With a Genius above talent, a Courage above Heroism
None ever forgot the scene who saw the long line of funeral carriages winding, like a black stream, through streets where the snow came up to the axles, under the low-hanging sky that stooped heavily and gloomed into leaden grayby the time the cortége reached the cemetery. And all the afternoon the brooding air throbbed with the tolling bells.
We said and believed that Richmond had never known so sad a day since she went into mourning for the threescore victims of the burning of the theatre in 1811.
The trial of Thomas Ritchie for murder in the first, and of the seconds as “principals in the second degree,” followed the duel with swiftness amazing to the reader of criminal cases in our age. On March 31, 1846, four of the ablest lawyers in Virginia appeared in court to defend the prisoner.
The old brochure which records the proceedings is curious and deeply interesting reading; in nothing more remarkable than in the defence of what was admitted to be “an unhappy custom” and directly opposed to the laws of the country.
“The letter of the law is made to yield to the spirit of the times” is an italicized sentence in the principal speech of the defence. The same speaker dwelt long and earnestly upon precedents that palliated, excused, and warranted the time-honored (although “unhappy”) practice.
Not less than fifteen instances of the supremacy of the higher law of the “spirit of the times” were drawn from English history.
“In not one of which had there been any prosecution.
“And now, gentlemen of the jury, does any one suppose that duelling can be suppressed, or capitally punished, when the first men in the kingdom—such men as Pitt and Fox, and Castlereagh and Canning and Grattan, and Nelson and Wellington, lend the high sanction of their names, and feel themselves justified and compelled to peril their lives upon a point of honor? And I would ask my friend, the Commonwealth’s Attorney, if such men as theseconstitute the ‘swordsmen of England,’ and were alone worthy of the times of Tamerlane and Bajazet?...
“Was Andrew Jackson regarded as a ‘swordsman’ and duellist because he fought, not one, but three duels, and once shed the blood of a fellow-man in single combat? He was twice elected to the first office in the world, and died a Christian.... How many of Henry Clay’s numerous friends in Virginia, and, especially, the religious portion of them (including ministers of the Gospel), refused to vote for him as President of the United States because he had fought two duels?...
“The coroner’s inquest held on the body of General Hamilton brought in a verdict of wilful murder against Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States.
“Colonel Burr afterward took his seat in the Senate of the United States as Vice-President; his second, afterward, became a judge; and the second of General Hamilton—a most amiable and accomplished man—I served with in Congress, some years ago....
“I call upon you, then, gentlemen, by every motive that can bind you to a discharge of your duty, to do justice to my unfortunate young friend. Bind up the wounds of his broken-hearted parents; carry joy and peace and consolation to his numerous family and friends; wash out the stain that has been attempted upon his character and reputation, and restore him to his country—as, in truth, he is—pure and unspotted.”
The address of the Commonwealth’s Attorney is comparatively brief and emphatically half-hearted. We are entirely prepared for the announcement in smaller type at the foot of the last page:
“The argument on both sides” (!) “having been concluded, the jury took the case, and, without leaving the box, returned a verdict of ‘Not guilty!’
“The verdict was received by the large auditory withloud manifestations of applause. Order was promptly commanded by the officers of the court.
“Mr. Ritchie then left the court-house, accompanied by the greater portion of the spectators, who seemed eager to shake hands with him and to congratulate him upon his honorable acquittal.”
“Richmond,June 8th, 1847.“Dear Effie,—It is past ten o’clock, and a rainy night. Just such a one as would make a comfortable bed and a sound snooze no mean objects of desire.“George Moody, alias ‘The Irresistible,’ arrived this afternoon, and will leave in the morning, and I cannot let so good an opportunity of writing to you escape. I must scribble a brief epistle.“The drive down from Powhatan was delightful. I found Mr. Belt extremely pleasant, full of anecdote, a great talker, yet, withal—as Mr. Miller had told me—a good listener. A very necessary qualification, by-the-way, for any one with whom I may chance to be in company.“The first thing I heard when I reached home was tidings of that worst of bugbears to a Southern woman—an impending insurrection. A double guard was on duty at the capitol, and a detachment of military from the armory paraded the streets all night. I was, I confess, somewhat alarmed, and not a little startled, but gradually my fears wore away, and I slept as soundly that night as if no such thing were in agitation.“‘Puss Sheppard was in to supper, and her parting salutation to us at going was: ‘Farewell! If I am alive in the morning I will come and see if you are!’“The whole matter ended, like Mr. C.’s sermon—‘just where it began—viz., in nothing.’“Richmond is rather dull at present. The Texas excitement has subsided almost entirely, and those who gave credenceto the report of the insurrection are desirous to keep as still as possible.“Morning.—I can write no more. I am sure your good-nature will acquit me of blame so far as matter, chirography, and quality go, when I tell you that I have written this partly by the light of a lamp which finally went out, self-extinguished for want of oil, and partly this morning, when I am suffering with a sick-headache. I feel more like going to bed than writing, but ‘The Unexceptionable’ is about to take his departure, and waits for this. Write soon and much. I will try to treat you better next time.”
“Richmond,June 8th, 1847.
“Dear Effie,—It is past ten o’clock, and a rainy night. Just such a one as would make a comfortable bed and a sound snooze no mean objects of desire.
“George Moody, alias ‘The Irresistible,’ arrived this afternoon, and will leave in the morning, and I cannot let so good an opportunity of writing to you escape. I must scribble a brief epistle.
“The drive down from Powhatan was delightful. I found Mr. Belt extremely pleasant, full of anecdote, a great talker, yet, withal—as Mr. Miller had told me—a good listener. A very necessary qualification, by-the-way, for any one with whom I may chance to be in company.
“The first thing I heard when I reached home was tidings of that worst of bugbears to a Southern woman—an impending insurrection. A double guard was on duty at the capitol, and a detachment of military from the armory paraded the streets all night. I was, I confess, somewhat alarmed, and not a little startled, but gradually my fears wore away, and I slept as soundly that night as if no such thing were in agitation.
