Virginia: the Old Dominion · Chapter 10List of Illustrations (9)
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To the right of the hall was the drawing-room. Passing over its threshold, we thought of those old colonial days, the days of Colonel Byrd. As in his time, the light came subdued through the deep-casemented windows. It fell upon the walls that he had so handsomely panelled, upon the ceiling that he had ornamented in the delicate putty-work of his day, and upon furniture in carved mahogany that was of the period of his ownership of Westover.
At the farther end of the room was the noted mantelpiece imported from Italy by Colonel Byrd. It is an elaborate creation of Italian marble with relief design in white upon a black background. In front of it, on either hand, stood handsome brass torcheres, with their suggestion of the mellow candle-light that was wont to fall in this same room upon the courtly Colonel, the lovely Evelyn, and those brilliant assemblages of colonial times.
Opening also from the hall are the dining-room with its high colonial mantel and typical Virginia buffet, the French morning-room with its gray green tints and its touches of gilt, and the library with its old chimney-piece, high black fire-dogs, and quaint fire-tending irons. All the rooms have their colonial panelling, deep window-seats, and open fireplaces.
In the dining-room our interest was quickened upon our being told that the handsome sideboard had belonged to the Byrd family. It is believed to be a Hepplewhite, though similar in lines to a rare design of Sheraton's. Above the sideboard a circular, concave mirror of elaborate eighteenth century type accentuates the period furnishing of the room.
Up-stairs even more than below, we felt the atmosphere of the olden time. Perhaps passing the ancient clock on the landing helped to set us back a century or two. We were quite prepared for the quiet, old-fashioned upper hall, with its richness half lost in the shadows and with its sleepy night-stand holding a brass house lantern and a prim array of candles in brass candlesticks.
In the bedrooms were four-posters and the things of four-poster days. Wing-cheek chairs of cozy depths told of old-time fireside dreams; a work-table with attenuated legs called to mind the wearisome needlework of our foremothers; and a brass warming-pan carried us back to the times when only such devices could make tolerable the frigid winter beds of our ancestors.
One of the riverward bedrooms is the romantic centre of Westover. It now belongs to the little daughter of the house; but nearly two centuries ago it was the room of Evelyn Byrd. Doubtless, in a sense, it will always be hers. The soft toned panelled walls, the old fireplace opposite the door, and the cozy little dressing-room looking gardenward, all seem to speak of her; and the imaginative visitor can quite discern a graceful figure in colonial gown there in one of the deep window seats that look out upon the pleasance and the river.
Here the unfortunate colonial beauty lived and died with the grief that she brought from over the sea. Here she laid away the rich brocade, the old court gown of brilliant, bitter memories that was shown to us at Brandon. Through these windows she looked with ever more wistful eyes out upon the river, her thoughts hurrying with its waters toward the ocean and the lover beyond. And one day, it is said, a great ship from London came, and it touched at the pier before her windows, and Charles Mordaunt plead his cause with the stern father once more. But he plead in vain, and the ship and the lover sailed away. For a while longer, the colonial girl waited and looked out upon the river, then she too went away and the romance was over.
In the family circle at Westover to-day are Mrs. Ramsay, two sons, and the little daughter, Elizabeth. Among well-known families appearing in Mrs. Ramsay's ancestry are the Sears and the Gardiners of Massachusetts, she being a descendant of Lyon Gardiner of Gardiner's Island. She also claims kinship with the Randolphs and the Reeveses of Virginia, and a collateral and remote connection with the Byrds.
When we returned to the steamer pier after our visit at Westover, we found quite a wind on the river and the houseboat fretfully bumping the pilings. We hastened aboard, ran down stream before a stiff wind, and skurried back into our harbour in Herring Creek, where Gadabout settled to her moorings as contented as a duck in the marshes.
