I REWROTE the new book that winter, reading it, chapter by chapter,
aloud to my father, in the evening. He was a judicious critic, and I
need not repeat here how earnest and rapt a listener. I had received
proposals for the publication of my “next book” from six Northern
publishers. In the spring my father went to New York and arranged for
the preliminaries with the, then, flourishing firm of Derby & Jackson.
It was brought out while I was in Boston that summer, under the title
of _The Hidden Path_. I anticipate dates in jotting down here that I
had my first taste of professional envy in connection with this book.
My journeying homeward in September was broken by a fortnight’s stay at
the hospitable abode of the Derbys in Yonkers. I was at a reception in
New York one evening, when my unfortunately acute hearing brought to me
a fragment of a conversation, not intended for my edification, between
my publisher and a literary woman of note. Mr. Derby was telling her,
after the tactless manner of men, how well _The Hidden Path_ had “done”
at the Trade Sales just concluded.
“Ah!” said the famous woman, icily. “And I suppose she is naturally
greatly elated?”
Mr. Derby laughed.
“She hides it well if she is. Have you read the book?”
“Yes. You were good enough to send me a copy, you know. It is quite a
creditable school-girl production.”
I moved clean out of hearing. I told Mr. Derby, afterward, what I had
heard, adding that my chief regret was at the lowering of my ideal of
professional generosity. Up to that moment I had met with indulgent
sympathy and such noble freedom from envious hypercriticism, as to
foster the fondly-cherished idea that the expression of lofty sentiment
presupposes the ever-present dwelling of the same within the soul.
In simpler phrase, that the proverb—“Higher than himself can no man
think,” had its converse in—“Lower than himself can no man be.”
In this I erred. I grant it, in this one instance. I had judged
correctly of the grand Guild to which I aspired, with yearnings
unutterable, to belong.
It was an eventful summer. My father and I had gone on to Boston from
New York, setting out, the same week, for a tour through the White
Mountains. I was the only woman in the party. Our friend, Ned Rhodes,
a distant cousin, Henry Field, of Boston, and my father completed the
quartette. Ten days afterward, we two—my father and I—met a larger
travelling party in New York. Mr. and Mrs. William Terhune, Mrs.
Greenleaf, the widow of Doctor Hoge’s friend; “Staff” Little, the
brother of Mrs. William Terhune, and Edward Terhune, now the pastor
of a church at Charlotte C. H., Virginia, composed the company which
joined itself to us, and set forth merrily for Niagara and the Lakes.
The trip accomplished, I settled down comfortably and happily in Boston
and the charming environs thereof for the rest of the season.
Another halcyon summer!
If I have made scant mention of my father’s kindred in the land of his
birth, it is because this is a story of the Old South and of a life
that has ceased to be, except in the hearts of the very few who may
take up the boast of the Grecian historian—“Of which I was a part.”
I should be an ingrate of a despicable type were I to pass by as
matters of no moment, the influences brought to bear upon my life at
that date, and through succeeding years, by my association with the
several households who made up the family connection in that vicinity.
My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Lewis Pierce, owned and occupied
the ancient homestead in Dorchester. He was “a character” in his
way. Handsome in his youth, he was still a man of imposing presence,
especially when, attired in black broadcloth, and clean shaven, he sat
on Sunday in the pew owned by the Pierces for eight generations in the
old church on “Meeting House Hill.” He did not always approve of the
doctrine and politics of the officiating clergyman. He opened his mind
to me to this effect one Sunday that summer, as we jogged along in his
low-hung phaeton, drawn by a horse as portly and as well-set-up as his
master.
“The man that is to hold forth to-day is what my wife scolds me for
calling ‘one of those higher law devils,’” he began by saying. “He is
of the opinion that the law, forbidding slavery and denying rights
to the masters of the slaves and all that, ought to set aside the
Constitution and the laws made by better men and wiser heads than his.
He’d override them all, if he could. I’ve nothing to say against a
man’s having his own notions on that, or any other subject, but if he’s
a minister of the gospel, he ought to preach the truth he finds in the
Bible, and keep his confounded politics out of the pulpit.”
He leaned forward to flick a fly from the sleek horse with his whip.
“I’ve been given to understand that he doesn’t like to see me and some
others of the same stripe in church when he preaches for us. I pay
no attention to that. If he, or any others of his damnable way of
thinking, imagine that I’m to be kept out of the church in which the
Pierces owned a pew before this man and his crew were ever thought of,
he’ll find himself mistaken. That’s all there is about it!”
