“RICHMOND, _August 16th, 1856._
“MY VERY DEAR EFFIE,—My long silence has seemed strange
and may have appeared unkind to you, but there have been a
thousand hindrances to my writing.
“A sudden fit of illness interrupted the health that had
remained firm throughout the warm spring weather, and
obliged me to make my visit to Goochland earlier than I
intended. For a week or more after my arrival there I was
worse than I had been at home. When I began to recover, the
amendment was rapid.
“To cut short these details, I am most unromantically
well and robust, am gaining flesh daily, and boast an
appetite that would throw a sentimental young woman into
convulsions were she to witness my gastronomic exploits. Yet
I have delayed writing to you because I wished to arrange
everything relating to the final ‘performances’ before
notifying you of the same.
“There have been sundry alterations in the programme since
you and I last consulted over these things, the principal
of which is the change of the day and hour. We expect,
now, to leave home on Tuesday fortnight (September 2d) in
the morning, instead of (as was first spoken of) on the
afternoon of Wednesday, the 3d. This will allow us two days
in Philadelphia, and, being the plan most approved of by
father and Mr. Terhune, of course I am submissive.
“The bridal party will spend both Monday and Tuesday
evenings, besides breakfasting here on Tuesday morning. So
you girls may bring evening dresses.
“The bridesmaids are to wear blue muslin or lawn skirts,
with white muslin basques—a neat breakfast costume that
will look pretty as a uniform, and be becoming to all of
you, without throwing my quiet travelling attire too much
into the shade. You know that at a morning wedding it is
customary for each to dress as she pleases. This never
pleased my fancy. The company wears a motley look. Full
bridal robes would be equally out of place. Therefore, we
have selected this medium.
“Now, _ma chère!_ cannot you keep your intention of the
Richmond trip as profound a secret as you have other matters
we wot of? Your father and mother must be apprized of it,
and Colonel and Mrs. Graves; but, for a few days, cannot the
story be kept within the two families? I trust you to do
this for me.
“The Charlotte party will come down on Monday, the 1st.
We shall expect you and Virginia some days in advance of
that date. I hope to have everything in readiness, even to
packing my trunks, by the middle of the preceding week, and
to have time to enjoy your society. Write as soon as your
plans are formed, and let that time be very soon. As to my
trousseau—thanks to nimble and kind fingers, the work is
nearly done. Next week my time is to be divided between the
dressmaker and a gentleman who writes that he has ‘business
to attend to in Richmond,’ and who, it is fair to presume,
may call occasionally. The latest gossip is that there is to
be a double wedding here next month; that both sisters are
to be dressed precisely alike and be married in the evening.
Therefore, come prepared for the worst—or the best, as the
case may seem.
“To drop business and jesting together—it is very hard to
realize that, if Providence permit, one little fortnight
will bring such a change into my life. Here, in the home
of my girlhood, where all else is unaltered, and I seem to
be welded, as it were, into the household chain, I cannot
believe that my place is so soon to be vacant. Brain and
heart are so full of crowding thoughts and emotions that I
marvel how I preserve a composed demeanor. The past, with
its tender and hallowed memories; the present, with a
wealth of calm, real happiness; the bright, although vague
future, alike strive to enchain my mind.
“I long to see you; to have a good, old-fashioned chat, a
familiar interchange of our plans and our hopes. There is a
sentence in your last that promises much—a promise I shall
surely call upon you to redeem when we meet. I would have
you feel that by this union you gain, not lose a friend....
“My love to your mother and to ‘Cousin Mag.’ May I not ask
from them a sincere ‘God-speed’?
“You will not disappoint me, now, dear one? Write at once
that you are all coming. You and Virginia G. will require
little preparation—besides the blue skirt and the thin
muslin spencer (which you are sure to have!), a pair of
white gloves will be all you need.
“This is a hasty and, I fear, an incoherent letter, but a
full freight of love goes with it. As I began, I end with
‘COME!’”
As may be gathered from this letter, the wedding was to be a simple
affair—so quiet that it could not be called a social function.
We were of one mind on that point. To secure the presence of our most
intimate friends, we went through the form of selecting bridesmaids
and groomsmen. It was the custom to have a long train of attendants at
large wedding-parties, and we took advantage of the fashion to limit
the company to be assembled on that early September morning to “the
bridal party” and the family. The exceptions to the limit were dear old
Doctor Haxall (whose wife was out of town) and three friends of the
bridegroom. Two were from New Jersey and family connections, although
not related by blood. The other was Mr. Word, of Charlotte, the
gentlest-hearted of old bachelors—known affectionately by his intimates
as “Cousin Jimmy.”
