As I walked up to the Prestons’, along a beautiful shaded back street, a carriage passed with Governor Means in it. As soon as he saw me he threw himself half out and kissed both hands to me again and again. It was a whole-souled greeting, as the saying is, and I returned it with my whole heart, too. “Good-by,” he cried, and I responded “Good-by.” I may never see him again. I am not sure that I did not shed a few tears.
General Preston and Mr. Chesnut were seated on the
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piazza of the Hampton house as I walked in. I opened my batteries upon them in this scornful style: “You cold, formal, solemn, overly-polite creatures, weighed down by your own dignity. You will never know the rapture of such a sad farewell as John Means and I have just interchanged. He was in a hack,” I proceeded to relate, “and I was on the sidewalk. He was on his way to the war, poor fellow. The hackman drove steadily along in the middle of the street; but for our gray hairs I do not know what he might have thought of us. John Means did not suppress his feelings at an unexpected meeting with an old friend, and a good cry did me good. It is a life of terror and foreboding we lead. My heart is in my mouth half the time. But you two, under no possible circumstances could you forget your manners.”
Read Russell’s India all day. Saintly folks those English when their blood is up. Sepoys and blacks we do not expect anything better from, but what an example of Christian patience and humanity the white “angels” from the West set them.
The beautiful Jewess, Rachel Lyons, was here to-day. She flattered Paul Hayne audaciously, and he threw back the ball.
To-day I saw the Rowena to this Rebecca, when Mrs. Edward Barnwell called. She is the purest type of Anglo-Saxon – exquisitely beautiful, cold, quiet, calm, lady-like, fair as a lily, with the blackest and longest eyelashes, and her eyes so light in color some one said “they were the hue of cologne and water.” At any rate, she has a patent right to them; there are no more like them to be had. The effect is startling, but lovely beyond words.
Blanton Duncan told us a story of Morgan in Kentucky. Morgan walked into a court where they were trying some Secessionists. The Judge was about to pronounce sentence, but Morgan rose, and begged that he might be allowed to call some witnesses. The Judge asked who were his
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witnesses. “My name is John Morgan, and my witnesses are 1,400 Confederate soldiers.”
Mrs. Izard witnessed two instances of patriotism in the caste called “Sandhill lackeys.” One forlorn, chill, and fever-freckled creature, yellow, dirty, and dry as a nut, was selling peaches at ten cents a dozen. Soldiers collected around her cart. She took the cover off and cried, “Eat away. Eat your fill. I never charge our soldiers anything.” They tried to make her take pay, but when she steadily refused it, they cheered her madly and said: “Sleep in peace. Now we will fight for you and keep off the Yankees.” Another poor Sandhill man refused to sell his cows, and gave them to the hospital.
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XII. FLAT ROCK, N. C.
August 1,1862 – August 8,1862
FLAT ROCK, N. C., August 1,1862. – Being ill I left Mrs. McMahan’s for Flat Rock.1 It was very hot and disagreeable for an invalid in a boarding-house in that climate. The La Bordes and the McCord girls came part of the way with me.
The cars were crowded and a lame soldier had to stand, leaning on his crutches in the thoroughfare that runs between the seats. One of us gave him our seat. You may depend upon it there was no trouble in finding a seat for our party after that. Dr. La Borde quoted a classic anecdote. In some Greek assembly an old man was left standing. A Spartan gave him his seat. The Athenians cheered madly, though they had kept their seats. The comment was, “Lacedemonians practice virtue; Athenians know how to admire it.”
Nathan Davis happened accidentally to be at the station at Greenville. He took immediate charge of Molly and myself, for my party had dwindled to us two. He went with us to the hotel, sent for the landlord, told him who I was, secured good rooms for us and saw that we were made
1. Flat Rock was the summer resort of many cultured families from the low countries of the South before the war. Many attractive houses had been built there. It lies in the region which has since become famous as the Asheville region, and in which stands Biltmore.
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comfortable in every way. At dinner I entered that immense dining-room alone, but I saw friends and acquaintances on every side. My first exploit was to repeat to Mrs. Ives Mrs. Pickens’s blunder in taking a suspicious attitude toward men born at the North, and calling upon General Cooper to agree with her. Martha Levy explained the grave faces of my auditors by saying that Colonel Ives was a New Yorker. My distress was dire.
Louisa Hamilton was there. She told me that Captain George Cuthbert, with his arm in a sling from a wound by no means healed, was going to risk the shaking of a stagecoach; he was on his way to his cousin, William Cuthbert’s, at Flat Rock. Now George Cuthbert is a type of the finest kind of Southern soldier. We can not make them any better than he is. Before the war I knew him; he traveled in Europe with my sister, Kate, and Mary Withers. At once I offered him a seat in the comfortable hack Nathan Davis had engaged for me.
Molly sat opposite to me, and often when I was tired held my feet in her lap. Captain Cuthbert’s man sat with the driver. We had ample room. We were a dilapidated company. I was so ill I could barely sit up, and Captain Cuthbert could not use his right hand or arm at all. I had to draw his match, light his cigar, etc. He was very quiet, grateful, gentle, and, I was going to say, docile. He is a fiery soldier, one of those whose whole face becomes transfigured in battle, so one of his men told me, describing his way with his company. He does not blow his own trumpet, but I made him tell me the story of his duel with the Mercury’s reporter. He seemed awfully ashamed of wasting time in such a scrape.
That night we stopped at a country house half-way toward our journey’s end. There we met Mr. Charles Lowndes. Rawlins Lowndes, his son, is with Wade Hampton.
First we drove, by mistake, into Judge King’s yard, our
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hackman mistaking the place for the hotel. Then we made Farmer’s Hotel (as the seafaring men say).
Burnet Rhett, with his steed, was at the door; horse and man were caparisoned with as much red and gold artillery uniform as they could bear. He held his horse. The stirrups were Mexican, I believe; they looked like little sidesaddles. Seeing his friend and crony, George Cuthbert, alight and leave a veiled lady in the carriage, this handsome and undismayed young artillerist walked round and round the carriage, talked with the driver, looked in at the doors, and at the front. Suddenly I bethought me to raise my veil and satisfy his curiosity. Our eyes met, and I smiled. It was impossible to resist the comic disappointment on his face when a woman old enough to be George Cuthbert’s mother, with the ravages of a year of gastric fever, almost fainting with fatigue, greeted his vision. He instantly mounted his gallant steed and pranced away to his fiancée. He is to marry the greatest heiress in the State, Miss Aiken. Then Captain Cuthbert told me his name.
At Kate’s, I found Sally Rutledge, and then for weeks life was a blank; I remember nothing. The illness which had been creeping on for so long a time took me by the throat. At Greenville I had met many friends. I witnessed the wooing of Barny Heyward, once the husband of the lovely Lucy Izard, now a widower and a bon parti. He was there nursing Joe, his brother. So was the beautiful Henrietta Magruder Heyward, now a widow, for poor Joe died. There is something magnetic in Tatty Clinch’s large and lustrous black eyes. No man has ever resisted their influence. She says her virgin heart has never beat one throb the faster for any mortal here below – until now, when it surrenders to Barny. Well, as I said, Joseph Heyward died, and rapidly did the bereaved beauty shake the dust of this poor Confederacy from her feet and plume her wings for flight across the water.