It was worth seeing, after hearing this, the sturdy old representative
of the Puritans, sitting bolt upright in the quaint box-pew where his
forbears had worshipped the God of battles over a century before, and
keeping what he called his “weather eye” upon the suspected expounder
of the gospel of peace. The obnoxious occupant of the ancient and
honorable pulpit was, to my notion, an amiable and inoffensive
individual. He preached well, and with never an allusion to “higher
law.” Yet Uncle Lewis kept watch and ward throughout the service.
I could easily believe that he would have arisen to his feet and
challenged audibly any approach to the forbidden territory.
The day and scene were recalled forcibly to my memory by a visit paid
to my Newark home in 1864 by Francis Pierce, the protestant’s oldest
son, on his way home from Washington. He was one of a committee of
Dorchester citizens sent to the Capital to look after the welfare of
Massachusetts troops called into the field by a Republican President.
The wife of the head of the Pierce homestead was one of the loveliest
women ever brought into a world where saints are out of place. Near
her lived an old widow, who was a proverb for captiousness and
wrongheadedness. I never heard her say a kind or charitable word of
neighbor or friend, until she astounded me one day by breaking out into
a eulogy upon Aunt Pierce and Cousin Melissa, Francis’s wife:
“We read in the Scriptures that God is love. I allers think of them two
women when I hear that text. It might be said of both of ’em: they are
jest _love_—through an’ through!”
I carried the story to the blesséd pair, you may be sure. Whereupon, my
aunt smiled compassionately.
“Poor old lady! People who don’t know how much trouble she has had, are
hard upon her. We can’t judge one another unless we know all sides of a
question. She is greatly to be pitied.”
And Cousin Melissa, in the gentle tone she might have learned from her
beloved mother-in-law—“I always think that nobody is cross unless she
is unhappy.”
_Aurora Leigh_ had not been written then. If it had been, neither of
the white-souled dears would have read a word of it. Yet Mrs. Browning
put this into the mouth of her heroine:
“The dear Christ comfort you!
You must have been most miserable
To be so cruel!”
The old house was a never-ending delight to me. It was built in 1640
(see Chapter I), ten years after the good ship _Mary and John_ brought
over from Plymouth the Massachusetts Bay Colony, landing her passengers
in Boston. Robert Pierce (or Percie) was, although a blood connection
of the Northumberland Percies, the younger son of a younger son, and so
far “out of the running” for title or fortune on that account, that he
sought a home and livelihood in the New World.
My ancestress, Ann Greenaway, whose tedious voyage from England to
Massachusetts was beguiled by her courtship and marriage to stalwart
“Robert of Dorchester,” bore him many robust sons and “capable,” if not
fair daughters, dying at last in the Dorchester homestead at the ripe
age of one hundred and four.
From her the long line of descendants may have inherited the stout
constitutions and stouter hearts that gave and kept for them a place
in every community in which they have taken root.
The story of the Pierce Homestead is told in _Some Colonial Homesteads_
more at length than I can give it here.
The Virginia cousin was cordially welcomed to the cradle of her
foremothers, and a warm attachment grew up between me and each member
of the two households. My cousin Francis had built a modern house upon
a corner of the homestead grounds, and I was as happily at home there
as in the original nest.
Another adopted home—and in which I spent more time than in all the
rest put together—was that of my cousin, Mrs. Long, “the prettiest of
the three Lizzies” referred to in one of my letters. Her mother, my
father’s favorite relative, had died since my last visit to Boston.
Her daughter was married at her death-bed. She was a beautiful and
intelligent woman, wedded to a man of congenial tastes who adored
her. The intimacy of this one of our Yankee cousins and ourselves
began before Mea and I had ever seen her. My sister and “Lizzie” were
diligent correspondents from their school-days. To a chance remark
of mine relative to their letters, I owe one of the most stable
friendships that has blessed my life.
We sisters were in the school-room at recess one day when I was
fourteen, Mea sixteen. I was preparing a French exercise for M.
Guillet, Mea writing to Boston. We had the room to ourselves for the
time. My sister looked up from her paper to say:
“What shall I say to Lizzie for you?”
“Give her my love, and tell her to provide me with a correspondent as
charming as herself.”
In her reply Lizzie begged leave to introduce a particular friend of
her own, “intelligent and lovable—altogether interesting, in fact.”