Genial old saint! My heart swells now at the flashlight picture
fastened upon memory of my first sight of, and speech with him. He was
more closely shaven than I ever saw him afterward—and he was ever the
pink of neatness. An expanse of white vest and shirt-bosom covered a
broad chest that palpitated visibly, as, enfolding my hand in both of
his, he said, in the best manner of the gentleman of the old school
(and there are no finer gentlemen anywhere):
“My dear madam, let me entreat you to regard me from this moment as a
BROTHER!”
No capitals can endow the word with the meaning he put into it. He
fulfilled his part of the compact nobly.
To go back to the preparation for the quiet bridal: A Richmond fashion
I have never known elsewhere, and which outlasted the war by some
years, was that the bride-elect and two or three of her bridesmaids
drove from house to house a day, or two or three, before the marriage,
and left cards upon acquaintances who were not bidden to the ceremony.
This was done in cases where, as with me, it was to be a house-wedding,
and the attendants were confined to a few family friends. If there were
to be a church-wedding, followed by a reception, or if the ceremony
at home were to be witnessed by a large party of guests, the drive
and delivery of cards preceded the “occasion” by a week or ten days.
To send an invitation to any social gathering by post would be a
transgression of decorum and precedent—a cheap trick unworthy of any
one tolerably well versed in social forms. The delivery by the bride
and her suite was delicately complimentary to those she wished to honor.
In furtherance of our design of keeping even the date of the marriage
secret up to the last possible hour, we had delayed the delivery of my
“P. P. C.” cards until Monday.
At the very bottom of the box of time-discolored letters preserved by
the friend of my childhood and intimate of my girlhood, I found one
of these cards. Time’s thumbmarks have not spared the bit of glazed
pasteboard. My maiden name is there, and, in the left-hand lower
corner, “P. P. C.” That was all the information it deigned to give the
curious and the friendly. I was going away—somewhere. Just when and
where was nobody’s business.
It will hardly be believed that we kept our own counsel so well that
our own servants, while they might have their suspicions, were only
certain that I was going North on Tuesday, as I had often gone on other
summers, and that the girls who had been visiting me for a week were to
remain to a party my sister would give on Tuesday evening. Not until
Monday morning were any of them, except “Mammy Rachel,” informed what
was on foot.
The day dawned—if dawn it could be called—through steady sheets of
rain. No delusive adage of “Rain before seven, clear before eleven”
ever gained currency in Richmond. It was as clear to our dismayed souls
that this was an all-day rain, as that the drive and cards could not
be postponed until to-morrow. Sampson, the carriage-driver, whom we
did not dub “coachman” until after the war, was notified by the mouth
of Tom, the young dining-room servant, that he must have the carriage
at the door at ten o’clock, and prepare for a long expedition. We were
at the breakfast-table when word came back that “it warn’t a fittin’
day for no young ladies to go out. Nor for his carriage an’ horses. De
ladies will have to put off their shoppin’ for another time.”
Mea turned upon the respectful emissary with the snap of the eyes and
incisive accent he knew full well:
“Say to Sampson that Miss Virginia is to be married to-morrow, and that
we have to take out cards. He will be here on time!”
We had an answer before we left our chairs.
“Yes, ma’am! He says he’d go if it _killed_ him and the horses!”
We set forth at the appointed hour. Mea, Effie, Virginia Graves, and
myself, wrapped up as for a winter journey, but in as high spirits as
if the sun had shone and birds sung blithely in trees that shivered
and shrank and streamed under the weight of the bitter rain. Poor
Tom—for the nonce, the footman whose duty it was to jump down from
his perch at every door before which we signalled Sampson to stop, to
receive the enveloped card upon a silver tray, and to scamper up a
walk or up a flight of steps, his umbrella held low over the precious
consignment—had the worst of it all. He was soaked to the skin by the
time the route was finished and we turned homeward. We were out four
hours. And in all the four hours the rain never intermitted one drop,
and the wind only changed from the east to blow from all quarters of
the heavens at once. If coachman and patient footman were drenched, we
were more than moist, and so chilled that we rejoiced with exceeding
great joy at the sight of blazing fires in chambers and dining-room on
our return.
The home atmosphere was all that it should be on the eve of the first
wedding in a household where the happiness of one was the joy of all.
Maybe I took it too much as a matter of course, then. I value the
recollection with something akin to jealous fondness. How, all day
long, while the skies streamed without and the wind dashed the water
by pailfuls against the windows, mirth and frolic within went on like
a peal of joy-bells, and every look, gesture, and word carried to my
heart the sweet persuasion that I was not absent from the thoughts of
one of them for a moment.
So certain were we that nothing could “gang agley”—and this in the
teeth of the storm that had abated naught of its fury by nightfall—that
when Herbert, who had gone to the station to meet the Charlotte party
(including Doctor Hoge, who was returning from his vacation), brought
back a rueful countenance and the news that “the flood had washed away
a bridge on the Danville Railway and made it impracticable for trains
to run for twenty-four hours,” we fell upon him with a hail-storm of
laughing reproaches that swept away the pretence of sorrowful sympathy.
How could anything go wrong? Not one of us was hoaxed for the fraction
of a second.
We took for granted, with the like gay confidence, that the tempest
would rage itself faint by morning. It was no surprise that the day
was so brilliantly clear, so fresh and fragrant, that Doctor Hoge was
reminded of
“The rose that was newly washed by the shower”—
and, after the ceremony, strayed from one to another of the thirty
present, asking if any one could tell him who was the author of the
line.
Which quest, when comparison of notes elicited the fact that ten
persons had been catechised, took a place among our family jests.
One incident of the journey to Washington stands out in my mind among
the thousand and one “coincidences,” falsely so-called, that star or
mar every human life, if we will but heed them and their consequences.
Mr. Terhune, and Mr. Cardwell, one of the groomsmen, who went as far as
Baltimore with us, on his way to speak at a political meeting, had gone
to look to the luggage after settling me in the car in Richmond. The
air was close, and I tried to raise the window by me.
“Allow me!” said a pleasant voice in my ear, and a strong hand reached
forward to perform the trifling service.
I said, over my shoulder, “Thank you!” catching sight of a fine, manly
face, lighted by a pair of kind, gray eyes. I saw the shadow of the
hand that went up to his hat, as he uttered some conventional phrase
in acknowledgment, and thought no more of him until we had taken the
Potomac boat at Acquia Creek. I recognized my neighbor of the train
then, in the tall man who tramped the deck to stretch long limbs
cramped by sitting in the car, and checked his walk to pick up and
comfort a child that fell headlong in running away from its nurse. I
was struck by the gentleness of the handsome giant in handling the
baby, and the tact he displayed in taking the weeper in his arms, and
directing his attention to a passing steamer. The little fellow stopped
crying at once, and, when the frightened nurse found the runaway, he
clung to the stranger’s neck, much to the amusement of the latter. He
carried him to the far end of the boat, talking cheerily with him, and
finally handed him over to the woman, with a kiss upon the baby-lips
held up to him.
The call to dinner diverted my mind from the little scene, and it was
not until we were in our hotel in Washington that I alluded to it, and
told Mr. Terhune of the courtesy the stranger had rendered me on the
train.
“I wish you had mentioned it before,” he said. “I should have thanked
him. I saw him at the hotel last night. His name is Brookes, I think.
He is a cousin of Doctor Hoge. By-the-way, he must be related to your
mother. And”—laughingly—“naturally, to yourself.”
“Of course!” I broke in, excitedly. “I wish I had guessed who he was.
It must be the Rev. James Brookes, my mother’s cousin. You needn’t
laugh! and you must not say ‘Another?’ He is a splendid fellow. His
mother was Judith Lacy, and named for my grandmother!”
As the genealogist of the family, I reckoned up the “handsome giant”
forthwith. I even knew incidents of his family history he never heard
until I rehearsed them to him in his St. Louis home, thirty years
afterward. He was, by then, to me the best-belovéd of all my clerical
kinsmen. I upbraided him, when we were made known to one another, for
not letting me know who he was at our first encounter.
“My dear cousin! On your wedding-day!” was his exclamation. “Even the
tie of kindred blood would not have justified the intermeddling of a
stranger at that time.”
We made up for the delay of a quarter-century by full and glad
recognition of the blood-claim. He was a master in Israel; eloquent
in the pulpit; as a writer, strong and convincing; in parish
ministrations, as tender as a woman and helpful as a brother. He
adorned his profession; as a citizen he fought evil with a lion’s
strength, and succored the erring with the wisdom of Paul, the
gentleness of John.
What strength and comfort I drew from intimate association with this
wise, tender, and leal kinsman, may not be told here. I can never
acknowledge it aright until I speak with the tongue of angels.
More than a dozen years have passed since the Easter noon, when the
lightning leaped along a thousand miles of telegraph lines, to bring me
this message from his son-in-law:
“_James H. Brookes fell asleep at sunrise on Easter
morning._”
Since that glorious awakening he has dwelt forever with the Lord.