Virginia: the Old Dominion · Chapter 12List of Illustrations (11)
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As we neared a ridge of meadowland, a pastoral for a Schenck took shape in the fog cloud before us. Scattered groups of sheep appeared close at hand, and, faintly visible beyond them, a denser mass of moving white. No tree nor landmark was to be seen; just set into the soft whiteness, showing mistily, was the snowy flock itself. Sheep grazed in groups, the tan shaded slope in faint colouring beneath them. Here and there a mother turned her head to call back anxiously for the bleating lambkin lost behind the white curtain; and, dim and grotesque, the awkward strayling would come gamboling into sight. Near by on a little hillock, a single sheep stood with its head thrown up, a ghostly lookout. The hidden sun made the haze faintly luminous about this wandering flock of cloudland. We were not the first to move and to break the picture.
As we gained higher ground, a breeze was stirring and the fog was beginning to lift. When we reached the edge of the Shirley homestead and passed the turreted dove-cote, the near-by objects had grown quite distinct. But out on the river the fog yet lay dense; and two boats somewhere in the impenetrable whiteness were calling warningly to each other.
Now we went on toward the manor-house that loomed against a soft background of river fog.
The mansion is wholly unlike either Brandon or Westover, being a massive square building without wings. It is two and a half stories high, with a roof of modified mansard style pierced with many dormer windows. It has both a landward and a riverward front, and both alike. Each front has a large porch of two stories in Georgian design with Doric columns. The walls of the house are laid in Flemish bond, black glazed bricks alternating with the dull red ones. While both the roof and the porches are departures from the original lines of the house, yet they are departures that have themselves attained a dignified age of about a century and a quarter.
Always, in the consideration of colonial homes, Shirley is regarded as one of the finest examples. This means much more than at first appears. For the mansions with which Shirley is usually compared, were built from half a century to a century later.
Continuing along the road as we studied the home, we were led around to the landward front and into the midst of the ancient messuage.
We stood in a great open quadrangle, having the house at one end, the distant barns at the other; on one side the kitchen, a large two-story building, and on the other side a similar building used for storage and for indoor plantation work. A high box hedge ran across from one of these side buildings to the other, dividing the long quadrangle into halves, one part adjacent to the house and the other to the barns.
The village effect produced by the grouped buildings must have been even more striking in colonial times; for then the manor-house was flanked by two more large brick buildings, forming what might be called detached wings. One of these was still standing up to the time of the Civil War.
The visitor is conscious of two dominant impressions, as he stands thus in the midst of this seventeenth century homestead. The massive solidity of the place takes hold of one first; but, strangely enough, the strongest impression is that of an all-pervading air of youthfulness. Doubtless the oldest homestead on the river, and one of the oldest in the country, it utterly refuses to look its age. Perhaps the solid, square compactness of the buildings has much to do with this. They appear as though built to defy time. Even the shadow of the venerable trees and the ancient ivy's telltale embrace seem powerless to break the spell of perennial youth.
In the home, we met Mrs. Bransford, widow of Mr. H.W. Bransford, Commander and Mrs. James H. Oliver, U.S.N., and Miss Susy Carter. Mrs. Bransford and Mrs. Oliver are the daughters of the late Mr. and Mrs. Robert Randolph Carter, and are the present owners of the plantation, Mrs. Bransford making her home there. Commander Oliver represents the third consecutive generation of naval officers in the Shirley family.
Upon entering the house in the usual way, from the landward side, the visitor finds himself in a large square hall occupying one corner of the building. This room discloses at a glance the type and the genius of Shirley. It begins at once to tell you all about itself; and when you know this old hall, you have the key to the mansion and to its story. It is truly a colonial "great hall." It tells you that by its goodly old-time ampleness, its high panelled walls with their dimming portraits, its great chimneypiece flanked by tall cupboards, and its massive overshadowing stairway.
The chief architectural feature of the room is this stairway. Starting in one corner, it rises along the panelled wall until half way to the ceiling, then turns sharply out into the room for the remainder of its ascent to the second floor, thus exposing overhead a handsome soffit. The effect, in connection with the great panelled well of the staircase, is one of rich and goodly ancientness.
Indeed, though you may enter Shirley feeling that the house, like some long-lingering colonial belle, is perhaps not quite frank with you about its age, you will not find the hall taking part in any such misrepresentation. Despite some modern marks and even the fact that the fireplace has been closed, this room says in every line that it is very old.
It stands true to the memory of its seventeenth-century builder who had known and loved the "great halls" of "Merrie England." It tells of the time when the life of a household centred in the spacious hall; when there the great fire burned and the family gathered round—of the time when halls were the hearts, not the mere portals, of homes.
