Mose Evans: Part I
V.
GENERAL THEODORE THROOP differed from me as, I suppose, the South has differed, since the world was created, from the North; he was too slow, as I was possibly too fast. I dare say the General’s established position for half a century in the highest social circle of Charleston, had been the molding influence in virtue of which the old gentleman was such a Louis Le Grand in tones and bearing, and stately but gracious inertia, even. He rarely alluded to the subject, but, for him, there was no Future; why should he hurry himself ? My wife says I cannot live except when in motion, and am happiest when most driven, and it did try me sorely to wait for General Throop; or would have tried me had not my Southern wife accustomed me so long to waiting for her, never up to the instant, I regret to record it of her, since the ceremony of our marriage, when she kept; us all waiting full twenty minutes behind time. As we journeyed together, did business to large amounts together, I knew all along his determinations in matters, days before he had reached them himself; had said over and over to myself all he was slowly going to say upon a subject a dozen times before he had spoken. Yet I enjoyed the venerable gentleman even while I inwardly fussed at his ponderous propriety, and outran exceedingly his cultured slowness. There are as true gentlemen in Boston as the General, but he was of another variety altogether : a huge watermelon ripening asleep in the sun, as compared with a seekel pear, small but closely buttoned up to the chin in its perfect-fitting suit of brown and red: say, rather, and be done with it, a pineapple contrasted with a pippin.
What I wanted to say, when I began all this, was, that we two found it impossible to make our trip between Dick Frazier’s tavern in Brownstown, and the General’s proposed place down the river, in one day; the General being altogether too deliberate for that in waking, dressing, breakfasting, riding, looking over the land, conversing about its varied localities for corn and cotton, house and gin; and this explains how we came to ride one afternoon up to the cabin of Mose Evans, whose lands “ joined on ” ours, to stay, as Mose had assured us we could, all night. Now ten million people of our population, far from the worst of said population, live in just such cabins. We ride up to a rough paling fence, well whitewashed, as are the cabin and the hen-coops, and the trunk of every forest and fruit tree in the inclosure, the spotless geese wearing the same livery, as they string out of the front gate in the morning, and back in the evening, from the river flowing immediately before the house. Mrs. Evans had been described to us as being a devoted mother, a model housewife in point of neatness, but, alas, a woman of temper most terrible; our many informants insisting specially upon this last feature of her character. I called General Throop’s attention, as we hallooed from our saddles and waited for a reply, before dismounting, to the row of reddened bricks from the gate on either side of the pebbled walk to the porch; to the brilliant tin pans sunning upon thoroughly scrubbed shelves around the well in the yard, the long pole thereof, as also oaken bucket, seeming just from the same process. At this moment Mrs. Evans appeared, knitting in hand, upon the porch, and, with eyes shaded from the setting sun by the stocking held in her hand, bade us “ light.” It was so very easy, the way in which General Throop conquered our dreaded hostess upon her outpost and on the instant! Before he was half-way up the walk he had taken off his hat. It was natural to him; it was not natural to me following him, and I did not do it. Had she been the wife of Washington, he could not have been, and from sheer nature, more respectful. “Mrs. Evans, I presume? ” hat in hand and with a grave inclination of his white head. And when, in manner adapted to his own, she had bidden us enter — “I am ashamed, madam, to step with such boots upon your porch!” For steps of stone, pine floor, rude posts and railing of the porch, doors opening upon it from the cabin, the very pegs in the whitewashed logs from which bags of dried seeds were hung, all were of almost painful cleanness, the hide-bottom chairs pure and white from incessant soap and sand. After our weeks upon the road and at Dick Frazier’s, the snowy towels aud tablecloth, especially the coarse but very clean sheets and pillow-cases at night, were luxuries to General Throop I was glad of. To me Mrs. Evans was simply a tall, well-looking, neatly dressed female who had worried her husband to death, and who might, unless Odd Archer and Brownstown had lied to me, drive us from under her roof any moment by her termagant tongue. People had told the General the same, but, like all Southern gentlemen, he instinctively invested every white woman with certain chivalric attributes of sister, daughter, wife, mother, elevating her into an ideal being whom they call Woman, a creation, like Dulcinea del Toboso, having no existence outside imagination. In the most natural manner, all the time of our acquaintance, General Tliroop idealized Mrs. Evans, and she was idealized; that is, he assumed and she accepted and acted upon the assumption, that she was Woman.
Mose Evans observed it, at table, for I can read men, though he was merely a big and very handsome and bearded boy. Had General Throop said much about her admirable cookery, it would have ruined all; only a sincere word or two, his manner, his evident enjoyment of his meals, did everything. “He makes more work than all the rest of the housekeeping,” the mother said of her son in the course of conversation, “always in the fields with the hands, hunting and the like, he cannot help muddying and tearing his things, I know. But he does not haunt the town, never enters a doggery, doesn’t know a card, thank Heaven! and, then, I will not have any woman to help me!” This last for reasons with reference to her son, too, as I well knew. I wonder if people like General Throop do really stop at and sleep upon the surface of things as they seem to. “In these days of the overthrow of everything,” the General remarked, amazingly brightened up after a very substantial supper upon coffee, venison, and the perfection of corn bread and butter, “my intention, Mrs. Evans, is to adopt the very life you are now leading. That is, if I close with Mr. Anderson here.” The General and myself had really and finally reached certainty about that, only his outer person, so to speak, had not yet arrived. “I never talk politics,” the General added. “There are, in fact, no politics to talk. Victorious force has destroyed all I hold worth living for. We have entered, as did Greece and Rome, upon the era of military despotism and all corruption. The only glory is of gold, and that is evanescent! Excuse me. We may, in case I should close with Mr. Anderson, be neighbors. Mrs. Throop and my daughter Agnes. My only son, Theodore Throop, gave his life, at Sumter, for his country, but I did not desire to speak of that. We bury ourselves in these primeval woods purposely, the world forgetting by the world forgot. I like your son, madam,” for that individual had gone to look to our horses. “ I pride myself, Mrs. Evans, upon being a judge of character, and I am free to say, he seems to me to be a thoroughly manly and sensible person, as he certainly is most prepossessing in his outer man. You should be, and doubtless are, very proud of him, madam ! ”
Now, I knew Evans to be all of this and more, but I could not have kept it from seeming flattery if I had said it. The bearing of the stately old soul gave such weight to all his remarks.