CHAPTER XX AN OLD COURTYARD AND A SUN-DIAL
For some time that little anchorage was our watery home acre. We came to call it our sunrise harbour. The opening where creek and river met faced to the east; and it was well worth while, if the morning was not too chill, to have an eye on that opening when the sun came up. Breaking through the mist veil that hung over the James, he cast a golden pontoon across the river, and then came over in all his splendour. He made straight for the mouth of our little creek, flooding wood and marsh with misty glow, and fairly crowding his glory into the narrow channel.
One morning, quite in keeping with the splendid burst of dawn, a loud report rang out over the marshes like the sound of a sunrise gun. But it was no salute to the orb of day. Somebody was poaching. More shots followed; and ducks, quacking loudly, fluttered up out of the marshes. Later, when we were at breakfast, a long rowboat, containing a man and a pile of brush and doubtless some ducks with the fine flavour of the forbidden, came out from a break in the marshes and went hurriedly up the stream.
As we lay in our harbour, we found ourselves almost unconsciously listening for a sound that seemed to belong to those chill, gray days. At last, from somewhere high up in the air, it came ringing down to us—the stirring "honk, honk" of the wild goose. Though our eyes searched the heavens, we could see nothing of the living wedge of flight up there that was cleaving its way southward with the speed of the wind. But we felt the thrill of that wild, stirring cry and were satisfied.
Whether the geese brought it or not, bad weather came with them. Half a gale came driving the rain before it down the river. Gadabout lay with her bulkheads closed tight about her forward cockpit, and must have looked most dismal. But inside, dry and warm, she was a very cheery little craft. We listened quite contentedly to the uproar, looking out from our windows upon windswept marsh and scudding clouds and the fussy little wavelets of our harbour. It added to our sense of coziness to look through a stern window out upon the river where the waters piled and broke white, in their midst an anchored schooner with swaying masts, tipsy between wind and tide.
One day when the heavens had gone blue again, though tattered clouds were still racing across, we hoisted anchor for another visit to Westover. When Gadabout poked her head out of the creek, she saw a queer looking craft busy on the James. It was a government buoy-tender, an awkward side-wheeler with a derrick forward, and big red sticks and black ones lying on deck.
As we passed the tender, it was moving the red buoy at the mouth of our creek farther out into the river. Evidently the shoals were encroaching upon the channel. Gadabout showed little interest in the strange boat and its doings; and, unconcernedly turning her back, headed up the river. Of course buoys were all very well and she found them quite a help in getting about; but all this fussy shifting of them by a few feet mattered little to her, for she was on the wrong side of them most of the time anyway.
However, we thought of how differently the watchful buoy-tender would be regarded by the heavy laden freighters that would pass that way, their rusty hulls plowing deep. To them how important that each buoy, each inanimate flagman of the river route, should stand true where danger lies and truly point the fairway.
Reaching the little cove below the steamboat pier, Gadabout ran close in and cast anchor. She may well have been proud of the quite perceptible waves that she sent rolling to the shore and of the quite audible swish that they made on the beach.
That morning we saw the landward front of Westover, and straightway forgot all about the more pretentious river front. You step from the house down into an old-time courtyard. At first you do not see much of the courtyard itself, for you have heard of its noted entrance gates, perhaps the first example of ornamental iron-work in the colonies, and they stand quite conspicuously in front of you. These gates were imported from England by Colonel William Byrd, whose initials, W.E.B., appear inwrought in monogram.
Two great birds standing on stone balls top the gate-posts. With a fine disregard of both ornithology and heraldry these birds have often been spoken of as martlets—the martlet appearing in the Byrd coat of arms. They are evidently eagles, and pretty well developed specimens. American eagles, we might call them, if they had not lighted upon these gate-posts before the American nation adopted its emblem—indeed before the American nation was born. When, in the days of the Civil War, the Federal troops came along, the soldiers seem to have stood strictly upon chronology, and to have determined that these fine prerevolutionary birds were not entitled to any immunity as national emblems nor even as kinsfolk of "Old Abe." And so their tough feathers flattened many a bullet, and one eagle had to be sent to Richmond to get some toes and a new tail.
