There is much reading between the lines to be done for the right comprehension of that letter. My genre pictures of days that are no more would be incomplete were I to fail to touch upon the “worst of bugbears” I feigned to pass over lightly.
In the debate upon the abolition of slavery in my native State, lost by one vote in the Legislature of 1831-32, while Nat Turner’s insurrection was fresh in the public mind, John Randolph declared, “Whenever the fire-alarm rings in Richmond every mother clasps her baby closer to her breast.”
I cannot recollect when the whisper of the possibility of “Insurrection” (we needed not to specify of what kind) did not send a sick chill to my heart. The menace I here dismiss with a sentence or two was the most serious that had loomed upon my horizon. I could not trust myself to dwell upon it within the two days that had elapsed since my return from a vacation month in Powhatan. How keenly every circumstance attending it was bitten into my mind is proved by the distinctness of the etching preserved by a memory that has let many things of greater moment escape its hold.
My host, Mr. D., had come in to dinner the day before that set for my stage-journey back to town, with the pleasing intelligence that Mr. Lloyd Belt, a former citizen of Powhatan, but for twenty years a resident of Richmond, was “going down”—Richmond was always “down,” as London is “up” from every part of England—the next day, and would be glad to take me in his carriage. As I wrote to Effie, the drive was delightful. My courtly escort took as much pains to entertain me as if I had been a belle and a beauty, instead of an unformed school-girl. It was a way they had—those gentlemen of the Old School—of recognizing the woman in every baby-girl, and doing it honor.
It did not strike me as strange that Mr. Belt beguiled the thirty-mile journey with anecdote and disquisition. He was charming. I never thought that he was likewise condescending. I am quite as sure that the idea did not enter his knightly imagination.
As we drove leisurely up Main Street from the bridge, we noticed that groups of men stood on the street corners and in the doors of stores, chatting gravely, and, it would seem, confidentially.
“There must be news from the seat of war!” opined my companion.
The Mexican War was then in progress, and accompanying raids into the debatable territory of Texas kept public sentiment in a ferment.
My father and the rest of the family, with a couple of neighbors, were enjoying the cool of the day upon our front porch. He came down to the gate to assist me to alight. So did Mr. Strobia, our elderly next-door neighbor, and he handed me up the steps while my father lingered to thank my escort for bringing me safely home. In the joyous confusion of greetings, I had not observed that Mr. Belt was leaning down from the carriage to my father’s ear, and that both were very grave, until Puss Sheppard, like the rattlepate she was, whispered loudly to Mr. Strobia: