XXVII My Northern Kinspeople — “Quelqu’un” and a Lifelong Friendship
I rewrote the new book that winter, reading it, chapter by chapter, aloud to my father, in the evening. He was a judicious critic, and I need not repeat here how earnest and rapt a listener. I had received proposals for the publication of my “next book” from six Northern publishers. In the spring my father went to New York and arranged for the preliminaries with the, then, flourishing firm of Derby & Jackson.
It was brought out while I was in Boston that summer, under the title of The Hidden Path. I anticipate dates in jotting down here that I had my first taste of professional envy in connection with this book.
My journeying homeward in September was broken by a fortnight’s stay at the hospitable abode of the Derbys in Yonkers. I was at a reception in New York one evening, when my unfortunately acute hearing brought to me a fragment of a conversation, not intended for my edification, between my publisher and a literary woman of note. Mr. Derby was telling her, after the tactless manner of men, how well The Hidden Path had “done” at the Trade Sales just concluded.
“Ah!” said the famous woman, icily. “And I suppose she is naturally greatly elated?”
Mr. Derby laughed.
“She hides it well if she is. Have you read the book?”
“Yes. You were good enough to send me a copy, you know. It is quite a creditable school-girl production.”
I moved clean out of hearing. I told Mr. Derby, afterward, what I had heard, adding that my chief regret was at the lowering of my ideal of professional generosity. Up to that moment I had met with indulgent sympathy and such noble freedom from envious hypercriticism, as to foster the fondly-cherished idea that the expression of lofty sentiment presupposes the ever-present dwelling of the same within the soul. In simpler phrase, that the proverb—“Higher than himself can no man think,” had its converse in—“Lower than himself can no man be.”
In this I erred. I grant it, in this one instance. I had judged correctly of the grand Guild to which I aspired, with yearnings unutterable, to belong.
It was an eventful summer. My father and I had gone on to Boston from New York, setting out, the same week, for a tour through the White Mountains. I was the only woman in the party. Our friend, Ned Rhodes, a distant cousin, Henry Field, of Boston, and my father completed the quartette. Ten days afterward, we two—my father and I—met a larger travelling party in New York. Mr. and Mrs. William Terhune, Mrs. Greenleaf, the widow of Doctor Hoge’s friend; “Staff” Little, the brother of Mrs. William Terhune, and Edward Terhune, now the pastor of a church at Charlotte C. H., Virginia, composed the company which joined itself to us, and set forth merrily for Niagara and the Lakes.
The trip accomplished, I settled down comfortably and happily in Boston and the charming environs thereof for the rest of the season.
Another halcyon summer!
If I have made scant mention of my father’s kindred in the land of his birth, it is because this is a story of the Old South and of a life that has ceased to be, except in the hearts of the very few who may take up the boast of the Grecian historian—“Of which I was a part.”
I should be an ingrate of a despicable type were I to pass by as matters of no moment, the influences brought to bear upon my life at that date, and through succeeding years, by my association with the several households who made up the family connection in that vicinity.
My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Lewis Pierce, owned and occupied the ancient homestead in Dorchester. He was “a character” in his way. Handsome in his youth, he was still a man of imposing presence, especially when, attired in black broadcloth, and clean shaven, he sat on Sunday in the pew owned by the Pierces for eight generations in the old church on “Meeting House Hill.” He did not always approve of the doctrine and politics of the officiating clergyman. He opened his mind to me to this effect one Sunday that summer, as we jogged along in his low-hung phaeton, drawn by a horse as portly and as well-set-up as his master.
“The man that is to hold forth to-day is what my wife scolds me for calling ‘one of those higher law devils,’” he began by saying. “He is of the opinion that the law, forbidding slavery and denying rights to the masters of the slaves and all that, ought to set aside the Constitution and the laws made by better men and wiser heads than his. He’d override them all, if he could. I’ve nothing to say against a man’s having his own notions on that, or any other subject, but if he’s a minister of the gospel, he ought to preach the truth he finds in the Bible, and keep his confounded politics out of the pulpit.”
He leaned forward to flick a fly from the sleek horse with his whip.
“I’ve been given to understand that he doesn’t like to see me and some others of the same stripe in church when he preaches for us. I pay no attention to that. If he, or any others of his damnable way of thinking, imagine that I’m to be kept out of the church in which the Pierces owned a pew before this man and his crew were ever thought of, he’ll find himself mistaken. That’s all there is about it!”