And so in this room, as in few others in our country, does the visitor find the setting and the atmosphere of manor-house life in early colonial days. He can well fancy this "great hall" of Shirley in the ruddy light of flaming logs that burned in the wide fireplace two centuries and a half ago. Dusky in far corners or sharply drawn near the firelight, stood, in those days, chests and tables and forms and doubtless a bed too with its valance and curtains. In a medley typical of the times in even the great homes, were saddles, bridles, and embroidery frames, swords, guns, flute, and hand-lyre.
Here, in a picturesque and almost mediaeval confusion, the family mostly gathered, while favourite hounds stretched and blinked in the chimney-place beside the black boy who drowsily tended the fire.
Here, the long, narrow "tabull-bord" was spread with its snowy cloth, taken from the heavy chest of linen in the corner, of which my lady of the manor was prodigiously proud. Upon the cloth were placed soft-lustred pewter and, probably almost from the first, some pieces of silver too. The salt was "sett in the myddys of the tabull," likely in a fine silver dish worthy its important function in determining the seating about the "bord." As family and guests gathered round, the host and hostess took places side by side at one end; near them the more important guests were given seats "above the salt," while lesser folk and children sat "below the salt."
Then, from the distant kitchen in the quadrangle, came slaves or indentured servant bearing the steaming food in great chargers and chafing-dishes. Doubtless, in those earliest days, the food was eaten from wooden trenchers, not plates; while from lip to lip the communal bowl went round. Knives and spoons were plentiful, but even in such a home as Shirley forks were still a rarity; and the profusion of napkins was well when helpful fingers gave service to healthy appetites.
But that was the hall life of very early days. Gradually, in the colonies as in England, the evolution of refinement specialized the home; developed drawing-rooms, dining-rooms, libraries; and so took away from the "great halls" almost all of this intimate life of the household.
There is something pathetic in this desertion of the ancient, central hearthstone. We thought of Shirley's old hall growing sadly quiet and chill as it lost the merry chatter about the "tabull-bord"; as saddles and bridles jingled there for the last time on their way to some far outbuilding; as the gentlewomen carried their needlework away, and the little maids followed with their samplers. At last, all the old life was gone. Even the master himself came no longer to mull his wine by the andirons; and the very dogs stretched themselves less often and with less content at the chimney-side.
All the rooms at Shirley are richly panelled to the ceiling, and have heavy, ornate cornices and fine, carved mantelpieces and doorways. The examples of interior woodwork especially regarded by connoisseurs are the panelling in the morning-room, the elaborately carved mantel in the drawing-room, and the handsome doorway between that room and the dining-room.
Upstairs, a central hallway runs through the house, double doors opening at both riverward and landward ends upon broad porticoes. The bedrooms on either hand are panelled to the ceiling. They have deep-set windows, open fireplaces, and quaint old-time furnishings.
And people slept here back in the seventeenth century; dreamed here in those faraway times when James Towne, now long buried and almost forgotten, was the capital of the little colony. Here, in succeeding generations, have slept many notable guests of Shirley. Tradition includes among these the Duke of Argyle, LaFayette, our own George Washington, and the Prince of Wales.
Here, too, are some of the oldest ghosts in America. Most of these are quiet, well-behaved members of the household; but one ancient shade, Aunt Pratt by name, seems to presume upon her age as old people sometimes will, and is really quite hard to get along with.
Listen to an instance of her downright unreasonableness. Her portrait used to hang in the drawing-room among those of the Hills (she is or was, or however you say it, a sister of the Colonel Hill who built the mansion); but having become injured it was taken down and put away face to the wall. Immediately, this ghostly Aunt Pratt showed deep resentment. Womanlike, she threw herself into a chair in one of these bedrooms and rocked and rocked violently. Of course she disturbed the whole household; but no matter how noiselessly people stole in to catch her at her tantrums, she was always too quick for them—the room was empty, the chairs all still. At last the picture was got out, repaired, and rehung. At once all was peace and quiet; Aunt Pratt had had her way.
CHAPTER XXIV FROM CREEK HARBOUR TO COLONIAL RECEPTION
Eppes Creek was the most remote and isolated of all our James River harbours. Gadabout was like a bit of civilization that had got broken off and had drifted away into the wild. The stream was such a mere ribbon with such tall trees along its banks, that we looked upward to but a narrow lane of open sky. Sometimes the lane was blue, sometimes gray, and sometimes dark and set with twinkling stars.
The wood across the creek from us was a dismal looking place. The trees were swamp cypresses that had lost their summer green, and stood drooping and forlorn in the low, marshy soil. Nautica wasted a good deal of sympathy upon them as she compared them with the richly clothed pines and the luxuriant holly upon our side of the stream.
