When Grandmamma Was New: The Story of a Virginia Childhood

I smile, as fancy reconstructs the group that turned the corner into this street, a block away, on the fifth of October of that memorable year in the forties. My father walked between Mary 'Liza and myself, each of us holding to one of his arms, as gentlemen and ladies in the country walked together then. He was a well-built, clear-eyed, clean-lived, upright gentleman, whom God had made and whom the world had not spoiled. My cousin and I were dressed exactly alike. Into every detail of daily life my mother carried her principle of treating the orphan as her own child. Our country-made frocks were of dark-green merino, becoming to my blond companion, and anything but becoming to my sun-browned skin. Over the frocks were neat black silk aprons with pockets. White linen-cambric frills, hemstitched by hand, and carefully crimped, were at our throats and wrists, and sunbonnets upon our heads, or rather, "slatted" hoods that could be folded at pleasure. These were of dark-green silk, to match the merinos, and ribbon of the same color was quilled around the capes, crowns, and brims. Our silk gloves were also dark green, and my mother had knit them herself.

Every item of our school costume was prescribed by her before we left home. I comprehend now, why the water stood in Cousin Molly Belle's eyes, while dancing lights played under the water, when we presented ourselves at breakfast-time, dressed for the important first day in the Seminary. I appreciate, furthermore, as it was not possible I should then, the tact and delicacy with which she gradually modified our everyday and Sunday attire into something more in accordance with that of our school-fellows.

As we found out for ourselves, before the day was over, we were little girls in the midst of young ladies, so far as dress and carriage went. We were imbued with the idea—gathered from the talk of friends and acquaintances, and our much reading of English story-books—that we were to be "polished" by our city associations. It was a shock and a down-topple of our expectations to be thrown, without preparation, into the society of girls whose manners were very little, if at all, more refined than those of the quartette who with us constituted Miss Davidson's home school. We were even more confounded at the discovery that our home-education had so rooted and grounded us in the rudiments of learning that we were classed, after the preliminary examination, with girls older than we by four and five years. The circumstance did not make us popular with our comrades.

As if my cheeks had tingled under the assault but to-day, I recall the exclamation of a girl of fifteen who sat next to me while the examination in history was held. Her father was a distinguished citizen of Richmond, and her mother a leader in fashionable society.

"Lord, child! how smart you think yourself, to be sure!" she said aloud, turning squarely about to look into my face.

I had answered as quietly and briefly as I could, the questions put to me, and tried politely not to look scandalized at her flippant failures.

"I'm sure I don't know!" "Never heard of him!" "If I ever knew, I've forgotten all about it!"—were, to my notion, a disgrace, and her cool effrontery would have been severely rebuked by our governess, and have met with still sterner judgment from my mother.

At recess this offensive young person headed a coterie that surrounded us, criticised our clothes, and catechised us as to our home, our family, and our mode of home living. Among other choice bon mots from the Honorable Member's daughter was the inquiry—"if we got the pattern of our wagon-cover hoods from Mrs. Noah?"

I told Cousin Molly Belle that night, that "the whole pack were ill-bred, rude, and unbearable."

She agreed heartily with two of my epithets, and took me up on the third:—

"Nothing is 'unbearable,' Namesake, except the thought of our own folly or sin. Still, this is a part of the discipline of life I would spare you, if I could. Endure hardness as a good soldier, and shame their want of breeding by the perfection of yours. An unmannerly schoolgirl is the cruellest of tormentors, and"—with a ring of her voice and a snap of her eyes that were refreshing and characteristic—"I should like to have the handling of that crew for an hour or two!"

I snuggled up close to her, already measurably consoled, and ready as usual, with one of the speeches that stamped me as "old-fashioned."

"We are like two wild pigeons, tied by the foot, in a yard full of peacocks. I would rather be a pigeon than a peacock. But pecks and struts and screamings are not agreeable, for all that."

Nor was it agreeable to be the only girls in our class-room who were not invited to a party given the middle of November, by one of the nicest of our new acquaintances. She had been quite friendly with us, and the very day the invitations were sent out, laid a sprig of citronaloes silently on my lap, during a French lesson. The smile that went with the scented leaves was sweeter still, and made my heart and face glow. When we were getting our wraps and bonnets in the cloak-room, at the close of the afternoon session, I edged nearer and nearer to her, pretending to hunt for my overshoes, meaning to say a word of thanks as soon as the group about her thinned. I got so near to her that I caught what she was saying in a low voice to her intimates:—

"I just hated not to invite the Burwells, but they do look so countryfied! like little old women cut short after they were made. And I don't believe either of them has a party dress to her name. They would be a pair of sights in a roomful of well-dressed people."

I slipped away with a barbed arrow in my self-love, and a hard, resentful pain at my heart, on my mother's account. Fierce tears scalded the inside of my eyelids as I recalled her weeks of loving preparation for our school life, the thousand of stitches set by her dear hands, the gentle smile of satisfaction with which she had surveyed our finished wardrobe. When I was in my own room at Cousin Molly's, I hugged and kissed and cried over the slatted hood, vowing vengefully to study so hard, and to rise so fast in my classes, and to acquit myself so nobly in the sight of my teachers, as to compel the admiration of the proud who rose up against me, and who compassed me about like bees. David's "cussing psalms" came readily and forcibly to my help in the hour of bitter humiliation.

If my wrath was unhallowed, it wrought the peaceable fruits of righteousness. The barb had gone too deep to be uncovered even to Cousin Molly Belle, but the hurt made a student of me. Giving up all thought of popularity and polish, I devoted myself to my school work with assiduity that threatened injury to my health before the half-term was over. But for my best and most clear-sighted of cousins I might have become a misanthropic invalid.

On the very day of the now hateful party, she took us for a long drive,—the whole length of Main Street, the sidewalks of which were thronged with promenaders and shoppers. She stopped the carriage—a handsome equipage, with a smart coachman and two spanking grays—at Samanni's and bought us a whole pound, apiece, of delicious candy, and treated us to Albemarle pippins to take home with us, and ice-cream eaten on the spot. Next, we went to Drinker and Morris's, the fashionable bookstore, and she told us to pick out, each for herself, the books we would like best to have. Mary 'Liza chose The School-girl in France, and I, The Scottish Chiefs. (I have it to this day.) We finished our excursion by a visit to St. John's Church and burying-ground. Cousin Molly Belle's grandfather had heard Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech, and she made the scene very plain to us as we strolled along the dim aisles, streaked with flaming bars of sunset, striking through the western window upon the very spot where the great orator had stood.

By the time I had finished my supper, and was settled before the fire with my book, the memories of my jaunt making glad my whole being, I had clean forgotten party and slight, and did not care a fig—for that one night—if I was countryfied and had not a party dress to my name. The real things were mine,—home-loves and the world of books and imagination,—possessions which the scorning of those who were at ease, and the contempt of the proud could not molest or take away.

I was reading The Scottish Chiefs for the second time,—out of school, of course,—and studying with might and main, when something came to pass that altered the tone of my mates, converted oppressors into champions, and made a moderate heroine of me.

There were sixteen of us in the senior Geography Class, I being the youngest. The practice of "turning down" for incorrect answers to questions was common at that date, even in Young Ladies' Seminaries. When the class was formed, we were seated according to age, but thanks to my governesses' drill, I had mounted steadily until I was now but one from the top—or, as we put it, was "next to head." The topmost place had been held for over a month by Mary Morgan, a slovenly and indolent girl of sixteen, who wrote poetry and had a great deal of old blue blood in her veins, as she was fond of informing all who had the patience to listen to her. Her recitations in most of her classes were so imperfect that everybody was surprised at her keeping an honorable place in any until the whisper went around that she smuggled "help-papers" into the class with her.

I am told that the use of "ponies," and much less reputable aids to perfect recitation in school and in college, is not considered dishonorable among the youth of the present age. Unmannerly and cruel as the girls in our seminary appeared to me, they had a certain sense of honor, a respect for truth and fair-dealing that bespoke better things than their surface-conduct indicated. When it was certainly known that Mary Morgan carried into the recitation-room notes of the lesson, written upon bits of paper, and tucked up her sleeve, or hidden in the folds of her dress, popular indignation arose to a bubbling boil. A tale-bearer would have been drummed out of school, and not a lisp of the shameful truth was carried to the teacher, the second Miss Nunham, who was near-sighted and unsuspicious. The geography lesson was the most exciting event of the day,—a prize-ring, in which the two at the head of the class were chief actors. When a question reached Mary Morgan, the class held its breath for a time. When she answered with glib accuracy, the breath exhaled in chagrin audible to all but the teacher. Out of class I was noticed, cheered, and commended, and exhorted to hold on in the course of truth and uprightness—encouragement corresponding to the rubbing down and bracing bestowed by his guardians upon the pugilist. And still the geography questions went around, and Mary Morgan was head and I next to head.

