AFTER the mother’s death the home seemed very desolate; and when the eldest brother’s, James L. Petigru’s, wife proposed most generously to take the younger girls to live with them in Charleston, so that their education might be carried on, their father gladly consented, and my mother from that time lived with her brother in Charleston until her marriage, having the best teachers that the city afforded and enjoying the most charming and witty social surroundings. Aunt Petigru, though a beauty and belle, was a great invalid, so that the care of the house and her two young children came much on the sisters-in-law. Louise, two years older than my mother, married first and was established in her own home. After two years in society, which was very gay then, my mother became engaged to Robert Allston. When the family heard of the engagement they were greatly disturbed that my mother should contemplate burying her beauty and brilliant social gifts in the country, and her sister Louise thought fit to remonstrate, being a{58} matron properly established in her city residence. She made a formal visit and opened her batteries at once.
“My dear Adèle, I have come to remonstrate with you on this extraordinary announcement you have made! You cannot think of accepting this young man. Mr. Allston lives winter and summer in the country. He will take you away from all your friends and family. That he is good-looking I grant you, and I am told he is a man of means; but it is simply madness for you with your beauty and your gifts to bury yourself on a rice-plantation. Perhaps I would not feel so shocked and surprised if you did not have at your feet one of the very best matches in the city. As it is, I feel I should be criminal if I let you make this fatal mistake without doing all I can to prevent it. If you accept Mr. Blank, you will have one of the most beautiful homes in the city. You will have ample means at your command and you will be the centre of a brilliant social circle. My dear sister, my love for you is too great for me to be silent. I must warn you. I must ask you why you are going to do this dreadful thing?”
My mother was at first much amused; but as{59} my aunt continued to grow more and more excited, contrasting her fate as my father’s wife with the rosy picture of what it would be if she accepted the city lover, mamma said: “Louise, you want to know why I am going to marry Robert Allston? I will tell you:—because he is as obstinate as the devil. In our family we lack willpower; that is our weakness.”
My aunt rose with great dignity, saying: “I will say good morning. Your reason is as extraordinary as your action.” And she swept out of the room, leaving my mother master of the field.
It was indeed a brave thing for my mother to do, to face the lonely, obscure life, as far as society went, of a rice-planter’s wife. She had been born in the country and lived there until she was fifteen, but it was a very different country from that to which she was going. It was in the upper part of the State, the hill country, where there were farms instead of plantations, and there were pleasant neighbors, the descendants of the French colony, all around, and each farmer had only one or two negroes, as the farms were small. In the rice country the plantations were very large, hundreds of acres in each, requiring hundreds of{60} negroes to work them. And, the plantations being so big, the neighbors were far away and few in number. Whether my mother had any realization of the great difference I do not know. I hope she never repented her decision. I know she was very much in love with her blue-eyed, blond, silent suitor. They were complete contrasts and opposites in every way. Papa outside was considered a severe, stern man, but he had the tenderness of a very tender woman if you were hurt or in trouble—only expression was difficult to him, whereas to my mother it was absolutely necessary to express with a flow of beautiful speech all she felt.
They were married at St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, April 21, 1832, and went into the country at once. There was a terrible storm of wind and rain that day, which seemed to the disapproving family an appropriate sign of woe. But it was only the feminine members of the family who were so opposed to my father. My uncle approved of mamma’s choice, for he recognized in my father rare qualities of mind and spirit and that thing we call character which is so hard to define.
My uncle feared my mother would find only raw, untrained servants in her new home, so he{61} gave her a well-trained maid and seamstress to whom she was accustomed, and who was devoted to her. Maum Lavinia was a thoroughly trained, competent house-servant, and must have been a great comfort, though she had a terrible temper. She married on the plantation and had a large family, dying only a few years ago, keeping all her faculties to extreme age. One of her grandsons is a prosperous, respected man in New York now, Hugh Roberton. I keep track of all the descendants of our family servants, and it gives me great pleasure when they make good and do credit to their ancestry. It does not always happen. In so many instances, to my great regret, they have fallen in character and good qualities instead of rising;—without training or discipline that is to be expected.
Mamma has told me of her dismay when she found what a big household she had to manage and control. Not long after they were married she went to my father, almost crying, and remonstrated: “There are too many servants; I do not know what to do with them. There is Mary, the cook; Milly, the laundress; Caroline, the housemaid; Cinda, the seamstress; Peter, the butler; Andrew, the second dining-room man; Aleck, the{62} coachman; and Moses, the gardener. And George, the scullion, and the boy in the yard besides! I cannot find work for them! After breakfast, when they line up and ask, ‘Miss, wha’ yu’ want me fu’ do to-day?’ I feel like running away. Please send some of them away, for Lavinia is capable of doing the work of two of them. Please send them away, half of them, at least.”