“‘Puss Sheppard was in to supper, and her parting salutation to us at going was: ‘Farewell! If I am alive in the morning I will come and see if you are!’
“The whole matter ended, like Mr. C.’s sermon—‘just where it began—viz., in nothing.’
“Richmond is rather dull at present. The Texas excitement has subsided almost entirely, and those who gave credenceto the report of the insurrection are desirous to keep as still as possible.
“Morning.—I can write no more. I am sure your good-nature will acquit me of blame so far as matter, chirography, and quality go, when I tell you that I have written this partly by the light of a lamp which finally went out, self-extinguished for want of oil, and partly this morning, when I am suffering with a sick-headache. I feel more like going to bed than writing, but ‘The Unexceptionable’ is about to take his departure, and waits for this. Write soon and much. I will try to treat you better next time.”
There is much reading between the lines to be done for the right comprehension of that letter. Mygenrepictures of days that are no more would be incomplete were I to fail to touch upon the “worst of bugbears” I feigned to pass over lightly.
In the debate upon the abolition of slavery in my native State, lost by one vote in the Legislature of 1831-32, while Nat Turner’s insurrection was fresh in the public mind, John Randolph declared, “Whenever the fire-alarm rings in Richmond every mother clasps her baby closer to her breast.”
I cannot recollect when the whisper of the possibility of “Insurrection” (we needed not to specify of what kind) did not send a sick chill to my heart. The menace I here dismiss with a sentence or two was the most serious that had loomed upon my horizon. I could not trust myself to dwell upon it within the two days that had elapsed since my return from a vacation month in Powhatan. How keenly every circumstance attending it was bitten into my mind is proved by the distinctness of the etching preserved by a memory that has let many things of greater moment escape its hold.
My host, Mr. D., had come in to dinner the day before that set for my stage-journey back to town, with the pleasingintelligence that Mr. Lloyd Belt, a former citizen of Powhatan, but for twenty years a resident of Richmond, was “going down”—Richmond was always “down,” as London is “up” from every part of England—the next day, and would be glad to take me in his carriage. As I wrote to Effie, the drive was delightful. My courtly escort took as much pains to entertain me as if I had been a belle and a beauty, instead of an unformed school-girl. It was a way they had—those gentlemen of the Old School—of recognizing the woman in every baby-girl, and doing it honor.
It did not strike me as strange that Mr. Belt beguiled the thirty-mile journey with anecdote and disquisition. He was charming. I never thought that he was likewise condescending. I am quite as sure that the idea did not enter his knightly imagination.
As we drove leisurely up Main Street from the bridge, we noticed that groups of men stood on the street corners and in the doors of stores, chatting gravely, and, it would seem, confidentially.
“There must be news from the seat of war!” opined my companion.
The Mexican War was then in progress, and accompanying raids into the debatable territory of Texas kept public sentiment in a ferment.
My father and the rest of the family, with a couple of neighbors, were enjoying the cool of the day upon our front porch. He came down to the gate to assist me to alight. So did Mr. Strobia, our elderly next-door neighbor, and he handed me up the steps while my father lingered to thank my escort for bringing me safely home. In the joyous confusion of greetings, I had not observed that Mr. Belt was leaning down from the carriage to my father’s ear, and that both were very grave, until Puss Sheppard, like the rattlepate she was, whispered loudly to Mr. Strobia:
“I’m scared to death! What is the latest news? You men won’t tell us.”
“I have heard no news about anything or anybody!” ejaculated the old gentleman, testily and loudly, glancing over his shoulder at Gilbert, who had my trunk on his shoulder and was carrying it in at the side-gate. “Upon my soul, I haven’t!” And as she caught his arm and swung around to get the truth from his eyes, he bustled down the steps and so on home.
I had the tale in full by the time my bonnet was off. Mea, on one side, and Puss on the other, poured it forth in excited whispers, having closed “the chamber” door. Abolitionists had been at work among the negroes in Henrico and Hanover counties for weeks. There were indications of an organized conspiracy (in scope and detail so like the plot for which John Brown’s blood paid twelve years thereafter, that I bethought me of it when the news from Harper’s Ferry stunned the nation), and the city was under arms. Governor Smith was said to have issued a proclamation to militia and citizens at large in Latin.
I laughed there.
“‘Extra Billy!’ He knows less of Latin than of Choctaw!”
The worthy functionary had earned thesobriquetby superdiligence in the matter of extra baggage while in the service of a stage-coach company, and as he was a Democrat we never forgot it.
“Let that pass!” said Mea, impatiently. “We can’t get away from the fact that where there is so much smoke there must be a little fire. Some evil business is on foot, and all the servants know what it is, whether we do or not.”
I felt that she was right when Mary Anne and “Mammy,” Gilbert, Tom, his assistant, and my little maid Paulina, with black Molly, Percy’s nurse, trooped in, one after the other, to welcome “Miss Firginny” home. They had donethe like ever since I was born. I should have felt hurt and angry had they failed in the ceremony. My sharpened senses detected something that was overdone in manner and speech. They were too glad to see me, and while they protested, I discerned sarcasm in their grins, a sinister roll in lively eyeballs.
We talked fast over the supper-table, and of all manner of things irrelevant to the topic uppermost in our thoughts. Once, while Gilbert and his half-grown subaltern were out of the room, I ventured a hasty whisper to my father, at whose right I sat:
“Father, have we any arms in the house if they should come?”
Without turning his head, he saw, out of the tail of his eye, Gilbert on the threshold, a plate of hot waffles in hand, and Tom at his heels bearing a pitcher of fresh water. My father reached out a deliberate hand for a slice of bread from a plate near his elbow.
“All that I have to say, my daughter” (his speech as deliberate as his hand, and every syllable sharp and clear), “is that we are prepared for them, come when and how they may.”
A perceptible shiver, as when one catches breath after an electric shock, ran around the table. All felt that he had thrown down the gauntlet, and was ready to take the consequences. My heart leaped up as an elastic bough from the weight that had bowed it to the earth. It was no effort after that to be gay. I told stories of my country sojourn, retailed the humors of the visit to our old neighborhood, mimicking this and that rustic, telling of comical sayings of the colored people who pressed me with queries as to town life—in short, unbottled a store of fun and gossip that lasted until bedtime. Then, as I told my correspondent, I went to bed and slept the sleep of youth, health, and an easy mind.
