These have been many days in my life which have been most tedious. The
imaginative man can perhaps fill them up with his own fancies; but
what little imagination I have--and it is certainly very small--must
be excited by some external objects.
Mine is a sort of lazy fancy, which wants stirring up to activity. I
can sit by the side of a dashing brook, and see it sparkling and
foaming onward, and regard it as a little epitome of life, with its
rapids and its shallows; its sunshine and its shade; its quiet lapses
and its turbulent activity. I can see in its different aspects the
hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows of existence. I can even watch
the root-frequenting trout coming soberly forth into mid-stream, like
some money-getting recluse, issuing forth into the current of
speculation, to be angled for by man or the devil; and I can endow the
old gentleman with all the thoughts and feelings of humanity,
wondering what he is calculating now, and asking myself in what stock
he is about to embark his capital. But there are some days when there
is nothing suggestive in external circumstances; and dull and wearily
do the leaden wings of time flap on. Oh, the heavy hours I have passed
in an Indian bungalow, hearing the rain drop, drop, drop for ever,
without a book to solace the passing hour, without a sight or sound to
waken the soul from a lethargy which is not sleep; and I have envied
the impassibility of the good Hindoos, who, squatted in the
neighbouring sheds, were pleasantly occupied in profound meditations
concerning nothing.
But of all the weary days I ever spent, the worst was that which
succeeded the evening of the camp-meeting; and many circumstances
tended to render it so. A sort of dead monotony seemed to have fallen
over the whole family of Mr. Stringer. The boys, whose wicked activity
and genial love of mischief might have afforded some amusement, were
closely cooped up during the whole morning by Mr. McGrubber. Mr.
Stringer himself was busy, supplying all deficiencies which a somewhat
prolonged absence had left in the ordering and arrangement of his
farm. Mrs. Stringer sat all day long embroidering, like a lady of the
olden time. Bessy Davenport sat, solemn and demure as a nun, by her
side, drawing patterns of collars and cuffs, as if she had been
working for her daily bread in a Manchester manufactory. Yet, ever and
anon, she looked up at my face with eyes which seemed to say, "Do you
recollect, Cousin Richard, that you are going to fight a duel, and may
very likely be killed, and leave me whom you love--you know you do--to
mourn you all alone?"
I asked her to go out and take a walk, but she declined, saying it was
too warm. And then again Mr. Wheatley had ridden over to Jerusalem
upon some business, promising to be back again that evening or the
next day. There were not many books in Mr. Stringer's house, and I had
brought none with me except one, wishing to make the world my book
rather than my oyster.
As a last resource, I went out and took a stroll by myself, and
heartily wished the time was come for loading and firing; but there
was nothing to amuse me--nothing to occupy my thoughts--and the day
was sultry, but not scorching; a thin, white haze covered the face of
heaven; the flowers most susceptible of atmospheric influence had half
closed their petals, and everything seemed as weary about the world as
I was. Air, I could find none; so, as a last resource, I sat myself
down under a tree and began to meditate. I won't trouble you with what
I thought about. I composed there a whole essay upon duelling,
condemned it logically in principle and practice, thought every man
who gave way to it a great fool, myself at the head of them, and rose
up just as much determined to fight Mr. Robert Thornton as ever.
The evening of that day passed a little more pleasantly. Mr. Wheatley
returned, and enlivened us a good deal with his gay talk. Bessy sang
us some very beautiful songs, and there seemed to me a deeper
sentiment, a more tender expression in her tones, than I had ever
heard before.
Yet she did not talk very much to me. She seemed amused, nay, pleased,
with Mr. Wheatley, and had I not known him to be a married man, I
might have felt a little jealous. She got into corners with him, and
talked in a low voice, and though she sometimes laughed and often
smiled, there was a sort of earnestness about her manner which annoyed
me a little.
The morning of the next day passed very nearly in the same manner,
only Mr. Wheatley was there all the time, and he, at least, kept up
his share of the conversation. About Bessy Davenport, I remarked a
good deal of what I may call flutter. She was now sad, silent, gloomy,
abstracted; then gay--almost wildly gay--but still with a saddened
gaiety. I remarked that her eyes often turned to my face, and I
thought I understood her better than the day before.
