When he had excused himself and left the table, my father startled me yet more by his answer to my mother’s remark: “We shall miss him. He is a nice boy!”
Her husband stirred his coffee meditatively for a moment before saying, without looking up:
“I am not sure that I have not a touch of that same fever myself.”
With the inconsequence of infancy, I did not connect the speech with our breaking up the Lunenburg home the next autumn and setting out for what was explained to us girls as a round of visits to friends in Richmond and Powhatan.
We call ours a restless age, and the modern American man a predatory animal, with an abnormal craving for adventure. Change and Progress are the genii who claim his allegiance and sway his destiny. In sighing for the peace and rest of the “former times” we think were “better than these,” we forget (if we ever knew) that our sires were possessed by, and yielded to, unrest as intense and dreams as golden as those that animate the explorer and inventor of the twentieth century. My father was in no sense a dreamer of day dreams of the dazzling impossible. He was making a fair living in the heart of what was, even then, “Old Virginia.” He had recouped his shattered fortunes by judicious business enterprise, and the neat share of her father’s estate that had fallen to my mother at his demise in 1829, placed her and her children beyond the reach of poverty. The merchant was respected here as he had been in Amelia, for his intelligence, probity, courtesy, and energy. His place in society and in church was assured. Yet he had caught the Western fever. And—a mightier marvel—“Uncle Carus,” the clerical Connecticut Yankee, the soul of conservatism, who had settled in the downiest of nests as the incumbent of Mount Carmel, a Presbyterian church built upon the outskirts of the Montrose plantation, and virtually maintained by that family—sober, ease-loving Uncle Carus—had joined hands with his wife’s brother-in-law in the purchase of Western lands and the scheme of emigration.
The two men had travelled hundreds of miles on horseback during the last year in quest of a location for the new home. My father’s letters—worn by many readings, and showing all over the odd and unaccountable brown thumbmarks of time—bear dates of wayside post-offices as well as of towns—Lynchburg, Staunton, and Charlottesville. Finally they crossed the Ohio line, and after due deliberation, bought a farm in partnership. The letters are interesting reading, but too many and too long to be copied in full.
Every detail of business and each variation of plans were communicated as freely as if the wife were associated with him in commercial as in domestic life.
Once, when he is doubtful what step to take next, he writes, playfully: “Some men need a propelling power. It might be well for you to exert a little of the ‘government’ with which some of our friends accredit you, and move me in the right direction.”
When, the long journey accomplished and the purchase of the farm completed, he returned home, he encountered no opposition from his wife, but much from neighbors and friends. A letter written to her from Lunenburg, whither he had returned to close up his affairs, leaving her with her brother at Olney, describes the numerous tokens of regret and esteem of which he is the recipient. The climax of the list comes in the humorous tale of how an old-fashioned neighbor, Mrs. L——, “says it troubled her so much on New Year’s night that she could not sleep. She actually got up after trying vainly to court slumber, lighted her pipe, and smoked and thought the matter over. She was not reconciled, after all. … When I take my departure it will be with feelings of profound regret, and full confidence in the friendship of those I leave behind.”
The land bought in Ohio by the two victims of the “Western fever” is now covered by the city of Cleveland. If the two New-Englanders could have forecast the future, their heirs would be multi-millionaires.
Behold us, then, a family of two adults and three babies—the eldest not yet seven years old—en route from Richmond to Montrose, travelling in a big barouche, with a trunk strapped on the rack behind, in lumbering progress over thirty-seven miles of execrable roads, just now at their worst after a week of autumnal rains.
The damp discomfort of the journey is present with me now. The sun did not shine all day long; the raw air pierced to the bones; the baby was cross; my mother was not well, and my sister and myself were cramped by long sitting upon the back seat. Our horses were strong, but mud-holes were deep, the red clay was adhesive, and the corduroy causeways jarred us to soreness. It was late in the day when we turned from the highway toward the gate of the Montrose plantation. We were seen from the house, and a colored lad of fifteen or thereabouts ran fleetly down the avenue to open the great outer gate. He flung it wide with a hospitable intent that knocked poor Selim—the off-horse—flat into the mud. Once down, he did not offer to arise from the ruddy ooze that embedded one side. He had snapped the harness in falling, but that made no difference to the fagged-out beast. The accident was visible from the porch of the house, an eighth of a mile away, and four men hastened to the rescue.
The foremost was, I thought, the handsomest man I had ever seen. He was tall, young, as dark as a Frenchman (having Huguenot blood in his veins), and with a marvellously sweet smile. Coming up to my pale mother, as she stood on the miry roadside, he kissed her, picked up the baby, and bade “Cousin Anna” lean upon his other arm. My father insisted upon relieving him of the child; but the picture of my delicate mother, supported in the walk up the drive by the gallant youth—her favorite cousin of all the clan—Josiah Smith, of Montrose—will never leave the gallery of pictures that multiplied fast from this date.
I did him loving honor to the best of my poor ability as the “Uncle Archie” of “Judith.” I cannot pass him by without this brief tribute.
A second and younger cousin, who seemed uninteresting beside my new hero, took charge of my sister and myself, and we trudged stiffly on to the ancient homestead. An avalanche of feminine cousins descended upon us as we entered the front gate, and swept us along through porch and hall and one room after another, to the “chamber,” where a beautiful old lady lay in bed.
Her hair was dark as midnight; so were her eyes; her cap, pillows, gown, and the bed-coverings were snowy white. Her face was that of a saint. This was “Aunt Smith,” the widowed mistress of Montrose. She was of the Huguenot Michaux stock, the American founders of a colony on James River. During a widowhood of twenty years she had, by wise management, relieved the estate from embarrassment, brought up and educated six children, and established for herself a reputation for intelligence, refinement, and piety that is yet fragrant in the minds of those who recollect Montrose as it was in its palmy days.
She was often ailing, as I saw her now. Accustomed as I am to the improved physical condition of American women, I wonder what was amiss with the gentlewomen of that generation; how they lived through the protracted seasons of “feeling poorly,” and their frequent confinement to bed and bed-chambers. The observation of that winter fixed in my imagination the belief that genteel invalidism was the normal state of what the colored servants classified as “real ladies.” To be healthy was to approximate vulgarity. Aunt Smith was as much in her bed as out of it—or, so it seemed to me. Her eldest child, a daughter and the most brilliant of the family, had not had a day of perfect health since she had an unhappy love-affair at twenty. She was now nearly forty, still vivacious, and the oracle of the homestead. My dearest “Cousin Mary,” resident for the winter at Montrose with her mother, was fragile as a wind-flower, and my own mother fell ill a few days after our arrival at her mother’s birthplace, and did not lift her head from the pillow for three months.
I have no data by which to fix the relative times of any happenings of that long, long, dreary winter. It dragged by like an interminable dream. My father was absent in Ohio for some weeks of the first month. He had set out on a second journey to his Promised Land when
