WEDDING AND BRIDESMAID—THE ROUTINE OF A LARGE FAMILY—MY FIRST
BEREAVEMENT
IN the summer of 1851, my grandmother had bought and given to her
only child the house which was to be our home as long as we remained
a resident family in Richmond. Of this house I shall have a story to
tell in the next chapter. It stands upon Leigh Street (named for the
distinguished lawyer of whom we have heard in these pages as taking
a part in the Clay campaign), and the locality was then quietly, but
eminently, aristocratic. There were few new houses, and the old had a
rural, rather than an urban, air. Each had its garden, stocked with
shrubbery and flowers. Some had encompassing lawns and outlying copses
of virgin native growth.
The new home held a large family. The stately old dame who had settled
us for life, occupied a sunny front chamber, and in addition to our
household proper, we had had with us, for two years, my mother’s
widowed brother-in-law, “Uncle” Cams, and the stepdaughter for whose
sake we had consented to receive him. My aunt had died soon after her
youngest child (Anne) was taken to a Better Country; Cousin Paulina
went a year later, and as the mother’s parting request to the eldest
of her flock was that she would “take care of her father,” separation
was not to be thought of. None of us loved the lonely old man. One and
all, we loved her who was a younger sister to our mother, and a second
mother to her children.
So we sat down to our meals every day, a full dozen, all told, and
as we were seldom without a visitor, we must have been “thirteen
at table”, times without number. If we had ever heard the absurd
superstition that would have forbidden it, we never gave it a thought.
I should not have liked to meet my father’s frown and hear his comment,
had the matter been broached in his hearing.
The modern (nominal) mistress would be horrified at the thought of
twelve eaters, drinkers, and sleepers under the roof of a private
house. We descried nothing out of the way in it, and fared exceeding
comfortably from year’s end to year’s end. Large families were still
respectable in the public eye, and an increase in the number of
domestics kept the addition to the white family from bearing hard upon
the housemother.
How gayly and smoothly the little craft of my life moved on up to the
middle of ’53, let a few passages from a letter dated July 23d of that
year, testify:
“I came back from the mountains on the 2d of this month.
I had a charming visit at Piedmont. I believe I left warm
friends behind me when I reluctantly said ‘Good-bye’ to
the hospitable abode. I was the only young lady on the
plantation, and there were four grown brothers and a cousin
or two. Each had his pet riding-horse, which he ‘must have
me try.’ I had rides, morning and evening, and once at
_high noon_. In June! Think of it! I won’t tell you which
Rosinante I preferred. You might have a notion that his
master shared his honors, and these shrewd guesses are
inconvenient sometimes. The very considerate gallants found
out, ‘by the merest chance,’ that it made me sick to ride in
a closed carriage, and, of course, as there were two buggies
on the place, there was ‘tall’ bidding as to which I should
distinguish by accepting a seat in it. Sarah C., her mother,
and sister were kindness itself to me. I was quite ashamed
of my unworthiness of such petting....
“I got home just in time to help Mea with the preparations
for her Northern trip, and to get ready for Sarah Ragland’s
wedding—an event that had its influence in shaping my summer
plans.
“We enjoyed the ‘occasion’ heartily. How could I do
otherwise when my attendant groomsman was ordered for the
affair from Charlottesville?—the very youth who smote my
already beriddled heart when I was up in that region. He
is a cousin of the Raglands—Charley Massie by name—and the
arrangement was Mary’s (bless her heart!). Mr. Budwell,
the bridegroom, was indisputably the handsomest man in the
room. This was as it should be; but I never attended another
wedding where this could be said with truth. My knight was
the next best-looking, and for once I was content with a
second-best article.”
I allude in this letter to “Cousin Mollie’s” illness, but with no
expression of anxiety as to the result. She had been delicate ever
since I could recollect anything. She went to Saratoga every summer,
and now and then to Florida in the winter. The only intimation I ever
had from her as to the cause of her continued singlehood was in answer
to the girlish outburst: “Cousin Mary, you must have been beautiful
when you were young! You will always be charming. I can’t comprehend
why you have never married!”
Her speech was ever even and sweet. I detected a ring of impatience or
of pain in it, as she said: “Why should I marry, Namesake? To get a
nurse for life?”
I had suspected all along that she had a history known to none of us.
After that I knew it, and asked no more questions.