And this because he who never lied to me had said that he was “prepared” for the assassins, come when they might.
A week later, when the fireless smoke had vanished quite from the horizon, and we dared jest at the “scare,” I asked my mother what arsenal my father had had in reserve that he could speak so confidently of preparation for midnight attack and domestic treachery.
“Nothing more formidable than a carving-knife,” she answered, merrily, “and courage that has always served him in the hour of peril. He was not alarmed. I believe he would face a hundred negroes with no other weapon than his bare hands.”
I am often asked why, if our family servants were really and warmly attached to us, we should have let the “bugbear” poison our pleasures and haunt our midnight visions. To the present hour I am conscious of a peculiar stricture of the heart that stops my breath for a second, at the sudden blast of a hunter’s horn in the country. Before I was eight years old I had heard the tale of Gabriel’s projected insurrection, and of the bloodier outbreak of murderous fury led by Nat Turner, the petted favorite of a trusting master. Heard that the signal of attack in both cases was to be “a trumpet blown long and loud.” Again and again, on my visits to country plantations, I have been thrown into a paroxysm of terror when awakened from sleep in the dead of night, by the sound of the horns carried by “coon hunters” in their rounds of the woods nearest us. I could not have been over ten, when, on a visit to “Lethe,” a homestead occupied for a while by Uncle Carus, I was rambling in the garden soon after sunrise, picking roses, and let them fall from nerveless fingers at the ringing blast of a “trumpet blown long and loud”, from the brow of a neighboring hill. As it pealed louder and longer, until the blue welkin above me repeated the sound, I fled as fastas my freezing feet would carry me, to the deepest recesses of the graveyard at the foot of the garden, and hid in a tangle of wild raspberry bushes higher than my head. There I lay, wet with the dews of the past night, and my face and hands scratched to bleeding, until the winding horn grew faint and fainter, and the bay of a pack of hounds told me what a fool panic had made of me. We always thought of the graveyard as an asylum in the event of a rising. No negro would venture to enter it by day or night.
In any ordinary period of danger or distress, I would have trusted my life in the hands of the men and women who had been born on the same plantation with my mother, and the younger generation, to whom she had been a faithful and benignant friend from their cradles. In fire and flood and tempest; in good report and evil report; in sickness and in health; in poverty, as in riches—they would have stood with, and for us to the death. We knew them to be but children of a larger growth, passionate and unreasoning, facile and impulsive, and fanatical beyond anything conceivable by the full-blooded white. The superstitious savagery their ancestors had brought from barbarous and benighted Africa, was yet in their veins. We had heard how Gabriel, a leader in prayer-meetings, and encouraged by the whites to do Christian evangelization among his own race, had deliberately meditated and written down, as sections of the code to be put into practice, when he should come into his kingdom of Lower Virginia—a plan of murder of all male whites, and a partition of the women and girl-children among his followers, together with arson and tortures exceeding the deviltries of the red Indians. We had heard from the lips of eyewitnesses, scenes succeeding the Southampton massacre of every white within the reach of the murderous horde howling at the heels of the negro preacher whom hismaster had taught to read and write—how the first victim of the uprising, in the name of God and freedom, was that master as he lay asleep at his wife’s side. Of how coolly—even complacently—Turner recorded: “He sprang up, calling his wife’s name. It was his last word. A single blow was sufficient to kill him. We forgot a baby that was asleep in the cradle, but Hark went back and dispatched it.”
In every plan of rising against their masters, Religion was a potent element. It was, to their excitable imaginations, a veritable Holy War, from which there would be no discharge. The “Mammy” who had nursed her mistress’s baby at her own bosom, would brain it, with the milk yet wet upon its lips, if bidden by the “prophet” to make the sacrifice. Nat Turner split with his axe the skull of a boy he had carried in his arms scores of times, and stayed not his hand, although the little fellow met him with a happy laugh and outstretched arms and the cry, “Uncle Nat, you have come to give me a ride! Haven’t you?”
I repeat, we knew with what elements we should have to deal if the “rising” ever took an organized form. This ever-present knowledge lay at the root of the hatred of the “abolition movement.” To the Northerner, dwelling at ease among his own people, it was—except to the leaders—an abstract principle. “All men are created free and equal”—a slaveholder had written before his Northern brother emancipated his unprofitable serfs. Ergo, reasoned the Northern brother, in judicial survey of the increasing race, whose labor was still gainful to tobacco and wheat planter, the negro slave had a right to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
He did not count the cost of a consummation devoutly to be desired. He had no occasion to meditate upon the bloody steps by which the enslaved and alien race wouldclimb to the height the Abolitionist would stimulate him to attain.
So well was it understood that a mother ran dangerous risks if she put her child into the care of the colored woman who complained that she “was tired of that sort of work,” that neglect of such dislike of a nurse’s duties was considered foolhardy. I heard a good old lady, who owned so many servants that she hired a dozen or so to her neighbors, lament that Mrs. Blank “did not mind what I told her about Frances’ determination not to take care of children. I hired the girl to her as a chambermaid, and gave her fair warning that she just wouldnotbe a nurse. A baby was born when Frances had been there four months, and she was set to nurse it. You must have heard the dreadful story? Perhaps you saw it in the papers. When the child was six months old the wretched creature pounded glass and put it in the baby’s milk. The child died, and the girl was hanged.”
Ugly stories, these, but so true in every particular that I cannot leave them out of my chronicle of real life and the workings of what we never thought, then, of calling “the peculiar institution.”
One of my most distinct recollections of the discussions of Slavery held in my hearing is that my saintly Aunt Betsy said, sadly and thoughtfully:
“One thing is certain—we will have to pay for the great sin of having them here. How, or when, God alone knows.”
“We did not bring them to Virginia!” was my mother’s answer. “And I, for one, wish they were all back in Africa. But what can we do, now that they are on our hands?”
