HAD been seven years old for so long that I alluded to myself habitually as "almost eight." We had our governess now, Miss Davidson, a handsome, amiable, and somewhat sentimental Bostonian recommended by a Richmond friend of my father. Four other girls studied with us. Two of them, Paulina and Sarah Hobson, were our second cousins. They stayed at our house from Monday morning until Friday evening, going home for Sunday, unless the weather were bad. Madeline and Rosa Pemberton were day scholars, the Pemberton plantation adjoining ours.
I was the youngest of the six, and while Ifancy that I was rather a favorite with Miss Davidson, I endured much from the girls on account of my inferiority in age, as well as because of my "old-fashioned, conceited ways." That was one reason I spoke of being almost eight. I was trying to grow up to what they complained of as "getting above" myself.
The frank brutality of school children of both sexes, as contrasted with the unselfish forbearance (or the show of it) and the suave courtesy of well-bred men and women, is an instructive study in the evolution of ethics. The youngest boy or girl in class or college is the weakest wolf in the pack, the under dog in the fight. I had all of a little girl's natural desire for new playfellows and the dreamer's passion for more material for castle-building. The prospect of "the school" was ravishing. I constructed scenes and rehearsed conversations, with the cast of coming actors, until the quartette must have been super-or sub-human, had they come up to one tithe of my requirements.
In plain and very homely fact, they were four commonplace, provincial girls of average natural intelligence, in age varying from twelve to fourteen. They studied because they would be called upon to recite, and recited fairly well for fear of reproof and bad marks should they be derelict. Out of school, books and bookish thoughts were cast to the four winds of heaven. Their talk was cheery chatter, as brainless as the rattle of grasshoppers in the summer grass.
Mary 'Liza towered above them in scholastic attainments, although the junior of the youngest of them, keeping at the head of every class with unostentatious ease. I am afraid that I may have done my orphaned cousin seeming injustice in former chapters of this autobiography. Her temper was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would have led the casual acquaintance to suppose. She was ultra-conscientious, and naturally so exemplary that her good behavior was a snare. She could not sympathize with my temptations to naughtiness and many fallsfrom good-girlhood. I mention this to introduce what was a surprise to me at the time. She never joined in the persecutions of me that were the labor and the pastime of the other girls. It would have been asking too much to expect her to champion me openly. I was affectionately grateful to her for holding herself aloof when baiting me was the amusement of the hour.
My mother had lamented that I took life so much to heart. It took itself to my heart now, uninvited. I was headstrong and headlong, hot in love, and honest in hatred; with a brain full of absurd fancies, all of which were beloved by their author. I had browsed at will in my father's library, poring by the hour over books twenty years too old for me, yet, by mental cuticular absorption, taking in and assimilating much that contributed to the formation of taste and character. My familiar use of language that sounded pedantic because I got it from books, my frequent references to characters I had known in print, were gibberishand vanity of vanities to my new associates. My very plays were unintelligible to girls who had never heard of William Wallace, and Robert Bruce, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, or read, on Sunday afternoons, of Tobias and the Angel, Judith and Holofernes, and Christiana and her children.
Not one of the four had an intellectual ambition. Mary 'Liza's scholarship did not excite their envy because she was quiet and inoffensive. Proficiency in her studies was "one of her ways." I was talkative and aggressive, and needed taking down. They set themselves systematically about the performance of the duty. The work was done deftly and discreetly, out of the sight and hearing of our elders. Young and raw as I was, I was too wise to tell tales on them. By the time I was four years old that lesson was rubbed into my consciousness by the gruesome rhyme:—
"Tell-tale tit!Your tongue shall be slit,And every dog in our townShall have a little bit!"
This apparently tedious preamble yet leads by an air-line to the first Agricultural Fair ever held at Powhatan Court House. The date was October fifteenth, and all the gentlemen and ladies in the county were entreated to send exhibits of plantation products and feminine handiwork. Enthusiasm ran from homestead to homestead with the speed and heat of a March fire in pine woods. Cattle, tobacco, grain, vegetables, fruit, flowers, bedquilts, poultry, bees, knitting, embroideries,—nothing was talked of but the finest specimens of these that would be "in strong and beauteous order ranged," upon the important day.
