Until I read that letter, I had not meant to devote so much as a page—much less a chapter—to the crucial experiences of that novitiate in domestic lore. Now, I feel it incumbent upon me, as a duty I owe to the countrywomen I have tried to help along these lines, for forty-odd years, to lift the veil from the homely, ill-appointed kitchen in which I successfully deluded a quick-eyed, quick-witted man into believing I was mistress of the situation.

In my father’s house I was considered to have a turn, if not a talent, for housewifery. From childhood it was my delight to haunt the laundry, where the finer branches of cookery were carried on when the washing was out of the way. My mother was a very Mrs. Rundle in the excellence of her preserves and pickles. Mary Anne, the comely Indo-mulatto, was proficient in the composition of cakes, jellies, and pastries, syllabubs and creams. She liked to have me “help” her, as she put it. That is, I whipped eggs and beat butter and pounded spices, peeled fruit, topped and tailed gooseberries, when I felt like it, and kept her amused with my chatter.

At ten, I was trusted to carry the key-basket and to “give out” ingredients required for the day’s cooking and serving. At fourteen, I believed myself to be a clever cake-maker, and at sixteen, proudly assumed the responsibility of putting up preserves and pickles for the winter’s consumption, one summer, when my mother’s health obliged her to leave town in the height of the fruit season. When she came home, the stern old granddame, with whom I was rather a favorite (if she ever indulged her buckram-clad spirit in the weakness of having a favorite), informed her gentle daughter-in-law that “Mary”—as she persisted in calling me—“had kept the house so well that we had hardly missed her mother.”

It was not strange, therefore, that I took the helm of my newly launched barque with faint and few misgivings as to my ability to navigate the unknown seas that looked calm and bright from the shore.

Ours was a prosperous country parish, and liberal hospitality was the law of daily living. The Henrys vacated the Parsonage a few days before Christmas, and I went down to Richmond for a fortnight, to complete the household plenishing we had begun during the honeymoon. My sisters-in-law—with whom I was ever upon cordial terms—had lent advice and co-operation in the selection of furniture at the North. My carpets were bought in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Judge Terhune was an old and honored resident. My mother had seen to the outfit of household linen. I smile now, in recollecting how care-free was my mood through that happy Christmas fortnight, after the receipt of a letter from the member of the firm who abode by the stuff for ten days of my holiday, apprised me of the arrival of the furniture from New Brunswick and from Richmond, likewise, that “Mrs. Eggleston and Mrs. Henry, with some other ladies, kindly insist upon having the house cleaned, the carpets made and put down, and the furniture settled in place while you are away.”

The proceedings would astound me now that I know more of humankind, and of parishes. Still more extraordinary would I consider the cool, matter-of-course way in which I received the intelligence. It was the Old Virginia atmosphere in that long-dead-and-buried time.

I did open my eyes, and break into ecstatic gratitude, when, on taking formal possession of our real home, where we had expected to live in picnic fashion upon the provisions we had laid away in baskets and trunks before leaving Richmond, we beheld the table set in the dining-room for supper, and fires alight in every room. Further search revealed that the house was in perfect order, the curtains hung, carpets down, and the larder stocked to overflowing with staples and delicacies. The cook and chambermaid hired for the year—as was the invariable custom of the “system”—were on hand, and John, the man-of-all-work, had met us at the station. Not another human creature was visible. For any evidence furnished to the contrary, by sight or hearing, the “surprise” might have been the work of benevolent pixies. My sister Alice—a girl of fourteen—would be an inmate of our house for most of the time, and study with us as heretofore. She and I ran about the house like two madcaps, after supper and until bedtime, calling out excitedly at each fresh discovery.

Two barrels of flour and one of corn-meal; two of apples and one of potatoes; a half-barrel of sugar, and other staple groceries, in divers measures, made the foundation of the abundant supply for creature wants. The upper shelves of the store-room were crowded with pickles, preserves, and all manner of conserved fruits for which the Virginia housewife was justly famed. Truly, the lines had fallen to us in pleasant places.