“ He is all I have!” was her only reply, and she was halted, I saw, at the mention of that daughter! — with reference to any possible results concerning her son, halted, like a female panther guarding her cub. And I began to understand this Xantippe, by help of what I had heard, through and through! — But I could have laughed aloud. Miss Agnes Throop! The flower and perfection of Charleston culture; the belle of all its beauties by their own confession. Agnes Throop and this handsome boor; Beauty and the Beast; heaven and earth are not more removed. “ You seem to be pleased at something, sir?” It was the panther again, with her head ever so little upon one side, a gleam of danger in her eyes, and quicker knitting!
How people do have to steer in the rapids of life, barely grazing the rocks! And the steering is sometimes very like lying-
“ Ah, General,” I readily exclaimed, “ Mrs. Evans has her household duties. Were you to seclude yourself from all the outer world, as you threaten, you would have to take to books as some persons take to drinking! ” And, to make my blunder worse, I glanced around as I said it.
“ Not one! Except an old Bible, not one book or paper in the house! ” Mrs. Evans said it out, and I to myself in the same instant. I began to take deeper interest in her! It was not at all to me, it was in subjection to the inquiring yet perfectly respectful “ Ah? ” of General Throop, that Mrs. Evans gave us her version of their family history. Not at once. Doubtless she brooded day and night over her story, and it forced its way out by a sort of fermentation during our after acquaintance. But it was to my companion she always addressed herself, and to him exclusively. He seemed, in some way, to have brought back a former life, as of ages ago, to her mind. One day, during our many calls at her cabin, she showed us her husband’s daguerreotype. I had a suspicion that it had lain unopened in the bottom of some trunk until very lately.
“ He was evidently, madam, a gentleman and a scholar,” the General said, after long and grave inspection of the faded and old-fashioned picture. “ And he seems,” he added as he returned to its inspection, “ to have been somewhat broken down. Ill health, I presume ? ’ ’
The woman did not reply. I saw that she refrained by an effort from looking at me. Odd Archer explained it all to me afterward, as we shall see. Yet I must say here that he hated the woman, connected, I think, as chief witness with one of his manifold disgracesI made allowance for its being from him in all I learned from his very unreliable lips. Yet Brown County agreed the woman had worried and scolded the miserable husband to death. Somehow she had embroiled and broken him up along a series of downward removals. What books remained to him were his only refuge. To give value to these pages, I would like greatly to know whether they were sold for bread, lost in their many moves, burned accidentally. It would be dramatic if Brown County was right, but I do not certainly know, and therefore cannot say, whether or no Mrs. Evans in her storms of temper did really, as Brown County asserted, rend to fragments and burn the poor fellow’s volumes to the very last leaf. From what Chaucer makes his Wife of Bath confess of her tempestuous course in reference to the volumes of her bookish husband, I think this quite likely.
I had bought a picture or two, had heard Helen and others talk, as well as listened to some of what Ruskin has to say, enough to enjoy a little grouping of trees, cows, children — any light and shade and life. Therefore I remember the morning after our first night at Mrs. Evans’ double log cabin. As we afterward learned, Mose had got up about midnight, watched from a tree a certain worn ravine down which the deer came to drink in the river at dawn, and returned by breakfast with the antlered result. I could have painted it if I could have painted anything, that morning scene. He had hung the buck to a limb of a live-oak off to one side in the yard. From respect for his mother’s ideas of neatness, I suppose, he had disemboweled the beast before we appeared, so that no reminder even remained, and was slowly flaying the animal as it hung, replying, as he did so, to the General standing by greatly interested; for there is an occult connection between chivalry and hunting, since Esau, The General, his white hair uncovered to the air, and aglow with the bright morning, a sound sleep and hearty breakfast, was admiring the young Esau more than his prey. No wonder. I would n’t have given the man a hundred a year as entry clerk in our office; but he was worth thousands as a picture. He was in leather from head to foot, the fringe along hunting frock and cape, and general neatness throughout, telling of his mother. His old cap lay at the stock of his rifle, which was leaning against the well near by, and his uncovered head with its abundant hair was as glorious as that of a god, the sun striking upon its gold. He seemed a model, in all his vigorous frame, of absolute youth, health, strength. It was the sneer of Brown County, the watch Mrs. Evans kept upon Mose, and his consequent purity in all regards ; and the complexion of the man, the childlike unconsciousness of his manner, the infantile steadiness and clearness of his brow, and of his eyes in yours ! — you see, I can no more paint with pen than with brush!
“ I never met a nobler youth in my life,” the General said, as we rode off about our lands. “ He seems to me to be of the very chivalry of nature. Good blood, rest assured. Possibly his father may have come of some Carolina or Virginia family. Good material for a man if fallen into the right hands. I intend to have him supply us with game, if we close our matter, Mr. Anderson. I think he would interest Agnes; you know we will not bring even our negroes —former slaves, I should say — or our dogs, if we remove.”
“ I have puzzled myself,” I replied, “ as to why his mother has allowed him to grow up untaught. Jealous even of books, because she never opens one? Hating them as the preference of her husband to her, his last resort from her? Or sheer indifference and brutal ignorance! The only intellect the woman ever had has run into temper; vixen, virago, termagant, they tell me.”