Madeline Pemberton had "done" a chair-cover in cross-stitch that her mother said ought to get the first prize, and was dead sure to take the third; Mary 'Liza was knitting a pair of shell-pattern, openwork stockings as fine as a cobweb, in which there wouldnot be a knot or a dropped stitch, and Paulina Hobson was putting her eyes out over a linen-cambric handkerchief under Miss Davidson's direction. Fine sewing and embroidery were taught by governesses then. Sarah Hobson had pieced a crib quilt containing one thousand and twelve tiny squares. I was supposed to be left out in the cold. I would not knit, and to sew I was ashamed because I did it so badly. Nobody paid any attention to me when comparing notes and queries touching the great show.
Yet I nursed an ambition of my own to which no one was privy except Spotswoode, a gray-headed, and proverbially taciturn field-hand, without whose knowledge and coöperation the purpose could not have been carried out.
Wandering, one July afternoon, on the outskirts of a corn-field—the same in which I once lost Musidora—I happened upon a "volunteer" mangel-wurzel beet that had sprung up in a fence corner, a quarter of amile away from any of its kindred. Attracted by the beauty of the translucent, red-veined leaves, I called to Spotswoode who was ploughing between the corn rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif, then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it, Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the wire-grass. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day passed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of grass or a weed was allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh mould, black with fatness, was worked about the swelling tuber by my kind field-hand. He knew that it was to be sent to the Fair in the fulness of time, and believed with me that "not another beet there could hold a candle to it."
As the air thickened and heated with rumors of the prodigies to be revealed on the fifteenth to the lasting honor of Old Powhatan, it was harder and harder to keep whatI knew to myself. I had purposed not to reveal the secret until my father's wagons were in loading with other mammoth esculents and his finest corn and tobacco. Then—so ran the programme—I would march up, bearing my beet with me. It was to be dug up and cleaned by Spotswoode on the evening of the fourteenth, and kept safely in hiding for me. I could depend upon his literal obedience, albeit he never had an original idea.
Temptation befell, and overcame me, on the afternoon of October thirteenth, a date I was not likely, thenceforward, to forget. All six of us girls were gathered in the porch, listening to, and relating, stories of what this one had raised, and that one had made. Mr. Pemberton had a seven-hundred-pound pig, and Mr. Hobson a rooster more beautiful than a bird of Paradise. The syrup of Mrs. Hobson's preserves was as clear as spring water, and Mrs. Pemberton's water melon-rind sweetmeats had as good as taken the prize.
Paulina Hobson sat on the top step of the porch. She was very fair, and her hair was nearly as white as her skin. She was fourteen years old, and wore a grass-green lawn frock. Her eyes were of a paler green, she had a nasty laugh, and her teeth were not good.
"Isn't it nice that all five of us are going to send something?" she said complacently. "You know that nobody but exhibitors can go into the tent for the first hour—from eleven to twelve—so's they can see everything before the crowd gets in. Who'll you stay with, Miss Molly Mumchance, when we all leave you?"
I had not spoken while the talk went on, for fear something might slip out and betray me, prematurely, but I took fire at this.
"I'm going in, myself!" I snapped out.
"Oh, you are? What are you going to exhibit, may we ask?" with her nasty laugh.
"The biggest beet in the world! It measures a yard around."
"Hoo! hoo! hoo!" squealed Paulina soloudly that my father, who was coming in the gate with my mother, Miss Davidson, Uncle Carter, and Aunt Eliza, said pleasantly:—
"What is the joke, young ladies? Mayn't we laugh, too?"
Madeline Pemberton answered. Miss Davidson had to reprove her every day for forwardness.
"Why, Mr. Burwell,"—laughing with affected violence,—"Molly says she is going to send some beets to the Fair that measure ever so many yards around."
"I didn't!" cried I, in a passion. "You know that isn't true!"
My father moved toward me.
"Whatdidyou say, daughter?"
I hung my head. If I told, where would be the surprise and the visioned triumph?
"What did you say, Molly?" repeated my father, in quiet gravity.
"I saidonebeet, and that it measured one yard," stammered I, reluctantly.
"That was bad enough. When so manyolder people are trying to see who can tell the biggest story, little girls ought to be especially careful."
His eyes did not go to Madeline, but his emphasis did. The thought of being classed with her lent me coherence and courage. I looked up.