At length, about half-past one o'clock, I rose, saying,--
"I must go, I think. I will change my dress. I have engaged to dine
with Mr. Byles, Mrs. Stringer, and, in the hospitable Old Dominion, I
suppose I must pass the night there; but I shall set out in the cool
to-morrow morning, and meet you all at breakfast."
I thought I heard a gasp from the other side of the table, and,
turning round, I saw Bessy as pale as the spring moon.
"Good-bye, for the present, my sweet cousin," said I, holding out my
hand.
She gave me hers, as cold as that of a corpse, saying in a voice very
low, but perfectly distinct,--
"Farewell, Richard--farewell!"
Just at that moment, Mr. Wheatley exclaimed, "Going to dine with Mr.
Byles! What, my old friend Billy Byles? Hang me, if I don't go with
you. No one needs an invitation in Virginia, and you will give me a
seat in your buggy, I dare say."
This was rather unpleasant; but it could not be helped, and I only
made one attempt to escape the unsought-for companionship: "I have no
buggy with me," I said, laughing. "I go on horseback; but I'll take
you up behind me if you like."
"Oh, no," answered he, "I have a double-seated drotsky here, and as
pretty a pair of little tits as ever were driven. I will drive you
over, and we will take your broken-headed man Zed behind, to look
after the traps. Come, let us go and make ready." And he quitted the
room.
I followed, venturing but one more look at Bessy, and in about half an
hour we were rolling rapidly along towards the house of Mr. Byles.
After we had entered upon the high road, Mr. Wheatley turned towards
me with a smile, saying, "Do you know why I come with you?"
"No, indeed," I answered, "unless it be to dine with your old friend
Mr. Byles."
"No, indeed," returned Mr. Wheatley, with one of his short laughs; "I
never saw bold Billy but twice in my life. I came to take care of
you."
"You are really very considerate, Mr. Wheatley," I said drily.
"Very gallant, you mean," rejoined my companion. "You must know there
is a young lady, with the most beautiful hair, and eyes, and teeth,
and lips in the world, and the prettiest foot and ankle, and the most
charming little hand, who has got it into her dear little head, that
Sir Richard Conway is going to fight some giant or some windmill, and
was diplomatizing with me all last night to see if I could not, or
would not, tell her all about it, imagining that I had come up to be
your second. Now as I was convinced she was in the right--ladies
always are right in everything--and knowing that Billy Byles is not
the safest man in the world to trust in such matters, I determined to
go over with you to act as a sort of moderator."
"I am much obliged to you," I answered, a little mortified, "and much
obliged to my sweet Cousin Bessy for the interest she takes in me. But
I must say, my good friend, this is altogether a little irregular,
according to our notions on the other side of the Atlantic; ladies
there do not meddle with such matters, nor friends either, except when
they are invited."
"Pray, my dear Sir Richard," interrogated Mr. Wheatley, "do not you,
who are clearly a man of the world, fall into the great error of your
countrymen, and fancy you can carry England about with you wherever
you go? When you are in your own room, with nothing but your trunk,
you can be as English as you please; but the moment you are brought in
contact with Virginians, you must be Virginian to a certain extent. We
manage these little affairs of honour quite differently here and in
Great Britain. There, you are obliged to sneak about as if you were
going to steal something, breathe no syllable of the matter to
anybody, except the choice friend, and seek out some lonely spot on a
common, where you can see for ten miles round, for fear you should be
interrupted by the police. Now here, the constable of the township
would load your pistols for you, and keep the ground clear. The first
thing a man does when he is called out is to say to his wife, 'Mary,
my dear, I am going to fight Jack Robertson to-morrow. I wish you
would look that the lock of my rifle goes easy.' 'I'll look to that,'
answers Mary; 'and I'll cut you up some patches. What time would you
like the carriage, love? Don't ride on horseback; you know it always
shakes your hand.'"
I could not help laughing at this description, delivered with capital
mimicry of the male and female voices in the colloquy; but I replied,
"It would seem all ladies do not take it so quietly, from what you
tell me of Miss Davenport."
"Oh, that's quite a different case," said Mr. Wheatley, with a merry
glance of the eye. "She is not your wife yet, you know. She has no
chance of being an interesting widow, whose husband was killed in a
duel. But, joking apart, for I see you wince, Miss Davenport has cause
to dislike duels. Her father was killed in a duel by a dear friend and
near connection, all in consequence of a confounded mistake; and his
death was followed by a long train of law-suits and misfortunes, quite
sufficient to give her a horror of the pleasant little practice of
being shot at without pay. By the way, I don't think she knows
one-half of her own history, poor girl!" he added, in a meditative
tone; "if she did, it might make some difference."