Before turning to other and pleasanter themes, let me say that my father, after consultation with the wife who had brought to him eight or ten “family servants” as part of her father’s estate, resolved to free them and send themto Liberia at his own expense. This was in my early childhood, yet I recollect how the scheme failed through the obstinate refusal of the slaves to leave master, home, and country for freedom in a strange land. They clung to my mother’s knees, and prayed her, with wild weeping, not to let them go. They had blood relatives and dear friends here; their children had intermarried with men and women in different parts of the county; their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had left them no legacy of memories that would draw them toward the far-off country which was but the echo of an empty name to their descendants. They were comfortable and happy here. Why send them, for no fault of theirs, into exile?
“There is something in what they say!” my father had said to my mother, in reviewing the scene. “I cannot see that anything is left for us to do except to keep on as we are, and wait for further indications of the Divine will.”
This was in the thirties, not many years after an act of gradual emancipation was lost in the Legislature by the pitiful majority I named in an earlier paragraph. A score of years had passed since that momentous debate in our capitol, and our Urim and Thummin had not signified that we could do anything better than to “keep on as we were.”
It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the Slavery Question, for master, as for slave.
Inthe 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, alltold, 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 athigh 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’swedding—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 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 athigh 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’swedding—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.
Patient, brave, unselfishly heroic—
“The sweetest soulThat ever looked with human eyes,”
“The sweetest soulThat ever looked with human eyes,”
“The sweetest soulThat ever looked with human eyes,”
“The sweetest soul
That ever looked with human eyes,”
—she lingered day after day, now weaker, now rallying, until she spoke her own conviction to me one day in lateJuly, as I sat by, fanning her, and no one else was present.
I smiled as she opened her large dark eyes, the only beauty left in the wasted face, and saw me.
“You are better, dear! We shall have you up and out driving before long.”
“No, dear child!”—infinite weariness in tone and look. “The old clock has run clean down!”
I did not believe it, and I said it stoutly aloud, and to myself.
She seemed no more languid—only drowsy—the next afternoon, as I fluttered into the room and leaned over her in a glow of excitement:
“Cousin Mollie, darling! I have come in to say that Junius Fishburn is down-stairs. He is in town for a day on his way to Newport.”
The great eyes opened wide, a smile lighted them into liveliness.
“Oh, I am so glad!” she gasped.
She was “glad” of everything that gave me pleasure. I had never doubted that. I had never gone to her with a pain or a pleasure without getting my greedy fill of sympathy.
When I had said a hearty “bon voyage!” to my caller, I went back to tell her of the interview. She was dying. We watched by her from evening to morning twilight.
Ned Rhodes, who was in Boston when he got my letter, telling briefly what had come to us, sent me lines I read then for the first time. Had the writer shared that vigil with us, he could not have described it more vividly:
“We watched her breathing thro’ the night,Her breathing soft and low,As in her breast the wave of lifeKept heaving to and fro.Our very hopes belied our fears;Our fears our hopes belied:We thought her dying while she slept,And sleeping when she died.”
“We watched her breathing thro’ the night,Her breathing soft and low,As in her breast the wave of lifeKept heaving to and fro.Our very hopes belied our fears;Our fears our hopes belied:We thought her dying while she slept,And sleeping when she died.”
“We watched her breathing thro’ the night,Her breathing soft and low,As in her breast the wave of lifeKept heaving to and fro.Our very hopes belied our fears;Our fears our hopes belied:We thought her dying while she slept,And sleeping when she died.”
“We watched her breathing thro’ the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.
Our very hopes belied our fears;
Our fears our hopes belied:
We thought her dying while she slept,
And sleeping when she died.”
At midnight there was a rally for a few minutes. I was wetting the dry lips, leaning over the pillow, so that she looked into my eyes in unclosing hers. A smile of heavenly sweetness played over her face—a ray that irradiated, without moving a feature or line. The poor mouth stirred ever so slightly. I bent closer to it to hear the whisper:
“I’m almost there!”
Two months later I wrote to my old friend:
“Our great sorrow in July was my first affliction. Yet I was wonderfully supported under it, and theterribledesolation that has grown upon us, instead of lessening. I say ‘supported,’ for not once have I wished her back; but I miss her—oh, so sadly!“‘I cannot make her dead!’“Then mother went to the country for a month, and I was left as housekeeper, with the whole care of the family on my hands. Rising betimes to preside at father’s early breakfast, pickling, preserving, sewing, overseeing the servants, etcetera.“Enough of this! Although the little girls’ lessons begin again to-day, and I have my sister’s domestic and social duties to perform in addition to my own, I have more leisure than you might think, and you shall have the benefit of a spare half-hour on this bright Monday morning. (Alice practising, meanwhile, in the same room!)“Mea is still in Boston and the vicinity, and will not return for a month or more. Lizzie M. is to be married late in October or early in November, and wishes to have Mea with her. Another of the three Lizzies, and the prettiest—Lizzie N.—married last week a Mr. L.—a nice young man, Mea says. I have never seen him, although they have been engaged forsome time. He has taken up his abode in Boston, to keep his lovely wife with her invalid mother.“And while upon marriage—E. G. is to wed on October 11th, Mr. R. H., one oftenbrothers. She is ‘doing very well,’ say the gossips.“Sarah and Mr. Budwell are at home again, he handsomer than ever, while she looks prettier and happier than she ever was before.“While retailing news, let me chronicle the arrival of Master Robert Wallace Courtney, an interesting youth, who—as father dryly remarked, when I said that he ‘came from a foreign shore’—‘speaks the language of the Cry-mea.’“Heigho! so goes this mad world of ours: death; marriage; birth. Ranks are mowed down, and filled up as soon. Few of us appreciate what a fearful thing it is to die, and fewer yet how awful it is to live—writing our histories by our actions in the Book of God’s Remembrance, a stroke for every word, movement, and thought! Again I say, if Death be fearful, Life is awful!“We are prone to forget, as one and another fall, and the chasm is closed up and Life seems the same—except within the bleeding hearts of mourners—that our day is coming as surely as those others have gone. In effect, we arrogate immortality for ourselves.“The longer I live, and the more I see of the things that perish with the using, the more firmly persuaded am I that there is but one reality in life, and that is Religion. Why not make it an every-day business? Since the loving care of the Father is the only thing that may not be taken from us, why do we not look to it for every joy, and cling to it for every comfort?...“Write soon. Will you notcometo me? I am very lonely at times. One sistergone!Another absent!“I am wondering if you have changed as much as I feel that I have? It is not natural to suppose that you have. You have not the same impression of added responsibility, the emulation to throw yourself into the breach made by the removal of one so beloved, and, in her quiet way, exercisingso much influence. If I could but hope that patience and prayerful watchfulness would ever make me ‘altogether such an one’ as she was!“How many and how happy have been the meetings in heaven since I last saw you! Dear little Sallie B.! How often in fancy do I see her walk away in the moonlight night of our parting! I never look from the front window in the evening without recalling that hour.”
“Our great sorrow in July was my first affliction. Yet I was wonderfully supported under it, and theterribledesolation that has grown upon us, instead of lessening. I say ‘supported,’ for not once have I wished her back; but I miss her—oh, so sadly!
“‘I cannot make her dead!’
“Then mother went to the country for a month, and I was left as housekeeper, with the whole care of the family on my hands. Rising betimes to preside at father’s early breakfast, pickling, preserving, sewing, overseeing the servants, etcetera.
“Enough of this! Although the little girls’ lessons begin again to-day, and I have my sister’s domestic and social duties to perform in addition to my own, I have more leisure than you might think, and you shall have the benefit of a spare half-hour on this bright Monday morning. (Alice practising, meanwhile, in the same room!)
“Mea is still in Boston and the vicinity, and will not return for a month or more. Lizzie M. is to be married late in October or early in November, and wishes to have Mea with her. Another of the three Lizzies, and the prettiest—Lizzie N.—married last week a Mr. L.—a nice young man, Mea says. I have never seen him, although they have been engaged forsome time. He has taken up his abode in Boston, to keep his lovely wife with her invalid mother.
“And while upon marriage—E. G. is to wed on October 11th, Mr. R. H., one oftenbrothers. She is ‘doing very well,’ say the gossips.
“Sarah and Mr. Budwell are at home again, he handsomer than ever, while she looks prettier and happier than she ever was before.
“While retailing news, let me chronicle the arrival of Master Robert Wallace Courtney, an interesting youth, who—as father dryly remarked, when I said that he ‘came from a foreign shore’—‘speaks the language of the Cry-mea.’
“Heigho! so goes this mad world of ours: death; marriage; birth. Ranks are mowed down, and filled up as soon. Few of us appreciate what a fearful thing it is to die, and fewer yet how awful it is to live—writing our histories by our actions in the Book of God’s Remembrance, a stroke for every word, movement, and thought! Again I say, if Death be fearful, Life is awful!
“We are prone to forget, as one and another fall, and the chasm is closed up and Life seems the same—except within the bleeding hearts of mourners—that our day is coming as surely as those others have gone. In effect, we arrogate immortality for ourselves.
“The longer I live, and the more I see of the things that perish with the using, the more firmly persuaded am I that there is but one reality in life, and that is Religion. Why not make it an every-day business? Since the loving care of the Father is the only thing that may not be taken from us, why do we not look to it for every joy, and cling to it for every comfort?...
“Write soon. Will you notcometo me? I am very lonely at times. One sistergone!Another absent!
“I am wondering if you have changed as much as I feel that I have? It is not natural to suppose that you have. You have not the same impression of added responsibility, the emulation to throw yourself into the breach made by the removal of one so beloved, and, in her quiet way, exercisingso much influence. If I could but hope that patience and prayerful watchfulness would ever make me ‘altogether such an one’ as she was!
“How many and how happy have been the meetings in heaven since I last saw you! Dear little Sallie B.! How often in fancy do I see her walk away in the moonlight night of our parting! I never look from the front window in the evening without recalling that hour.”
Oneevening of the winter following the events recorded in the last chapter, “Ned” Rhodes and I had spent a cosey two hours together. My parents never did chaperon duty, in the modern acceptation of the word. They made a habit, without hinting at it as a duty, of knowing personally every man who called upon us. When, as in the present case, and it was a common one, the visitor was well known to them, and they liked him, both of them came into the drawing-room, sat for a half-hour or longer, as the spirit moved them, then slipped out, separately, to their own sitting-room and books.
I have drawn Ned Rhodes’s picture at length as “Charley” inAlone. I will only say here that he was my firm and leal friend from the time I was twelve years old to the time of his death, in the early eighties.
He had a piece of new music for me to-night, and we fell to work with piano and flute soon after my father’s exit. It was not difficult. The songs and duets that followed were familiar to us both. We chatted by the glowing grate when we left the piano—gayly and lightly, of nothing in particular—the inconsequent gossip of two old and intimate acquaintances that called for no effort from either.
I mention this to show that I carried a careless spirit and a light heart with me, as I went off in the direction of my bedroom, having extinguished the hanging lamp in the hall, and taking one of the lamps from the parlor to light myself bedward.
It was a big, square Colonial house, with much waste of space in the matter of halls and passages. The entrance-hall on the first floor was virtually a reception-room, and nearly as large as any apartment on that level. It was cut across the left side by an archway, filled with Venetian blinds and door. Beyond these was a broad, easy stairway, dropping, by a succession of landings, to the lower from the upper story. Directly opposite the front door was a second and narrower arch, the door in which was, likewise, of Venetian slats. This led to the rooms at the back of the house. The plan of the second floor was the same. On this eventful night I passed through the smaller archway, closing the door behind me. It had a spring latch that clicked into place as I swung it to. The bedroom I shared with my sister, who was not at home that night, was directly across the passage from that occupied by our parents. A line of light under their door proved that they were still up, and I knocked.
“Come in!” called both, in unison.
My mother, wrapped in her dressing-gown, lay back in her rocking-chair, her book closed upon her finger. My father had laid aside his coat, and stood on the rug, winding his watch.