"I have one beet, father, that is a yard 'round. I raised it myself. If you don't believe me, you can ask Spotswoode."
"I don't ask my servants if my daughter is telling the truth. Where is your beet?"
I pointed.
"Away over yonder—the other side of the corn-field."
Paulina and Rosa tittered, Madeline giggled,—then all three pretended to smother the demonstration with their handkerchiefs and behind their hands. Mary 'Liza looked scared and sorry. My father took hold of my hand.
"Take me to see it!"
The others fell into Indian file behind us,as we marched outside of the garden fence and past the Old Orchard where the rays of the sinking sun shot horizontal shafts under the trees to our very feet, and so to the corn-field. I did not glance behind to see who entered it after us, but pushed right ahead between the stalks, the stiff blades switching my cheeks. When we neared the "garden," I ran forward, flushed and impatient, not to display my prize, but to clear myself by proving my words. An envious, jagged blade slashed my forehead as I tore by. I did not feel it at the moment, or for half an hour after it began to bleed.
For—the beet was gone!
The cleared space was there to show where something had been cultivated; the bare earth was raked level. Not so much as the hole from which my beet had been ravished remained in circumstantial evidence. The rest of the party arrived while I stood transfixed, the picture of detected guilt. To the rustle of the corn, and the shuffle of feet over thefurrows succeeded a horrible hush. Then, a chorus of mocking girlish cackles, led by Paulina Hobson's discordant screech, smote the sunset air and covered me with a pall of infamy. Paulina caught at the fence for support as she laughed; Madeline bent double and reeled sideways.
I clutched my father's hand, drowning and suffocating in the waves of despairing agony; I shook my tight fist at the insulting quartette.
"They—they—took it! It was here this morning. It was here just after dinner to-day!"
"Be quiet, girls!" ordered my judge-advocate. "Molly! I want the exact truth. If you accuse them, you must prove what you say. Things have gone too far to stop here. Didn't you say that Spotswoode knew something about the affair?"
"He knows all about it. He helped me, ever so many times, and he saw how big it was," I ejaculated vehemently.
"We shall probably find him at the stables, feeding the horses."
Back we trudged by my air-line, well-worn but narrow. I fancy that my father took note of my familiarity with the path, but he did not speak of it. I marched in front of him, gloomy and desperate. Some of the others talked low as they straggled along. The girls kept up a hissing whispering, for which I hated them with my whole soul. I think that my mother and Miss Davidson shed some furtive tears, for my case was black, and they were tender-hearted.
Spotswoode was looking after his plough-horses, as my father had conjectured. At his master's shout, he emerged from the stalls and presented himself in the stable door. Ungainly, dirty, bare-footed, his ragged wool hat on the back of his unkempt woolly poll, his jaw dropping in idiotic amazement at sight of the party—he was a ludicrous figure in the bath of late sunshine that brought out every uncomely item of the picture. Preoccupied and distraught as I was, I saw how the dust from the stable floor floated in goldenclouds to the cobwebbed rafters, as the sun struck past the man in the doorway and glorified the murky interior.
I rushed through the yard, heedless of manure heaps, and young pigs and calves scattered by my impetuous approach.
"Oh, Spotswoode!" in a voice that cracked and went to pieces as I ran, "somebody has stolen my beet! You can tell father—"
A hot valve closed in my windpipe and shut out the rest.
Spotswoode's jaw hung more loosely; his eyes were utterly vacant.
"Ya-as, little Mistis!" he drawled, and slunk back into the stable.
"What do you mean, sir? Come back here, this minute!" called his master.
When he reappeared, he carried in both hands, extended, after the similitude of a pre-historic monkey making a votive offering—something dark-red and pot-bellied, and more immense than I had dreamed it could look.A cluster of cropped leaves crowned it, a taper root, a foot long, depended from the bottom.
"I done been dig it up fo' you an' wash it, dis ebenin', 'stid o' termorrer," drawled my vindicator. "So's ter hab it all ready fur the Fyar."
Mute and triumphant, I received it in a rapturous embrace, set it on a bench by the stable door, and passed the hem of my muslin apron about it. The ends just met.
"That's how I knew how big it was," I said simply. "Mother told me that my apron was a yard wide. I measured it while it was in the ground."
