XXXV The Stirred “Nest Among the Oaks” — A Crucial Crisis
“Charlotte C. H., April 12th, 1857.
“My still-remembered Friend,—It is a raw, cloudy Sunday afternoon; Mr. Terhune is suffering somewhat from a cold, and is, moreover, fatigued by the labors of the day. I have persuaded him to take a siesta on the lounge. Even my birds are quiet under the drowsy influence of the weather, and only the fire and clock interrupt the stillness of my pleasant chamber....
“I have been on the point several times of writing to you (despite your broken promise of last September), begging you to visit us during the summer. Need I say how happy we should be to see you in our Home?
“It is a sweet word to my ear, a sweet place to my heart, for a happier was never granted to mortals. I do not say this as a matter of course. You should know me too well than to suppose that. It comes up freely—joyously—from a brimming heart. My only fear is lest my cup should be too full, for what more could I ask at the hands of the Giver of mercies? I have a dear little home, furnished in accordance with my own taste; delightful society, and an abundance of it; perfect health, having scarcely seen a sick day since my marriage—and the best husband that lives upon the globe....
“This is a large and flourishing church, demanding much hard work on his part; but he is young and strong, and he loves his profession. We visit constantly together, and here end my out-of-door ‘pastoral duties.’ Within doors, my aim is to make home bright; to guard my husband from annoyance and intrusion during study-hours; to entertain him when he is weary, and to listen sympathizingly to all that interests him. I shall never be a model ‘minister’s wife.’ I knew that from the first, so I have never attempted to play the rôle. Fortunately, it is not expected, much less demanded.
“We shall make a flying visit to Richmond in May. After that, we shall be at home, off and on, certainly until September. Our cottage parsonage—the ‘little nest among the oaks,’ as Alice calls it—is ever ready to receive you, and so are our hearts.
“Were my other and very much better half awake, he would join me in love and good wishes, for I have taught him to know and to love you all.”
A year after my marriage, the friend of my childhood and the intimate correspondent of my girl-life, was married to Rev. William Campbell, the pastor of “Mount Carmel,” the pretty country church in which my forebears and contemporaries had worshipped for generations, the church for which my great-grandfather gave the land; in which he was the first ordained elder, and in which my beloved “Cousin Joe” (“Uncle Archie”) had succeeded him in the same office. In Mount Carmel I had taken my first Communion, and here the new wife of the pastor was to be welcomed into full fellowship with her husband’s flock in November. My husband was invited by Mr. Campbell to take the service on that day, and I was warmly pressed to accompany him.
“Charlotte C. H., November 8th, 1857.
“My own dear Friend,—A fact overlooked by Mr. Terhune and myself, occurred to me a little while ago—viz., that there is only a semi-weekly mail to Smithville. Therefore, to insure your reception of this in season at Montrose, it should go from this place to-morrow. It was Mr. Terhune’s intention to drop a line to Mr. Campbell to-night; but I have begged that I might write to you instead.
“I have many and bright hopes for you. Hopes, not ‘as lovely as baseless,’ but founded upon a knowledge of your character and that of him whom God has given you as your other and stronger self. When I rejoiced in your union, it was with sincere and full delight. You have a mate worthy of you—one whom you love, and who loves you. What more does the woman’s heart crave? You have chosen wisely, and happiness, such as you have never known before, must follow.
“Will you not come up and see us this winter? Nothing would give me more pleasure than to see you in our dear little home.
“Mr. Terhune is very anxious that I should accompany him to Powhatan, but I dare not suffer my mind to dwell upon a project so charming. He cannot, all at once, get used to visiting without me, but in the crib, over in the corner, lies an insurmountable obstacle—tiny to view, but which may not be set aside.
“I wish you could see my noble boy, who will be two months old to-morrow! He is very pretty, says the infallible ‘Everybody.’ To us, he is passing dear. Already he recognizes us and frolics by the half-hour with us, laughing and cooing—the sweetest music that ever sounded through our hearts and home. Nothing but the extreme inconvenience attendant upon travelling and visiting with so young a child, prevents me from accompanying the Reverend gentleman....
“I have no advice to give you except that you shall be yourself, instead of following the kind suggestions of any Mrs. Grundy who has an ideal pattern of the ‘Minister’s Wife’ ready for you to copy. I am confident that you will be ’helpmeet’ for the man, and since he will ask no more, his parish has no right to do it.