Excitement was renewed next morning by the appearance at the outer gate, and streaming down the walk, of a procession of colored men and women, each laden with basket, or pail, or tray, or parcel. The women bore their burdens on their heads, the men upon shoulders or in their arms. All, like the Greeks of old, came bearing gifts, and of a more perishable nature than those that loaded pantry and store-room shelves. Honey, breads of all shapes and characters; cakes, butter, and eggs; chickens, dressed for the table; sausage, spareribs, hams, and shoulders; a roast of beef; custards and puddings and mince-pies—seemed designed to victual a garrison rather than a family of three whites and three servants. To crown the profusion and add to the variety, the elegant young lawyer, Mr. Cardwell, who had figured in our bridal train, drove up through the main street, in at our front gate, and down to the Parsonage door, a cow and calf, to the unbounded delight of the village urchins who flocked at his heels up to the gate. The cow, “Old Blue,” as she was dubbed, because her color could not be more accurately described, gave the richest milk I ever skimmed. I would let no one else take care of it after one week’s experience had taught me the necessity of giving my personal attention to each department of housewifery, if I would not be cheated at every conceivable opportunity.

Thus gayly began my training in a school from which I have not yet been graduated.

My mother was a good housekeeper, and the wheels of her machine ran in smooth ruts. She had old and competent servants. I doubt if she had ever swept a room, or roasted a piece of meat, in her life. The cook we had hired from a neighboring planter had excellent recommendations. True, she had been one of the superfluous “hands” who were hired out from year’s end to year’s end, and such were not warranted as first-class workers. They were prone to become shiftless and indifferent to their work, by reason of frequent changes. Still, Emily was reputed to be a fair cook and laundress. Among the cuts of fresh meat sent in by the friends, whose consistent generosity moved me to the invention of the phrase “kitchenly-kindness,” was a noble beefsteak. I ordered it to be cooked for breakfast the second day of our incumbency.

Emily fried it brown—almost to a crisp!

Five cook-books were in my just-unpacked library. Breakfast over, I sought out Miss Leslie’s Complete Cook-Book, and read up on beefsteak.

Two more were sent in that day from country parishioners. Next morning, I hied me surreptitiously to the kitchen before my husband or sister was awake. I bore the steak upon a charger—alias, a crockery platter. It had been under lock and key until then; otherwise, its fair proportions would inevitably have been shorn. The honesty of the hired hand was an axiomatic negligible quantity; and the most faithful of family servants seldom resisted successfully the temptation to appropriate to their own use an unlawful share of eatables. They were a gluttonous race, and the tenet that “taking from marster wasn’t stealing,” stood high in their creed.

I had told Emily overnight that I would show her how a steak should be cooked, and she was more than ready for me.

I had never touched a bit of raw meat before, and the clamminess of the gory cut sent “creeps” all over me. It was very bloody to my eyes, and I washed it well in cold water preparatory to laying it upon the broad bottom of the frying-pan, heated and buttered, which, I had learned from another of the five manuals, was “a passable substitute for a gridiron if the young housekeeper had failed to provide herself with this important utensil.” Emily had not found a gridiron in the box of kitchen utensils unpacked before my arrival, and there was no time to look it up. The steak, dripping wet, went into the broad pan set over a bed of red coals. We cooked with wood in Old Virginia. It hissed and spluttered and steamed like the escape-valve of a balky locomotive. Miss Leslie said, “Turn it at the end of eight minutes.” The sodden pallor of the exposed side did not look right to me, somehow.

“Oh!” quoth Emily, “you is gwine to stew it—is you?”

Pass we quickly over the abhorrent tale! The steak never attained unto the “rich brown” which, according to my cook-book makers, it should display when ready for table. I turned it four times, and, with a vague idea that butter browned more readily than meat, I added a great spoonful to the juices oozing from the steak. There was a great deal of gravy in the dish when it was served, and my companions pronounced it “extremely savory.”

“But you should not have gone out into the kitchen,” demurred my husband. “Does not the cook understand her business?”

