have not seen each other for ten or
more years. Don’t you think I had better come here oftener
to keep up the family acquaintance? for it seems to require
some extraordinary event to set these good folks to using
their powers of locomotion. By-the-by, you must not be
jealous, but I had a lady kiss me yesterday, for the first
time it was ever done here, and who do you think it was? My
cousin Mary, of whom you have heard me speak. I have so
much love given in charge for you, my own dear wife, that
it will be necessary to send a part of it in this letter
for fear that I should not be able to travel with it all.
I am especially directed to bear from a lady two kisses to
you from her, and they shall be faithfully delivered when
we are permitted to meet. You don’t know how many inquiries
have been made after you, and regrets expressed that you
did not come on with me. Mother says, ‘Tell Anna I should
like for Samuel to stay longer, but know that he is wanting
at home, so will not say a word at his leaving.’ She sends
much love to her daughter Anna. Father keeps coming in, and
from his movements I judge he is waiting for me to finish.
You know he is clock-work, so adieu once more. Give my love
to the girls, and all at the parsonage. Kiss the children
for father. I must now close my letter by commending you to
the care and protection of Him who preserves, guides, and
directs us in all things. May His choicest blessing rest on
you, my dear wife, and on the children of our love! Adieu,
my dear wife.
“Your husband,
“SAMUEL.”
Thus cheerily runs the old-fashioned family epistle. The writer, who
never demitted the habit of going to church twice every Sunday, and
sometimes thrice, does not comment upon the coincidence that he hears
again a sermon from the text used and “improved” by a Virginia divine,
two years ago. His mind was full of other things just now. This one of
his annual visits to his mother was a glad holiday. The world was going
smoothly with him, and the hearty congratulations of townspeople and
kindred were a-bubble. His mother was happy in her second marriage. The
good deacon was “father” to her son and his wife, and filled the rôle
well.
My father’s namesake son, Samuel Horace, was born earlier in the summer.
Although the month was June, the weather must have been cold or damp,
for a low wood fire burned upon the hearth one afternoon as I crept
into the “chamber” to get a peep at the three-days-old baby, and
perchance to have a talk with my mother. The nurse, before leaving the
room on an errand, had laid the infant upon a pillow in a rocking-chair
(I have it now!) There was no cradle in the house, and one had been
ordered from Richmond. My mother was asleep, and, I supposed, had the
baby beside her. Stealing noiselessly across the floor, I backed up
to the Boston rocker, in childish fashion, put my hands upon the arms
of the chair, and raised myself on tiptoe, when the child (aroused, I
fancy, by his guardian angel, prescient of the good he would accomplish
in the world he had just entered, and compassionate of the remorseful
wight whose life would be blighted by the impending deed) stretched
out his arms and yawned. I saw the movement under my lifted arm, and
dropped flat upon the rug. I must have crouched there for half an hour,
a prey to horrible imaginings of what might have been. My mother did
not awaken, and the baby went to sleep again. The shock would have
been terrific to any child. To a dreamer like myself, the visions
that flitted between me and the red embers were as varied as they
were fearful. Lucy Bragg’s tragic death had killed her mother and the
baby-boy. If I had crushed our new baby, my own sweet mother would have
died with him. I saw myself at their funeral, beside the coffin holding
them both, and my father shrinking in abhorrence from the murderess.
Forecasting long years to come, I pictured a stricken and solitary
woman, shunned by innocent people who had never broken the sixth
commandment, and cowering beside a brier-grown grave, crying as I had
read somewhere, “Would to God I had died when I was born!”
I do not think I shed a tear. Tears were dried up by the voiceless
misery. I know I could not sleep that night for hours and hours. I
know, too, that I never told the shameful thing—the almost murder—to a
living creature until it was ten years old.
I appreciate, most clearly of all, that my baby-brother became from
that hour, in some sort, my especial property. The peculiar tenderness
that has characterized our feeling for each other, the steadfast
affection and perfect confidence in our mutual love that have known no
variableness or shadow of turning, for all our united lives, may not
have been rooted in the vigil of unutterable horror and unspeakable
thankfulness. I look back upon it as a chrism.