“My warm regards to Mr. Campbell. When I see him I will congratulate him. You would not deliver the messages I would send to him. ‘Eddie’ sends a kiss to ‘Auntie Effie.’”
In folding, almost reverently, the time-dyed letter and laying it beside the rest in the box at the bottom of which I found the sallowed “P.P.C.” card, date of “September 2, 1856,” I feel as if I were shutting the door and turning the key upon that far-away time; bidding farewell to a state of society that seems, by contrast with the complex interests of To-day, pastoral in simplicity. In reviewing the setting and scenes of my early history, I am reading a quaint chronicle, inhaling an atmosphere redolent of spices beloved of our granddames, and foreign to their descendants.
It is not I who have told the story, but the girl from provinces that are no more on earth than if they had never been. The Spirit of that Past is the narrator. I sit with her by the open “chimney-piece,” packed as far as arms can reach with blazing hickory logs; as she talks, the imagery of a yet older day comes to my tongue. We knew our Bibles “by heart” in both senses of the term, then, and believed in the spiritual symbolism of that perfervid love-Canticle—the song of the Royal Preacher. I find myself whispering certain musical phrases while the tale goes on, and the story-teller’s face grows more rapt:
“Thy lips drop as the honey-comb; honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon;
“Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard;
“Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon.”
It is not a mystic love-chant, or a dreamy jargon, that I recite under my breath. The sadly few (more sad and few with each year) who recall with me the days that are no more—and forever—will feel what I cannot put into words.
Soon after the dawn of the year 1858, we had news of the death of my husband’s youngest sister, a bright, engaging matron, of whom I had grown very fond in my visits to her New Jersey home. The happy wife of a man who adored her, and the mother of a beautiful boy, she had but one unfulfilled wish on earth. When a baby-girl was put into her arms, she confessed this, and that now she could ask nothing more of heaven. The coveted gift cost her her life.
In March, my dearest friend, Mary Ragland, paid a long-promised visit to the “nest among the oaks.” She had not been strong all winter. She was never robust. I brought her up from town, in joyous confidence that the climate that had kept me well and vigorous would brace her up to concert pitch. For a few weeks she seemed to justify that belief. Then the languor and slow fever returned. She faded before our incredulous eyes as a flower droops on the stem. She had no pain, and so slight was the rise in temperature that made her thirsty by night, that we would not have detected it had she not mentioned casually at breakfast that she arose to get a drink of water, and chanced to see, through the window, a lunar rainbow. This led to the discovery that she always arose two or three times each night to quench her thirst. It was characteristic that she saw the rainbow, and was eager to report it next day. Beautiful things floated to her by some law of natural attraction. She never took to her bed. To the last, she averred, laughingly, that she was “only lazy and languid.” She “would be all right very soon.”
As a sort of low delirium overtook her senses, her fantasies were all of fair and lovely sights and sweet sounds. She asked me “where I got the chain of pearls I was wearing, and why she had never seen it before?” She exclaimed at the beauty of garlands of flowers wreathing pictures and window-cornices, invisible to our eyes. Music—a passion of her life—was a solace in the fearful restlessness of the dying hours. She would have us sing to her—first one, then the other, for an hour at a time—lying peacefully attent, with that unearthly radiance upon her face that never left it until the coffin-lid shut it from our sight, and joining in, when a favorite hymn was sung, with the rich contralto which was her “part” in our family concerts.
“She is singing herself away,” said my husband, at twilight on the ninth of May—my mother’s birthday.
At nine o’clock that evening the swan-song was hushed.
We carried her down to Richmond, the next day but one.
I have said elsewhere that it is not given to one to have two perfect, all-satisfying, friendships this side of the Land that is all Love. She had gladdened our cottage for little over a month. It was never quite the same after she flew heavenward. Nor was my life.
To everybody else, it seemed that the “stirring” of the nest began during the visit we paid to Northern friends that summer.
Our vacation was longer than usual. It could not be gay, for our mourning garments expressed but inadequately the gloom from which our spirits could not escape, with the memory of two bereavements fresh in the minds of all.
It was during this sojourn with the relatives, whose adoption of me had been frankly affectionate from the beginning of our association, that I learned of the desire of my father-in-law to have his son removed nearer to the rest of the family. The old Judge was proud and fond of the boy, and Virginia was a long distance away from New York—to him, and other loyal Middle Statesmen, as truly the Hub of Civilization as Boston to the born Bostonian. Moreover, the Village Church at Charlotte Court-House was a country charge, although eminently respectable in character, and honorable in all things pertaining to church traditions. Other men as young, and, in the father’s opinion, inferior in talent and education, were called to city parishes. “It was not right for Edward to bury himself in the backwoods until such time as he would be too near the dead line, with respect to age, to hope for preferment.”