It was worth seeing, after hearing this, the sturdy old representative of the Puritans, sitting bolt upright in the quaint box-pew where his forbears had worshipped the God of battles over a century before, and keeping what he called his “weather eye” upon the suspected expounder of the gospel of peace. The obnoxious occupant of the ancient and honorable pulpit was, to my notion, an amiable and inoffensive individual. He preached well, and with never an allusion to “higher law.” Yet Uncle Lewis kept watch and ward throughout the service. I could easily believe that he would have arisen to his feet and challenged audibly any approach to the forbidden territory.
The day and scene were recalled forcibly to my memory by a visit paid to my Newark home in 1864 by Francis Pierce, the protestant’s oldest son, on his way home from Washington. He was one of a committee of Dorchester citizens sent to the Capital to look after the welfare of Massachusetts troops called into the field by a Republican President.
The wife of the head of the Pierce homestead was one of the loveliest women ever brought into a world where saints are out of place. Near her lived an old widow, who was a proverb for captiousness and wrongheadedness. I never heard her say a kind or charitable word of neighbor or friend, until she astounded me one day by breaking out into a eulogy upon Aunt Pierce and Cousin Melissa, Francis’s wife:
“We read in the Scriptures that God is love. I allers think of them two women when I hear that text. It might be said of both of ’em: they are jest love—through an’ through!”
I carried the story to the blesséd pair, you may be sure. Whereupon, my aunt smiled compassionately.
“Poor old lady! People who don’t know how much trouble she has had, are hard upon her. We can’t judge one another unless we know all sides of a question. She is greatly to be pitied.”
And Cousin Melissa, in the gentle tone she might have learned from her beloved mother-in-law—“I always think that nobody is cross unless she is unhappy.”
Aurora Leigh had not been written then. If it had been, neither of the white-souled dears would have read a word of it. Yet Mrs. Browning put this into the mouth of her heroine:
“The dear Christ comfort you!
You must have been most miserable
To be so cruel!”
The old house was a never-ending delight to me. It was built in 1640 (see Chapter I), ten years after the good ship Mary and John brought over from Plymouth the Massachusetts Bay Colony, landing her passengers in Boston. Robert Pierce (or Percie) was, although a blood connection of the Northumberland Percies, the younger son of a younger son, and so far “out of the running” for title or fortune on that account, that he sought a home and livelihood in the New World.
My ancestress, Ann Greenaway, whose tedious voyage from England to Massachusetts was beguiled by her courtship and marriage to stalwart “Robert of Dorchester,” bore him many robust sons and “capable,” if not fair daughters, dying at last in the Dorchester homestead at the ripe age of one hundred and four.
From her the long line of descendants may have inherited the stout constitutions and stouter hearts that gave and kept for them a place in every community in which they have taken root.
The story of the Pierce Homestead is told in Some Colonial Homesteads more at length than I can give it here.
The Virginia cousin was cordially welcomed to the cradle of her foremothers, and a warm attachment grew up between me and each member of the two households. My cousin Francis had built a modern house upon a corner of the homestead grounds, and I was as happily at home there as in the original nest.
Another adopted home—and in which I spent more time than in all the rest put together—was that of my cousin, Mrs. Long, “the prettiest of the three Lizzies” referred to in one of my letters. Her mother, my father’s favorite relative, had died since my last visit to Boston. Her daughter was married at her death-bed. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, wedded to a man of congenial tastes who adored her. The intimacy of this one of our Yankee cousins and ourselves began before Mea and I had ever seen her. My sister and “Lizzie” were diligent correspondents from their school-days. To a chance remark of mine relative to their letters, I owe one of the most stable friendships that has blessed my life.
We sisters were in the school-room at recess one day when I was fourteen, Mea sixteen. I was preparing a French exercise for M. Guillet, Mea writing to Boston. We had the room to ourselves for the time. My sister looked up from her paper to say:
“What shall I say to Lizzie for you?”
“Give her my love, and tell her to provide me with a correspondent as charming as herself.”
In her reply Lizzie begged leave to introduce a particular friend of her own, “intelligent and lovable—altogether interesting, in fact.” This friend had heard her talk of her Southern cousins and wished to know them; but I must write the first letter. I caught at the suggestion of what commended itself to me as adventure, and it was an epistolary age. Letters long and numerous, filled with details and disquisitions, held the place usurped by telephone, telegraph, and post-cards. We had time to write, and considered that we could not put it to a better purpose. So the next letter from my sister to my cousin contained a four-pager from me, addressed to “Quelqu’une.” I gave fancy free play in conversing with the unknown, writing more nonsense than sober reason. I set her in the chair opposite mine, and discoursed at her of “divers sayings.” If not
“Of ships and shoes and sealing-wax
And cabbages and kings”—
of wars and rumors of wars, and school duties, and current literature.
In due time I had a reply in like strain, but to my consternation, written in a man’s hand, and signed “Quelqu’un.” He apologized respectfully for the ambiguous terms of the introduction that had led me into a mistake as to his sex, and hoped that the silver that was beginning to stipple his dark hair would guarantee the propriety of a continued correspondence.
“Time was,” he mused, “when I could conjugate Amo in all its moods and tenses. Now I get no further than Amabam, and am constrained to confess myself in the tense at which I halt.”
We had written to one another once a month for two years before the sight of a note to Lizzie tore the mask from the face of my graybeard mentor, and confirmed my father’s suspicions as to his identity with Ossian Ashley, the husband of Aunt Harriet’s elder daughter. The next visit I paid to Boston brought us together in the intimacy of the family circle. He never dropped the rôle of elderly, and as time rolled on, of brotherly friend. He was, at that date, perhaps thirty-five years of age, and a superb specimen of robust manhood. I have seldom beheld a handsomer man, and his port was kingly, even when he had passed his eightieth birthday. Although a busy man of affairs, he was a systematic student. His library might have been the work-shop of a professional litterateur; he was a regular contributor to several journals upon financial and literary topics, handling each with grace and strength. His translation of Victor Cherbuliez’s Count Kosta was a marvellous rendering of the tone and sense of the original into elegant English. He was an excellent French and Latin scholar, and, when his son entered a German university, set himself, at sixty-odd, to study German, that he “might not shame the boy when he came home.”
Before that, he had removed to New York City, and engaged in business there as a railway stock-broker. He was, up to a few months prior to his death, President of the Wabash Railway, and maintained throughout his blameless and beneficent life, a reputation for probity, energy, and talent.
Peace to his knightly soul!
He was passing good to me that summer. In company with his wife, we drove, sailed, and visited steamships, Bunker Hill Monument, and other places of historic interest. In their society I made my first visit to the theatre, and attended concerts and lectures. He lent me books, and led me on to discuss them, then, and when I was at home. And this when he was building up his business, looking after various family interests, not strictly his own (he was forever lending a hand to somebody!), and studying late into the night, as if working for a university degree. I am told that such men are so rare in our time and country as to make this one of my heroes a phenomenon.
It is not marvellous that friendships like these, enjoyed when character and opinion were in forming, should have cultivated optimism that has withstood the shock and undermining of late disappointments. It may well be that I have not known another man who, with his fortune to found, a household to support, and a press of mental toil that would have exhausted the energies of the average student, would have kept up a correspondence with a child for the sake of pleasing and educating her, and carried it on out of affectionate interest in a provincial kinswoman.
Affection and genial sympathy, with whatever concerned me or mine, endured to the end. He was my husband’s warm friend, a second father to my children—always and everywhere, my ally.
My last sight of him, before he succumbed to lingering and mortal illness, is vividly present with me. We had dined with him and his wife, and said to ourselves as we had hundreds of times, that time had mellowed, without dimming her beauty, and made him magnificent. The word is none too strong to describe him, as he towered above me in the parting words exchanged in light-heartedness unchecked by any premonition that we might never chat and laugh together again this side of the Silent Sea. He was over six feet in height; his hair and flowing beard were silver-white; his fine eyes darker and brighter by contrast; his smile was as gentle and his repartee as ready as when he had jested with me in those bygone summers from which the glory has never faded for me.
My upturned face must have expressed something of what filled heart and thoughts, for he drew me up to him suddenly, and kissed me between the eyes. Then, with the laugh I knew so well, he held out his hand to my husband:
“You mustn’t be jealous, my dear fellow! I knew her a long time before you ever saw her. And such good friends as we have been for—bless my soul!—can it be more than fifty years?”
Again I say: “God rest his knightly soul!” It is worth living to have known one such man, and to have had him for my “good friend” for “more than fifty years.”