Later in the year, another incident that might have been a tragedy,
stirred the even flow of domestic life. We had finished prayers and
breakfast, and my father was half-way down the avenue on his way to the
village when we saw him stop suddenly, retrace his steps hurriedly,
enter the yard, and shout to the colored butler who was at the
dining-room window. The man ran out and came back shortly, dragging
Argus and Rigo into the hall with him, shutting the front door. My
father was taking down his gun from the hooks on the wall of the hall,
and, without a word, began to load it.
One of the earliest of our nursery lessons was, “Never ask questions of
busy people!” My mother set the example of obedience to this precept
now by silence while her husband, with set lips and resolute eyes,
rammed down a charge of buckshot into the barrel, and, saying, “Keep
the children in the house!” ran down the steps and down the avenue
at the top of his speed toward the big gate opening upon the village
street a hundred yards away.
From the front windows we now saw a crowd of men and boys, tramping
down the middle of the highway, firing confusedly and flinging stones
at a great yellow dog trotting ahead of them, and snapping right and
left as he ran. Before my father reached the gate, the dog had turned
sharply to the right down a cross-street skirting our lower grounds.
A low fence and a ditch divided the meadow from the thoroughfare. My
father kept on our side of the fence, raising his gun to cover the
brute, which, as we could now see, was slavering and growling hoarsely.
A cry arose from the crowd, and my mother groaned, as the dog, espying
the man across the ditch, rushed down one side of it and up the other,
to attack the new foe. My father held his hand until the dog was within
a few feet of him, then fired with steady aim. The brute rolled over to
the bottom of the ditch—dead.
That evening we were allowed to walk down the field to see the
slaughtered monster. That was what I named him to myself, and forthwith
began a story in several chapters, with my father as the hero, and an
astonishing number of beasts of prey as _dramatis personæ_, that lasted
me for many a night thereafter.
The title I had chosen was none too large for the dog as he lay, stark
and still, his big head straight with his back, his teeth showing
savagely in the open jaws. A trickle of water was dammed into a pool by
his huge bulk.
I held my father’s hand and laid my cheek to it in reverence I had not
words to express, when my mother said:
“You ran a terrible risk, love! What if your gun had missed fire, or
you had not hit him?”
“I had settled all that in my mind. I should have stood my ground and
tried to brain him with the butt.”
“As your forefathers did to the British at Bunker Hill!” exulted I,
inwardly.
Be sure the sentence was not uttered. The recollection of the inner
life, in which I was wont to think out such sayings, has made me more
tolerant with so-called priggish children than most of their elders are
prone to be.
One paragraph of our next letter has a distinctly modern flavor. By
substituting millions for thousands in the estimate of the defalcation,
we might date it in this year of our Lord.
“RICHMOND, _April 11th, 1839._
“(Saturday night.)
“MY DEAR WIFE,—The general subject, and, in fact, the only
one which at present occupies the minds of the citizens
here, is the late discovery of defalcations of my old friend
D., first teller of the Bank of Virginia, for the sum, as
reports say, of nearly, or quite half a million. He has
absconded, but some individuals here have had part of the
cash; among the number is the great speculator, W. D. G.,
who has ruined and also severely injured many persons in
this place by borrowing, or getting them to endorse for
him. I never have before witnessed so general an excitement
here. Mr. G. has been arrested to-day, and taken before the
mayor. It is now nine o’clock, and the court is still in
session. It is probable he will be sent to the higher court
for trial, etc. I expect a good many of our plain country
folks will be afraid of Bank of Virginia notes when they
hear of the loss. I hope it will make some of them shell
out and pay me all that they owe. I should like to find a
few thousands waiting for me on my return home. I expect
to-morrow to attend the Sabbath-school at the Second Church,
conducted by Mr. Reeve. It is said to be the best school in
the city. Tell Herbert I have bought a book called _Cobwebs
to Catch Flies_, and I hope it will be the means of catching
from him many good lessons. He must learn fast, as I have
bought for him _Sanford and Merton_, with plates, and when
he can read he shall have it for his own. May I not hope for
a letter from you on Tuesday?—for it seems a long time since
we parted.”
