The victory

by Molly Elliot Seawell

BRIGHT was the Christmas of 1860 at the old manor house of Harrowby in lowland Virginia. It lay upon the broad, bright river which ran laughing into the arms of the great bay, and from there bay and river rushed together to the windy floors of the wide Atlantic. Nearly two hundred years before, the first Tremaine, a discontented gentleman, who found life very uncomfortable in England after Monmouth’s rebellion, had made the beginning of the Harrowby mansion. It was built quite flat to the ground, with the low ceilings and steep, narrow stairs of the seventeenth-century country house.

This first Harrowby house, with a room clapped on here and there, as each successive inheritor fancied, answered well enough for the Tremaines until the end of the eighteenth century. Then Mr. Jefferson having brought back with him from France some noble architectural conceptions, these became embodied in many Virginia country houses, including Harrowby. There, a new and commodious house was built, with a vast entrance hall, lofty ceilings, spacious rooms, and wide staircases. It was connected by a narrow corridor with the original house, and although frankly swearing at the first incumbent of the ground, yet conformed to it enough to make the whole both picturesque and comfortable. The modern part of the house was reserved for the master and mistress, for guests, and for those Virginia dinner parties which lasted from noon until midnight, the Virginia balls where the dancers’ feet beat the floor from the first rising of the stars until the rosy dawn, and the Virginia weddings which took three weeks’ frolicking to carry through in style. There were always sons in the Tremaine family, and these sons required tutors and dogs, so that the old part of the house, with its shabby Colonial furniture, was always in possession of men and boys and dogs. The newer part, with its furniture all curves, its Empire mirrors, its elaborate cornices, and decorative fireplaces, was reserved for more ceremonious uses.

The house sat upon a great, smooth lawn, which sloped down to the river, now a dull, steel blue in the red and waning Christmas eve. A short, rude wharf lay a little way in the river, which softly lapped the wooden piles. A little distance from the house, to the left, lay a spacious, old, brick-walled garden, now all russet brown and gold and purple in ragged splendor like a beggar princess. Great bare clumps of crape-myrtle and syringas and ancient rose trees bordered the wide walk which led from the rusty iron garden gate down to the end of the garden. Here a long line of gnarled and twisted lilac bushes clung to the brick wall; lilacs and crumbling wall had held each other in a strong embrace for more than a hundred years. Outside the garden, the wide lawn was encircled by what had once been a shapely yew hedge, which had grown into a ragged rampart of ancient trees, black and squat and melancholy as yew trees always grow. A great gap in this hedge opened upon a long, straight lane leading to the highroad and beyond that lay the primeval woods. On each side of the lane were cedar trees which had once stood young and straight like soldiers, but were now, as the yew trees, old and bent like a line of veterans tottering in broken ranks.

Under the somber branches of the yew hedge was a walk of cracked flagstones, known, since Harrowby was first built, as the “Ladies’ Walk.” For when the paths and lanes about the place were too wet for the dainty feet of ladies, this flagged path was their exercise ground. The negroes, of course, peopled it with the dead and gone ladies of Harrowby, who generally took, upon those broken stones, their last walk upon earth, and who found it haunted, not by the ghosts of their predecessors but by the joys, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, the perplexities, the loves, and the hates which had walked with them there, in cool summer eves, in red autumn afternoons, in bitter winter twilights, and in the soft and dewy mornings of the springtime.

Far off in the open field beyond the garden lay the family burying ground, where, according to the Virginia custom, the dead were laid near the homestead instead of the church. The brick wall around the burying ground was decaying, and the tombstones, never properly set up, were beaten all manner of ways by storm and wind, and trained into strange positions by the soft insistence of the roots of huge weeping willows, those melancholy trees which give a touch of poetic beauty to the most commonplace landscape. Yet the aspect of Harrowby was usually far from melancholy. On the other side of the house from the garden, still farther off, were the negro quarters, slovenly but comfortable, and the stables, which were partly hidden by the straggling yew hedge that extended all around the lawn. In these quarters were housed the two hundred negroes on the plantation, and as twenty-five of them were occupied about the house and garden and stables there was always life and movement around the place.