“Few of her class can do without teaching,” I rejoined, valiantly.

I had already made a resolve from which I never swerved: If my cook did not understand her business, and I understood it even less, I would not confess it. As time went on, I was to feel such test of the heroic resolve as I had never anticipated. For, as the knowledge of Emily’s ineptitude grew upon me, the conviction of my own crass and comprehensive ignorance waxed into a haunting horror. I was as unlearned as the babe unborn in everything that a practical housekeeper should know. I could not make a batch of bread, or boil a potato, or broil a chop, had my eternal welfare—or my husband’s happiness—depended upon it. As for soup-making, roasting, stewing, and boiling meats, frying and baking fish—the very commonest and coarsest rudiments of the lore in which I was supposed to be proficient—I was as idiotically void of comprehension as if I had never heard of a kitchen. How I maintained a brazen show of competency is a mystery to me at this distance from that awful trial-period. I studied my quintette of cook-books with agonized earnestness. And when I was tolerably positive that I had mastered a recipe, I “went and did it” with Squeersian philosophy. How many failures were buried out of the sight of those who loved me best, and were most constantly with me, would have shocked the frugal housewife into hysterics. My mastery of this and of that process was painfully slow, but it began to tell upon our daily fare. I got out the gridiron, and learned to cook to perfection the steaks my husband’s soul loved, and from my nonpareil of neighbors, Mrs. Eggleston, I got a recipe for quick biscuits.

To the acquisition of that particular formula, and the conversation that embedded the gift, I attribute a large measure of the success which eventually rewarded the striving unto blood, that was my secret martyrdom for half a year.

She was a “capable” housewife, according to Mrs. Stowe’s characterization of the guild. She was, moreover, warm-hearted, sensible, and sympathetically reminiscent of her own early struggles with the housekeeping problem. When I took her into confidence as to my distrust of my quintette of manuals, she laughed out so cheerily that I felt the fog lift from my spirits.

“All written by old maids, or by women who never kept house,” she declared. “To my certain knowledge, Miss Leslie has boarded in a Philadelphia hotel for twenty years. I wouldn’t give a guinea a gross for their books. Make your own! I do! When I get a tiptop, practical recipe—one that I have tried for myself and proved, I write it down in my own every-day language; then I have met that enemy, and it is mine!”

We were in her house, and she brought out the manuscript book in which her victories were recorded. Next, she offered to lend it to me.

“I don’t think,” she subjoined, tactfully, “that old-fashioned housekeepers, like your mother and mine—yes, and my mother-in-law—take the lively interest in learning new ways of doing things that we do. I am very proud of some discoveries and a few inventions that I have written down there. Those quick biscuits, for instance, are my resource when the bread doesn’t turn out just right. They never fail. And speaking of bread, here is a sort of short-cut to excellence in that direction. That is my composition, too. Take the book with you, and copy anything you fancy.”

“Bread is Emily’s strong point,” I remarked, complacently, in accepting the loan. “Nevertheless, I shall try your composition.”

The promise was fulfilled in a way I had not expected. I had been keeping house now about four months, and was beginning to justify, in some degree, the fond boast of the son to the father of my familiarity with kitchen-craft, when Emily announced one morning, as I was “giving out” for the day:

“Tain’ no use measurin’ out dat ar’ flour, Miss Virginny!” (The old-time servant never said “Mrs.” to, or of anybody.) “I done got my han’ out makin’ bread! I’d jes’ spile yer flour an’ things ef I was to try to make a batch o’ bread.”

“What is the matter with your hands?” I looked at the members, brown and brawny, and apparently uninjured.

She spread them out as a bat might his wings, and regarded them in affectionate commiseration.

“As I tole you, I done got my han’ out for makin’ bread. Nobody don’ know how-come a body’s han’ gits out for somethin’ or ’nother. Sometimes, it’s fur bread, an’ then agin it’s fur cake, or maybe cookin’ chickens, or the likes o’ that. Thar’s some as thinks it’s a sort of bewitched, or conjurin’. Some says as how it’s the ole Satan what takes his spite on us that ’ar way. I don’t know nothin’ bout how that may be. I jes’ know that my han’ done got out for makin’ bread. I been done feel it soon’s I got out o’ bade this mornin’.”

