XIX Wedding and Bridesmaid — The Routine of a Large Family — My First Bereavement
In the 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, all told, 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 at high 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’s wedding—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 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 late July, 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 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 the terrible desolation 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 for some 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 of ten brothers. 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 not come to me? I am very lonely at times. One sister gone! 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, exercising so 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.”