But papa made her understand that he could not. These were house-servants; they had been trained for the work, even if they were not efficient and well trained. It would be a cruelty to send them into the field, to work which they were not accustomed to. Then he said: “As soon as you get accustomed to the life here you will know there is plenty for them to do. The house is large and to keep it perfectly clean takes constant work. Then there is the constant need of having clothes cut and made for the babies and little children on the place; the nourishment, soup, etc., to be made and sent to the sick. You will find that there is really more work than there are hands for, in a little while.” And truly she found it so. But it took all her own precious time to direct and plan and carry out the work. The calls to do something which seemed important and necessary were{63} incessant. One day my father came in and asked her to go with him to see a very ill man. She answered: “My dear Mr. Urston” (she always called papa Mr. Allston, but she said it so fast that it sounded like that), “I know nothing about sickness, and there is no earthly use for me to go with you. I have been having the soup made and sending it to him regularly, but I cannot go to see him, for I can do him no good.” He answered with a grave, hurt look: “You are mistaken; you can do him good. At any rate, it is my wish that you go.” Mamma got her hat and came down the steps full of rebellion, but silent. He helped her into the buggy and they drove off down the beautiful avenue of live oaks, draped with gray moss, out to the negro quarter, which is always called by them “the street.”
The houses were built regularly about fifty yards apart on each side of a wide road, with fruit-trees on each side. There are generally about twelve houses on each side, so that it makes a little village. On Chicora Wood plantation there were three of these settlements, a little distance apart, each on a little elevation with good Southern exposure, and all named. One was called California, one Aunty Phibby Hill, and one Crick{64} Hill, because Chapel Creek, a beautiful stream of water, ran along parallel with it and very near. In California, which was the middle settlement, was the hospital, called by the darkies “the sick-house.” To this, which was much larger than the other houses, built for one family each, my father drove. He helped mamma out and they entered; the room was large and airy, and there on one of the beds lay an ill man with closed eyes and labored breathing; one could not but see that death was near. He appeared unconscious, with a look of great pain on his face. My father called his name gently, “Pompey.” He opened his eyes and a look of delight replaced the one of pain. “My marster!” he exclaimed. “Yu cum! O, I tu glad! I tink I bin gwine, widout see yu once more.”
Papa said: “I’ve brought something good for you to look upon, Pompey. I brought your young mistress to see you,” and he took mamma’s hand and drew her to the side of the bed where Pompey could see her without effort.
His whole face lit up with pleasure as he looked and he lifted up his hands and exclaimed: “My mistis! I tank de Lawd. He let me lib fu’ see you! ’Tis like de light to my eye. God bless{65} you, my missis.” And turning his eyes to papa, he said: “Maussa, yu sure is chuse a beauty! ’Tis like de face of a angel! I kin res’ better now, but, my marster, I’m goin’! I want yu to pray fur me.”
So papa knelt by the bed and offered a fervent prayer that Pompey, who had been faithful in all his earthly tasks, should receive the great reward, and that he might be spared great suffering and distress in his going. Then he rose and pressed the hand which was held out to him, and went out followed by my mother. As they drove home she was filled with penitence and love. She wanted to express both, but as she glanced at my father she saw that his mind was far away and she could not. He was, in mind, with the dying man; he was full of self-questioning and solemn thought: “Had he been as faithful to every duty through life as Pompey in his humbler sphere had been?” No thought of his bride came to him.
At last she spoke and said: “I thank you for having made me come with you, and I beg you to forgive my petulance about coming. I did not understand.” He pressed her hand and kissed her but spoke no word, and they returned to the house in silence.{66}
My heart has always been filled with sympathy for my mother when she told me these things of her early life, for I was very like her, and I do not know how she stood that stern silence which came over papa when he was moved. And yet I adored him and I think she did, but all the same it must have been hard.
She found the life on the plantation a very full one and intensely interesting, but not at all the kind of life she had ever dreamed of or expected, a life full of service and responsibility. But where was the reading and study and self-improvement which she had planned? Something unexpected was always turning up to interrupt the programme laid out by her; little did she suspect that her mind and soul were growing apace in this apparently inferior life, as they could never have grown if her plans of self-improvement and study had been carried out.