“And may I ask,” I interrupted, in freezing politeness that was utterly wasted, “how long your hand is likely to stay out?”

She shook her head, sadly, imperturbably.

“Nobody can’ never say how long, Miss Virginny. Maybe six days, and maybe two mont’s. Sis’ Phœbe” (fellow church-members were always “Brother” and “Sister” even in every-day speech), “what b’long to Mars’ Wyatt Cardwell, she got her han’ out for two or three t’ings at oncet las’ year, an’ sho’s you’re born an’ I’m standin’ here in this yere blessed sto’-room, she ain’t got it in agin fur better’n six mont. I’s certainly mighty sorry fur you an’ Mars’ Ed’ard, but the Lord’s will is jes’ p’intedly got to be done.”

Constant to my vow of discretion in all things pertaining to domestic tribulations, I said never a word to the other members of the smitten household of what menaced them. The congestion was the more serious, inasmuch as there was not a baker within twenty miles, and we baked fresh bread and rolls every day. I was in poor physical case for culinary enterprise, for one of the constitutional headaches which I had inherited from both parents had warned me of its approach; I ought to keep quiet and discourage the advance. Instead of which, I girded up the loins of my spirit and concluded that there could hardly be a more propitious opportunity for trying Mrs. Eggleston’s bread recipe. Since a knowledge of practical bread-making was one of life’s stringent necessities in this latitude, “better sune than syne.”

I set the sponge at noon, in pursuance of directions laid down so explicitly that a novice with a headache that was by now a fixed fact, could not err therein. I could not sit up to supper for the blinding pain. Alice was taking that meal, and was to spend the evening with a friend, and my husband had a business call in his study. No one would be privy to the appeal I meditated making to my tyrant. I sent for her, and ordered her to bring to my room the sponge I had left in a secluded corner of the dining-room. When it came, I bade her bring kneading-tray and flour. These set in order on the table, I called her attention to the hopeful and enticing foaming condition of the sponge, and assured her that no evil could befall the dough if she were to knead in the flour and prepare the mass for the night’s working, there under my eyes.

She planted herself in the middle of the floor and surveyed me mournfully—a sphinx done in chocolate.

“I suttinly is mighty sorry for you, Miss Virginny, an’ I’d do anyt’ing what I could do fur to help you out o’ you’ trouble. But thar ain’t no manner o’ use in my layin’ my han’ to that ar’ dough. It wouldn’t never rise, not ‘tell the jedgment-day. It would be temptin’ Providence, out and out. When a body’s han’ is out, it’s out for good and all! I done do my best to make you onderstan’ what’s happen’ to me, an’ angels couldn’t do no mo’! Lord ’a’ mercy! what is you goin’ to do?”

I had jumped up and belted in my dressing-gown, rushed to the wash-stand, and washed my hands furiously. Without a syllable I tackled the sponge, measured and worked in the flour, and fell to kneading it in a blind rage. Pretty soon my strength flagged; the pain in my temples and back of the eyes beat me faint. To get a better purchase on the stiffened mass, I set the tray down on the floor and knelt over it. That bread had to be made if I perished in the attempt.

The chocolate-colored sphinx surveyed me sorrowfully, without stirring an inch from her place on the hearth-rug.

Neither of us heard the door open, softly and cautiously, lest the noise might disturb my slumbers. Both of us started violently at the voice that said:

“What is the meaning of this?”

I sat up on my knees and faced the speaker, essaying a miserable imitation of a laugh.

“Emily has got her hand out in bread-making, and I am trying mine. This is almost ready now.”

He walked across the floor and lifted me to my feet; laid me incontinently upon the lounge, and confronted the cook.

“Take up that tray!” She obeyed dumbly. “Carry it out into the kitchen and finish the bread. Yes! I mean it! Get your hand in before you are a minute older, or I’ll know the reason why. And if the bread is not good, I shall send you back to your master to-morrow morning, and tell him I have no further use for you.”