This friend had heard her talk of her Southern cousins and wished
to know them; but I must write the first letter. I caught at the
suggestion of what commended itself to me as adventure, and it was an
epistolary age. Letters long and numerous, filled with details and
disquisitions, held the place usurped by telephone, telegraph, and
post-cards. We had time to write, and considered that we could not put
it to a better purpose. So the next letter from my sister to my cousin
contained a four-pager from me, addressed to “Quelqu’une.” I gave fancy
free play in conversing with the unknown, writing more nonsense than
sober reason. I set her in the chair opposite mine, and discoursed _at_
her of “divers sayings.” If not
“Of ships and shoes and sealing-wax
And cabbages and kings”—
of wars and rumors of wars, and school duties, and current literature.
In due time I had a reply in like strain, but to my consternation,
written in a man’s hand, and signed “Quelqu’un.” He apologized
respectfully for the ambiguous terms of the introduction that had led
me into a mistake as to his sex, and hoped that the silver that was
beginning to stipple his dark hair would guarantee the propriety of a
continued correspondence.
“Time was,” he mused, “when I could conjugate _Amo_ in all its moods
and tenses. Now I get no further than _Amabam_, and am constrained to
confess myself in the tense at which I halt.”
We had written to one another once a month for two years before the
sight of a note to Lizzie tore the mask from the face of my graybeard
mentor, and confirmed my father’s suspicions as to his identity with
Ossian Ashley, the husband of Aunt Harriet’s elder daughter. The
next visit I paid to Boston brought us together in the intimacy of
the family circle. He never dropped the rôle of elderly, and as
time rolled on, of brotherly friend. He was, at that date, perhaps
thirty-five years of age, and a superb specimen of robust manhood.
I have seldom beheld a handsomer man, and his port was kingly, even
when he had passed his eightieth birthday. Although a busy man of
affairs, he was a systematic student. His library might have been the
work-shop of a professional _litterateur_; he was a regular contributor
to several journals upon financial and literary topics, handling
each with grace and strength. His translation of Victor Cherbuliez’s
_Count Kosta_ was a marvellous rendering of the tone and sense of the
original into elegant English. He was an excellent French and Latin
scholar, and, when his son entered a German university, set himself, at
sixty-odd, to study German, that he “might not shame the boy when he
came home.”
Before that, he had removed to New York City, and engaged in business
there as a railway stock-broker. He was, up to a few months prior to
his death, President of the Wabash Railway, and maintained throughout
his blameless and beneficent life, a reputation for probity, energy,
and talent.
Peace to his knightly soul!
He was passing good to me that summer. In company with his wife, we
drove, sailed, and visited steamships, Bunker Hill Monument, and
other places of historic interest. In their society I made my first
visit to the theatre, and attended concerts and lectures. He lent me
books, and led me on to discuss them, then, and when I was at home.
And this when he was building up his business, looking after various
family interests, not strictly his own (he was forever lending a hand
to somebody!), and studying late into the night, as if working for a
university degree. I am told that such men are so rare in our time and
country as to make this one of my heroes a phenomenon.
It is not marvellous that friendships like these, enjoyed when
character and opinion were in forming, should have cultivated optimism
that has withstood the shock and undermining of late disappointments.
It may well be that I have not known another man who, with his fortune
to found, a household to support, and a press of mental toil that would
have exhausted the energies of the average student, would have kept up
a correspondence with a child for the sake of pleasing and educating
her, and carried it on out of affectionate interest in a provincial
kinswoman.
Affection and genial sympathy, with whatever concerned me or mine,
endured to the end. He was my husband’s warm friend, a second father to
my children—always and everywhere, my ally.
My last sight of him, before he succumbed to lingering and mortal
illness, is vividly present with me. We had dined with him and his
wife, and said to ourselves as we had hundreds of times, that time
had mellowed, without dimming her beauty, and made him magnificent.
The word is none too strong to describe him, as he towered above me
in the parting words exchanged in light-heartedness unchecked by any
premonition that we might never chat and laugh together again this side
of the Silent Sea. He was over six feet in height; his hair and flowing
beard were silver-white; his fine eyes darker and brighter by contrast;
his smile was as gentle and his repartee as ready as when he had jested
with me in those bygone summers from which the glory has never faded
for me.
My upturned face must have expressed something of what filled heart and
thoughts, for he drew me up to him suddenly, and kissed me between the
eyes. Then, with the laugh I knew so well, he held out his hand to my
husband:
“You mustn’t be jealous, my dear fellow! I knew her a long time before
you ever saw her. And such _good_ friends as we have been for—bless my
soul!—can it be more than fifty years?”
Again I say: “God rest his knightly soul!” It is worth living to have
known one such man, and to have had him for my “_good_ friend” for
“more than fifty years.”