There doubtless was game in that desolate wood; although about the only living things that we saw in it, even when we rowed close along its ragged shore, were owls. At night, strange, uncanny cries came out of the wood, and probably out of the owls also; but such sad and querulous cries as may well have been the plaints of the mournful marsh forest itself. Upon our Shirley shore too, there lived an owl, evidently of a different kind. We never saw him; but at night he worked untiringly upon a voluminous woodland edition of "Who's Who."
In this harbour, we heard often the stirring cry out of the high heavens that our ears had caught once in our anchorage at Westover. And now we saw the wild geese themselves.
Each time, at the first faint "honk," we got quickly to the windows or out on deck, and stood waiting for the beautiful V-shaped flight to come swinging into our sky-lane. And with what a glorious sweep the birds came on! And to what gloriously discordant music!
Sometimes they went over in V's that were quite regular; but often the diverging lines would grow wavy, the beautiful flying letter still holding but swinging in and out as though blown about on the face of the sky.
Perhaps we had something to do with those variants of the wild goose's favourite letter. Quite likely the sight of Gadabout, fluttering her flags down there in Eppes Creek, made those wise old gander leaders veer in a way somewhat disconcerting to their faithful followers.
But on they came, and on they went in their wonderful flight through sunshine and through storm, by day and by night; leaving a strangely roused and quickened world behind them. Just a fleet passing of wings, a clamour of cries—why should one's heart leap, and his nerves go restless, and joy and sadness get mixed up inside him? A few birds flying over—yet stirring as a military pageant! A jangle of senseless "honks"—yet in it the irresistible urge of bugle and drum!
One cannot explain. One can only stand and look and listen, till the living, flying letter is lost in the sky; till his ear can no longer catch the glorious, wild clangour of "the going of the geese."
Isolated as our anchorage was, we had a connecting link between Gadabout and civilization. It was about three feet long, of a sombre hue, and its name was Bob. Bob brought us milk and eggs and our mail, and ran errands generally. He was usually attended by such a retinue that only the smallest picaninnies could have been left back at the quarters.
Sometimes, Bob lightened his labours by having a member of his following carry a pail or the mail-bag. This worked badly; for it was only by such badges of office that we were able to tell which was Bob. But after several small coins had gone into the wrong ragged hats, Bob grasped the situation; and, in a masterly way, solved the question of identity without losing the services of his satellites. Henceforth, when we heard the chattering boys coming through the woods, if we looked out promptly enough, we would see Bob relieving some one of his doubles of pail or mail-bag; and by the time he reached the houseboat, he would be in full possession of all means of identification.
"Would you like to go to meet the ladies and gentlemen on the walls?" Mrs. Bransford asked one day at Shirley.
The invitation was accepted with as much alacrity as if we had feared that the reception hours were almost over. But there was really no need of haste; for the lines of notables on Shirley's walls stand there from generation to generation, yet receiving always with such dignity and courtesy as permit not the slightest sign of weariness or expression of being bored.
In meeting those old-time owners and lovers of Shirley, the visitor is passed from one hand-clasp to another, as it were, down through the generations of colonial times.
Giving precedence to age, we made our first fancied obeisance before two distinguished looking people who, however, did not seem entitled to any consideration whatever on the ground of age, being both in the prime of life. And yet, these were Colonel and Mrs. Edward Hill, second of the name at Shirley, and the first master and mistress of the present manor-house.
We were a little surprised at the Colonel's appearance; for he was clean shaven and wore a wig. Now, we had been hobnobbing long enough with those beginners of our country—Captain John Smith, Sir Edwin Sandys, Lord Delaware, and the rest—to know that they were a bearded set and hadn't a wig amongst them.
Fortunately, we remembered in time that this portrait-gentleman, old as he was, did not quite reach back to the days of those first settlers; and that he had lived to see the great change of fashion (in the reign of Charles II) that made Englishmen for generations whiskerless and bewigged.
Though our land was settled by bearded men, with just the hair on their heads that Nature gave them (and sometimes, when the Indians were active, not all of that), yet the country was developed and made independent and set up as a nation by smooth-faced men, most fuzzily bewigged. That reign of the razor that began in the days of Colonel Hill, was a long one, and, later, determined the appearance of the Father of our Country. Imagine George Washington with a Van Dyck beard!
Of course it was bad form for us to stand there staring at the Colonel while we reasoned out all this matter of the beards and the wigs. Now the Commodore, at a suggestion from Nautica's elbow, shifted to the other foot and cleared his throat to say something. But what was there to say? It is a little trying, this meeting people who cannot converse intelligently upon anything that has happened since the seventeenth century.
