University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
THE FRIENDS AND RELATIONS OF JAMES.

Mr. Zebedee Marvyn, the father of James, was
the sample of an individuality so purely the result
of New England society and education, that he
must be embodied in our story as a representative
man of the times.

He owned a large farm in the immediate vicinity
of Newport, which he worked with his own
hands and kept under the most careful cultivation.
He was a man past the middle of life, with a
white head, a keen blue eye, and a face graven
deeply with the lines of energy and thought. His
was one of those clearly-cut minds which New
England forms among her farmers, as she forms
quartz crystals in her mountains, by a sort of gradual
influence flowing through every pore of her
soil and system.

His education, properly so called, had been merely
that of those common schools and academies with
which the States are thickly sown, and which are
the springs of so much intellectual activity. Here

he had learned to think and to inquire, — a process
which had not ceased with his school-days. Though
toiling daily with his sons and hired man in all the
minutiæ of a farmer's life, he kept an observant
eye on the field of literature, and there was not a
new publication heard of which he did not immediately
find means to add to his yearly increasing
stock of books. In particular was he a well-read
and careful theologian, and all the controversial
tracts, sermons, and books, with which then, (as
ever since,) New England abounded, not only lay
on his shelves, but had his pencilled annotations,
queries, and comments thickly scattered along their
margins. There was scarce an office of public
trust which had not at one time or another
been filled by him. He was deacon of the church,
chairman of the school-committee, justice of the
peace, had been twice representative in the State
legislature, and was in permanence a sort of adviser-general
in all cases between neighbor and
neighbor. Among other acquisitions, he had gained
some knowledge of the general forms of law, and
his advice was often asked in preference to that
of the regular practitioners.

His dwelling was one of those large, square,
white, green-blinded mansions, cool, clean, and
roomy, wherein the respectability of New England
in those days rejoiced. The windows were shaded
by clumps of lilacs; the deep yard with its white

fence inclosed a sweep of clean, short grass, and
a few fruit-trees. Opposite the house was a small
blacksmith's-shed, which, of a wet day, was sparkling
and lively with bellows and ringing forge,
while Mr. Zebedee and his sons were hammering
and pounding and putting in order anything that
was out of the way in farming-tools or establishments.
Not unfrequently the latest scientific work
or the last tractate of theology lay open by his
side, the contents of which would be discussed
with a neighbor or two as they entered; for, to
say the truth, many a neighbor, less forehanded
and thrifty, felt the benefit of this arrangement of
Mr. Zebedee, and would drop in to see if he
“wouldn't just tighten that rivet,” or “kind o' ease
out that 'ere brace,” or “let a feller have a turn
with his bellows, or a stroke or two on his anvil,”
— to all which the good man consented with a
grave obligingness. The fact was, that, as nothing
in the establishment of Mr. Marvyn was often
broken or lost or out of place, he had frequent
applications to lend to those less fortunate persons,
always to be found, who supply their own lack of
considerateness from the abundance of their neighbors.

He who is known always to be in hand, and
always obliging, in a neighborhood, stands the
chance sometimes of having nothing for himself
Mr. Zebedee reflected quietly on this subject, taking

it, as he did all others, into grave and orderly
consideration, and finally provided a complete set
of tools, which he kept for the purpose of lending;
and when any of these were lent, he told the next
applicant quietly, that the axe or the hoe was already
out, and thus he reconciled the Scripture
which commanded him “to do good and lend”
with that law of order which was written in his
nature.

Early in life Mr. Marvyn had married one of the
handsomest girls of his acquaintance, who had
brought him a thriving and healthy family of children,
of whom James was the youngest. Mrs. Marvyn
was, at this time, a tall, sad-eyed, gentle-mannered
woman, thoughtful, earnest, deep-natured,
though sparing in the matter of words. In all her
household arrangements, she had the same thrift
and order which characterized her husband; but
hers was a mind of a finer and higher stamp than
his.

In her bedroom, near by her work-basket, stood
a table covered with books, — and so systematic
were her household arrangements, that she never
any day missed her regular hours for reading. One
who should have looked over this table would have
seen there how eager and hungry a mind was hid
behind the silent eyes of this quiet woman. History,
biography, mathematics, volumes of the encyclopædia,
poetry, novels, all alike found their

time and place there, — and while she pursued her
household labors, the busy, active soul within travelled
cycles and cycles of thought, few of which
ever found expression in words. What might be
that marvellous music of the Miserere, of which
she read, that it convulsed crowds and drew groans
and tears from the most obdurate? What might
be those wondrous pictures of Raphael and Leonardo
da Vinci? What would it be to see the
Apollo, the Venus? What was the charm that
enchanted the old marbles, — charm untold and inconceivable
to one who had never seen even the
slightest approach to a work of art? Then those
glaciers of Switzerland, that grand, unapproachable
mixture of beauty and sublimity in her mountains!
— what would it be to one who could see
it? Then what were all those harmonies of which
she read, — masses, fugues, symphonies? Oh, could
she once hear the Miserere of Mozart, just to know
what music was like! And the cathedrals, what
were they? How wonderful they must be, with
their forests of arches, many-colored as autumnwoods
with painted glass, and the chants and anthems
rolling down their long aisles! On all these
things she pondered quietly, as she sat often on
Sundays in the old staring, rattle-windowed meeting-house,
and looked at the uncouth old pulpit,
and heard the choir faw-sol-la-ing or singing fuguing
tunes; but of all this she said nothing.