Turning from the gates, your eyes follow down the courtyard toward the garden. Walls, outbuildings, the quaint cellar-hut, even the diamond-shaped stepping-stones along the way, all help to make up a characteristic colonial scene.
And for what striking bits of colonial life has this old courtyard been the setting! Now the exquisite Colonel and his ladies would visit the little capital of Williamsburg; so, at his door, stands ready his "lordly coach and six with liveried outriders in waiting." Again, the great gates are thrown open to guests arriving on horseback and in chariots and chairs. Pompous, beruffled dignitaries vie with gay gallants in obeisances and compliments to the ladies, and in assisting them to alight without harm to brocades and laces and rich cloaks and wide-hooped petticoats. And, yet again, all is a-bustle here with scarlet-coated horsemen and baying hounds and hurrying black boys and all that goes to
"Proclaim a hunting-morning."
When the ancient courtyard is left empty again—the colonial coaches rolled off through the gates; the colonial huntsmen up and away and now but distant points of red, fading to the music of hounds and horns—we fall to wondering about those early Virginians.
Such, largely, was their life—abundant leisure, elegant display, exuberant merrymaking. Just such a life, by all the rules, as would produce a useless race devoid of any solidity of mind or of character. Just such a life as in fact produced a race of high-minded, intelligent, and capable men; a race that gave us Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Madison, Marshall, Monroe, and the scarcely lesser names on down the long list of those wonderful sons of the Old Dominion.
It would do no good to ask even that colonial courtyard for an explanation of all this. It simply recalled what it had seen and heard. Nor could we of to-day understand the explanation were we to get it. Unable to reconcile industry and leisure, we underrate the real work that went with the idling of those early Virginians; and as to the gayety, we long ago lost sight of the fact that merrymaking is man-making.
Turning from the gateway, we went down the old courtyard. We followed a walk that led past the kitchen and the dairy, skirted a wall, and then turned through a box-shaded gateway into the garden.
Those December days were not the season of gardens, even in Virginia. The paths led us not where bloom was, but where bloom had been. Yet, truly all times are garden times where warm red walls shut you in with shadowing trees and shrubs, and where ancient box and ivy hedge the prim old ways.
How much our colonial forefathers thought of their gardens! and how much their English forefathers thought of theirs! It was in the blood to have a garden, and to have it walled, and to sit and to walk and to talk in it.
Walking and talking that day with Westover's mistress in Westover's garden, we soon came upon the tomb of the noted William Byrd. Representative as was this master of Westover of all that was most elegant in the colonial life of his day, he was much more than merely a man of the fashionable world. Ability of a high order went with the beauty and the ruffles and the powder. He was statesman, scholar, and author; and in England he had been made, for his proficiency in science, a fellow of the Royal Society.
We owe a great deal to this old-time grandee for the glimpses his writings give us of colonial life in the South during the generation just preceding that of Washington. Unlike the Northern colonists, the Southern ones left little record of themselves. So much the more valuable, then, the accounts given by this remarkable man of the times.
We seemed turning from an impressive text as we left the tomb; left the old grand seignior in his little six feet of earth—six feet out of 175,000 acres! But, after all, it was a rueful text; not one for morning sunshine and blue sky, for hearts that yet beat strong, that yet gloried in a boundless estate—all the bright world ours. And the birds were holding carnival over by the stone basin under the ram's head on the wall; and the river was dancing in the sunlight; and besides, we had caught sight of a sun-dial there in that old colonial garden by the banks of the "King's River"! To he sure we were told that this was not an ancient timepiece of the sun. We were much too late to see the original sun-dial of this garden. That old colonial worthy had found time too long for its marking. Worn with the years that it had told, it had leaned and dozed, and lost count, and was gone.