“ I never allow myself, Mr. Anderson,” General Throop makes grave reply, “ to speak disrespectfully of others. Therefore no one speaks, I believe, disrespectfully of me. Or, it is to their face, when I must speak. Excuse me, as so much the elder, but I never express myself with other than respect of the aged, of the helpless, especially of woman. You need not always speak, you know. As I said before, yes, sir, her son is noble material. But for what? If there is a future for this most miserable country, I do not know it! ”
VI.
In one point we were unanimous at the post-office, that day I first met the worthies assembled therein, and this was that we would all go and hear the Rev. Mr. Parkinson preach next Sunday. He had come in for his letters while we were assembled there, a pale, thin, long-haired, exceedingly shy youth, fresh from the institution which prepared him for the pulpit. So very long had Brownstown been without the services of any minister, of his denomination, at least, that he was accepted as a novelty, an experiment, a mild sensation, even. The members of his church were the richest men around, having been the first settlers of Brown County. Doubtless no stricter members existed when in the North Carolina from which they removed; but “things had got awfully torn up,” as the patriarch among them himself told me, during the absence of a pastor — very much so indeed if I was to accept the unanimous statement of all I met.
Now, my host, Mr. Robinson, was a member and officer of the church of which Mr. Parkinson was the very youthful minister, He was a very tall man, exceedingly stooped in his old age, and answered to the title of Squire, Judge, Colonel, General, Deacon, or Elder, as the case might be; and although not quite so bad as Odd Archer, yet even he had fallen, unless greatly slandered, into singular courses in reference to cardplaying and horse-racing. Sabbath having come, there was quite a congregation of us at church. And a tumble-down old “ cathedral ” it was; for an Irishman, in excess of native politeness, alluded to it as such in my hearing the week after. A miserable old disused dwelling it was, that Sabbath, and has fulfilled before this, I do hope, what was then its fixed intention of tumbling down.
“ The entire Robinson connection are on the ground,” Odd Archer informed me before we entered the house. “North Carolina! See it? Stamped in strong family likeness: tall, redhaired, sandy-complexioned, gaunt as their hogs, long armed and legged, inflexible. As strong a family likeness among them as there is in a boat-load of clams — their very noses long and insisting like those of the animals mentioned! In fact, they are Scotch-Irish, but sadly degenerate after two centuries of emigration. Sir,” Odd Archer adds, “my father is to-day one of their most eminent divines. He was out here once, preached to them and to me. But it was too much for him, these people and myself.”
Yet this disreputable limb of the law is evidently arrayed in the best suit of his shabby black, to do honor to the day and place; and in certain curious aspects, tones, bearing, is as thorough a gentleman as General Throop; and with a mutual bow, these two exchanged the civilities of the hour before tlie General passed on into the place of worship.
“A religious man, the General, I see,” the lawyer added. “A gentleman always is. Washington was. I am a hopeless case myself, but I can and do respect religion in others! If they are not actually bringing my pet to church! How are you, Dob?” For Dick Frazier, hotel keeper and sheriff, presses past us through the throng round the entrance at this moment, with a man heavily ironed. “ Dob Butler,” my informant explains, “the worst desperado in all Brown County. You see, he wouldn’t stay in the jail, breaks out. It is a good idea having him at church; it rests Dick Frazier and may do Dob some good, His case is on at court next week. Oh, I will clear him! No doubt about his guilt, murdered a teamster, but he kept money enough to put him through! How are you, Harry! Now, Harry, be a gentleman. No fun here! Dr. Jones, excuse me! Pardon the liberty, but seeing it is Sunday and church, you ought to have dressed up a little, Doc.”
“ Only what I wore every day in Philadelphia,” Dr. Alexis Jones makes cool reply, for he is dressed in the extremity of fashion.
“Is there not, excuse me, something offensive in the air? ” the lawyer says, with his fingers to his ruby nose; “ pity it should be under the church — polecat, I ’m afraid! ”
The youthful physician cannot but color a little at this reference to his perfumery, and hastens to turn the topic.
“But how singular, gentlemen! here in this nineteenth century attending church ; so far as I am concerned, as well be at a pagoda in Japan!” In fact Dr. Jones prided himself upon his unbelief, as being the one precious possession which specially distinguished him from and elevated him above the common herd, and made it prominent accordingly, very much as he did his broadcloth and jewelry. As the young man passes in, Odd Archer, Esq., says, in a plaintive manner, “I can stand a scoundrel, like Dob Butler in there, or myself, but a consummate fool ” —
At this juncture we are swept along with a number of people, male and female, into tbe long, low, dingy room used as a church; and as nearly twenty thousand of our best preachers labor every Sabbath under like circumstances, along the line of the nation’s advance westward, let me review, for my gratification if not for yours, dear reader, this Sabbatli service with Mose Evans, Mr. Robinson, and the rest, Mr. Parkinson preaching. Because there is a heroism in such service. Planks have been so disposed upon hide-bottom chairs as to make seats sufficient to accommodate the two or three hundred persons present, while the youthful clergyman has his special chair beside a little well inked and whittled school desk by the huge fire-place at one end of the apartment ; to which now this, now that member of the congregation comes during sermon and stands beside the preacher, warming first one, then the other of his or her feet, listening, somewhat in the attitude of a critic, to the discourse in progress. There was a puncheon plank, a foot or so off to the left from tbe fire-place, which I heard Mr. Robinson warn the young minister of before sermon, as sure to let him through into the cellar below, if he should step upon it. There were never less than seven children running about the room all through and through the sermon; the number of smaller members of the congregation crying at once I attempted but failed to count, owing to inadequacy of brains for labor so multiform. Besides, in order to see his sermon, Mr. Parkinson bad piled two brickbats from the old hearth under each leg of the little table before him, and was in evident terror all along lest a touch of his hand should topple the pulpit, and, with it, the entire service and Sabbath, over, as actually did occur some weeks after! And the poor young fellow is as thoroughly unfitted for his ministry of such a flock as a man can possibly be. Yet I do not know! He is as fair and frail as a flower, and his congregation are robust, sunburned, hardened to work, and, a good many of them, to wickedness. He knows nothing about the world, and they know nothing about books. Things they are accustomed to as matter of course are repulsive and impossible to him! The exceeding contrast may have done the people good, like that of a woman to a man! But, oh. that sermon! A plea for the personality of the devil, I remember, making Satan very nebulous, however, from excess of drapery. Perfectly true in general and utterly false in particular, merest moonshine as to practical effect upon the people, who waited with waning patience for him to get through. Mr. Robinson was in a hide-bottom chair to the left, tilted against the wall upon its hind legs, solemnly and soundly asleep. To do the preacher justice, he and his subject both became more practical toward the close. And it was Mose Evans, listening with large, earnest eyes, like a big boy who really wanted to know all about the matters concerning which the minister spoke, who steadied him, until unconsciously he stopped preaching and began to tell him, in reply to his eager eyes, all the theologian himself knew about it.