At last, on the fifteenth of December, came the tug of war in the shape of a review of the exercises of the last month, and Mary Morgan was armed for the fray by half a dozen long slips of paper covered with characters in very black ink. Presuming upon the teacher's short-sighted eyes, and nerved by a sense of the gravity of the situation, she boldly laid the papers upon the bench between her and myself, and consulted them from time to time, with coolness that would have been heroic had it not been impudent. The recitation was half over, when the girl who sat next below me "made a long arm" behind my back, and abstracted one of the abhorrent slips without the knowledge of the owner. She perceived the loss as the questions were again nearing her, gave one frightened glance at the floor on all sides of her, colored violently; made a desperate rally of memory and courage when the question reached her, answered so wildly that the teacher gave her a second trial, and, in pity for her distress, still a third.

Such a simple question as it was! I can never forget it. "What large island lies south of Hindostan?"

Nor can I forget the pale dismay of the face turned to me as the teacher said, reluctantly,—"Next."

I had never liked the girl; latterly, I had despised her and regarded her as my enemy. I did not analyze the revulsion of feeling that made me hesitate while one could have counted ten, before saying in a low, constrained voice,—"Ceylon!"

The deposed pupil sank to the middle of the class before the recitation was over, much to the bewilderment of the single-minded teacher. By the morrow she was at the bottom of the line and so far across the outer confines of Coventry that she never got back. That was our way of looking at "cribs" half a century ago.

It is not ten years since I met the banished scholar in a metropolitan reception-room, and a few minutes afterward, another old schoolfellow, who said in one and the same breath, "Do you know that Mary Morgan is here?" and, "I suppose it is uncharitable, but I can never forget that she used to cheat in her recitations at Mrs. Nunham's."

We went home "for Christmas." My father sent the carriage for us. The roomy family coach he never allowed to get shabby. The "squabs," i.e. padded inner curtains to exclude the cold in winter, were in, and there were thick shawls and a pillow apiece and two footstoves for our comfort in the thirty-mile drive, and upon the front seat, gorgeous in a new shawl of many and daring colors, her snowy turban wound about head and ears, was Mam' Chloe, the comfortablest thing there. Hamilcar, the carriage-driver, (we did not say "coachman") had on his Christmas suit, including a shaggy overcoat for which his master had given him an order upon a Richmond tailor, and was spruce exceedingly. To ensure our perfect safety and respectability we had an outrider in the shape of Mr. James Ireton, a young fellow-countryman, who was returning from a business trip to town.

The boxes under the seats—an old-fashioned convenience, capable of containing a gentleman's entire wardrobe and half of a lady's—were brimful of Christmas gifts and "goodies," and parcels stuffed with the same wedged Mam' Chloe in the exact middle of the front seat. A big hair-trunk was strapped upon the rack behind, and a box packed by Cousin Molly Belle was between Hamilcar's feet.

It began to snow before we had left the city a mile behind us, but that made things all the merrier. How we chuckled with laughter as the fast flakes stuck upon Mr. Ireton's hat and overcoat and leggings, until he looked like a polar bear but for his face that got redder as the rest of his body whitened, until, with his shining teeth and powdered hair, he made us think of Santa Claus. When we let down the carriage-window to tell him so, he drew a pipe from his pocket, got behind the carriage to screen it from the wind while he was lighting it, and rode up again alongside of us, puffing away at it to carry out the likeness.

We set out at nine o'clock, and at one o'clock stopped at Flat Rock, a well-known house of entertainment, for an early dinner and a generous feed for the horses. The roads were heavy with winter mud, red and sticky. It looked like strawberry ice-cream as the wheels and hoofs churned it up with the snow. Mam' Chloe laughed until her fat sides quaked when I said that. How good she was to us that day! how good everybody was! and how good it was to be just what I was, and where I was—off on a royal spree in the splendidest snowstorm I had ever seen, and Home and Christmas at the end of the journey.

Darkness fell by four o'clock, and, but for the whiteness of the earth, we would not have been able to see the trees on the side of the road when we came in sight of the house. Not a shutter had been closed, and every window was aglow with fire and lamplight, golden and pink through the snowy veil shifting and swaying between them and our happy eyes.

When, for me, Life's little day—full, rich, and blessèd, for all that storm and wreck and blight have, once and again, befallen me, as was God's will, and therefore, for my eternal good—when, for me, Life's little day darkens to its outgoing, may the lights of the Home that changes not, save from glory to glory, shine out for me through night and chill with such loving welcome as gleamed in those ruddy windows!