CHAPTER I.

THE OLD MANSION HOUSE.

All day within the dreary house, The doors upon their hinges creak; The blue fly sings in the pane—the mouse Behind the mouldering wainscot creeps, Or from the crevice peers about. TENNYSON.

The wild wind sweeps across the old damp floors, And makes a weary and a wailing moan, All night you hear the clap of broken doors, That on their rusty hinges grate and groan; And then old voices calling from behind The worn and wormy wainscot flapping in the wind. MILLER.

The character of the first settlers of Maryland and Virginia is known to have been very different from that of the Pilgrim Fathers—as opposite as the idle, gay, and dissolute cavalier to the stern, laborious, and self-denying Puritan. Their purpose in seeking the shores of the Western World was also widely different from that of the first settlers of New England—the object of the latter being spiritual liberty; the end of the former, material wealth. And their history since the first settlement of the country has been as broadly diverse. The children of the Pilgrim Fathers have reached the highest seats in the temples of Fame and Fortune—the descendants of the first aristocratic settlers of Maryland and Virginia have seen themselves outstripped in the path of success and honor by the children of the very menials of their father’s house. This is emphatically the case in Maryland. Among the friends and partizans of Lord Baltimore, who sought with him an Eldorado among the rolling hills and lovely vales, and beside the broad and beautiful rivers of Maryland, came many younger sons of the decayed old English nobility and gentry, who thought out of the wealth of the New World to found a name and a family here, that should rival, in power and splendor, the house from which they sprang. They seemed to overlook the fact that this coveted wealth was as yet unreclaimed from the wilderness—that nothing but energy, labor, and perseverance could receive and appropriate it; and even if at first they had observed this, it would have availed them little, for unlike the Pilgrim Fathers, they were deplorably destitute of these natural and necessary qualifications for success in a new and unsubdued world.

With all their old ancestral pride, they also brought to these shores those habits of idleness, dissipation, and reckless expenditure which had been so destructive to their fortunes in the old country. Many succeeded in securing from the wilderness large estates, and upon them they erected handsome edifices,—the bricks, glass, and other materials for which were mostly imported from England to Baltimore, and brought down the Potomac or Patuxent rivers to the site selected for building (so little available then to these settlers were the fine resources of the country). Some of these old mansion houses are yet standing,[1] but like the families that own them, much decayed, and remaining merely as memorials of past grandeur. The descendants of these first settlers of Maryland and Virginia are the proudest, and _some_ of them, alas! the poorest of the citizens of these States. These people are _sui generis_—unlike any other people I ever saw or read of. Each planter on his own estate, great or small, productive or barren, is prouder, and more thoroughly convinced of his own immense personal importance, than any throned, crowned, and sceptred monarch in Christendom or Heatheness. With all this, they are brave, generous, gallant, and hospitable, even to extravagance. It has been entered as a complaint against the older counties of Maryland and Virginia, that the taverns are wretched, and how can it be helped? Tavern-keeping is a poor business there, because the doors of every planter’s house fly open to receive the traveller who passes near his gates—and a welcome is extended to him with the cheerful, genial warmth of a country gentleman to whom the exercise of hospitality is a delight as well as a duty. It is a very common thing to see a perfect stranger ride up to the gate of a Maryland or Virginia planter’s farm yard, with the purpose of remaining all night—or a week, if his convenience requires it—and he is sure of a welcome, as long as he pleases to stay—for him the “fatted calf” is killed, for him the butt of cordial broached.

Footnote 1:

We have one in Washington. It is an old ruin—some hundred years older than the city—and stands near the junction of the Potomac and Anacostia. It is haunted, of course.

Northern and Western men who occasionally happen to travel through the lower counties of these States, put up at poor taverns, and go away to abuse the half savage state of society there. They should rather present themselves at some planter’s house, where they would be received with the best, as a matter of course, and invited, if it were spring, to a fish feast upon the banks of the nearest river, or, if it were autumn, to a deer hunt. Let idlers who are _ennuyés_ to death with the common-places of their daily life, just take a country road tour through the lower counties of Maryland and Virginia, and they will find themselves transported to the associations of two centuries ago, among the oldest-fashioned people, with the oldest-fashioned houses, furniture, and manners in the world.