“For God’s sake, Mr. Parkinson,” I said to him afterward, when we had become thoroughly acquainted with each other, “don’t talk in abstract essays to these folks. Your discourse is so elaborate that, so to speak, it chills and changes yon into a sort of ecclesiastical automaton tbe moment you begin to deliver it. Why clothe yourself (for I want you to do good here) in such a mannerism of starch and silk? You are not a medicine-man among savages, relying upon your feathers and paint to conjure them out of their evil case! These are common-sense, sinning, suffering men and women. God has given you a sufficient gospel to save them with. Use it, man! Speak it out plainly, squarely, to the sin and need of the congregation. Don’t speak of your Creator as ‘ the Deity.’ And Satan is not ‘the ethereal effluence of essential evil; ’ call him the devil and be done with it! Whom are you so afraid of? They will respect you and listen to you and be benefited by you as you fear no one but your Master. Be as practical, Bible in hand, as if you were driving a trade! Odd Archer before a jury, liar, rogue, lewd dog that he is, has a thousand times your sense in his way of pleading his cause ” —
But never mind. To go back to the congregation, — the second object of interest at church was old New Hampshire. Burdett, Seth Burdett, is his name; I should have recorded it before. To the amazement of Brownstown he came out, the old, hard, tough postmaster, in a new light altogether that day. After giving out a familiar hymn the young minister sat blushing and paling in the silence which followed, broken as it soon was by certain titterings among the young ladies present. “If any friend can raise the tune” — the preacher said, at last. I had not been to singing-school in New England for nothing, and had already hit upon Ortonville as the orthodox tune for the hymn announced. But the postmaster was from New England, also, and, to the profound astonishment of all there, raised that very tune and in full voice himself! Like the others he was carefully attired in his best, and was as practical, persistent, and undaunted in leading the singing as in all else. It was music from a stone Memnon indeed! His voice was somewhat shrill, but not without a certain quaint and old-fashioned sweetness too, and we all joined in when a verse or two had given the world assurance of a tune!
I can see at this instant the horsethief and murderer — Dob Butler — sitting in his chains beside the county sheriff, Dick Frazier, in the farthest right-hand corner, the jail being too frail to be relied upon for an hour, even; how the clink, now and then, of the fetters still sounds upon my ear as during the sermon then, through all the manifold noises of the years since!
Immediately in front of the minister were the rest of the Robinsons, male and female, who all seemed to me like a party of school children caught in a melon patch, stealing, and who had made solemn promise to do so no more.
I found General Throop talking with Mose Evans out of doors after service that day. He was as carefully arrayed as his saddle-bags allowed, but in coarsest jeans he would have been General Theodore Throop and — Charleston — still.
It made a vast difference to Mose Evans, the being dressed in his Sunday best, a modest suit of gray stuff. He was twenty-three years old, as I was told, of stalwart yet perfect proportions, with abundant hair and beard, silken and of that peculiar shade of gold called, Helen tells me, by painters, “lion’s eye,” — as handsome a man as I ever saw in my life, his glory lying in his large, frank eyes, sincerity, simplicity, absolute independence, supreme health, cordial willingness to be hearty friend or enemy, as you saw fit!
I was the more interested in him as his home joined the General’s estate, and he was being employed to oversee certain improvements towards the removal of the family from Charleston — the lands being yet exactly as they were left after Creation and Deluge. I think it was the day after that Sunday’s service that Odd Archer remarked to me, in continuation, “ Mose Evans is, sir, a child of nature! As you will pay me no fee for lying in the matter, I will add that the man is, from sheer ignorance, I suppose, and lack of opportunity, considered to be as immaculate as King Arthur of the Round Table, — for I read a book occasionally as variety to steady wickedness.”
“ Is he very poor? ” I began.
“Land!” My informant’s only reply, but with an emphasis.
“ We spent a night at his cabin; his mother seemed to be ’’ — I venture.