At last, we murmured something about Charles II; and, to make sure, let the murmuring run over a little into the reigns of James II and of William and Mary, and then passed on; though the Commodore felt there should have been at least some slight allusion to the pyramids and the cave-dwellers.
We must have taken very slowly the few steps that carried us to the next member of the receiving party; for in that time the world moved on a generation, and we found ourselves paying respects to no less a personage than "King" Carter himself. Too modest to suppose that he had come over from Corotoman on our account, we strongly suspected that the matter of alliance between the families of Hill and of Carter was in the air; which would account for the presence of the potentate of the Rappahannock.
He looked very imposing in his velvets and his elaborate, powdered periwig, standing ceremoniously, one hand thrust within his rich, half-open waistcoat.
Now was the time for all that we knew about Queen Anne and King George the First, and about the recent removal of the colonial capital from James Towne to Williamsburg.
The next dignitaries were very near; but again it took a generation to get to them, the names being John Carter (usually called Secretary Carter from his important colonial office) and Elizabeth Hill Carter, his wife. These were the young people who united the houses of Shirley and Corotoman. So, even yet, we had got down only to the days of George the Second.
Secretary and Mrs. Carter were a handsome pair; she, fair and girlish, with an armful of roses; he, dark and courtly and one of the most attractive looking figures we had met in our travels in Colonial-land. These people could not tell us much about the old manor-house; for, while possessing two of the finest plantations in the colonies, Shirley and Corotoman, they made their home chiefly at Williamsburg.
However, they were especially interesting people to meet because of their familiarity with the first half of the eighteenth century, that brightest and most prosperous period of colonial life. They could tell us at first hand of those happy, easy-going times that lay between the long struggle to establish the colonies and the fierce struggle to make them free.
Though neither Mr. nor Mrs. Carter exactly said so, yet we gathered the idea that those were days of much dress and frivolity. It seems that ships came from everywhere with handsome fabrics and costly trifles; and that rich colonials strove so manfully and so womanfully to follow the capricious foreign fashions (by means of dressed dolls received from Paris and London) that usually they were not more than a year or two behind the styles.
We could not help feeling that the matter of wigs must have been an especially troublesome one. As styles changed in England, these important articles of dress (often costing in tobacco the equivalent of one hundred dollars) had to be sent to London to be made over. Between the slowness of ships and the slowness of wig-makers, it must often have happened that even such careful dressers as the fastidious Secretary himself would be wearing wigs that would scarcely pass muster at the Court of St. James or at Bath. Indeed, Secretary Carter did not deny there being some truth in this; but he appeared so at ease that day at Shirley that we knew, on that occasion at least, he was sure of his wig.
One more progression along the receiving line, one more generation passed by the way, and we came upon Charles Carter, with his strong, kindly face, a gentleman of the days of George III and of the last days of colonial times.
And what days those were! The days of stamp acts and "tea parties" and minute men; of state conventions and continental congresses; of Lexington and Valley Forge and the surrender of Cornwallis; of the Articles of Confederation and the formation of the Union. This Charles Carter saw our nation made and, in the councils of his colony, helped to make it. Here, in old Shirley, he put down the cup from which he had right loyally drunk the colonial toast, "The King! God bless him!" and he took it up again to loyally and proudly drink to "George Washington and the United States of America."
We met still other old-time people at the manor-house that day; but it would not do to try to tell about them all. The omitted ones do not count much, being chiefly wives. Everybody knows that in meeting colonial people it is scarcely worth while considering a man's wife, for so soon she is gone and he has another.
Truly, Shirley's colonial reception was very enjoyable, we thought, as we took a last glance at the serene, old-time faces and caught a last whiff of ambergris from the queer, old-time wigs.
CHAPTER XXV AN INCONGRUOUS BIT OF HOUSEBOATING
By this time, we were becoming anxious about the lateness of the season. Of course it was only through some mistake that we were getting all those fine warm days in December. Perhaps Nature had not had her weather eye open when Father Time wet his thumb and turned over to the last page of the calendar. But now, there was something in the look of the sky and in the feel of the air to make us fearful that the mix-up of the seasons had been discovered, and that winter was being prodded to the front.
Still we lingered in Eppes Creek, and soon we could not do otherwise than linger; for we wakened one morning to find the stream frozen over, and Gadabout presenting the incongruous spectacle of a houseboat fast in the ice.
All that day and the next the coldness held; and the ice and the tide battled along the creek with crackings and roarings and, now and then, reports like pistol shots. This surely was strange houseboating. It was a serious matter too. We knew that we might be held in the grip of the ice indefinitely. We did not care to spend the winter in Eppes Creek; nor could we abandon our boat there.