The beet—and its history—went to the Fair, and a prize was awarded to "Miss Mary Hobson Burwell, For best specimen of Mangel Wurzel, raised by Herself."
N a country neighborhood where half the people were cousins to the other half, gossip could not but spring up and flourish as lushly as pursley,—named by the Indians, "the white man's foot."
The gossip was usually kindly; sometimes it was captious, now and then it was almost malicious. Everything depends upon the medium through which the floating matter in the air is strained.
Cousin Molly Belle's best friends thought and said that she chose judiciously in marryingthe clean-lived, high-minded gentleman who had loved her before she was grown and whom she loved dearly in return. Her next best friends intimated that the most popular girl in the county might have done better for herself than to take Frank Morton, as fine a fellow as ever lived, but whose share of his father's estate was a small plantation with a tolerable house upon it, a dozen "hands" and, maybe, a thousand dollars or so in bonds and stocks. The girls she had out-belled, the girls' mothers, and sundry youths to whom Mrs. Frank Morton had given the mitten in her singlehood, said openly that she had quite thrown herself away in settling down to house-keeping, poultry-raising, and home-making in an out-of-the-way farmstead, with little society except that of a man ten years older, and thirty years soberer, than herself.
What a different story I could have told to those who doubted, and those who pitied! Nowhere in all our broad and bonny State did human lives flow on more smoothly andradiantly than in the white house nestled under the great oak that was a landmark for miles around. It had but five rooms, kitchen, store-room, smoke-house, and other domestic offices being in detached buildings, as was the custom of the region and times. If there had been fifty they could not have held the happiness that streamed through the five as lavishly as the sunshine, and, like the sunshine, was newly made every day.
I was going on ten years old when my sweet mother gave a little sister to Bud and me. She had been with us but three days when Cousin Molly Belle drove over for me and the small hair trunk that meant a visit of several days when it went along. This time it signified four of the veryloveliestweeks of my life, and two Adventures.
The blessèd grandchildren, at whose instance these tales of that all-so-long-ago are written with flying pen and brimming heart, and sometimes eyes so moist that the lines waver and swim upon the page, will have it—as their parents insisted before them—that "we never, never can have such good times and so many happenings as you had when you were new."
If I smile quietly in telling over to myself the simple elements and few, out of which the good times were made, and how tame the happenings would be to modern young folk, I cannot gainsay the truth that my daily life was full and rich, and that every hour had a peculiar interest.
For one thing, there was a baby at Oakholme, a bouncing boy, sturdy of limb and of lung, and so like both his parents in all the good qualities possible to a baby, as to leave nothing to be desired by the best friends aforesaid, and no room for criticism on the part of the malcontents. Out-of-doors were chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea-fowls, pigs, calves, pigeons, and a couple of colts,—all, like the baby boy, the best of their kind. What time was left on our hands after each had had its meed of attention, was more than consumedby a library such as few young planters had collected in a county where choice literature was as much household plenishing as beds, tables, and candlesticks.
It was July, and the days were at their longest according to the Warrock's Almanac that hung over Cousin Frank's desk in a corner of the dining room. They were never so short to me before.
Adventure No. 1 befell us one forenoon, as Cousin Molly Belle and I were topping and tailing gooseberries for tarts, on the side porch. Baby Carter was on the mat at our feet, bulging his eyes and swelling his cheeks in futile efforts to extort a squeak from a chinquapin whistle his father had made for him. The kind that, as you may recollect, kept the whistle in them over night, and did not shrivel up.
"It's there, old fellow, if you really know how to get it out," Cousin Frank told his son and heir. "Everything depends upon yourself."
"Like other things that people fret for," moralized the mother.
Nevertheless, she reached down for the whistle, wiped the mouthpiece dry, and sent the baby into ecstasies by executing "Yankee Doodle" flourishingly upon it. A chinquapin fife lends itself more readily to the patriotic, step-and-go-fetch-it melody than to any other in the nationalrépertoire. Carter crowed, opened his mouth wide, and beat his fat pink palms together.
"Just as they applaud the clown at the circus!" said the performer. "He already recognizes his mother's talents."
"If he ever fails to do that, I'll flog him out of his boots!" retorted the father.