“I was hoping that you would look in,” he said. “I wanted to ask what that new piano-and-flute piece is. I like it!”
We exchanged a few sentences on the subject; I kissed both good-night, and went out into the hall, humming, as I went, the air that had caught his fancy.
The lamp in my hand had two strong burners. Gas had not then been introduced into private dwellings in Richmond. We used what was sold as “burning fluid,” in illuminating our houses—something less gross than camphene or oil, and giving more light than either. I carried the lamp in front of me, so that it threw a bright light uponthe door across the passage, here a little over six feet wide. As I shut the door of my mother’s room, I saw, as distinctly as if by daylight, a small woman in gray start out of the opposite door, glide noiselessly along the wall, and disappear at the Venetian blinds giving upon the big front hall.
I have reviewed that moment and its incident a thousand times, in the effort to persuade myself that the apparition was an optical illusion or a trick of fancy.
The thousandth-and-first attempt results as did the first. I shut my eyes to see—always the one figure, the same motion, the same disappearance.
She was dressed in gray; she was small and lithe; her head was bowed upon her hands, and she slipped away, hugging the wall, as in flight, vanishing at the closed door. The door I had heard latch itself five minutes ago! Which did not open to let her through! I recall, as clearly as I see the apparition, what I thought in the few seconds that flew by as I stood to watch her. I was not in the least frightened at first. My young maid, Paulina, a bright mulatto of fifteen, had more than once that winter fallen asleep upon the rug before my fire, when she went into the room to see that all was in readiness for my retiring. The servants slept in buildings detached from the main residence, a custom to which I have referred before.
“The house” was locked up by my father’s own hands at ten o’clock, unless there were some function to keep one or more of the servants up and on duty. Therefore, when I had twice awakened Paulina from her unlawful slumber, I had sent her off to the “offices”—in English parlance—with a sharp reproof and warning against a repetition of the offence. My instant thought now was:
“The little minx has been at it again!” The next, “She went like a cat!” The third, in a lightning flash, “She did not open the door to go through!” Finally—“Nor did she open the door when she came out of my room!”
I had never, up to that instant, known one thrill of supernatural dread since I was old enough to give full credence to my father’s assurances that there were no such things as ghosts, and to laugh at the tales told by ignorant negroes to frighten one another, and to awe white children. I had never been afraid of the darkness or of solitude. I would take my doll and book to the graveyard and spend whole happy afternoons there, because it was quiet and shady, and nobody would interrupt study or dream.
It was, then, the stress of extraordinary emotion which swept me back into the room I had just quitted, and bore me up to the table by which my mother sat, there to set down the lamp I could scarcely hold, enunciating hoarsely:
“I have seen a ghost!”
My father wheeled sharply about.
“What!”
At that supreme moment, the influence of his scornful dislike to every species of superstition made me “hedge,” and falter, in articulating, “If there is such a thing as a ghost, I have seen one!”
Before I could utter another sound he had caught up the lamp and was gone. Excited, and almost blind and dumb as I was, I experienced a new sinking of heart as I heard him draw back the bolt of the door through which the Thing had passed, without unclosing it. He explored the whole house, my mother and I sitting, silent, and listening to his swift tramp upon floor and stairs. In a few minutes the search was over.
He was perfectly calm in returning to us.
“There is nobody in the house who has not a right to be here. And nobody awake except ourselves.”
Setting down the lamp, he put his hand on my head—his own, and almost only, form of caress.
“Now, daughter, try and tell us what you think you saw?”
Grateful for the unlooked-for gentleness, I rallied to tell the story simply and without excitement. When I had finished, he made no immediate reply, and I looked up timidly.
“I really saw it, father, just as I have said! At least, I believe I did!”
“I know it, my child. But we will talk no more of it to-night. I will go to your room with you.”
He preceded me with the lamp. When we were in my chamber, he looked under the bed (how did he guess that I should do it as soon as his back was turned, if he had not?). Then he carried the light into the small dressing-room behind the chamber. I heard him open the doors of a wardrobe that stood there, and try the fastenings of a window.
“There is nothing to harm you here,” he said, coming back, and speaking as gently as before. “Now, try not to think of what you believe you saw. Say your prayers and go to bed, like a good, brave girl!”
He kissed me again, putting his arm around me and, holding me to him tenderly, said “Good-night,” and went out.
I was ashamed of my fright—heartily ashamed! Yet I was afraid to look in the mirror while I undid and combed my hair and put on my night-cap. When, at last, I dared put out the light, I scurried across the floor, plunged into bed, and drew the blankets tightly over my head.
My father looked sympathizingly at my heavy eyes next morning when I came down to prayers. After breakfast he took me aside and told me to keep what I had seen to myself.
“Neither your mother nor I will speak of it in the hearing of the children and servants. You may, of course, take your sister into your confidence. She may be trusted. But my opinion is that the fewer who know of a thing thatseems unaccountable, the better. And your sister is more nervous than you.”
Thus it came about that nothing was said to Mea, and that we three who knew of the visitation did not discuss it, and tried honestly not to think of it.
Until, perhaps a month after my fright, about nine o’clock, one wet night, my mother entered the chamber where my father and I were talking over political news, as we still had a habit of doing, and said, hurriedly, glancing nervously behind her:
“I have seen Virginia’s ghost!”
She saw it, just as I had described, issuing from the closed door and gliding away close to the wall, then vanishing at the Venetian door.
“It was all in gray,” she reported, “but with something white wrapped about the head. It is very strange!”
Still we held our peace. My father’s will was law, and he counselled discretion.
“We will await further developments,” he said, oracularly.
Looking back, I think it strange that the example of his cool fearlessness so far wrought upon me that I would not allow the mystery to prey upon my spirits, or to make me afraid to go about the house as I had been wont to do. Once my father broke the reserve we maintained, even to each other, by asking if I would like to exchange my sleeping-room for another.
“Why should I?” I interrogated, trying to laugh. “We are not sure whereshegoes after she leaves it. It is something to know that she is no longer there.”
