Virginia: the Old Dominion · Chapter 6List of Illustrations (5)
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It seemed good to be under way again. There was music in the chug of our engines and in the purl of the water about our homely bows. The touch of the wind in our faces was tonic, and we could almost persuade ourselves that there was fragrance in the occasional whiffs of gasoline.
We soon came to an opening in the shore to starboard where the James receives one of its chief tributaries, the Chickahominy, memorable for its association with the first American romance. Though the tale is perhaps a trifle hackneyed, yet the duty of every good American is to listen whenever it is told. So here it is.
Of course the hero was Captain John Smith. How that man does brighten up the record of those old times! Well, one day the Captain with a small party from James Towne was hunting in the marshes of the Chickahominy for food, or adventure, or the South Sea, or something, and some Indians were hunting there also; and the Indians captured the Captain. They took him before the great chief Powhatan; and as John lay there, with a large stone under his head and some clubs waving above him, the general impression was that he was going to die. But that was not John's way in those days; he was always in trouble but he never died. Suddenly, just as the clubs were about to descend, soft arms were about the Captain's head, and Pocahontas, the favourite daughter of the old chief, was pleading for the ever-lucky Smith. The dramatic requirements of the case were apparent to everybody. Powhatan spared the pale-face; and our country had its first romance.
To be sure, some people say that all this never happened. Indeed the growing skepticism about this precious bit of our history, this international romance that began in the marshes of the Chickahominy, is our chief reason for repeating it here. It is time for the story to be told by those who can vouch for it—those who have actually seen the river that flows by the marshes that the Captain was captured in.
On we went with tide, wind, and engines carrying us up the James. Dancing Point reached sharply out as if to intercept us. But the owner of those strong dark hands that happened to be at the wheel knew the story of Dancing Point—of how many an ebony Tam O'Shanter had seen ghostly revelry there; and Gadabout was held well out in the river.
Again, how completely we had the James to ourselves! We thought of how, even back in those old colonial days, our little craft would have had more company. Here, with slender bows pushing down stream, the Indian canoes went on their way to trade with the settlers at James Towne; their cargoes varying with the seasons—fish from their weirs in the moon of blossoms, and, in the moon of cohonks, limp furred and feathered things and reed-woven baskets of golden maize. Returning, the red men would have the axes, hatchets, and strange articles that the pale-faces used, and the cherished "blew" beads that the Cape Merchant had given them in barter.
Here sailed the little shallops of the colonists as they explored and charted this unknown land. A few years later and, with rhythmic sway of black bodies and dip of many oars, came the barges of the river planters. Right royally came the lords of the wilderness—members of the Council perhaps, and in brave gold-laced attire—dropping down with the ebb tide to the tiny capital in the island marshes. And up the stream came ships from "London Towne," spreading soft white clouds of canvas where sail was never seen before; and carrying past the naked Indian in his tepee the sweet-scented powders and the rose brocade that the weed of his peace-pipe had bought for the Lady of the Manor.
Now, Gadabout began to sidle toward the port bank of the river as our next harbour, Chippoak Creek, was on that side. Here the shore grew steep; and at one point high up we caught glimpses of the little village of Claremont. At its pier lay a three-masted schooner and several barges and smaller boats. Along the water's edge were mills, their steam and smoke drifting lazily across the face of the bluffs.
On a little farther, we came to the mouth of Chippoak Creek with the bluffs of Claremont on one hand, the sweeping, wooded shores of Brandon on the other, and, in between, a beautiful expanse of water, wide enough for a river and possibly deep enough for a heavy dew. We scurried for chart and sounding-pole. Following the narrow, crooked channel indicated on the chart, we worked our way well into the mouth of the stream and cast anchor near a point of woods. From the chart we could tell that somewhere beyond that forest wall, over near the bank of the river, was the old manor-house that we had come chiefly to see—Brandon, one of America's most noted colonial homes.
Next morning we were ready for a visit to Brandon. But first, we had to let the sailor make a foraging trip to the village. One of the troubles about living in a home that wanders on the waters, is that each time you change anchorage you must hunt up new places for getting things and getting things done.
While it is charming to drop anchor every now and then in a snug, new harbour, where Nature, as she tucks you in with woodland green, has smiles and graces that you never saw before, yet the houseboater soon learns that each delightful, new-found pocket in the watery world means necessity for several other new-found things. There must be a new-found washerwoman, and new-found somebodies who can supply meats, eggs, vegetables, ice, milk, and water—the last two separate if possible. True, the little harbour is beautiful; but as you lie there day after day watching waving trees and rippling water, the soiled-clothes bags are growing fatter; and then too, even in the midst of beauty, one wearies of a life fed wholly out of tin cans.