Especially was this true at Christmas time, and on the Christmas eve of 1860, never was there more merriment, gayety, color, and loud laughter known at Harrowby. Lyddon, the English tutor there for ten years was struck by this, when returning from his afternoon’s tramp through the wintry woods, he passed across the lawn to the house. The air was sharp, like a saber, and the stars were already shining gloriously in the deep blue field of heaven. He watched a half dozen negro men who, with guttural laughter and shouts and merry gibes, carried into the house the great back log for the Christmas fire. From the time that this back log was placed upon the iron fire dogs of the yawning hall fireplace until it was entirely consumed, the negroes had holiday. According to the privileged practical joke of long custom, the log was of black gum, a wood hard to burn at any time. It had lain soaking for weeks in the inky mud of the salt marsh on the inward bend of the river, where the cows stood knee-deep in water at high tide, and hoof-deep in black ooze at low tide. The union of marsh mud and black gum was certain to insure at least a week’s holiday, when no work was required of the negroes, except the waiting on the house full of guests which always made the roof of Harrowby ring during the Christmas time. Great pyramids of wood towered at the woodpile to the left of the house, where the joyous sound of the ax was heard for a week before Christmas, that there should be oak and hickory logs to feed the great fireplaces, and lightwood knots to make the ruddy flames leap high into the wide-throated chimneys.

Lyddon, a gaunt, brown, keen-eyed man, who had watched this backlog business with great interest for ten successive Christmases, studied it anew as a type of the singular and unpractical relations existing between the master and the slave. All of these relations were singular and unpractical, and were a perpetual puzzle to Lyddon. One of the strangest things to him was that the word slave was absolutely tabooed and all sorts of euphemisms were used, such as “the servants,” “the black people,” in order to avoid this uncomely word.

Another typical puzzle was taking place on the side porch. There stood Hector, Colonel Tremaine’s body servant, and general factotum of Harrowby, engaged in his usual occupation of inciting the other negroes to work, while carefully abstaining therefrom himself. He was tall, and had by far the most imposing air and manner of any person at Harrowby. Having accompanied his master several times to the White Sulphur Springs, to say nothing of two trips to Richmond and one to Baltimore, where he saw a panorama of the city of New York; and most wonderful of all, having attended Colonel Tremaine through a campaign in the Mexican War, Hector held a position of undisputed superiority among all the negroes in five counties. He classified himself as a perfect man of the world, a profound expounder of the Gospels, an accomplished soldier, and military critic.

As regards Hector’s heroic services during the Mexican War, he represented that he was always at General Scott’s right hand except when his presence was imperatively demanded by General Zachary Taylor. According to Hector’s further account he led the stormers at Chapultepec, supported Jefferson Davis when he made his celebrated stand at Buena Vista, and handed the sword of General Santa Anna to General Scott when the former surrendered. Colonel Tremaine, on the contrary, declared that Hector never got within five miles of the firing line during the Mexican War, and that whenever there was the remotest sign of an attack, Hector always took refuge under the nearest pile of camp furniture and had to be dragged out by the heels when the danger was overpast. He modeled his toilet upon Colonel Tremaine’s, whose cast-off wardrobe he inherited. The colonel claimed to be the last gentleman in Virginia who wore a ruffled shirt, and Hector shared this distinction. Great billows of cotton lace poured out of the breast of his blue coat, decorated with brass buttons, which was too short in the waist and too long in the tails for Hector, and for whom the colonel’s trousers were distinctly too small, and were kept from crawling up to his knees by straps under the heels of his boots.

What Hector’s business in life was, beyond shaving Colonel Tremaine once a day, Lyddon had never been able to discover. Colonel Tremaine always said, “my boy Hector,” although, like the colonel himself, he had passed the line of seventy; but having become the colonel’s personal attendant when both were in their boyhood, he remained “my boy, sir,” until Time should hand him over, a graybeard, to Death. Another anomaly, scarcely stranger to Lyddon than Hector’s eternal boyhood, was that, having an incurable propensity to look upon the wine when it is red, he had entire charge of the cellar at Harrowby, and when upon occasions of ceremony his services might have been of some slight use, he was tolerably sure to be a little more than half-seas over. He made up for this by an Argus-eyed vigilance over his two postulates, Jim Henry and Tasso, gingerbread-colored youths, who did the work of the dining room under Hector’s iron rule. So careful was he of their morals that he made a point of himself drinking the wine left in the glasses at dinner, “jes’ to keep dem wuffless black niggers f’um turnin’ deyselves into drunkards, like Joshua did arter he got outen de ark.”