His words, from the manner in which they were spoken, seemed to me to
have more significance than appeared upon the surface; but I had other
things to think of, and the next moment he rambled on in his usual
way, saying,--
"Now don't be surprised, and don't show any irritation, if you find a
dozen or two people on the ground, black and white. It is just as
likely as not; and mind, if they chance to get in the line of fire,
shoot a white man, and not a black. A white man's life here is worth
nothing; a black man is worth from nine hundred to a thousand dollars.
We are a commercial people, and always take a business-like view of
these transactions. Pray when is this pigeon-shooting to come off?"
He proceeded to ask a great number of questions, but I cut him short,
saying, "You must excuse me, my good friend, for keeping up some of my
Old English prejudices here, while you and I are alone together. From
me you shall hear none of the particulars, though I dare say Mr. Byles
will tell you all about it. With us, it is a matter of etiquette for a
principal in such an affair to talk about it to no one but his
second."
"Oh, very well," he answered; "perhaps you are right. In my part of
the country, I mean the part where I was born, they carry matters
further than even you do in England, for they won't let us fight at
all, and send a man to the penitentiary for asking his friend to take
a morning's walk with him. In fact, the three great distinctions
between the North and South are these. In the South, they fight duels
whenever they can; have slaves for their servants; and grow tobacco
and cotton. In New England, they never fight if they can help it; are
slaves to their own servants, and make wooden clocks and wooden
nutmegs."
Probably one could not have had a more serviceable or amusing
companion, when going about a disagreeable piece of business, than Mr.
Wheatley. There was a lightness, or, to use a vulgar expression, a
devil-may-carishness about his conversation which imperceptibly led
one away from serious views, even of a serious business; and when I
got out of his carriage, at the door of Mr. Byles's house, I could
have fired a pistol at an antagonist without half the hesitation and
remorse which I should have felt an hour before.
The house of Mr. Byles was very different from any gentleman's
dwelling I had yet seen in Virginia, and was indeed an ornamented sort
of cottage--the reality of that whereof we see many imitations in
Great Britain. It was all upon one floor--unless indeed there were
rooms for the servants upstairs, which I do not know--and parlours,
dining-room, bedrooms, &c, stretched out in a confused sort of
labyrinth, which I did not attempt to penetrate any further than I was
led by others. An enormous swarm of little black boys, with one
respectable elderly gentleman of the same colour, were all ready to
receive us: and, by the way in which they climbed into Mr. Wheatley's
carriage, seized upon all the loose articles it contained, and carried
them off, Heaven knows whither, they put me in mind of the little
hairy savages, which boarded the ship of Sinbad the sailor, during one
of his marvellous voyages. None of them seemed to know anything about
their master, however. It was a thing recognized and understood, that
whoever came to the house was to make himself comfortable--that the
house would contain any possible number, and that all that was in it
was at the disposal of the guests.
Mr. Wheatley had set about providing for himself as soon as we
arrived; Zed had rushed away with my valise, where, and about what, I
knew not; and I stood solitary for a moment or two, in the midst of a
spacious, low-ceiled drawing-room, filled with as many nicknacks as
would have bedizened the boudoir of a London lady. At length, a very
neat little boy, of fourteen years of age, with his snowy white jacket
and trousers and apron, contrasting magnificently with the jetty hue
of his hands and face, came in and asked, with a grace quite oriental,
whether I was the Honourable Sir Richard Conway.
"Honourable, I trust I am," I replied, "and my name is Richard
Conway."
"Ah, then, here is your room, sir," answered the boy. And he led me
into a very handsome bedroom, immediately out of the drawing-room,
where I found every possible convenience that either London or Paris
could supply. It seemed to have been the pleasure of Mr. Byles to
accumulate under the roof of a very unpretending dwelling, the form
and structure of which I suspect it would be impossible to describe,
all the luxuries of a dozen different climates, and to enjoy them, and
make his friends enjoy them, without those conventional restraints
with which they are usually associated.