Henry was a good forager; and we were confident, as his strong strokes carried him from the houseboat shoreward, that he would soon put us in touch with all the necessary sources of supply, so that in the afternoon we could make our visit to the old manor-house. And he did not fail us. His little boat came back well loaded, and he bore the welcome news that "Sally" (whoever she might be) would take the washing.
But now, a matter of religion got in between us and Brandon. A launch came down the creek; and, as we were nearly out of gasoline, the Commodore hailed the craft and made inquiry as to where we could get some. One of the two men aboard proved to deal in gasoline, and appeared to be the only one about who did. He had some of it then on the pier at Claremont; and would sell it any day in the week except Saturday. The rather puzzling exception he explained by saying that he was a Seventh-day Adventist. To be sure, it was then only Thursday; but as it seemed making up for bad weather that might prevent our running down to the pier next day, we arranged to take on a barrel of the gasoline that afternoon.
We started after a rather late dinner; and ran back down the river to where we had seen the schooner and the barges the day before. Just as the Commodore made a nice, soft-bump landing at the pier, a man informed him that the gasoline had been carried to the Adventist's mill by mistake. So, we cast off our ropes again, and went farther down to where the little mills steamed away at the foot of the bluffs.
Off shore, several sloops and rowboats were tied to tall stakes in the water. We went as close to shore as we dared; and Gadabout crept cautiously up to one of the stakes, so as not to knock it over, and was tied to it. Then, the Commodore went ashore and arranged to have the gasoline brought out to us.
Presently, two negroes rolled the barrel into a lighter. They poled their awkward craft out to Gadabout and made fast to a cleat. It took a long time to pump the gasoline into cans, and then to strain it into our tank on the upper deck. The day was about over. Relinquishing our plan of visiting Brandon, we ran back to our Chippoak harbour, and our anchor went to bed in the creek as the sun went down.
CHAPTER XI AT THE PIER MARKED "BRANDON"
It was late on the following afternoon when Gadabout was out of the creek, out in the river, and bound for the little pier marked Brandon.
A belated steamboat was swashing down stream, and a schooner, having but little of wind and less of tide to help it along, was rocking listlessly in the long swell. In the shadow of the slack sails a man sprawled upon the schooner's deck, while against the old-fashioned tiller another leaned lazily.
Gadabout had to make quite a detour to get around some shad-net poles before she could head in toward the Brandon wharf; and her roundabout course gave time for a thought or two upon the famous old river plantation.
Starting but a few years after those first colonists landed at Jamestown Island, the story of Brandon is naturally a long one. But, working on the scale of a few words to a century, we may get the gist of it in here.
Among those first settlers was one Captain John Martin, a considerable figure of those days and a member of the Council appointed by the King for the government of the colony. He seems to have been the only man who believed in holding on at James Towne after the horrors of the "Starving Time." He made vigorous protest when the settlers took to the ships and abandoned the settlement.
About 1616, he secured a grant of several thousand acres of land in the neighbourhood of this creek that we were now lying in, and the estate became known as Brandon—Martin's Brandon. The terms of the grant were so unusually favourable that they came near making the Captain a little lord in the wilderness. He was to "enjoye his landes in as large and ample manner to all intentes and purposes as any Lord of any Manours in England dothe holde his grounde." And he certainly started out to do it.
But soon the General Assembly attacked the lordly prerogatives of the owner of Martin's Brandon. It did not relish the idea of making laws for everybody in the colony except John Martin, and he was requested to relinquish certain of his high privileges. This he refused to do, saying, "I hold my patente for my service don, which noe newe or late comers can meritt or challenge." After a while, however, he was induced to surrender the objectionable "parte of his patente," and manorial Brandon became like any other great estate in the colony.
After several changes of ownership, Brandon came into the possession of another prominent colonial family, the Harrisons. The founder of this Virginia house (the various branches of which have given us so many men prominent in our colonial and national life) was Benjamin Harrison, one of the early settlers, a large land holder, and a member of the Council. His son Benjamin (also a man of position in the colony and a member of the Council) was probably the first of the family to hold lands at Brandon.
But it was not until the third generation that the Harrisons became thoroughly identified with the two great plantations that have ever since been associated with the name; Benjamin Harrison, the third, acquiring Berkeley, and his brother Nathaniel completing the acquisition of the broad acres of Brandon. Berkeley passed to strangers many years ago; but Brandon has come down through unbroken succession from the Harrisons of over two centuries ago to the Harrisons of to-day.
That makes a great many Harrisons. And as it happened, while Gadabout was on her way that day to visit their ancestral home, a genealogical chart with its maze of family ramifications was lying on a table in the forward cabin, and Henry saw it.
"King's sake!" he exclaimed. "That must be the host they couldn't count. Don't you know John say how he saw a host no man could number? That's cert'nly them!"
As we approached the Brandon pier, we saw a man on it who proved to be the gardener and who helped to handle our ropes as we made our landing. Then, with the aid of a beautiful collie, he led us up the slope toward the still invisible homestead.
Entering the wooded grounds through quaint, old-fashioned gateways, we followed our guide along a trail that topped the river bluff, where honeysuckle ran riot in the shrubbery and tumbled in confusion to the beach below. The trail ended in a cleared spot on the crest of the bluff—a river lookout, where one could rest upon the rustic seat and enjoy the ever-varying picture of water, sky, and shore.
But we turned our backs upon it all, for to us it was not yet Brandon. Now, our course lay directly away from the river along a broad avenue of yielding turf, straight through an aged garden. Above were the arching boughs of giant trees; below and all about, a wealth of old-fashioned bloom. The sunlight drifted through shadowing fringe-trees, mimosas, magnolias, and oaks. Hoary old age marked the garden in the breadth of the box, in the height of the slow-growing yews, and in the denseness of the ivy that swathed the great-girthed trees. It all lay basking in the soft, mellow light of sunset, in the hush of coming twilight, like some garden of sleep.
Suddenly, the grove and the garden ended and we were over the threshold of a square of sward, an out-of-door reception room, no tree or shrub encroaching. Beyond this was a row of sentinel trees; and then a massive hedge of box with a break in the middle where stood the white portal of Brandon. We could tell little about the building. The eye could catch only a charming confusion: foliage-broken lines of wall and roof; ivy-framed windows; and, topping all, just above the deep green of a magnolia tree, the white carved pineapple of welcome and hospitality.
In the softened light of evening, the charm of the place was upon us—old Brandon, standing tree-shadowed and dim, its storied walls in time-toned tints, its seams and crannies traced in the greens of moss and lichen, its ancient air suggestive, secretive,
"In green old gardens hidden away From sight of revel and sound of strife."
We entered a large, dusky hall with white pillars and arches midway, and with two rooms opening off from it—the dining-room on the one hand, the drawing-room on the other. In the old chimney-pieces, fire leaped behind quaint andirons taking the chill from the evening air.
And there in the dusk and the fire-glow, where shadows half hid and half revealed, where old mahogany now loomed dark and now flashed back the flickering light, where old-time worthies fitfully came and went upon the shadowy, panelled walls—we made our acquaintance with Brandon and with the gracious lady of the manor. Our talk ran one with the hour and the dusk and the firelight—old days, old ways, and all that Brandon stands for.
When our twilight call was over, it was with dreamy thoughts on the far days of Queen Anne and of the Georges that we went from the white-pillared portico down the worn stone steps and followed a side path back toward our boat. In the gloaming the side-lights were being put in place, and Gadabout turned a baleful green eye upon us, as though overhearing our talk of such unnautical things as gardens and heirlooms and ancestral halls.
Next morning there was much puffing of engines and ringing of signal bells down in Chippoak Creek. Gadabout went ahead and backed and sidled. And it was all to find a new way to go to Brandon. Mrs. Harrison had told us of a landing-place in the woods at the creek side from which a sort of roadway led to the house. Fortunately, our charts indicated, near this landing, a small depression in the bed of the creek where there would be sufficient depth of water for our houseboat to float even at low tide. At last, we got over the flats and into the hole in the bottom of the creek that seemed to have been made for us.
We rowed ashore to a yellow crescent of sandy beach shaded by cypresses where a cart-path led off through the woods. We called it the woods-way to Brandon. It followed the shore of the creek a little way, and through the leafy screen we caught glimpses of Gadabout out in the stream, now with a cone-tipped branch of pine and again with a star-leaved limb of sweet gum for a foreground setting.
Farther along were many dogwood trees; and in the springtime these woods must be dotted with those white blossom-tents that so charmed the first settlers on their way up the river. Here, for the first time, we came upon the trailing cedar spreading its feathery carpet under the trees. Ferns lifted their fronds in thick, wavy clusters. The freshness from a night storm was upon every growing thing; a clearing northwest wind was in the tree-tops; and the air was filled with the spicy sweetness of the woodland.