He would have cut his hand off before he would have struck a woman, and the creature knew it as well as I did, but she cowered before the blue blaze of his eyes, as at a lightning flash.

His call stayed her on the threshold.

“Do you understand what I have said?”

The sphinx crumbled:

“Ya’as, suh!”

“You understand, too, that your hand is not to get out again?”

“Not ef I can holp it, Mars’ Ed’ard!”

“See that you do help it!”

Then I held my head hard with both hands to keep the sutures from flying asunder, and laughed until I cried.

From the stress and toils, the mortifications and bewilderment of that year, grew into a settled purpose the longing to spare other women—as ill-equipped as I was, when I entered upon my housewifely career—the real anguish of my novitiate. The foundation of Common Sense in the Household was laid in the manuscript recipe-book begun at Mrs. Eggleston’s instance. I had learned, to my bitter woe, that there was no printed manual that would take the tyro by the hand and show her a plain path between pitfalls and morasses. I learned, by degrees, to regard housewifery as a profession that dignifies her who follows it, and contributes, more than any other calling, to the mental, moral, and spiritual sanity of the human race. I received my call to this ministry in that cottage parsonage.

My departure from the beaten track of novel-writing, in which I had achieved a moderate degree of success, was in direct opposition to the advice of the friends to whom I mentioned the project. The publishers, in whose hands my first cook-book has reached the million mark, confessed frankly to me, after ten editions had sold in as many months, that they accepted the work solely in the hope that I might give them a novel at some subsequent period. Even my husband shook a doubtful head over the wild scheme. It was the only book published by me that had not his frank and hearty approval. Upheld by the rooted conviction that I had been made, through my own shortcomings and battles, fit to supply what American women lacked and needed sorely, I never debated or doubted.

My husband found me “gloating” over a copy of Common Sense the week after it was published.

“I verily believe,” he said, wonderingly, “that you take more pride in that book than in all the rest you have written.”

I answered, confidently, “It will do more good than all of them put together.”

This was fifteen years after Emily’s hand got out, and I knelt on the carpet in my bedroom to knead my trial batch of bread.

XXXV
THE STIRRED “NEST AMONG THE OAKS”—A CRUCIAL CRISIS

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.

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:

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!

XXXVI
MIGRATION NORTHWARD—ACCLIMATION—ALBERT EDWARD, PRINCE OF WALES, IN NEW YORK—POLITICAL PORTENTS

One who had known my husband well for fifty years, wrote of him soon after his translation: “More than any other man I ever knew, he had a genius for friendship.”

This testimony is amply supported by the fact that he kept, to his journey’s end, the friends whose loving confidence he gained during the five years of his Charlotte pastorate. Those who loved him in his youth loved him to the end—or so many of them as remained to see the beautiful close of his long day.

We left our Parsonage home and the parish, which was our first love, laden with proofs of the deep affection inspired by devoted service in behalf of a united constituency, and the rare personal gifts of the man who suffered, in the parting, a wrench as sharp as that which made the separation a grief to each member of the flock he was leaving. It was a just tribute to his integrity of purpose and conscientiousness that the purity of his motives in deciding upon the step were never questioned. Leading men in the church said openly that they could not have hoped to keep him, after his talents and his ability to fill worthily a wider field were recognized in the world outlying this section of the Great Vineyard. They had foreseen that the parting must come, and that before long. He was a growing man, and the sphere they offered was narrow.

It was in no spirit of Christian philosophy that I dismantled the nest among the oaks, and packed my Lares and Penates with a fair show of cheerfulness. Inly, I was in high revolt for a full week after the die was cast. The final acceptance of the inevitable, and the steadfast setting of my face Northward, ensued upon the persuasion that the one and only thing for a sensible, God-fearing woman to do was to make the very best of what no human power could avert.

It is a family saying, based upon the assertion of my eldest daughter, that “if mother were set down in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, and made to comprehend that she must spend the rest of her days there, she would, within ten minutes, begin to expatiate upon the many advantages of a dry climate as a residential region.”

