Throckmorton: A Novel

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Such was the Severn neighborhood—called so from Severn church. Every brick in this old pile had been brought from green England two hundred years before. It seemed as if, in those early days, nothing made with hands should be without picturesqueness; and so this ancient church, paid for in hogsheads of black tobacco, which was also the currency in which the hard-riding, hard-drinking parsons took their dues, was peaked and gabled most beautifully. The bricks, mellowed by two centuries, had become a rich, dull red, upon which, year after year, in the enchanted Southern summers and the fitful Southern winters, mosses and gray lichens laid their clinging fingers. It was set far back from the broad, white road, and gnarled live-oaks and silver beeches and the melancholy weeping-willows grew about the churchyard. Their roots had pushed, with gentle persistence, through the crumbling brick wall that surrounded it, where most of the tombstones rested peacefully upon the ground as they chanced to fall. Within the church itself, modern low-backed pews had supplanted the ancient square boxes during an outbreak of philistinism in the fifties. At the same time, a wooden flooring had been laid over the flat stones in the aisles, under which dead and gone vicars—for the parish had a vicar in colonial days—slept quietly. The interior was darkened by the branches of the trees that pressed against the wall and peered curiously through the small, clear panes of the oblong windows; and over all the singular, unbroken peace and silence of the region brooded.

The country round about was fruitful and tame, the slightly rolling landscape becoming as flat as Holland toward the rich river-bottoms. The rivers were really estuaries, making in from the salt ocean bays, and as briny as the sea itself. Next the church was the parsonage land, still known as the Glebe, although glebes and tithes had been dead these hundred years. The Glebe house, which was originally plain and old-fashioned, had been smartened up by the rector, the Rev. Edmund Morford, until it looked like an old country-woman masquerading in a ballet costume; but the Rev. Edmund thought it beautiful, and only watched his chance to lay sacrilegious hands on the old church and to plaster it all over with ecclesiastical knickknacks of various sorts.

The Rev. Mr. Morford had come into the world handicapped by the most remarkable personal beauty, and extreme fluency of tongue. Otherwise, he was an honest and conscientious man. But he belonged to that common class among ecclesiastics who know all about the unknowable, and have accurately measured the unfathomable. On Sundays, when he got up in the venerable pulpit at Severn, looking so amazingly handsome in his snow-white surplice, he dived into the everlasting mysteries with a cocksureness that was appalling or delightful according to the view one took of it. In the tabernacle of his soul, which was quite empty of guile and malice, three devils had taken up their abode: one was the conviction of his own beauty, another was the conviction of his own cleverness, and still another was the suspicion that every woman who looked at him wanted to marry him. Mr. Morford reasoned thus:

I. That all women want to get married.
II. That an Edmund Morford is not to be picked up every day.
III. That eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

On Sundays he scarcely dared look toward the pew where General and Mrs. Temple sat, with their beautiful widowed daughter-in-law, Mrs. Beverley Temple, on one side of them, and Jacqueline Temple, as lovely in her small, kittenish way, on the other, for fear that one or the other of these young women would fall hopelessly in love with him. Mrs. Beverley, as the young widow was called, to distinguish her from the elder Mrs. Temple, had the fatal charm for the Rev. Edmund that all things feared and admired have. He believed in his heart of hearts that widows were made for his undoing, and that the good old Hindoo custom of burning them up alive was the only really safe disposition to make of them. The charm of Judith Temple’s piquant face and soft, shy eyes was somewhat neutralized by a grim suspicion lodged in Mr. Morford’s mind that she was unnecessarily clever. The Rev. Edmund had a wholesome awe of clever women, especially if they had a knack of humor, and was very much afraid of them. Judith had a sedate way of replying to Morford’s resounding platitudes that sometimes created a laugh, and when he laboriously unwound the meaning, he was apt to find the germ of a joke; and Judith was so grave—her eyes were so sweetly serious when she was laying traps to catch the Rev. Edmund’s sluggish wits. But Judith herself thought of no man whatever, and had learned to regard the sparkle of her unquenchable humor almost as a sin. However, having got a bad name for cleverness, neither the most sincere modesty nor the deepest courtesy availed her in keeping it quiet. Morford, in his simple soul, thought a clever woman could do anything; and suppose Judith should cast her eyes on—at this the Rev. Edmund would turn pale in the midst of his sermon when he caught Judith’s gray eyes fixed soberly on him. Soberness—and particularly Judith’s soberness—was deceitful.