“Vixen. Virago. Termagant. Xantippe. Should have been ducked to death as a notorious scold years ago. Sir,” my companion gravely added, “it could be legally done in the river to-morrow—statute law of old England never repealed. She killed her husband. This way. He was a professor in some Georgia college, years ago. Like those dry old pedants, fell desperately in love with his wife when a blooming girl, because, I suppose, she was so pretty and so ignorant. Mold her, you observe. Very soon she broke him up in Georgia. They had to move and move and keep moving, until they wound up here, where he died. Sir, that poor fellow was scientifically scolded to death! I tell you, Mr. Anderson, if Mrs. Evans had been a Madame Brinvilliers or La Farge, and made daily use of the lesser poisons of herb and crucible, it could not have been accomplished more systematically. I knew him. About his land titles. We lawyers have to know everybody and everything. He had been driven into a kind of dazed insanity long before he died. His poor body held out longest, being only the secondary object of her assault. The son does not know how to read, sir! ”
“ Mose Evans ? ”
“Mose Evans! Splendid specimen of a man as I ever saw in a jury box, or on trial for murder, yet cannot read. Owing to the peculiar unsettledness of their life and to his remarkable mother, as they say of Cornelia and Martha Washington! I do not know if there ever were other children, but Mose is now her only child. She may love him, for what I know, but he never learned to read. I doubt whether she has ever opened a book since she was a schoolgirl. Fact, sir.” All of which made me look with more interest upon Mose Evans, meeting him next day down the river by appointment in company with General Throop. Although I did not know of it until long afterward, I will mention it here that the man had begun to learn to read in those days. It was the old postmaster who taught him, very secretly, in the little back room of the old man’s store, and at night. I am certain his mother knew nothing of it.
“This queer thing about it, sir,” the lawyer had told me in the conversation just mentioned; “it is the poor fellow’s mother has kept him clear of the women, virtuous and otherwise. I suppose he dreads them all as he dreads her, knowing his father’s experience and his own. All the women about admire him, but they are too much afraid of his mother to speak to him, hardly! ”
Aside from the mere gossip of Brown County, all this interested me to a singular degree. Foolish as it may seem to you at this stage of my narrative, I regarded Mose Evans as a species of nugget I had most unexpectedly stumbled upon; and I propose to be rigidly statistical and accurate in regard to the man, as we all instinctively are where gold is in question. As I write he rises before me, illumined by all the wonders which followed; yet, had any lunatic imagined them all, and asked me if such things were possible of him, I would have said, even before those remarkable events took place, “ Such things never entered my mind, sir, but now that you have raised the question as to their possibility, why, yes, sir, yes!” And I would have made the reply even with enthusiasm! Looking back over the whole affair, I do declare, as upon oath, before a notary public, that I regard Mose Evans as being the most remarkable man I ever knew. What is more, dear reader, I trust you will heartily agree with me before we part.
VII.
At the time of which I would now speak, General Throop and family had arrived in Brown County from Charleston, and were settled down in their new home upon the bank of the river, a few miles below Brownstown. The General and myself had carefully selected the site for the house. I am satisfied that the General entertained some vague idea of being the Romulus of a new Rome, or rather, and far better, the founder of a new Carolina, if not of a second Charleston, though ages must roll away before his purpose could be consummated. The glory of the place was in the baronial old live-oaks, bearded with sweeping gray moss, and extending their arms abroad over the roof below, in perpetual benediction. There were plenty of magnolia-trees scattered around the cottage, as up and down the river for hundreds of miles, laden in season with their yellow-white flowers, and intoxicating the air with perfume. A paradise of a place, with its greensward, the broad verandah having a swinging hammock for the old General, in which he smoked the day through and the year round; smoked with set purpose, as if he would puff his soul and body, all his disastrous past, blasted present, and hopeless future away, to be lost and perish with the Confederate cause, as the smoke from his white-mustached lips did in the air! No syllable of complaint about his personal fortunes; a vast deal, I confess, about the Federal government, and the era of “ ism and rapid ruin over all the world! ”
“The very prosperity, sir,” he often said to me, “of your country, — your country, for it is not mine, — Like that of Rome when it had fallen under the despotism of its Cæsars, is but the flush of the fever which is destroying it!” and much more to the same effect.
Whenever I happened for the night at the General’s, in my many land excursions here and there over Brown County, I could not but observe the Mary Martha Washington, their slave of whom I have already spoken, — their slave on religious principle, as sublimated by her delusion as was Mrs. General Throop by hers. I was to the old “ girl ” a specimen of the terrible variety of my race known as “an Abolitionist,” alluded to during all her life, only in dark and shuddering whispers, as at once the vilest and most venomous of mankind, and endured by her now ouly under protest!
But I am speaking of the home of the Throops. I had secured the services of Mose Evans as a kind of overseer, while the building was being erected. It was nothing but a pile of hewn logs, the cracks between carefully “ chinked and daubed,” that is, filled in with blocks of wood sawed for the purpose, and coated with mortar outside and inside alike. My “ overseer ” had given his heart to the work during the months it was in course of being constructed, before the arrival of the family, and Brown County in general came to see, and congratulated him upon the result. There were a good number of rooms carpeted with India matting, a comfortably furnished library, the parlor arranged as much like the one in Charleston as Mose Evans could manage it, from plans furnished by me. The whole place, in fact, was a spot to spend a week of romance in, and then to weary to death of, unless alive with some deeper interest to you. The family were there simply as in exile, confident of living and dying in banishment. There was no possible reversal of their sentence; you would learn that much soon after your acquaintance! Knowing this, the household did all that human beings in their case could do to feel at home, and to be neighborly with all; their culture, however, marking them off as distinctly from the families and persons around as if they had arrived from another planet. I had ventured this last assertion to my venerable host, Mr. Robinson, one day during my sojourn with him, in the emergency of having no one else to say it to, only to be misunderstood, my friend being deaf of outer and inner hearing.