By the time we stayed our flight in Richmond, where we spent our Christmas, I took from the worn and harassed man of the hour the burden of explanation and defence of the reasons for tearing ourselves up by the roots and transplanting the tender vine into what some of our best wishers called, “alien soil.” I had worked myself into an honest defender of the Middle States in contradistinction to “Yankee land,” before we departed, bag, baggage, and baby, for the new home.

Mr. Terhune had preached twice in Newark, in December, after formally accepting the call. We removed to that city in February of 1859.

With the Saharan spirit in full flow, I met the welcoming “people”; settled in the house we bought in a pleasant quarter of the growing city—then claiming a population of less than seventy-five thousand—installed white servants; received and returned calls, and was, for the first time in my life, homesick at heart for three months.

In the recollection of the eighteen years that succeeded that period of blind rebellion against the gentle leading which was, for us, wisdom and loving-kindness throughout, I write down the confession in shame and confusion of face, and abasement of soul.

I stay the course of the narrative at this point to record, devoutly and gratefully, that never had pastor and pastor’s wife, in any section of our land, a parish in which “pleasant places” did more richly abound. I would write down, yet more emphatically and thankfully, the amazing fact that, in the dozen-and-a-half years of my dwelling among them, I never had a word of unkind criticism of myself and my ways; not a remark that could wound or offend was ever addressed to me.

I wish I might have that last paragraph engraved in golden capitals and set to the everlasting credit of that Ideal Parish! To this hour, I turn instinctively in times of joy and of sorrow, as to members of the true household of faith, to the comparatively small band of the once large congregation who are left alive upon the earth.

For eighteen years I walked up the central aisle of the church, as I might tread the halls and chambers of my father’s house in that far Southern town, with the consciousness that we were surrounded by an atmosphere of affectionate appreciation, at once comforting and invigorating.

All this—and I understate, rather than exaggerate, the real state of circumstance and feeling I am trying to depict—was the more surprising, because I went to this people young, and with little experience as a clergyman’s wife. In Charlotte, I had, as we have seen, done no “church work.” I was petted and made much of, in consideration of my position as the wife of the idolized pastor, and my newness to the duties of country housekeeping and the nursery. In Newark, I was gradually to discover that I could not shirk certain obligations connected with parish and city charities. The logic of events—never the monitions of friends and parishioners—opened my eyes to the truth. When, at length, I took charge of a girls’ Bible Class, and, some years after, worked up the Infant Class from tens to hundreds, there was much expression of unfeigned gratification and eager rallying to my help, not an intimation of relief that I “had, at last, seen my way clear to the performance of what everybody else had expected of a minister’s wife.”

I have never had a higher compliment than was paid me by the invitation, a dozen years back, to address the Alumni of Union Theological Seminary in New York City upon the subject of “Ministers’ Wives.”

I took occasion, in the presence of that grave and reverend assembly of distinguished theologues, to pay a brief tribute, as strong as words could make it, to that Ideal Parish. I could not withhold it then. I cannot keep it back now. I believe my experience in this regard to be highly exceptional. More’s the pity and the shame!

Five children were born to us in those happy, busy years. Each was adopted lovingly by the people, so far as prideful affection and generous deeds implied adoption. We were all of one family.

Returning to the direct line of my narrative—the spring of 1860 found us well, at work, and contented. I had good servants, kindly neighbors, and a growing host of congenial acquaintances. Our proximity to New York was an important factor in the lives of both of us, bringing us, as it did, within easy reach of the best libraries and shops in the country, and putting numberless means of entertainment and education at our very door. There were two babies by now—healthy, happy, bright—in every way thoroughly satisfactory specimens of infant humanity. In the matter of children’s nurses, I have been extraordinarily blessed among American women. In the twenty-one years separating the birth of our elder boy from the day when the younger was released from nursery government, I had but three of these indispensable comforts. Two married after years of faithful service; the third retired upon an invalid’s pension. All were Irish by birth. After much experience in, and more observation of, the Domestic Service of these United States, I incline to believe that, as a rule, we draw our best material from Celtic emigrant stock.