A wild commotion at "the quarters" cut his speech short. Women shrieked, children bellowed, men roared, and two words disentangled themselves from the turmoil.
"Maddog!maddog!" pronounced, as the warning cry is spoken everywhere at the South, with a heavy accent on the first word.
Cousin Frank whipped up the baby; Cousin Molly thrust her hand under the collar of Hector, a fine pointer who lay on the floor, and, urging me before them, they hustled us all into the house in the half twinkle of an eye. In another, Cousin Frank was driving a load of buckshot into his gun faster than it was ever loaded before, even by him, and he was a hunting expert.
"Dear!" his wife caught the hand laid on the door-knob; her eyes were wild and imploring.
"Yes, my darling!"
He was out and the door was shut.
We flew to the window. Right up the path leading by the quarters from the spring at the foot of the hill, trotted an enormous bull dog. Half a dozen men were pelting him with stones from a respectful distance. He paid no attention to stones or shouts. Keeping the straight path, his brute head wagging drunkenly, he was making directly for the open yard-gate, from which a gravel walk led to theporch where we had been sitting. Snap, his master's favorite hunter, and the petted darling of his mistress, was hitched to the rack by the gate, ready-saddled for Cousin Frank's morning round of the plantation. At the noise behind him, the intelligent creature threw up his handsome head, glanced over his shoulder, and began to plunge and snort, as if aware of the danger. His master spoke soothingly as he planted his own body between him and the ugly beast.
"Steady, old boy! steady!"
In saying it he raised the gun to his shoulder. It was all done so quickly that I had hardly seen the livid horror in Cousin Molly Belle's face when the good gun spoke, the muzzle within ten yards of the dog's head, and he rolled over in the path.
"What if you had missed him! He would have been upon you before you could reload!" shuddered the wife, as we ran out to meet Cousin Frank.
"I did not mean to miss him. If I had,I should have clubbed my gun and brained him. No, dear love! it would not 'have done as well had I fired at him over the palings.' Snap was on the other side of the gate. And"—with an arch flash he might have learned from her—"you and Namesake and I think the world and all of Snap, you know."
It was the only allusion he ever made in my hearing to the escapade that won him his wife.
We learned, within a few hours, that the dog had bitten several cows, five other dogs, and a valuable colt, before he reached Oakholme.
I was always very fond of Cousin Frank. Henceforward, he stepped into the vanguard of my heroes. I did not believe that Israel Putnam could have done anything more daring than what I had witnessed in the safe place in which he put us "before he sallied forth into the very jaws of death." That was the way I described it to myself.
Tramping through the lower pasture at his side that afternoon I tried to voice my admiration to him, but used less inflated language. I dearly enjoyed these long walks over the plantation in his company. He was an excellent farmer, and kept no overseer. I learned a great deal of forestry and botany from his talk. If he adapted himself, consciously, to my understanding, he did not let me perceive it. The recollection of his unfailing patience and his apparent satisfaction in the society of the child who worshipped him and his wife, has been a useful lesson to me in my intercourse with the young. I had told Cousin Molly Belle, a long time ago, that he "talked straight to children," with none of the involved meanings and would-be humorous turns of speech with which some grown-uppers diverted themselves and mystified us.
When he smiled at my well-mouthed, "Do you know, Cousin Frank, that your bravery may have saved at least four lives—Cousin Molly Belle's, and baby's, and Snap's, and mine?"—I felt that he was not laughing at me inside, as the manner of some is.
"I don't know about that, Namesake." Nobody but himself and his wife was allowed to call me that. They were one, you know. "All of you would probably have got out of the way, except Snap. Itwouldhave been a great pity to have him bitten. But here is a wee bit of a thing that could, and would, save a good many lives if people were as well acquainted with it as they ought to be. I am surprised that it is so little known in a part of the country where snakes abound as they do about here."
He stooped to gather, and gave to me, some succulent sprigs from a plant that grew in profusion along the branch running through the meadow.
"It is a cure for a snake-bite if bruised into a poultice and bound upon the placesoon after one is bitten. My father showed it to me a great many years ago, when I was a little shaver, and told me how he had learned about it from an old Indian herb-doctor. He tried it several times for moccasin-and adder-and copperhead-bites among his servants, and it was a cure in every instance. It grows on both sides of this branch, and nowhere else that I know of on the plantation. My father was an admirable botanist."