“ From another plantation? so they are; sea-island cotton place somewhere there in Carolina. Twenty cents, I ’m told, when our best upland is only ten! Longer and finer staple, you see! Gin it with rollers instead of saws like us. Stuff it in a long bag hung through a hole in the gin floor, with a nigger and a crowbar, instead of a screw and press like us. Sing’lar, is n’t it? ”
Now I regret all the time I am writing, that, being merely an overworked business man, I cannot put upon paper the people inhabiting this, their new home, at the time I would speak of, all of whom I came to like almost beyond any persons I had ever known before. Certainly, they were to me a new and remarkable variation upon all my previous experiences. There was, for instance, the wife and mother. You have met invalids — I select the gentlest term — like Mrs. Throop, or my effort to place her before you is utter failure. Dickens would have run off with the comic side of her singular character, Thackeray with the tragic; torn to atoms, the poor lady, in either case. Ah me! 1 close my eyes and see her now! Nothing but a matron in deep black, with the simple manners of a lady, but with eyes which, with abnormal insight, arraign you on the instant, read your soul, condemn you, endure you merely for the present! “ I myself used to sin like the rest of you,” I have actually heard her say in conversation, “ but I have got beyond all that. You are to me as I myself once was, therefore I know your very soul so well! I used all the forms and ceremonies; there in Charleston, not for myself, but for their influence on others. I do not regret being deprived of them all here,” for it was after her removal to the West I heard her that evening, many evenings, “since I had long done with them. Nothing in Sabbath or Scripture, prayer or praise, of service to me any longer. And how sorry, sorry I am for the rest of you!”
All that Agnes, so like and so utterly unlike her mother, could do on such occasions was to say, occasionally, “Oh, mother!” “Now, mother!” as to an invalid, or simply to hang her head in shame. The old General always gravely arose, when the topic came up, and walked sadly from the room.
“ Our Theodore is, you know, Mr. Anderson, in heaven, — killed in Sumter! and I have so much, oh, so very much more actual companionship every day with him than I have with the General or with Agnes here! we two understand each other! You, poor creatures, how I do know and pity you! ”
And there was Mr. Clammeigh! Once or twice he came out from Charleston to see them. I wish I could photograph him upon this page. Of course, his connection with Helen — I refer to my wife — prejudiced me. And why should I be so drawn toward and repelled from that cold, correct, polished, silent corpse of a man? I am from New England, not from the tropics, yet there is some profound antipathy of our natures; my fault of excess, possibly, or his of deficiency. Lift a cabbage leaf and, in recoiling from the toad squatted beneath, you recoil from Mr. Clammeigh! smite asunder a primeval rock to find a living frog seated in its centre from the creation of the world, as indifferent to light as to darkness, to motion as to rest — “ Now, I like Mr. Clammeigh! ” Why should it always be said as in defense of the man? Hawthorne would analyze the inmost ice of this heart; I do not pretend to. About the only thing I know is, if Mr. Clammeigh dwells, we will say, as at the North Pole, then Mose Evans has his home at the South Pole; never two men more exactly the opposite the one of the other! I have a sense of relief as I cease in despair from saying anything more upon the subject. I do not understand Mr. Clammeigh. Yet Mose Evans I do understand, as I do, may I say, a section of land, or a summer morning? The philosophy of it all, I suppose, is that Mose Evans is simply and purely nature, human nature !
Although it seems absurd to name Miss Agnes Throop in the same breath with the untutored backwoodsman in question, yet, if I was to say that I never knew a manlier man than Mose Evans, I could add, and in the same sense, that I never met a womanlier woman than Miss Throop. Draped as she was from birth in the linens, silks, ribbons of conventionalism, thoroughly enveloped, as to her very soul, so to speak, in the subtler Valenciennes of her peculiar breeding, she was, as if in virtue of her very refinement, so much the more woman, simply woman ! Heaven knows what it was in her that reminded one of Eden and Eve. Small figure, dark yet ever variable eyes, hair of the same hue, peculiar grace of manner, highest culture of tone and bearing, natural grace and sweetness, — it is useless for me to attempt description, though all the army of nouns and adjectives marched to my assistance! I admire and love my wife as well as husband ever did, or could, yet next to her, I swear allegiance to this lady, because you can no more deny her being a queen, than you can deny her existence.
“I do thank you so sincerely, Mr. Anderson ! ” she said to me the day I dropped in upon them for the first time after their arrival; and, somehow, in giving me her cordial eyes and hand she gave me, if I dared to say it without being misunderstood, her heart and soul. “ You and that Mr. Evans have done so much more for us than we could have hoped, and in such a short time, too. It is a paradise of a place ! There is so much in our taking a strong liking to a new home, and from the very first! ”
But I cannot record the conversation. As much in tone and manner as in words, she let me know that she perfectly understood her new position and intended to fill it. To make up to her parents for wealth, slaves, health, lost son and brother, Charleston, the whole world they had forever lost, — this was the task she had taken upon her. Task is not the word, nor duty, nor even pleasure; this was to he her glad life thenceforth !. Fascination? And consisting as much in my weakness as in her peculiar power ? Perhaps so. Yet I insist upon the fact that all persons coming under her influence were affected, more or less, in the same way. Not my own sex only, the other also, which makes it the more wonderful.
vIII.
I was much occupied, after I had seen the Throops fairly fixed in their new home, with the affairs of our company. I had to examine in person large bodies of land, not merely in Brown County but over the entire State. My wife has likened me to a sparrow-hawk. Certainly no fowl of the air could come and go upon the wing more irregularly, hardly more swiftly than myself. The fact is, money was to be made, just there and then, and a good deal of it. In consequence, I often lost sight of the Throops, and for long periods at a time, for I had to come and go, too, between Charleston and Brownstown more than once at this juncture. I made a rapid call upon the General whenever I possibly could, but my headquarters were chiefly, for land reasons, with Mr. Robinson, patriarch as he was both in church and state. On one of my rapid returns for the moment to Brownstown, Odd Archer, Esq., had laid hands upon me as I alighted in front of Dick Frazier’s hotel, from my mustang.
“Look here, Major Anderson,” he said, “ I’ve tre-men-dous news for you, sir! It will astonish you, sir, tough to astonishment as I ’ll acknowledge you are! ”
“ That you have given up drinking, and the like, Mr. Archer ? Yes,” I replied, “ I am astonished. If it will only hold out.” But I decline to narrate what followed upon the part of the reprobate lawyer. The fact is, I halted him in mid-volley, so to speak, mounted my weary animal, and, caked in mud, as well as ravenously hungry and dead tired as I was, rode through the swamp and the darkness to Mr. Robinson’s plantation, miles out of town. Upon some topics I “had to stand Odd Archer,” as the county phrase ran; upon the subject of his remarks just then, “ I could n’t and wouldn’t and didn’t!” to use the same county dialect.