Mea had to be taken into confidence after she burst into the drawing-room at twilight, one evening, and shut the door, setting her back against it and trembling from head to foot. She was as white as a sheet, and when she spoke, it was in a whisper. Something had chased herdown-stairs, she declared. The hall-lamp was burning, and she could see, by looking over her shoulder, that the halls and stairs were empty but for her terrified self. But Something—Somebody—in high-heeled shoes, that went “Tap! tap! tap!” on the oaken floor and staircase, was behind her from the time she left the upper chamber where she had been dressing, until she reached the parlor door. Her nerves were not as stout as mine, perhaps, but she was no coward, and she was not given to foolish imaginations. When we told her what had been seen, she took a more philosophical view of the situation than I was able to do.
“Bodiless things can’t hurt bodies!” she opined, and readily joined our secret circle.
Were we, as a family, as I heard a woman say when we were not panic-stricken at the rumored approach of yellow-fever, “a queer lot, taken altogether”? I think so, sometimes.
The crisis came in February of that same winter.
My sister Alice and a young cousin who was near her age—fourteen—were sent off to bed a little after nine one evening, that they might get plenty of “beauty sleep.” Passing the drawing-room door, which was ajar, they were tempted to enter by the red gleam of the blazing fire of soft coal. Nobody else was there to enjoy it, and they sat them down for a school-girlish talk, prolonged until the far-off cry “All’s well!” of the sentinel at the “Barrack” on Capitol Square told the conscience-smitten pair that it was ten o’clock. Going into the hall, they were surprised to find it dark. We found afterward that the servant whose duty it was to fill the lamp had neglected it, and it had burned out. It was a brilliant moonlight night, and the great window on the lower landing of the staircase was unshuttered. The arched door dividing the two halls was open, and from the doorway of the parlor they had a fullview of the stairs. The moonbeams flooded it half-way up to the upper landing; and from the dark hall they saw a white figure moving slowly down the steps. The mischievous pair instantly jumped to the conclusion that one of “the boys”—my brothers—was on his way,en déshabillé, to get a drink of water from the pitcher that always stood on a table in the reception-room, or main hall. To get it, he must pass within a few feet of them, and they shrank back into the embrasure of the door behind them, pinching each other in wicked glee to think how they would tease the boy about the prank next morning. Down the stairs it moved, without sound, and slowly, the concealed watchers imagined, listening for any movement that might make retreat expedient. They said, afterward, that his nightgown trailed on the stairs, also that he might have had something white cast over his head. These things did not strike them as singular while they watched his progress, so full were they of the fun of the adventure.
It crossed the moonlit landing—an unbroken sheet of light—and stepped, yet more slowly, from stair to stair of the four that composed the lowermost flight. It was on the floor and almost within the archway when the front door opened suddenly and in walked the boys, who had been out for a stroll.
In a quarter-second the apparition was gone. As Alice phrased it:
“It did not go backward or forward. It did not sink into the floor. It just wasnot!”
With wild screams the girls threw themselves upon the astonished boys, and sobbed out the story. In the full persuasion that a trick had been played upon the frightened children, the brothers rushed up-stairs and made a search of the premises. The hubbub called every grown member of the household to the spot except our deaf grandmother, who was fast asleep in her bed up-stairs.
Assuming the command which was his right, my father ordered all hands to bed so authoritatively that none ventured to gainsay the edict. In the morning he made light to the girls and boys of the whole affair, fairly laughing it out of court, and, breakfast over, sent them off to school and academy. Then he summoned our mother, my sister, and myself to a private conference in “the chamber.”
He began business without preliminaries. Standing on the rug, his back to the fire, his hands behind him, in genuine English-squirely style, he said, as nearly as I can recall his words:
“It is useless to try to hide from ourselves any longer that there is something wrong with this house. I have known it for a year and more. In fact, we had not lived here three months before I was made aware that some mystery hung about it.
“One windy November night I had gone to bed as usual, before your mother finished her book.”
He glanced smilingly at her. Her proclivity for reading into the small hours was a family joke.
“It was a stormy night, as I said, and I lay with closed eyes, listening to the wind and rain, and thinking over next day’s business, when somebody touched my feet. Somebody—not something! Hands were laid lightly upon them, were lifted and laid in the same way upon my knees, and so on until they rested more heavily on my chest, and I felt that some one was looking into my face. Up to that moment I had not a doubt that it was your mother. Like the careful wife she is, she was arranging the covers over me to keep out stray draughts. So, when she bent to look into my face, I opened my eyes to thank her.
“She was not there! I was gazing into the empty air. The pressure was removed as soon as I lifted my eyelids. I raised myself on my elbow and looked toward the fireplace. Your mother was deep in her book, her back towardme. I turned over without sound, and looked under the bed from the side next the wall. The firelight and lamplight shone through, unobstructed.
“I speak of this now for the first time. I have never opened my lips about it, even to your mother, until this moment. But it has happened to me, not once, nor twice, nor twenty—but fifty times—maybe more. It is always the same thing. The hands—I have settled in my mind that they are those of a small woman or of a child, they are so little and light—are laid on my feet, then on my knees, and travel upward to my chest. There they rest for a few seconds, sometimes for a whole minute—I have timed them—andsomethinglooks into my face and is gone!
“How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all! I know that itis!That is all. Shakespeare said, long before I was born, that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’ This is one of them. You can see, now, daughter”—turning to me—“why I was not incredulous when you brought your ghost upon the scene. I have been on the lookout for what our spiritualistic friends call ‘further manifestations.’”
“You believe, then,” Mea broke in, “that the girls really saw something supernatural on the stairs last night? That it was not a trick of moonlight and imagination?”
“If we can make them think so, it will be better for them than to fill their little brains with ghostly fears. That was the reason I took a jesting tone at breakfast-time. I charged them, on the penalty of being the laughing-stock of all of us, not to speak of it to any one except ourselves. I wish you all to take the cue. Moreover, and above everything else, don’t let the servants get hold of it. There would be no living in the house with them, if they were to catch the idea that it is ‘haunted.’”