The way led out of the shadow of the trees into the open, and we came upon "the quarters"—long, low buildings with patches of corn and sweet potatoes about them. Two coloured women were digging in the gardens and another was busy over an out-of-door washtub. A group of picaninnies played about a steaming kettle swung upon a cross-stick above an open-air fire. One fat brown baby sat in a doorway poking a pudgy thumb into a saucer of food and keeping very watchful eyes on the strangers. Beyond the quarters were barns and some small houses.
And here was our first reminder of a distressing chapter in the story of Brandon. We knew that but few of these buildings were old-time outbuildings of the estate. The Civil War bore hard upon this as upon other homes along the James. It left little upon the plantation except the old manor-house itself, and that injured and defaced.
On ahead, we could see the great grove in which the manor-house stands, looming up in the midst of the cleared land like a small forest reservation. Our route this time brought us to the homestead from the landward side through an open park, and we got a better view of the building than the dense foliage on the other side had permitted. The house is of the long colonial type, consisting of a square central building, two large flanking wings, and two connecting corridors. It is built of brick laid in Flemish bond, showing a broken pattern of glazed headers. Each front has its wide central porch and double-door entranceway.
The emblem of hospitality that tops the central roof is truly characteristic of the spirit within. Old colonial worthies, foreign dignitaries, presidents and their cabinets, house-parties of "Virginia cousins," and "strangers within the gates"—all have known the open hospitality of Brandon. And the two latest strangers now moved on assured of kindly welcome at the doorway.
Entering Brandon from the landward front, we found ourselves again in the large central hall. It is divided midway by arches resting on fluted Ionic columns and has a fine example of the colonial staircase. This hall and the drawing-room and the dining-room on either side of it cover the entire ground floor of the central building. Offices and bedrooms occupy the wings. The rooms are lofty, and most of them have fireplaces and panelled walls.
Through the east doorway one looks down a long vista to the river. In the sunlight it is striking: the shadows from the dense foliage before the portal lie black upon the grass; beyond is the stretch of sunny sward; and then the turf walk under meeting boughs, a green tunnel through whose far opening one sees a bit of brown river and perhaps a white glint of sail.
In drawing-room and dining-room are gathered numerous paintings forming a collection well known as the Brandon Gallery. It represents the work of celebrated old court painters and of notable early American artists.
In the drawing-room, a canvas by Charles Wilson Peale may be regarded as the portrait-host among the shadowy figures gathered there, its subject being Colonel Benjamin Harrison. He was friend and college roommate of Thomas Jefferson, and a member of the first State Executive Council in 1776. Against the dense background is shown a slender gentleman of the old school, with an intellectual, kindly face and expressive eyes.
About him is a distinguished gathering—dames and damsels in rich attire and languid elegance; gallants and nobles in court costume and dashing pose, jewelled hand on jewelled sword.
In the dining-room, the portrait hostess is found, the wife of the Colonel Harrison who presides in the drawing-room. She was the granddaughter of the noted colonial exquisite and man of letters, Colonel William Byrd, whose old home, Westover, we should soon visit on our way up the river. It was through her marriage to Colonel Harrison that there were added to the Brandon collection many of the paintings and other art treasures of the Byrd family, including a certain, well-known canvas that carries a story with it.
It is an old, old story—indeed the painting itself is dimmed by the passing of nearly two centuries; but just as the sweet face looks out from its frame ever girlish, so does perennial youth seem to dwell in the romance of the "Fair Maid of the James." The portrait is by Sir Godfrey Kneller. It shows a beautiful young woman. Her gray-blue gown is cut in a stiff, long-waisted style of the eighteenth century, yet still showing the slim grace of the maiden. The head is daintily poised. A red rose is in her hair and one dark curl falls across a white shoulder. Her face is oval and delicately tinted. She follows you with her soft, brown eyes, and her lips have the thought of a smile.
Such was the colonial beauty, Evelyn Byrd, daughter of Colonel William Byrd. Though her home was not here but at Westover, and there she sleeps under her altar-tomb, yet the girlish presence seems at Brandon too, where the winsome face looks down from the wall, and where we must pause to tell her story.
This Virginia girl was educated in London where she had most of her social triumphs. There she was presented at court and there began the pitiful romance of her life in her meeting with Charles Mordaunt. In all youth's happy heedlessness these two fell in love—the daughter of "the baron of the James" and the grandson and heir of London's social leader, Lord Peterborough.