"So are you," said I, stoutly.
"Oh, no. As the saying is, his chips were worth more than my logs."
No law of nature is more nearly invariable than that Events are twins, and often triplets. That very evening, after supper, Cousin Frank was on his way from the stables to the house, and saw what he mistook for a carriage whip lying in the walk. The moon was shining and he had no doubt as to what the thing was when he stooped to pick it up. Before he touchedit, it made one swift writhe and dart and struck him on the wrist.
Cousin Molly Belle was laying Carter in the cradle, the last note of her lullaby upon her lips when her husband entered. He clutched his right wrist tightly with the left hand and was pale, but his voice was steady and gentle.
"Dear," he said, "don't be frightened, but I have been bitten by a snake. A copperhead, I think. Get me some whiskey, please."
"The whiskey, Flora! Quick!" called the wife to her maid who stood by. "Pour out a tumblerful and give it to him."
For herself, she fell upon her knees, seized her husband's wrist and carried it to her mouth. This I saw, and heard the first words of his startled protest as the dear lips closed upon the wound. I was out of the room and clear of the house the next minute and speeding down the path and hill to the lower pasture.
The snake was at large, and might waylay me from any bush or tuft of grass. The moonbeams were ghostly and the stillness of the wide solitude was eerie. Being but a child,—and a girl-child,—I thought of these things, and of the likelihood of meeting runaway negroes, and mad dogs, and stray sane curs whose duty it was to attack nocturnal trespassers, and of a vicious bull never let out to roam the pasture except at night. I was afraid of them all, intellectually. My heart was too full of a mightier dread to let bugbears turn me back. I ran right on until the branch, a silver ribbon on the dark bosom of the meadow, was before me. Grasses and weeds were laden with dew, and the water whirled and whispered about the roots. I could have believed that the purling formed itself into words when I knelt down to fumble for the snake-bite cure. I would not let myself be scared. I kept saying over and over—"To save his life! to save his life!"
In the intensity of my excitement, languagethat I was afraid was blasphemous, yet could not exclude from my mind, pressed upon me:—
"He saved others. Himself he cannot save!"
He might be dying now. He had said that the poultice ought to be applied at once. Horrid stories of what had happened to people who were bitten by rattlesnakes and cobras tormented me, and would not be beaten off.
"A copperhead, I think he said. How could he know that it was not a cobra? Would he swell up, turn black, and expire in convulsions before I could reach him?" I said "expire in convulsions," out of a book. Everyday Virginia vernacular fell short of the exigency.
My feet were drenched, my pantalettes and skirts were bedraggled up to the knees, my eyes were large and black in my colorless face, when I burst into the chamber, and threw the bunch of priceless herbs into Cousin Molly Belle's lap. I was too spent for speech.
Cousin Frank's coat and vest were off; his right shirt-sleeve was rolled up to the shoulder,and he was holding his hand and wrist in a deep bowl of warm water. The air reeked with the fumes of whiskey and hartshorn.
I concluded, when I came to think of it the next day, that the whiskey must have been doing antidotal work by getting into his head, for he laughed outright at sight of the specific I had brought. Then, tears—real tears and plenty of them—suffused his eyes and made his voice weak and husky. Or—was it the whiskey?
"You are a dear, brave, thoughtful Namesake!" he said, clearing his throat. "Darling!" to his wife who was eyeing the herbs wonderingly,—"She has been all the way to the lower meadow for those. I showed her the snake-bite cure to-day. Bruise them and put them on my wrist. Then Namesake must get off her wet clothes and go to bed. The danger is over."
I was thirty years old before I found out that what I had risked so much to procure was not the panacea he had showed me, but common jewel-weed, or wild touch-me-not, a species of theImpatiensof botanists, harmless, but not curative.
And they had never let me guess what a blunder I had made!
TheGateses were our distant relatives. Not nearer than fourth cousins-in-law, I fancy, but we counted them among our "kinfolks" in Virginia, calling Mrs. Gates "Cousin Nancy," and Captain Gates, "Cousin 'Ratio." His proper name was Horatio, of course, and he belonged to the family that gave the Revolutionary hero, Horatio Gates, to his country.