But it is not so much that a garden should have an old sun-dial, as that it should have a sun-dial. For the matter of that, they are all old. Venerableness is their birthright. Whoever thinks of youth in a sun-dial? Were you unboxing one just from the maker would you not expect to find it moss-grown?
Indeed, are these timepieces of sun and shadow made at all, or do they just occur here and there like hoary rocks and mossy springs? And what a charming provision of Nature it is that they so often occur in gardens! Sun-dials and gardens! Sunshine-and-shadow time for plants to grow by; sunshine-and-shadow time for flowers to bloom by. Surely this is the only time by which a morning-glory should waken, by which a four-o'clock should know its hour, by which an evening primrose should time its fragrant bloom.
Sun-dials and gardens! Sunshine-and-shadow time for birds to sing by; sunshine-and-shadow time for mortals to laze and dream by. Beautiful, silent, peaceful time; where no clocks strike the passing hours, no whistles scream the round of toil. What time like that of the noiseless, scarce-moving shadow upon the dial for a sleepy old garden and a day-dreamer in the sunshine? And if, perchance, the garden-lover is not building castles in Spain, but has crept into the garden only for brief rest from the fray, or to give a weary clock-driven soul an hour with its Maker, then truly again—sun-dials and gardens! Sun-dial time to rest the fainting heart by; sun-dial time for the troubled soul to reach up to God by. Sun-dials and gardens!
Be the garden-lover what he may—day-dreamer, fainting heart, troubled soul—how gently the shadow-finger on the dial points the time for him! How softly, almost lingeringly, it lets the moments slip from gold to gray, seeking to give him, to the full and unfretted, his little hour in the sunshine!
And yet, the gentlest marker of time must mark. It may mark very softly those passing moments of life's lessening span; but when we come to look again, the shadow has moved on. Nor can childish interference avail. Spread your rebellious hands upon the dial; you shall only see the shadow come stealing through your fingers. Stand defiantly in the path of the sunlight, and blot out the telltale dial shadow with your own; it but waits until you step aside, then leaps across the moments you have wasted. Not for you shall the boon to the sick and penitent King of Judah be repeated; not for you shall the shadow turn backward on the sun-dial of Ahaz.
CHAPTER XXI AN UNDERGROUND MYSTERY AND A DUCKING-STOOL
For a day or two Gadabout lay out in the James in front of Westover. One evening it turned cold and a strong wind set in, coming straight at us across the river. As usual, when Gadabout was anchored on a stormy night near a lee shore, we cast a lead out ahead, so as to be able to tell (after it should become too dark to see the land) whether or not we were dragging anchor.
That is, we called it casting a lead, though in reality the process consisted in throwing out into the river (as far ahead of us as we could) a piece of old iron with a string tied to it. Then, at any time, by gathering up the loose end of the string that lay in the cockpit, one could detect by the outgo of the line any tendency on the part of Gadabout to run away with her anchor. It was a very simple device and not exactly original, having doubtless been used a little earlier by Christopher Columbus and Noah and those people. But we never permitted any question of priority to dampen our interest in the thing.
As the evening wore on the storm held steadily; steadily and rapidly the barometer kept counting backward; and we took the river's width in wind and sea for half the night. We could not sleep, and sat bolstered up in our chairs. The Commodore quite likely did breathe audibly now and then; but Nautica was wide awake, as shown by her announcing with feeling and frequency that "she knew we were dragging anchor and were just about to be horribly wrecked upon rocks or 'stobs' or something or other."
The Commodore arose and busied himself about cockpit and cabin mysteriously. When he finished his labours, the string from the piece of iron out in the river came into the cabin through a hole in the wall made for an engine bell cord. It ran along the ceiling to the after end of the cabin, where a weight kept it taut. A handkerchief that could be plainly seen even in the dim light, was fastened to the string just where it passed above Nautica's head. By this time, the Commodore's mystery was a mystery no longer; and Nautica was laughing.
