As may be gathered from this letter, the wedding was to be a simple affair—so quiet that it could not be called a social function.
We were of one mind on that point. To secure the presence of our most intimate friends, we went through the form of selecting bridesmaids and groomsmen. It was the custom to have a long train of attendants at large wedding-parties, and we took advantage of the fashion to limit the company to be assembled on that early September morning to “the bridal party” and the family. The exceptions to the limit were dear old Doctor Haxall (whose wife was out of town) and three friends of the bridegroom. Two were from New Jersey and family connections, although not related by blood. The other was Mr. Word, of Charlotte, the gentlest-hearted of old bachelors—known affectionately by his intimates as “Cousin Jimmy.”
Genial old saint! My heart swells now at the flashlight picture fastened upon memory of my first sight of, and speech with him. He was more closely shaven than I ever saw him afterward—and he was ever the pink of neatness. An expanse of white vest and shirt-bosom covered a broad chest that palpitated visibly, as, enfolding my hand in both of his, he said, in the best manner of the gentleman of the old school (and there are no finer gentlemen anywhere):
“My dear madam, let me entreat you to regard me from this moment as a Brother!”
No capitals can endow the word with the meaning he put into it. He fulfilled his part of the compact nobly.
To go back to the preparation for the quiet bridal: A Richmond fashion I have never known elsewhere, and which outlasted the war by some years, was that the bride-elect and two or three of her bridesmaids drove from house to house a day, or two or three, before the marriage, and left cards upon acquaintances who were not bidden to the ceremony. This was done in cases where, as with me, it was to be a house-wedding, and the attendants were confined to a few family friends. If there were to be a church-wedding, followed by a reception, or if the ceremony at home were to be witnessed by a large party of guests, the drive and delivery of cards preceded the “occasion” by a week or ten days. To send an invitation to any social gathering by post would be a transgression of decorum and precedent—a cheap trick unworthy of any one tolerably well versed in social forms. The delivery by the bride and her suite was delicately complimentary to those she wished to honor.
In furtherance of our design of keeping even the date of the marriage secret up to the last possible hour, we had delayed the delivery of my “P. P. C.” cards until Monday.
At the very bottom of the box of time-discolored letters preserved by the friend of my childhood and intimate of my girlhood, I found one of these cards. Time’s thumbmarks have not spared the bit of glazed pasteboard. My maiden name is there, and, in the left-hand lower corner, “P. P. C.” That was all the information it deigned to give the curious and the friendly. I was going away—somewhere. Just when and where was nobody’s business.
It will hardly be believed that we kept our own counsel so well that our own servants, while they might have their suspicions, were only certain that I was going North on Tuesday, as I had often gone on other summers, and that the girls who had been visiting me for a week were to remain to a party my sister would give on Tuesday evening. Not until Monday morning were any of them, except “Mammy Rachel,” informed what was on foot.
The day dawned—if dawn it could be called—through steady sheets of rain. No delusive adage of “Rain before seven, clear before eleven” ever gained currency in Richmond. It was as clear to our dismayed souls that this was an all-day rain, as that the drive and cards could not be postponed until to-morrow. Sampson, the carriage-driver, whom we did not dub “coachman” until after the war, was notified by the mouth of Tom, the young dining-room servant, that he must have the carriage at the door at ten o’clock, and prepare for a long expedition. We were at the breakfast-table when word came back that “it warn’t a fittin’ day for no young ladies to go out. Nor for his carriage an’ horses. De ladies will have to put off their shoppin’ for another time.”