He drew his brows into the horseshoe frown that meantannoyance and perplexity. “How I hate the word! You girls are old enough to understand that the value of this property would be destroyed were this story to creep abroad. I would better burn the house down at once than to attempt to sell it at any time within the next fifty years with a ghost-tale tagged to it.
“Now, here lies the case! We can talk to outsiders of what we have seen and felt and heard in this, our home, where your grandmother, your mother and father have hoped to live comfortably and to die in peace, or we can keep our own counsel like sensible, brave Christians. ‘Bodiless spirits cannot hurt bodies,’ and”—the frown passing before a humorous gleam—“the little gray lady seems to be amiable enough. I can testify that her hands are light, and that they pet, not strike. She is timid, too. What do you say—all of you? Can we hold our tongues?”
We promised in one voice. We kept the pledge so well that both the girls and the boys were convinced of our incredulity. Our father forbade them positively to drop a hint of their foolish fancies in the hearing of the servants. Young as they were, they knew what stigma would attach to a haunted house in the community. As time passed, the incident faded from their minds. It was never mentioned in their hearing.
A year went by without further demonstration on the part of the little gray lady, except for two nocturnal visitations of the small, caressing hands. My father admitted this when we questioned him on the subject; but he would not talk of it.
The one comic element connected with the bodiless visitant was introduced, oddly enough, by our sanctimonious clerical uncle-in-law, who now and then paid us visits of varying lengths. As he came unannounced, it was not invariably convenient to receive him. On one occasion his appearance caused dismay akin to consternation. Wewere expecting a houseful of younger friends within two days, and needed the guest-room he must occupy. He was good for a week at the shortest.
True to the Arab-like traditions of hospitality that pervaded all ranks of Old Dominion society, we suffered nothing of this to appear in our behavior. Nor could he have heard the anguished discussion of ways and means that went on between Mea and myself late that night. It was, therefore, a delightful surprise when he announced, next morning, his intention of going out to Olney that day, and to remain there for—perhaps a week. He “had let too long a time elapse since he had paid the good people there a visit. He didn’t want them to think he had forgotten them.”
One of the “good people,” the wife of my mother’s brother, drove into town to spend the day with us, a week after the close of his stay at Olney. “Aunt Sue” was a prime favorite with us all, and she was in fine feather to-day, full of fun and anecdote. She interrupted a spicy bit of family news to say, by-and-by:
“Did any of you ever suspect that your house is haunted?”
“How ridiculous!” laughed my mother. “Why do you ask?”
The narrator laughed yet more merrily.
“The funniest thing you ever heard! The old gentleman had an awful scare the last night he was here. I asked him what he had eaten—and drunk—for supper that evening. But he stuck to it that he was standing at his window, looking out into the moonlight in the garden, when somebody came up behind him, and took him by the elbows and turned him clear around! He felt the two hands that grabbed hold of him so plainly that he made sure Horace had hidden under the bed and jumped out to scare him. So he looked under the bed and in the wardrobeand the closet, and, for all I know, in the bureau drawers and under the washstand, for the boy. There was nobody in the room but himself, and the door was locked. He says he wouldn’t sleep in that room another night for a thousand dollars.”
“Nobody is likely to offer it!” retorted Mea, dryly. “I have slept there nearly a thousand nights, and nothing ever caught hold of me.”
Passing over what might or might not have been a link in the true, weird history of our bodiless tenant, I leap a chasm of a dozen years to wind up the tale of the “little gray lady,” so far as it bears directly upon our family. After the death of her husband and the marriages of sons and daughters left my mother alone in the old colonial homestead, she decided to sell it and to live with my youngest sister.
The property was bought as a “Church Home”—a sort of orphanage, conducted under the patronage of a prominent Episcopal parish renowned for good works. In altering the premises to adapt buildings to their new uses, the workmen came upon the skeleton of a small woman about four feet below the surface of the front yard. She lay less than six feet away from the wall of the house, and directly under the drawing-room window. There was no sign of coffin or coffin-plate. Under her head was a high, richly carved tortoise-shell comb, mute evidence that she had not been buried in cap and shroud, as was the custom a hundred years agone. The oldest inhabitant of a city that is tenacious of domestic legends, had never heard of an interment in that quarter of a residential and aristocratic district. The street, named for the eminent lawyer, must have been laid out since the house was built, and may have been cut right through grounds, then far more spacious than when we bought the place. Even so, the grave was dug in the front garden, and so close to the house as torender untenable the theory that the plot was ever part of a family burying-ground.
The papers took inquisitive note of all these circumstances, and let the matter drop as an unexplained mystery. Within the present occupancy of the house, I have heard that the gray lady still walks on moonlight nights, and, in gusty midnights, visits the bedside of terrified inmates to press small, light hands upon the feet, and so passing upward, to rest upon the chest of the awakened sleeper. I was asked by one who had felt them, if I had “ever heard the legend that a bride, dressed for her wedding, fell dead in that upper chamber ages ago.”
My informant could not tell me from whom she had the grewsome tale, or the date thereof. “Somebody had told her that it happened once upon a time.” She knew that the unquiet creature still “walked the halls and stairs.”
She should have been “laid” by the decent ceremony of burial in consecrated ground, awarded to the exhumed bones.
I have talked with a grandson of our former next-door neighbor, and had from him a circumstantial account of the disinterment of the nameless remains. They must have lain nearer the turf above them, a century back, than when they were found. The young man was a boy when he ran to the hole made by the workmen’s spades, and watched the men bring to light the entire skeleton. He verified the story of the high, carved comb. He told me, too, of a midnight alarm of screaming children at the vision of a little gray lady, walking between the double row of beds in the dormitory, adding:
“I told those who asked if any story was attached to the house, that I had lived next door ever since I was born, and played every day with your sisters and brothers, and never heard a whisper that the house was haunted.”
So said all our neighbors. We kept our own counsel. It was our father’s wise decree.
I have told my ghost-story with no attempt at explanation of psychical phenomena. After all these years I fall back, when questioned as to hypotheses, upon my father’s terse dicta:
“How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all!”