Mrs. Bass, the meek widow of a Methodist clergyman, succeeded the
eighteen-year-old girl in the conduct of the neighborhood school. It
is doubtful if we learned anything worth relating from her. I am sure
we learned nothing evil. She was very kind, very gentle, very devout;
she wore a widow’s cap and a bombazine gown, and she was the only
woman I ever heard pray until I was over fourteen years of age. There
were a dozen girls in the class, which met in a one-roomed building in
a lot adjoining her garden. We had no public schools at that date in
Virginia. We were all paid pupils, and carefully selected from families
in our own class. Those from Presbyterian families outnumbered the
rest, but no objection was made by our parents to the “methods” of the
Wesleyan relict. The tenets of the two churches were the same in the
main. Discrepancies in the matter of free agency, predestination, and
falling from grace were adjudged of minor importance in the present
case. Mrs. Bass was not likely to trench upon them in the tuition of
pupils of tender age. I more than suspect that there would have been
a strong objection made to intrusting us to a Baptist, who would not
lose an opportunity of inculcating the heresy that “baptize” meant,
always and everywhere in the Bible, immersion. And every school was
opened daily by Bible-reading. To this our black-robed, sweet-faced
instructress joined audible petitions, and in our reading and the
lessons that followed she let slip no chance of working in moral and
religious precepts.
Let one example suffice:
One of our recitations was spelling, with the definitions, from
Walker’s Dictionary. Betty Mosby, a pretty girl with a worldly father
and a compliant mother, had learned to dance, and had actually attended
a kind of “Hunt Ball,” given in the vicinity by her father’s sister.
She had descanted volubly upon the festivities to us in “play-times,”
describing her dress and the number of dances in which she figured with
“grown-up gentlemen,” and the hearts of her listeners burned within us
as we listened and longed.
On this day the word “heaven” fell to me to spell and define. This
done, the “improvement” came in Mrs. Bass’s best class-meeting tone:
“Heaven! I hope and pray you may get there, Virginia! You ought not to
fail of the abundant entrance, for your parents are devout Christians
and set you a good example, but from him to whom much is given shall
much be required. Next! ‘Heavenly!’”
Near the foot of the column stood “Hell.”
Anne Carus rendered it with modest confidence, spelling and defining
in a subdued tone befitting the direful monosyllable. That she was
a minister’s daughter was felt by us all to lend her a purchase
in handling the theme. Mrs. Bass was not to be cheated of her
“application”:
“HELL!” she iterated in accents that conveyed the idea of recoiling
from an abyss. “Ah-h-h! I wonder which of my little scholars will lie
down in everlasting burnings?”
“Mercy! I hope I won’t!” cried Betty Mosby, with a shiver of well-acted
terror.
She was a born sensationalist, and quick to voice sensation.
The teacher’s groan was that of the trained exhorter:
“I can’t answer for that, Betty, if you _will_ dance and go to balls!”
That was her “Firstly.” There were at least six heads and two
applications in the lecture “in season” trailing at its heels.
We took it all as a matter of course. Each teacher had ways of his,
and her own. Those of our relict were innocent, and our parents did
not intermeddle. We were very happy under her tutelage. On Saturdays
she had a class in “theorem painting.” That was what she called it,
and we thought it a high-sounding title. Decorators know it as one
style of frescoing. Pinks, roses, dahlias, tulips, and other flowers
with well-defined petals, also birds and butterflies, were cut out
of oiled paper. Through the openings left by removing the outlined
pattern, paint was rubbed upon card-board laid underneath the oiled
paper. I have somewhere still a brick-red pink thus transferred to
bristol-board—a fearful production. I knew no better than to accept it
thankfully when Mrs. Bass had written on the back, “To my dear pupil,
M. V. H., from her affectionate Teacher,” and gave it to me with a kiss
on the last day of the term.
She gave up the school and left the county at the close of that term,
going to live with a brother in another part of the State. I heard,
several years later, that she had “professed sanctification” at a
Lynchburg camp-meeting. Nowadays, they would say she “had entered upon
the Higher Life.”
She must have found, long ago, the abundant entrance into that
Highest Life where creeds and threatenings are abolished. Her benign
administration was to me a summer calm that held no presage of the
morrow’s storm.