"So that is to put an end to all my anxieties, is it?"
"Just so," said the Commodore. "When that anxious feeling comes, watch the handkerchief. If it is moving toward the door, you may know that your fears are better grounded than the anchors; but if it is not, try to get a wink of sleep."
And the wind howled and the boat pitched; but Nautica gazed in such relief at the immovable handkerchief that she fell asleep in her chair. When she wakened with a start and looked anxiously at the handkerchief, it was too late—the storm was over.
In the morning there was nothing to show for all that night's commotion. Smooth, peaceful, and lazy, old Powhatan was loitering in the sunlight to the sea. But Gadabout was not to be soothed into forgetfulness of those night hours. As soon as she had her morning work done up, she hoisted anchor and headed again for her quiet harbour in Herring Creek. After that, when we had a mind to go to Westover, we usually had no mind to take Gadabout with us. Instead, we were more likely to row up the river or to walk up the beach at low tide.
On the occasion of our last visit to the manor-house, we determined to go "beachway." We ran our rowboat on a sandy point jutting into the mouth of the creek, and took our way along the narrow strip of solid land that lay between river and marsh. White-limbed sycamores and tangled undergrowth went along with us, and sometimes inclined to take up more than their share of the narrow way. Brilliant berries gleamed on some bare, brown bushes, and the green leaves of the smilax pretended that they grew there too. Along the beach, tall bunches of reeds stood out against the brown of the river and the blue of the sky in their waving slenderness.
Looking backward across the marshes, we could see the white railing on Gadabout's upper deck and could catch the flutter of her flags through the openings in the trees. As we neared Westover, a slope led to higher land and to a riverward, side entrance to the grounds. Passing through this, a tangle of vines swinging with the great iron gate, we followed the walk toward the house.
Just before reaching the ballroom wing, we paused in front of a small brick outbuilding to have a few appropriate shivers over what was under it. From reading and from our talks at Westover, we knew about the mysterious subterranean chambers down there. To be sure, we had not seen them yet (one thing and another having got in the way of our making a visit to them); but surely one need not always wait to see; one can shiver a little anyway upon hearsay.
And the hearsay was like this. Somewhere underneath that brick outbuilding was an opening down into the earth, like a dry well, some fifteen or twenty feet deep. At the bottom, arched doorways on opposite sides of the shaft opened into two small square rooms. The walls of the well and of the rooms were cement; and the floors were paved with brick. A round stone table used to stand in one of the rooms. From this well once ran two passages or tunnels, large enough for people to go through; one connecting with the house by a curious stairway in the old wing that was destroyed in the war, and the other leading to the river.
We stood looking blankly at the closed outbuilding trying to imagine the hidden rooms and passages beneath it. Tradition told us that they were for refuge from the Indians. That explanation seemed well enough at first. But before we could get into the spirit of it enough to catch even the faintest bit of a warwhoop and to scuttle for the subterranean chambers, we made up our minds that that was not what the things were for anyway. There had ceased to be much danger from Indians along that part of the James by the time even this old home at Westover was built.
So, casting about for a better explanation, we hit upon the idea that William Byrd had constructed the underground rooms in imitation of Pope's famous grotto, which the Colonel and his daughter Evelyn must have seen when entertained by the poet in his villa at Twickenham. But even after we had pictured the mysterious chambers all hung round with mirrors, just like Pope's, and candles everywhere, we could see that so tame a thing as the grotto theory would never do.
There were so many nice, awful things that such a place would be good for. Spurring our jaded fancy with bits from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, we got on famously for a while with a pirates' den. We had a long, low, rakish ship lying in the river just off the tunnel's mouth; black-bearded ruffians, with knives between their teeth, stealing ashore and disappearing within the dark underground passage; the great stone table down there heaped with Spanish gold; good Jamaica rum pouring down wicked throats; the dark tunnels ever echoing the rollicking chorus, "Six men sat on the dead man's chest"—when suddenly it occurred to us that we were somewhat compromising the old colonial grandee, Colonel Byrd. With that we gave the matter up. We quit staring at a closed brick outbuilding with unseeable things down under it, and went on our way. And, as it turned out that we never visited the underground rooms after all, this was as near as we ever came to solving the colonial mystery.