So smoothly ran the sands of life that I recall but one striking incident in the early part of 1860. That was the visit of the Prince of Wales to this country. We witnessed the passage of the long procession that received and escorted him up-town, to his quarters at the, then, new and fashionable hostelry—the Fifth Avenue Hotel. My husband went down to the Battery to see the princeling’s review of the regiments drawn up in line before him, as he rode from end to end of the parade-ground.

Joining us at the window, from which we had a splendid view of the pageant, the critic, who was an accomplished horseman, reported disdainfully that “the boy was exceedingly awkward. He had no seat to speak of, leaning forward, until his weak chin was nearly on a line with the horse’s ears, and sticking his feet out stiffly on each side.”

Our impression of the imperial youth was not more agreeable. He sat back in the open coach, “hunched” together in an ungainly heap, looking neither to the right nor the left, evincing no consciousness of the existence of the shouting throngs that lined the pavements ten deep, other than by raising, with the lifeless precision of a mechanical toy, the cocked hat he wore as part of the uniform of a British colonel.

There was a big ball the next night, at which gowns of fabulous prices were sported, and reported by the newspapers, and Albert Edward flitted on to his mother’s dominions of Canada, leaving not a ripple in the ocean of local and national happenings.

That ocean was stilling and darkening with the brooding of a threatening storm. Newspapers bristled with portents and denunciations; demagogues bellowed themselves hoarse in parks and from stumps; torchlight processions displayed new and startling features.

“So much for so little!” sighed I, upon our return from a lookout at the nearest corner, commanding long miles of marching men. “It was ingenious and amusing; but what a deal of drilling those embryo patriots must have gone through to do it so well! And for what? The President will be elected, as other Presidents have been, and as maybe a hundred others will be, and there the farce will end. Does it pay to amuse themselves so very hard?”

“If we could be sure that it would end there!” answered my husband, with unexpected gravity. “The sky is red and lowering in the South. Between politicians, and the freedom of the press to play with all sorts of explosives, there is no telling what the rabble may do.”

I looked up, startled.

“You are not in earnest? The good Ship of State has been driving straight on to the rocks ever since I can recollect, and she has not struck yet. Think of the Clay and Polk campaign!”

“Child’s play compared with the fight that is on now!” was the curt retort.

Something—I know not what—in his manner moved me to put a leading question.

“Have you made up your mind how you will vote?”

“Yes.”

“A month ago, you said you had not.”

“A good deal has happened in that month.”

It was not like him to be sententious with me, but I pushed the subject.

“I have never interfered with your political opinions, as you know, and I don’t care to vote, myself; but if I had a vote, I should be in no doubt where to cast it. Lovers of peace and concord should unite upon Bell and Everett. That party seems to me to represent the sanest element in this mammoth muddle.”

He smiled.

“To say nothing of your fondness for Mr. Everett. A charming gentleman, I grant. But the helm of state is not to be in his hands. Even, supposing”—grave again, and sighing slightly—“that they are strong enough to hold it in a storm.”

There was a boding pause. Then I spoke, and unadvisedly:

“I ask no questions that I think you would not care to answer. But I do hope you are not thinking of voting for Abraham Lincoln? Think of him in the White House! Mr. Buchanan may be weak—and a Democrat. I heard father say, as the one drop of comfort he could express from his election: ‘At any rate, he is a gentleman by birth and breeding.’ Mr. Lincoln is low-born, and has no pretensions to breeding.”

“Then, if I should be so far lost to the proprieties as to vote for him, I would better not let either of you know.” And he glanced teasingly at Alice, who had just entered the room.

“I could never respect you if you did!” she said, spiritedly. “I am persuaded better things of you.”

A teasing rejoinder was all she got out of him. The matter was never brought up again by any of us. When Election Day came, I was too proud to seem inquisitive. But in my inmost soul I was assured that reticence boded no good to my hope of one gallant gentleman’s vote for Bell and Everett.