Even when comfortably seated with Mr. Robinson, after a particularly hearty supper beneath his roof, I shrank from asking questions. No questions were needed. The matter mentioned to me by the lawyer was the epidemic astonishment of all Brown County ; it was impossible for my host not to speak of it. But I allowed him to approach it in his own way. “ Oh yes,” he said, “ we all know Mose Evans. Everybody likes Mose, takes a fancy to him from the first, like you. And it is nigh impossible to stir him up. But when he is roused! You never heard, Mr. Anderson, of the thrashing he gave Job Peters ? Oh, well, hardly worth telling, at least not to-day, Sunday. Job did not know, I suppose, about Miss Agnes Throop. Not then! He does now! We all do now, of course! Job whispered something about her to Mose; he will never say what it was, and no man dares ask Mose. Only one blow! Nary another! I tell you they were so long bringing Job to, with their buckets of water dashed on him, that they began to believe Job had gone for good! ” To the place where the bad Jobs go, I say to myself; for we all know Job Peters, too, as well as we do Mose Evans. Job is the only brother of Harry Peters, the native Joe Miller of Brown County, but “ all the cussedness,” Mr. Robinson remarked, “ of the family was in Job.” Harry’s fun was enjoyed by the passing object of it, most of any; somehow Job’s fun was very apt to draw a blow in return, — a curse, at least.
“ There is one thing about Mose Evans will astonish you,” Mr. Robinson proceeds; “ I never think of Mose, but as a great big promising lad. Why, Mr. Anderson, that man ” —
“ Pardon me, I ’ve been told of it five hundred times, —cannot read,” I reply.
“ And no better rider in Brown County,” says Mr. Robinson, “ no better neighbor in a bear fight, no better shot, as good a planter, let alone being too easy with his black ones.”
“ They told me, as I came through town” — I interrupt, with considerable reluctance, too.
For so old a man, my host snatches the topic from my lips with singular eagerness.
“ It was the first day Father Hailstorm preached after her people moved here,” he said, filling his cob-pipe full again as for a good talk. “ You see, she came for the first time to our meeting that day ” — strong pull at his pipe — “ with her old father, the General there. What a powerful gentleman he is to look at; high-toned, too! But, fact is, sir, I never saw anything so wonderful in her: a nice lady, a very nice lady, of course, but more like a whiff of smoke! My taste is something solid, substantial, healthy, stout, you see!” my informant added frankly, his wife quite overflowing two hundred pounds, and every freckled daughter upon the ascending path to the same avoirdupois, or more.
“ That day there at church, it was Father Ransom preached; I disremember what month, but it was Ransom, sure; Hailstorm, they call him. That is the way I come to remember. She took her seat upon the front plank, — lit on it like you see a chip-bird on a twig, her father with her; so crowded you see, no other place. I always set on one side the stand, —keeps the folks in order when they know I see every soul of them, — and I thought of it the moment she came in. And so you are that old General Theodore Throop and his daughter, I said to myself, come out to get better and better acquainted? Glad to see you, and not so glad either. Hailstorm! I know you won’t believe it, sir, but I tell you the fact. One day years ago when the folks started for church, I stayed at home. I ’ll bet you a bale, I said to Judy as she got up on the horse-block, — we had run down a little in our ways then, so long without a preacher of our own denomination,— a bale, I said, if I do not tell you, sitting here upon my front porch, just as much of the sermon, a mile away it was, as you do. See if I don’t! such a tremendous voice he has, Father Ransom.”
“ I hope you lost your bale, Judge,” I remarked, Judge being the phase of Mr. Robinson’s character when spoken to just then.
“ I do not approve of betting!” as from the bench, my friend gravely replied, in contradiction to statements I had heard of him, “ or they would have had to pay! You know wife and the girls claim a bale each, of the crop when it goes to the port. In county sales,” by which my host meant account of sales, “the price is given of their bales separate; for calicoes, ribbons, hoop-skirts, and things, you know! Of course I could n’t hear until the old man, a most an excellent man he is, got warmed up. After that? I managed even to guess out the text! ”
“But about Miss Agnes Throop, Squire? ”
“What I’m talking about!” my friend Mr. Robinson added. “ It will kill you, I said to myself very first thing when I saw her take that seat in reach of his very hand — so close I was afraid he would strike her that way, too, when he got a-going. You see, the old man forgets everything but the sinners and their danger. And” — my friend continued after considerable pause— “ we do have some hard cases among us for sure! And he knows exactly how ease-hardened they are! I tell you he mauls them! And not one bit of use their pretending to slip out to look after their animals! One good mile all around! Unless them fellows actually mount and ride for it, they can’t help hearing,— after the old man gets roused, I mean! A most an excellent man; does his duty, yes, sir! And I’ve noticed this,” my friend proceeds after a serious pause, “ this,” —longer pause, — “ oh, well, this : he tells them just what and who they are, and, very plainly, pre-cisely where they are going! Makes that awful plain! hair stand on an end, you see. Not to say he ever shook us of the Robinson connection much; not of our denomination, you know. If Brother Parkinson nor no other of our own church had never come, we never would have joined any church but our own. That is n’t our way, in politics or religion ! But before he closes, — Hailstorm, I mean, — he always speaks of the Saviour for every one of them that will repent, and always in the lowest tones! May be he is worn out, no voice left. But it is if they repent and believe, — powerful plain upon that if; weeping, too, and everybody else, for that matter! It may be because of what goes before, but this last part of his sermon always brings them! I mean, does them most good! ”
“ But, Miss Agnes Throop? ” I have to add, for my friend is gravely thinking of something else.