That day, sitting about the fireplace in Colonel Byrd's library, we listened to a pleasant chapter in the story of an old manor-house—the account of the recent restoration of Westover. As in most cases where extensive rehabilitation of colonial homes has been attempted, an interesting part of the work was the opening up of goodly old-time fireplaces that the changing fashions of changing generations had filled in with brick and mortar. Sometimes they had shrunk to the dimensions of a modern grate; sometimes even to that of a stovepipe hole. Indeed, what chronological mile-stones are the various forms of our American fireplaces! As the historic dates grow larger, the fireplaces grow smaller.
Of course Westover never had the hugest of fireplaces. Even when this old home was built, the shrinkage in chimney-pieces had been going on for some time. No longer was most of the side of a room in a blaze. No longer was the flame fed by a backlog so huge that "a chain was attached to it, and it was dragged in by a horse."
How far removed Westover was from the day of such things, is shown by the noted mantelpiece in the drawing-room. Only with the coming of smaller fireplaces came those elaborate mantelpieces. But the great fireplaces of our ancestors yielded slowly, inch by inch, as it were; and something of the goodly proportions they yet had in Colonel Byrd's day, the hammer and chisel have shown at Westover.
If the exquisite Colonel's doubtless exquisite ghost haunts this home, we can imagine his pleasure when, one wintry night, he found reopened this fine old library fireplace, and sat him down to toast his shapely calves (even ghostly, they must yet be shapely) in the genial old-time glow.
Some of the most interesting features of the work of putting an old homestead back into a period from which it has strayed, grow out of the very limitations. At Westover, while conformity to colonial times is carried far, even to the exclusion of rocking-chairs, yet there has been no shrinking from anachronisms that comfort or convenience demand.
Eighteenth century fireplaces may blaze and crackle, and quite imagine themselves to be still heating the old house; but somewhere down below is a twentieth century furnace that is quietly doing most of the work.
And what a shock it must be to the colonial ghosts when they stumble in the dark over great claw feet, cold even as their own; the feet of monstrous hollow things, white and awesome as themselves—the things that moderns call bathtubs!
Over in the kitchen, unfortunately for the picturesque, all has to be modern. There the eighteenth century furnishing breaks down altogether. Not from the glowing heart of the old chimney-place, but from a huge, homely range comes the gastronomic hospitality of present-day Westover.
No devotion to the eighteenth century can bring the colonial kitchen back again; send the roaring blaze up the wide chimney; swing the crane with the great kettle into the glow; and rebuild the quaint row of skillet and gridiron and broiler, perched on their little legs over the hot embers of the old hearthstone.
Westover has an interesting reminder of the colonial in a copy of an old survey of the plantation that we saw that day. Our eyes quickly caught the suggestive name given on the map to the low, sandy point at the mouth of Herring Creek, where we had left our shore-boat to wait for us. We had not known that it was a place of such associations as the words "Ducking-stool Point" indicated.
Upon first landing there, we had been impressed with the unusual depth of water just off that point; but we had not suspected how, in colonial tunes, many a too-talkative woman had also been impressed with it. It was the law, made and provided, that a ducking-stool should be set up "neere the court-house in every county." So, doubtless, in accordance with that law, a long pole used to reach out from our sandy point, having a seat on the end of it, right over the deep water. And, also in accordance with law, the end of the pole sometimes went down into the water, and a shivering woman went with it. But what would you, when "brabbling women slander and scandalize their neighbours, for which their poore husbands are often brought into chargeable and vexatious suits and cast in great damages"?