Months afterward, when we were once again of one mind with respect to the nation’s peril and the nation’s need, he told me that he had kept his own counsel, not only because the truth might grieve me, but that party feeling ran so high in his church he thought it best not to intimate to any one how he meant to vote.

“And, like Harry Percy’s wife, I could be trusted not to tell what I did not know?” said I.

“You might have been catechised,” he admitted. “There are times when the Know-nothing policy is the safest.”

XXXVII
THE PANIC OF ’61—A VIRGINIA VACATION—MUTTERINGS OF COMING STORM

Bayard Taylor said to me once of a publishing house, “An honest firm, but one that has an incorrigible habit of failing!”

The habit was epidemic in the first half of 1861. Among others who caught the trick were my publishers. Like a thunderbolt came the announcement, when I was expecting my February semi-annual remittance of fat royalties: “We regret to inform you that we have been compelled to succumb to the stringency of the times.”

The political heavens were black with storm-clouds, and, as was inevitable then, and is now, the monetary market shut its jaws tightly upon everything within reach. We could not reasonably have expected immunity, but we had. We had never known the pinch of financial “difficulties.” Prudent salaried men are the last to feel hard times, if their wage is paid regularly. I had three books in the hands of the “failing” firm. All were “good sellers,” and I had come to look upon royalties as my husband regarded his salary, as a sure and certain source of revenue.

We had other and what appeared to us graver anxieties. My sister Alice had passed the winter with us, and the climate had told unhappily upon her throat. My husband had not escaped injury from the pernicious sea-fogs and the malarial marshes, over which the breath of the Atlantic flowed in upon us. He had a bronchial cough that defied medical treatment; and March, the worst month of the twelve for tender throats and susceptible lungs, would soon be upon us. His physician, a warm personal friend, ordered him South, and the church seconded the advice by a formal grant of an out-of-season vacation. We did not change our main plan in consequence of the disappointment as to funds. Nor did we noise our loss abroad. Somehow, the truth leaked out. Not a word of condolence was breathed to us. But on the afternoon of the day but one before that set for our departure, the daughter of a neighborly parishioner dropped in to leave a basket of flowers, and to say that her father and mother “would like to call that evening, if we were to be at home.” I answered that we should be glad to see them, and notified my husband of the impending call. The expected couple appeared at eight o’clock, and by nine the parlors were thronged with guests who “dropped in, in passing, to say ‘Good-bye.’” None stayed late, and before any took leave, there was the presentation of a parcel, through the hands of Edgar Farmer, a member of the Consistory, who, in days to come, was to be to my husband as David to Jonathan. He was young then, and of a goodly presence, with bright, kind eyes and a happy gift of speech. Neither Mr. Terhune nor I had any misgivings of what was in prospect, when he was asked to step forward and face the spokesman deputed to wish us Bon voyage and recovery of health in our old home. Mr. Farmer said this felicitously, and with genuine feeling. Then he asked the pastor’s acceptance of a parcel “containing reading-matter for the journey.”

The reading-matter was bank-bills, the amount of which made us open our eyes wide when the company had dispersed and we undid the ribbons binding the “literature.”

That was their way of doing things in the “Old First.” A way they never lost. In a dozen-and-a-half years we should have become used to it, but we never did. Each new manifestation of the esteem in which they held their leader, and of the royally generous spirit that interfused the whole church, as it might the body and soul of one man, remained to the last a fresh and delicious surprise.

Ten days out of the six weeks of our vacation were spent in Charlotte. Mr. Terhune’s successor was Rev. Henry C. Alexander, one of a family of notable divines whose praise is in all the Presbyterian churches. He was a bachelor, and the “nest among the oaks” was rented to an acquaintance. I did not enter it then, or ever again. I even looked the other way when we drove or walked past the gate and grove. To let this weakness be seen would have been ungracious, in the face of the hospitalities enlapping us during every hour of our stay. We dined with one family, supped with another, spent the night and breakfasted with a third, and there was ever a houseful of old friends to meet us. My husband wrote to his father: