Marion Harland's Autobiography. Marion Harland
bloodcurdling shriek:
“Ole Mis’ Moore! Sure’s you born! Don’ you see her cap on her hade?”
We fled, helter-skelter, as for our four lives, and never stopped to look behind us.
The apparition did resemble the crown of a mob-cap with knots of black ribbons at the sides. I saw, almost as plainly as I had beheld her daughter’s wraith, the form hidden by the wall, picking her way over the brier-grown enclosure.
I do not know how much longer we lived at the Bragg house. Sure am I that I never paid a second call upon the denizens of the half-acre defended by the brick wall.
Years afterward, my mother told me the true tale of the old lady’s pet cat that would not leave her mistress’s grave, having followed in the funeral train down the long alley, and seen the coffin laid in the ground on the day of the funeral. The dumb beast haunted the burying-ground ever after, living on birds and field-mice, and starved to death in a deep snow that lay long on the frozen ground the second winter of her watch.
Why the four-year-old child did not lose what wits were hers by nature, or become a nerveless coward for the rest of her days, under the stress of influences never suspected by her parents, was due, probably, to a strain of physical and mental hardihood inherited from a dauntless father.
It must have been shortly after this incident that, coming into the dining-room one morning, I heard my mother say to my father:
“My dear, Frank has the Western fever!”
Frank Wilson, a nice boy, the son of a neighboring planter, was my father’s bookkeeper and an inmate of our house. He was very kind to me, and had won a lasting place in my regard as the maker of the very best whistles and fifes of chincapin bark of any one I had ever known. They piped more shrilly and held their shape longer than those turned out by my father and by various visitors who paid court to my young lady cousins through me. So I looked anxiously at the alleged sufferer, startled and pained by the announcement of his affliction. He was eating his breakfast composedly, and answered my father’s “Good-morning—and is that true, my boy?” with a pleasant laugh. There was not a sign of the invalid in look, action, or tone.
“I can’t deny it, sir!”
I slipped into my chair beside him, receiving a caressing pat on the hand I laid on his arm, and hearkened with greedy ears for further particulars of the case, never asking a question. Children of that generation were trained to make their ears and eyes do duty for the tongue. I comprehended but a tithe of the ensuing conversation. I made out that the mysterious fever did not affect Frank’s appetite and general health, but that it involved the necessity of his leaving us for a long time. He might never come back. His proviso in this direction was, “If I do as well as I hope to do out there.”
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