“ Oh. her! That day ? Well, I watched her as he got a-going. She was actually frightened for a while. His voice is tremendous! And he never preaches less than an hour and a half. She? Like a prairie flower in a whirlwind, sitting almost in the whirl of his arms, most of his voice over her head, somehow. Fact is, I forgot all about her as he drew toward the close; the old man was speaking of amazing love to the worst case there, tears running down his white beard, worse than the perspiration before; we were all weeping, all except myself, I believe. Oh, her? I happened to notice her as the old man fell back in his hide-bottom chair, sermon done. She was crying, too, more like a flower you have seen all beaten down and drenched after a heavy shower. Not that I think her what you would call pretty, mind. Too fraillike, swinging on a stem a breath would break. Now, I like solid, well, fleshy ” —
“ I wonder when Mose Evans first saw her,” I said at this point. “ When was it, General? ”
“That is what I’m coming to, if you ’ll only give me time,” my friend makes eager reply. ‘ ‘ That very day it was! You see I always sit on the right of the stand—a loose puncheon plank there, and ever so many children coming about during preaching, to drink from the preacher’s water there on the stand. That day Mose Evans he got crowded on to the end of a plank seat, farthest end, not six inches to sit on, holding on by gripping into a crack between the logs behind him some way. Oh, I noticed Mose! The instant that Miss Agnes Throop came crowded along after the old General, her head down, I noticed Mose looking at her as any man would; she a new-comer, somehow not like our other girls, you see. It was only that after she sat down!” and the narrator illustrated his meaning by a snap of finger and thumb. “ Oh, I saw it all! She lifted up her head and looked modestly about. The instant her eyes fell upon Mose Evans ” —
“ Well? ” I demanded, after some silence.
“ For my life, I never could see, for my sold I never can see, what it is in her! ” my friend said in accents of complaint. “Eyes? Yes. Everybody’s got eyes. And I know hers are what you’d call larger eyes than usual. Brown? I believe they are brown eyes. And she’s so slight put together, does n’t weigh more’n half of our Betsy spinning in the cook-house back there all the week. Poor thing! Loss of their property, that wild brother of hers dead back in Carolina, pining, the girls tell me, for that chippy sort of a Clammeigh that came out to see her. Eyes? She seems all eyes, — the frailest thing! ”
“ But about Mose Evans, Colonel? ”
“ Struck like by lightning, sir! ” (Gravest animation.) “ The girls say it is all my fancy. I suppose I can see if I am seventy! The moment her eyes fell on that man’s face, great big man as he is, over a hundred and eighty! — he was sitting, Mose Evans was, on less than half a foot of the plank end, holding hard to the crack behind him to keep that — the moment she looked him in the face, that man, sir, great big fool that he is, wilted like — like — whether he was astonished, scared . . . You see, all his life Mose has lived in the woods. If she is pretty, I cannot see, and all even of the men folks say the same, so very much of it! But that poor fellow fell in love with her like falling down a well! I sat so near, happened to be looking so close, the matter has made so much talk since, I often think of it; it was her eyes, sir, and they hit and killed that man! Never saw anything like it in all my life. A perfect fool he has made of himself. I’m as certain as a man can be of anything, he never heard a sound of Father Ransom’s sermon! Staring at first at her as if he had never seen a woman before! She is not like the common run of girls, I acknowledge. Soon as he saw how she colored up and turned away, he was careful not to do that, only stealing a look out of the corners of his eyes, his face toward the preacher all the time, and no more hearing that preacher ’ ’ —
“ I wonder if he ever ” — I suggested.
“ Went to their place there on the river? ” my informant anticipated me. “No, sir! Nor ever mentioned her name to a soul, that I know of. He would n’t have given Job Peters that blow, — only one blow it was, whatever Job said,—if he had stopped to think. For her sake, you see, he would n't have done it. And he never annoys her like by following her about. Mose Evans is as high a toned a gentleman as I know; owns thousands of acres of best bottom lands. You ’ll see his brand of stock, an E in a circle, scattered fifty miles around. Pity he never learned to read. People laugh at Mose Evans, but they like him, too, more even than they do Harry Peters; you see there’s a thousand times more in him! It is here as it always is where young people are, good deal of courting going on. But not this sort! Mose Evans is as still and silent about it as you please, but it’s the most powerful sort of love ever known in these parts! Because it has changed Mose Evans so! They say he is learning to read, and if that young fellow had been off to college— pshaw, not that; look at that Dr. Alexis Jones! I mean if he had clerked ten years in a dry goods store, — it would n’t have transmogrified him so, as the boys say. All the women pity and despise Mose Evans, only they can’t help understanding and not understanding it! And Miss Throop ’ll never have him. That man’s no more to her than if he was a big live-oak she happened to pass, no more to her than a dog or an ox. She from Charleston, and —he? It would kill that proud old General. And there ’s that man Clammeigh, too, out here once from Charleston. Out of a bandbox. What a cool cowcumber sort of a fellow he is ! Rich, is n’t he? Saw him at church, and looks like it. But there’s the bell for supper! ” my host adds, rising upon his very long legs and putting his cob-pipe on the joist over the door. “ I do believe it is actually killing Mose. Sounds redickerlous! A man could knock an ox off its tracks with his fist, Man of strong sense, too. Somebody ought to tell her, and stop it. They seem to like you, Major Anderson; suppose you stop it. But, supper; come!”
In the course of conversation at table, Mrs. Robinson tells me, at length, of the black woman of the Throops, who persists in considering herself their property, because the Bible says she is.
“ I tell you, Judy,” my host breaks in with energy, “it is not that negro’s religion at all. It’s that Miss .Agnes has bewitched her! Slave? Look at that poor Mose Evans! ”
William M. Baker.