Throwing on our heavy wraps and trying to throw off our heavy spirits, we went above and paced the deck. In mockery our flags rippled under the northwest wind; from our flower-boxes, leafless, shrivelled little arms were held up to us; while our bright striped awning, with all its associations of sunshine and summer-time, was close furled and frozen stiff and hung with icicles.
We were surprised enough when the weather suddenly changed again, and the bright, warm sun set up such a thawing as soon sent the ice out of the creek and our anxieties with it. But no time was to be lost in getting away from that beautiful, treacherous stream. We should make one more visit to Shirley and then head again up river. But that last visit should be a quite conventional one; we should run the houseboat around to the regular steamboat pier in front of the old manor-house.
It was a warm, hazy afternoon down in Eppes Creek when we untied our ropes from the trees (cast them off, we ought to say), and Gadabout pulled her nose from the reedy bank and slowly backed out into the stream. She was obeying every turn of the steering-wheel perfectly (as indeed she always did except when the mischievous wind put notions into her head); and it was not her fault at all when her bow swung round under the tree that leaned out over the water and almost knocked her little chimney off. We dropped down the stream and passed out into the river where everything was softened and beautified by the light fog.
Skirting the low northern shore, we looked across the river at the high southern one where, through the mist, we could see the town of City Point and the bold promontory that marked where the Appomattox was flowing into the James. Upon the tip of the promontory was the home of the Eppes family, "Appomattox." While the present house is not a colonial one, the estate is one of the oldest in the country.
Now, just ahead of us was the Shirley pier on one side of the river and the village of Bermuda Hundred on the other. We headed first for the village, our intention being to get some supplies there.
We could not see much of Bermuda Hundred, perhaps because there was not much to see. It consists principally of age, having been founded only four years after the settlement of James Towne. Still, we let the sailor go ashore for butter and eggs, trusting that both would be as modern as possible. Our supplies aboard, Gadabout quickly carried us across the river and landed us at Shirley.
In that last visit to the old home, we went across the quadrangle and into the kitchen building, with its cook-room on one side of the hall and its bake-room on the other. Of course most of the colonial kitchen appointments had long since disappeared; but we were glad to see, in the stone-paved bake-room, the old-time brick ovens. With their cavernous depths, they were quite an object lesson in early Virginia hospitality.
And can any modern ranges bake quite as perfectly as did those colonial brick ovens? After a fire of oven-wood had flamed for hours in one of those brick chambers, and at last the iron door had been opened and the ashes swept out, the heated interior was ready to receive the meats and breads and pastry, and to bake them "to a turn."
When, in the restoration of Mount Vernon, the kitchen was reached, recourse was had to Shirley's kitchen. Drawings were made of an unusual colonial table, of a pair of andirons with hooks for spits to rest on, and of several other old-time cookery appointments; and, from these drawings, were constructed the duplicates that are now in the Mount Vernon kitchen.
It was on our way from the kitchen to the mansion that we came upon another visitor to Shirley. She was short and round and black and smiling and "feelin' tol'ble, thank you, ma'am." This, we learned, was Aunt Patsy. She had "jes heard dat Miss Marion done come home"; and so, arrayed in her best clothes including a spotless checked apron, she had come to "de gre't house" to pay her respects to Mrs. Oliver.
Drawn out somewhat for our benefit, she gave her views upon the subject of matrimony.
"I been married five times," she said. We were not particularly surprised at that; but were scarcely prepared for the added statement, "an' I done had two husban's."
However, no one could fail to understand Aunt Patsy's position, and to heartily agree with her, when she came to explain her marital paradox.
"De way 'tis is dis way," she said. "What I calls a husban' is one dat goes out, he do, an' gethahs up" (here, a sweeping gesture with the apron, suggestive of lavish ingathering), "gethahs up things an' brings 'em in to me. But what I calls havin' a man aroun' is whar he sets by de fiah and smokes he pipe, while I goes out an' wuks an' brings things home, an' he eats what I gives him. An' dat's how come I been married five times, an' I done had two husban's."
Before the old oak chest was opened for us, that day at Shirley, we knew that this colonial home was rich in antique silver. Yet, the family speak of the many pieces as "remnants," because of the still greater number lost at the time of the war. The plate was sent for safe-keeping to a man in Richmond who was afterward able to account for but a small part of it. Evidently, the Hills and the Carters went far in following the old colonial custom of investing in household silver. And as an investment the purchase of this ware was largely regarded in those days; family plate being deemed one of the best forms in which to hold surplus wealth.