All this and more of the like purport fell upon unheeding ears, when addressed to me. I had but one answer to make, after listening respectfully to argument and appeal:
“I promised Edward, of my own free will and accord, before our marriage, that I would never attempt to sway his judgment in anything relating to his profession. Least of all, would I cast the weight of what influence I might have into either scale, if he were called upon to make a change of pastorate. He must do as he thinks best.”
More than one church had made overtures to the rising man, and his kindred were hanging eagerly upon his decision. The initial “stir” had been given. It was a positive relief when we turned our faces southward.
The nest was full that autumn. My husband’s widower brother-in-law, crushed by his late bereavement, and compelled to resign the home in which his wife had taken just pride; helpless, as only a man of strictly domestic tastes can be in such circumstances, abandoned his profession of the law, and resolved to study divinity. My brother Herbert turned his back upon a promising business career, and made the same resolution. Both men were rusty in Latin and Greek, and neither knew anything of Hebrew. My husband—ever generous to a fault in the expenditure of his own time and strength in the service of others—rashly offered to “coach” them for a few months. I think they believed him, when he represented that Latin was mere play to him, and that an hour or two a day would be an advantage to him in refreshing his recollection of other dead languages.
Alice and I bemoaned ourselves, in confidence and privily, over the loss of the quietly-happy evenings when we sewed or crocheted, while the third person of the trio read aloud, as few other men could read—according to our notion. We grudged sharing the merry chats over the little round table with those who were not quite au fait to all our mots de famille, and did not invariably sympathize with our judgment of people and things. Mr. Frazee was one of the most genial of men—good through and through, and as kind of heart as he was engaging in manner. My brother was a fine young fellow, and his sisters loved him dearly. It was ungracious, ungenerous, and all the other “uns” in the English language, to regret the former order of every-day life. We berated ourselves soundly, at each of our secret conferences, and kept on doing it. Home was still passing lovely, but the stirring went on.
Is everything—moral, spiritual, and physical—epidemic? I put the question to myself when, less than a week after the arrival of an invitation to become the leader of the Third Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia, and before a definite answer was returned, the mail brought an important document, portentous with signatures and seals official, requesting Rev. Edward Payson Terhune to assume the pastorate of the First Reformed Church in Newark, New Jersey.
Here was a crucial test of my voluntary pledge never, by word, look, or deed, to let my husband suspect the trend of my inclinations with respect to any proposed change of clerical relations!
For, as I am at liberty now to confess, I wanted to go to Richmond horribly! Family, friends, ties of early association, strengthened by nearly fifteen years of residence at the formative period of life; the solicitations of parents, brothers, sisters, and true and tried intimates, who wrote to say how delighted they were at the prospect of having me “back home”—tugged at my heartstrings until I needed Spartan firmness of will and stoical reticence, to hold me fast to my vow. Meanwhile, letters bearing Northern postmarks were fluttering down upon the one whose must be, not the casting vote alone, but the responsibility of the decision of what he felt was one of the most momentous problems he was ever to face. Fortunately, neither of us knew then the full gravity of the crisis.
Looking back from the top of the hill, I see so clearly the working out of a benign and merciful design in what was then perplexity, puzzle, and pain, that I cannot say whether humility or devout gratitude has the ascendancy in my thoughts. Especially is this true when I reflect that strength was vouchsafed to me to hold my peace, even from what I conceived was “good,” when my husband brought both calls to me, after four days of anxious deliberation, and bade me speak one word in favor of, or against, either.
Side by side, they lay upon my table, and with them a paper upon which he had set down, clearly and fairly, the pros and cons of each.
He read these aloud, slowly and emphatically, then looked up at me.
“I am in a sore strait! Can you help me?”
In my heart I thought I could, and that right speedily. With my tongue I said: “No one has a right to say a word. It is a matter between God and yourself.”
He took up the papers silently, and went to the study. And I prayed, with strong crying and tears, that God would send us to Richmond.
An hour later he came back. The light of a settled purpose was in his face. All he said was:
“I have decided to go to Newark. We will talk it over to-morrow morning.”
He slept soundly that night, for the first time in a week. So did not I!