* * * * *

Down on the western shore of Maryland is a heath containing about five hundred acres—upon which stands an old mansion-house, in ruins, both of which I wish to describe. This heath is bounded on the North by the river P., on the South by Sachem’s Creek, on the West by a deep, dense forest, and on the East by the Chesapeake Bay. The heath rises gradually from the bay, and is relieved by clumps of pine and cedar trees, standing between the swells of ground as it rolls back from the water towards the forest, while towards the North the ground rises and sharpens into a steep promontory, sticking out between the junction of the river with the bay. Crowning the summit of this promontory, is a large, square, red brick old mansion-house. Around this house wave tall, gloomy old Lombardy poplars—like sable plumes around a hearse. Around the shores of the promontory runs a half-ruined low brick wall, inclosing the garden attached to the mansion. This garden is grown up with weeds and thistles. This estate was known by the name of The Heath, or Heath Hall, and had continued in the possession of the Churchill family since the first settlement of Maryland.

On the opposite point of the mouth of the river was the struggling little village of Churchill Point,—a great colonial seaport town, withered in the germ—now only an occasional depot for tobacco raised in the immediate neighborhood, and shipped thence to Baltimore by the little packets that traded up and down the river, and sometimes stopped there to take in freight. A large old barn of a storehouse, where produce was left till carried away—a large, old, white-framed tavern, half-furnished, where passengers went to meet the packets, a blacksmith’s shop, a country merchant’s store, a post-office, kept by the widow of the late post-master, a few cottages, tenanted by wool, cotton, and flax dyers, by domestic counterpane and carpet weavers, and other country laborers, made up the staple of the village. About a quarter of a mile back from the village, in a clearing in the forest, stood the Episcopal Church of the Crucifixion. Divine service was performed here only once a fortnight, as the pastor had two parishes under his charge.[2]

Footnote 2:

This is frequently the case, even at this day, in remote counties of Maryland.

To return to Churchill Hall. This estate had once been highly valuable, both as to size and productiveness. Running over its natural boundaries, it extended beyond the river and creek, and for miles into the forest behind—and for fertility it was called the garden spot of Maryland. But many acres had passed from the possession of the family, and what was left was worn out by that wretched system of agriculture which has ruined the once highly productive lands of Maryland. I mean the continual drain upon the resources of the soil, without ever giving it rest or food; sowing a field years at a stretch, without giving it the repose of a single season, or the nutriment of a single bushel of manure. All that was left of the once beautiful farm was the sterile heath and ruined Hall I have described, when the estate, by the death of his father, passed into the possession of Ignatius, the last heir of the Churchills, who, and his two sisters, Sophie and Rosalie, were the only remaining members of the family. His poverty and his incumbrances did not prevent him from loving and marrying a beautiful girl in his neighborhood, Agatha Gormon, who left a luxurious home to share his poverty in the ruined Hall at the Heath; nor could his love save her from death, when, in the second year of her marriage, she passed away, leaving an infant daughter of a day old. He had loved her with an exclusive, absorbing passion, and from the hour of her sudden death he pined away, and in less than a year thereafter was laid in her grave—opened to receive him. The orphan heiress of a ruin and a desert, the infant Agatha—or, as from her wild, dark beauty, she was nicknamed, _Hagar_—was left in charge of his sisters. These ladies, though poor, were quite comfortable. The lower rooms of the old house were kept in tolerable order. Their table was supplied by the garden, the dairy, and the river, which afforded excellent fish, crabs, and oysters—while their pocket money was supplied by the hire of several negroes owned by them. The girls were beautiful—and, poor as they were, it was thought not impossible that they might marry well. The elder sister, Rosalie, was a merry, plump, golden-haired, blue-eyed lassie, with a complexion that the country beaux compared to strawberries and cream—she was the first to fulfil the happy auguries drawn for her. She was seen by a young merchant of Baltimore, who happened to have business at Churchill’s Point, and after rather a short courtship, she was wedded and carried off to the city home of her husband. Sophie Churchill, now bereaved and alone at seventeen, devoted herself with all the enthusiasm of her ardent, loving nature, to the care and education of her infant niece, and little Hagar grew passionately fond of her aunt. Her sole domestic was an old woman, a pure Guinea negress, who, seventy years before, in her childhood, had been torn from her native coast, brought to this country, and sold. She had served the Churchill family for three generations, and was nearly eighty years old—yet with the strong tenacity of life distinguishing the native African, she still kept up and at work, seemingly in all her mid-life vigor. Now, reader, I am telling you no invented story—so do you not think that there was something slightly romantic about the position of this young girl, left with the charge of an infant, living in an old ruin, on a bleak shore, and having no other companion or attendant but the old Guinea negress? _Real life_ is full of the picturesque and the romantic. I have never yet needed to cull flowers from the fields of imagination. The gardens of memory and tradition will furnish materials for a life of romance writing.