I was slowly getting over the whooping-cough, having taken it, as I took most "catching" things that fell in my way,—with all my might. I began to whoop the last of April, and kept it up all summer, when every other child on the plantation was entirely well.
Captain Gates drove over to our house bythe time the breakfast-table was cleared one sultry August day, bringing in his roomy double buggy a basket of Georgia peaches—brunettes with crimson cheeks—and the biggest watermelon I had ever seen, as a neighborly gift to my mother.
"Miss Nancy gave me no peace of my life till I got off with them," he said in his loud, breezy tones. "There's none of her kin she sets more store by than by Cousin Ma'y Anna Burwell. And she's as proud as a peacock of our fruit. I tell her a judgment will come upon her for it. As I take it, Old Marster sends the rain upon the unjust as well as upon the just, and if it's our turn this year, somebody else's turn will come next year, and yet we'll be as good Christians then as we are now. It's one of His ways that's past finding out. Howdy'e, little lady!" putting out a brawny hand to pull me between his knees.
I was standing a yard or so away, but right in front of him, my hands behind me, my eyes and ears, and, I'm afraid, my mouth, open tohis hearty talk. I had never heard God called "Old Marster" before, and if I had not been taught that children ought not to criticise what grown people say and do, I should have been quite sure that it was wrong. I did not want to think any harm of Cousin 'Ratio, and determined that I would not, when he drew a great finger gently over my thin cheek, and looked down at me with kindly, pitying eyes.
"Tut! tut! tut! this is too bad! too bad! We must fill up this gulley somehow, Cousin Ma'y Anna. Other folks' victuals are the best physic I know for that sort of work. Miss Nancy would cry her eyes out if I was to go home with the story that little Molly Burwell had coughed her bones pretty near as bare as barrel-staves, and I didn't try to cover them up again. A week in my peach-orchard and watermelon-patch, with quarts of cream and Miss Nancy's breakfasts, dinners, and suppers—is what she wants. Get her bonnet, and stick a tooth-brush and a pocket-handkerchief into abandbox, Chloe, for I'm going to take her home with me, right straight off."
My mother shook her head smilingly at the thought of the week's visit.
"The child coughs so badly at night that I don't like to have her away from me, Cousin 'Ratio. But change of air, even for a day, would do her good. Her father and I will come for her about sundown."
Thus it happened, that, decked in a clean pink calico frock and white muslin apron, I was hoisted to my perch in the high gig beside Cousin 'Ratio, and set off to spend a whole day at Cold Comfort.
The name was so out of keeping with Cousin 'Ratio's kind, red face and funny ways, and the warm, sweet-smelling day, that I couldn't help asking him on the way "why he called his house such ashiveryname?"
The gig swayed and creaked under his laugh.
"That was just the reason my grandmother gave for naming it. You see, the house stands on the top of a hill, and all the winds fromthree counties get at it in winter. The house my grandfather put up was of wood, and none too tight in the joints, and the poor old lady, his wife—my step-grandmother she was—had rheumatism, and suffered a heap all the year 'round. So, nothing would do but it must be 'Cold Comfort,' and Cold Comfort it has been ever since. We Gateses have a way of giving in to our wives in 'most everything. Everything that's reasonable, I mean. And we don't pick out unreasonable girls for wives."
The fat, sleek horse was taking his own lazy pace in a mile of shady road, cut through the heart of a pine forest. The ground was brown and soft with pine needles, and the high gig swung and creaked a sort of drowsy tune. Cousin 'Ratio tapped the wheel nearest him with his whip, and fell into talk with himself, rather than with the child under his elbow.
"Now, there's Miss Nancy! There's been a heap of fun poked at me, first and last, for building my house in the shape I did.Though, for the life of me, I can't see why I should be obleeged to live in a four-square box because every other man-Jack in Pow'tan County builds his in that way. Miss Nancy was always mighty nervous from the time she was a child; I knew it when I married her. Fact is, she says to me: 'Cap'n Gates, I'm as nervous as a witch, and I'm afraid you'll get out of patience with me sometimes, and I wouldn't blame you if you did.' And, says I,—my hand right on my heart,—'Miss Nancy Miller! if you'll takemeas I am, I'll be proud and happy to takeyouas you are, nerves and all!' says I. 'The proudest man in the State of Virginia,' says I. 'Call it a bargain.'
"And she did—bless her soul! It was the best bargain that ever I made, or ever expect to make, too. Some men marry Temper, and some Extravagant Notions, and some Vanity, and some Jealous, Suspicious Dispositions, and some, again, Stinginess—Good gracious! there's no end to the disagreeable things mendomarry! I marriedNerves!and with them, the best and sweetest and, to my way of thinking, the prettiest woman in the County and State, and the Universe, and I've been thankful for it every day and every hour since—God bless her!"
I waited for him to say something more until I began to wonder, then to get impatient, that he let the horse jog along, the soft creak of the gig keeping time with the leisurely motions of the pampered beast, the master's eyes fixed upon the wheel he was tapping with his whip, as if he had forgotten me entirely.
I made a bold effort to reopen the conversation.
"I suppose Cousin Nancy asked you to build your house round, instead of square?"
I had heard so many different stories about the odd structure which was one of the county curiosities that I was anxious to get at the truth.
He laughed low and pleasantly:—
"Ask me! Not she, bless your soul! She would never have thought of such a thing. 'Twas me that studied it out, lying awake on windy nights because I knew she couldn't sleep for the roaring and whistling around the corners of the old house, and the wind humming in the chimneys and between the window-sashes like a bumblebee as big as a whale. It made her feel so lonesome and blue that many's the time I've heard her crying to herself when she thought I was sound asleep. We were going to pull down the old house, anyhow. It was a rickety concern, and inconvenient as could be. So I got Miss Nancy to tell me how many rooms and closets and all that she'd like to have in a house that was to be built on purpose for her, and for nobody else, and I made a plan of it all on paper, and then I sent her up to stay with her mother in Buckingham County for six months, going up to see her myself every Saturday to spend Sunday—like a nigger going to his 'wife-house,'"—here he stopped to laugh again—"until the last window-shutter was hung, and all the furniture put back and in order—Jerewsalem! how Ididwork! Then I brought her home. I wish you could have seen her face when we came in sight of the solid brick house—round as a cheese box—and I told her I had it built in that shape, so's she should never be made sorrowful, nor kept awake again by the wind a-cutting up shines around sharp corners, so long as we both should live—Amen!"
He jerked a blazing red bandanna handkerchief out of his pocket, turning his face clear away from me to do it, and blew his nose until the woods rang as with the echoes of a foxhunter's horn, then rolled the handkerchief into a ball and polished his face with it in the oddest possible fashion.
Most of the tales current about the round brick house had something to do with Cousin Nancy's whims, especially with her dislike to hearing the wind blow around the corners. Young as I was, I felt, after hearing Cousin'Ratio's story, that he had done a beautiful thing in planning the ingenious surprise for his delicate wife. It crossed my mind, too, that she might have thought the house as ridiculous as other people did, yet pretended to like it sooner than hurt his feelings. She must be a good and devoted wife. Furthermore, I got into my foolish head the notion that it was nice and interesting to have Nerves. I resolved to get a set of my own at an early opportunity and to work them well. To this end, I would watch Cousin Nancy's ways and copy them as closely as a little girl could copy the behavior of a grown-up heroine.
She met us in the porch of the house, crying out with pleasure at sight of me.
"That's a little lady, not to be afraid to come all by herself to see two quiet old folks!" she said as she kissed me. "I ought to have had a dozen girls and boys for you to play with by this time—but I haven't a single one."
She laughed in saying it, yet with suchsincere regret of face and accent that I answered, without taking time to think:—
"I'm mighty sorry you haven't!" Catching myself up, I blundered on: "Not that you and Cousin 'Ratio are not company enough for me. But it seems a pity that, in this pretty place, with so many peaches and watermelons and flowers—and pigeons—and chickens—and all that—there are not any children to eat, and to play with them—and keep you company. I've heard mother say, 'Home wouldn't be Home without the babies.'"
"Your mother is right, child! Your mother is right!"
The words seemed to stick in her throat, and to scrape it as she got them out. Then, to my horror, she sank into a rocking-chair, and, throwing her hands over her face, began to cry, with queer little squeals between the sobs that shook her all over.