Zed was already there, having arrived at my quarters by some
undiscovered passages, and was busy in arranging all the toilette
apparatus of Palmer and Savory, upon principles conceived by himself,
partly indoctrinated by me.
I threw myself into a chair, and, for a moment or two, gave myself up
to meditation, thinking--"This afternoon all these appliances for
luxury and comfort--to-morrow, perhaps, stretched upon that bed with a
pistol-shot through my heart!"
I am not much given to such considerations; but there are moments when
they will force themselves upon me, and I end by exclaiming, "What a
farce is life!"
Starting up with this conviction upon me, as I knew it must be near
the dinner-hour, I proceeded to change my dress, and get rid of the
soil and dust which the roads, now thoroughly dry, had left upon me.
Not twenty minutes after, my little black friend made his appearance
again, with a tumbler full of a bright yellow liquid, upon a silver
salver, saying,--
"Dinner will be ready in five minutes, sir."
"What is this, my friend!" I asked, taking up the tumbler.
"Apple-Jack, sir," replied the boy.
"And am I to drink this before dinner?"
"If you please, sir," he answered, in a decidedly affirmative tone.
So I drank it, and found it by no means unpleasant.
I suppose in these regions, where vast tracks of swamp and
forest-ground still remain unreclaimed, spreading around a sort of
miasma, such kind of stimulating drinks, which would kill us in the
old world, are not without their use; and certainly they do not seem
to produce the same stimulating effects that they would in Europe.
A minute or two after, Billy Byles himself entered without ceremony,
and apologized for having been absent at his stables when I arrived.
"I have asked nobody to meet you," he said, "because I know your
English prejudices upon these occasions; and I have given Bob Thornton
a hint not to bring more than two or three friends, at the utmost, to
the ground, to-morrow. I find Wheatley, of Norfolk, brought you over,
and he is as good a man as any to have with us."
"I can assure you he came with no invitation of mine," I replied; "but
hearing I was coming over to dine with you, he invited himself, and,
of course, I could not refuse his company. As we came, I found that
Miss Davenport's suspicions and his own knowledge of such affairs had
made him aware that some _rencontre_ was going to take place."
"All the better, all the better," answered Billy Byles; "and he is
always so cool and self-possessed, that in case of difficulty he is
ready to take the right ground in a moment. But now, let us go in to
dinner."
I followed him into the drawing-room, where we found Mr. Wheatley, and
thence into an adjoining dining room. There, as nice and well-cooked a
dinner as could be seen in any part of the world was set before us,
seasoned with excellent wines, and my two companions drank pretty
deep.
But after all the meats had been removed, and fruits, &c., set upon
the table, Mr. Byles interposed, saying,--
"Before we take anymore wine, we had better look at our tools and be
certain that everything is right and in good working order. Then we
will have a bowl of punch and a cigar, a game of piquette, if you
like, and then to bed, for we are to be at the Hunter-wood to-morrow
by five, and that is three miles off--Apollo, my good fellow"--to the
black man, who was still in attendance--"fetch me the mahogany case
which is on the table in my room, and bring an oil-cruet and a
feather."
The man soon returned with the pistol-case and the other things, and
we set to work to examine the instruments of destruction. One screw
wanted a little easing. A small portion of rust had gathered about the
bore of one of the pistols, and had to be removed. The balls, of which
there were a dozen ready cast, were all smooth and well pared, and
fitted closely and accurately. The patches were nicely greased; the
powder found not to leave a trace upon white paper; and everything, in
short, brought into neat and exact order. My two companions set about
the examination as amateurs; and I, who certainly knew, practically,
more of the matter than any of them, and whose life might depend upon
the result, thought I might just as well inform my mind upon the same
subject as sit idly looking on.
When all this was settled, a bowl of excellent punch was introduced,
with some capital Havanah cigars. We talked of matters in no way
connected with the business of the following morning; and the time
slipped away without any piquette, till, on looking at my watch, I
found it was ten o'clock. Then, telling Mr. Byles to have me called in
ample time, I retired to bed.
There are moments when thought, having done all its serviceable work,
had better be dismissed altogether. It is a happy art--and every man
should strive to acquire it--to be able so to dismiss thought, when
its results are arrived at, and it can be no longer serviceable.
Resolving to consign the future to the future, I lay down and slept
profoundly, till the negro boy appointed to attend upon me entered the
room early on the following morning.