It seemed a pretty knot of Cupid's tying; but just here William Byrd cast himself in the role of Fate. Some say because of religious differences, some say because of an old family feud, he refused to permit the marriage. He brought his daughter back to Virginia where, as the old records say, "refusing all offers from other gentlemen, she died of a broken heart."
That day when we left the manor-house, we started homeward, or boatward, with our faces set the wrong way; for we wandered first into the old garden.
It is a typical colonial garden that lies down by the river—a great roomy garden where trees and fruit bushes stand among the blossoming shrubs and vines and plants. It is a garden to wander in, to sit in, to dream in. All is very quiet here and the world seems a great way off. Only the birds come to share the beauty with you, and their singing seems a part of the very peace and quiet of it all. The old-fashioned flowers are set out in the old-fashioned way. There are (or once were) the prim squares, each with its cowslip border, and the stiffly regular little hedgerows. One may hunt them all out now; but for so many generations have shrub and vine and plant lived together here, that a good deal of formality has been dispensed with, and across old lines bloom mingles with bloom.
The old garden calendars the seasons as they come and go. As an early blossom fades, a later one takes its place through all the flowery way from crocus to aster.
Trifling, cold, and unfriendly seem most gardens of to-day in comparison with these old-fashioned ones. Perhaps the entire display in the modern garden comes fresh from the florist in the spring, and is allowed to die out in the fall, to be replaced the next spring by plants not only new but even of different varieties from those of the year before. Not so at Brandon. Here, the garden is one of exclusive old families. Its flower people can trace their pedigrees back to the floral emigrants from England. The young plants that may replace some dead ones are scions of the old stock. Strange blossoms, changing every spring like dwellers in a city flat, would not be in good standing with the blue flags that great- (many times great-) grandmother planted, nor with the venerable peonies and day lilies, the lilacs and syringas that remember the day when the elms and magnolias above them were puny saplings. Even a huge pecan tree, twenty-one feet around, whose planting was recorded in the "plantation book" over a century ago, is considered rather a new-comer by the ancient family of English cowslips.
Here is restful permanence in this world of restless change. Loved ones may pass away, friends may fail, neighbours may come and go; but here in the quiet old garden, the dear flower faces that look up to cheer are the same that have given heart and comfort to generations so remote that they lie half-forgotten beneath gray, crumbling stones with quaint time-dimmed inscriptions.
CHAPTER XII HARBOUR DAYS AND A FOGGY NIGHT
Day after day, we lay in our beautiful harbour of Chippoak Creek as the last of the summer-time went by and as autumn began to fly her bright signal flags in the trees along the shore.
Sometimes we moored in the little depression that Nature had scooped out for us close by the Brandon woods; sometimes we scrambled out from it at high tide and went across and cast anchor by the Claremont shore. Now and then we would go for a run up the creek, or out for a while on the broad James.
It is well to stay in a pretty harbour long enough to get acquainted with it. By the time we could tell the stage of the tide by a glance at the lily pads, and could get in and out over the flats in the dark, and could go right to the deep place in Brandon cove without sounding, we had learned where the late wild flowers grew, that the washing would get scorched on one side of the creek and lost on the other, that the best place for fishing was around behind the island, and that the Claremont "butcher" had fresh meat on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Gradually, our neighbours of marsh and woodland lost their shyness, and some of them paid us the compliment of simply ignoring us. Most of the blue herons flew high or curved widely past Gadabout—long necks stretched straight before, long legs stretched straight behind. But the Tragedian (he was the longest and the lankest) minded us not at all. At the last of the ebb, a snag over near the shore would suddenly add on another angle and jab down in the water, coming up again with a shiver and a fish. Then, it would approach the houseboat and stalk the waters beside our windows. The stage stride of the creature won for it the name of the Tragedian. Knowing the shyness of his kind we felt especially pleased by a still further proof of his confidence. One morning, in response to a cautious whisper from the sailor, we stole stealthily upon the after deck and saw that the Tragedian was, truly enough, "settin' on an awnin'-pole pickin' hisself."
There was a dead tree on our Brandon shore-line. It stood among tall pines and sweet gums and beeches as far up as they went, after that it stood alone in the blue. We called it Old Lookout. A bald eagle used it for a watch-tower. Lesser birds dared plume themselves up there when the king was away: crows cawed and sidled along the smooth branches; hawks and buzzards came on tippy wing and lighted there; and even little birds perched pompously where the big eagle's claws had been.