Barn Elms, the Temple place, was near to the Glebe and to Severn church. The house was rambling and shabby, and had been patched and pieced, with an utter disregard of architectural proportion that resulted in a curious and unexpected picturesqueness. A room was put on here, and a porch was clapped up there, just as the fancy of each successive Temple had dictated. It was partly of brick and partly of stone. Around it stood in tall ranks the solemn, black-leaved poplars, and great locust-trees grew so close to the house that on windy nights the sound of their giant arms beating the shingled roof awoke superstitious fears in the negroes, who declared it to be the “sperrits” of dead and gone Temples struggling to get in through the chimneys. There was a step up or a step down in every room in the house, and draughts enough in the unnecessary halls and passages to turn a windmill. There was, of course, that queer mixture of shabbiness and luxury about the old place and the mode of living that is characteristic of Virginia. Mrs. Temple had piles and piles of linen sheets laid away with the leaves of damask roses between them in the old cedar chests, but half the rooms and all the stairs and passages were uncarpeted. It required the services of an able-bodied negro to keep these floors polished—but polished they were, like a looking-glass. The instrument used in this process was called a “dry-rubbin’ bresh” by the manipulators, and might well have been used in Palestine during the days of Herod the tetrarch, being merely a block of wood covered with a sheepskin, well matted with wax and turpentine. At unearthly hours, in cold winter mornings and gray summer dawns, the monotonous echo of this “bresh” going up and down the hall-floors was the earliest sound in the Barn Elms house. There was a full service of silver plate displayed upon a huge and rickety mahogany sideboard, but there was a lack of teaspoons. Mrs. Temple had every day a dinner fit for a king, but General Temple was invariably behindhand with his taxes. The general’s first purchase after the war was a pair of splendid Kentucky horses to pull the old carriage bought when Mrs. Temple was a bride, and which was so moth-eaten and worm-eaten and rust-eaten that when it started out it was a wonder that it ever came back again. The kitchen was a hundred yards from the house in one direction, and the well, with its old-fashioned bucket and sweep, was a hundred yards off in another direction. The ice-house and stables were completely out of sight; while the negro houses, annually whitewashed a glaring white, were rather too near. But none of these things annoyed General and Mrs. Temple, who would have stared in gentle surprise at the hint that anything at Barn Elms could be improved.

General Temple, six feet tall, as straight as an Indian, with a rich, commanding voice and a lofty stride, stood for the shadow of domestic authority; while Mrs. Temple, a gentle, affectionate, soft-spoken, devoted, and obstinate woman, who barely reached to the general’s elbow, was the actual substance. From the day of their marriage he had never questioned her decision upon any subject whatever, although an elaborate fiction of marital authority was maintained between them and devoutly believed in by both. Mrs. Temple always consulted the general punctiliously—when she had made up her mind—and General Temple, after a ponderous pretense of thinking it over, would say in his fine, sonorous voice: “My dear Jane, the conviction of your extremely sound judgment, formed from my experience of you during thirty years of married life, inclines me to the opinion that your suggestion is admirable. You have my permission, my love”—a permission Mrs. Temple never failed to accept with wifely gratitude, and, like the general, really thought it amounted to something. This status is extremely common in Virginia, where, as a rule, the men have a magnificent but imaginary empire, and the women conduct the serious business of life.

Brave, chivalrous, generous, loving God and revering woman, General Temple was as near a monster of perfection as could be imagined, except when he had the gout. Then he became transformed into a full-blown demon. From the most optimistic form of Episcopal faith, he lapsed into the darkest Calvinism as soon as he felt the first twinge of his malady, and by the time he was a prisoner in the “charmber,” as the bedroom of the mistress of the family is called in Virginia, he believed that the whole world was created to be damned. Never had General Temple been known under the most violent provocation to use profane language; but under the baleful influence of gout and superheated religion combined, he always swore like a pirate. His womenkind, who quietly bullied him during the best part of the year, found him a person to be feared when he began to have doubts about freewill and election. To this an exception must be made in favor of Mrs. Temple and of Delilah, the household factotum, who was no more afraid of General Temple than Mrs. Temple was. She it was who was mainly responsible for these carnivals of gout by feeding the patient on fried oysters and plum-pudding when Dr. Wortley prescribed gruel and tapioca. Delilah was one of the unterrified, and used these spells to preach boldly at General Temple the doctrines of the “Foot-washin’ Baptisses,” a large and influential colored sect to which she belonged.

“Ole marse,” Delilah would begin, argumentatively, “if you wuz ter jine de Foot-washers—”