Sometimes, for days, her thoughts would turn
from these subjects and be absorbed in mathematical
or metaphysical studies. “I have been following
that treatise on Optics for a week, and never
understood it till to-day,” she once said to her husband.
“I have found now that there has been a
mistake in drawing the diagrams. I have corrected
it, and now the demonstration is complete. Dinah,
take care, that wood is hickory, and it takes only
seven sticks of that size to heat the oven.”

It is not to be supposed that a woman of this
sort was an inattentive listener to preaching so
stimulating to the intellect as that of Dr. Hopkins.
No pair of eyes followed the web of his reasonings
with a keener and more anxious watchfulness
than those sad, deep-set, hazel ones; and as she was
drawn along the train of its inevitable logic, a close
observer might have seen how the shadows deepened
over them. For, while others listened for the
clearness of the thought, for the acuteness of the
argument, she listened as a soul wide, fine-strung,
acute, repressed, whose every fibre is a nerve, listens
to the problem of its own destiny, — listened
as the mother of a family listens, to know what
were the possibilities, the probabilities, of this mysterious
existence of ours to herself and those dearer
to her than herself.

The consequence of all her listening was a history
of deep inward sadness. That exultant joy,

or that entire submission, with which others seemed
to view the scheme of the universe, as thus unfolded,
did not visit her mind. Everything to her
seemed shrouded in gloom and mystery; and that
darkness she received as a token of unregeneracy,
as a sign that she was one of those who are destined,
by a mysterious decree, never to receive the
light of the glorious gospel of Christ. Hence,
while her husband was a deacon of the church,
she, for years, had sat in her pew while the sacramental
elements were distributed, a mournful spectator.
Punctilious in every duty, exact, reverential,
she still regarded herself as a child of wrath, an
enemy to God, and an heir of perdition; nor could
she see any hope of remedy, except in the sovereign,
mysterious decree of an Infinite and Unknown
Power, a mercy for which she waited with the sickness
of hope deferred.

Her children had grown up successively around
her, intelligent and exemplary. Her eldest son was
mathematical professor in one of the leading colleges
of New England. Her second son, who
jointly with his father superintended the farm, was
a man of wide literary culture and of fine mathematical
genius; and not unfrequently, on winter
evenings, the son, father, and mother worked together,
by their kitchen fireside, over the calculations
for the almanac for the ensuing year, which
the son had been appointed to edit.

Everything in the family arrangements was
marked by a sober precision, a grave and quiet
self-possession. There was little demonstrativeness
of affection between parents and children, brothers
and sisters, though great mutual love and confidence.
It was not pride, nor sternness, but a
sort of habitual shamefacedness, that kept far back
in each soul those feelings which are the most
beautiful in their outcome; but after a while, the
habit became so fixed a nature, that a caressing
or affectionate expression could not have passed
the lips of one to another without a painful awkwardness.
Love was understood, once for all, to
be the basis on which their life was built. Once
for all, they loved each other, and after that, the
less said, the better. It had cost the woman's
heart of Mrs. Marvyn some pangs, in the earlier
part of her wedlock, to accept of this once for all
in place of those daily outgushings which every
woman desires should be like God's loving-kindnesses,
“new every morning;” but hers, too, was
a nature strongly inclining inward, and, after a few
tremulous movements, the needle of her soul settled,
and her life-lot was accepted, — not as what
she would like or could conceive, but as a reasonable
and good one. Life was a picture painted in
low, cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and though
another and brighter style might have pleased better,
she did not quarrel with this.

Into this steady, decorous, highly-respectable circle
the youngest child, James, made a formidable
irruption. One sometimes sees launched into a
family-circle a child of so different a nature from
all the rest, that it might seem as if, like an aerolite,
he had fallen out of another sphere. All the
other babies of the Marvyn family had been of
that orderly, contented sort, who sleep till it is convenient
to take them up, and while awake suck
their thumbs contentedly and look up with large,
round eyes at the ceiling when it is not convenient
for their elders and betters that they should
do anything else. In farther advanced childhood,
they had been quiet and decorous children, who
could be all dressed and set up in chairs, like so
many dolls, of a Sunday morning, patiently awaiting
the stroke of the church-bell to be carried out
and put into the wagon which took them over the
two-miles' road to church. Possessed of such tranquil,
orderly, and exemplary young offshoots, Mrs.
Marvyn had been considered eminent for her “faculty”
in bringing up children.

But James was destined to put “faculty,” and
every other talent which his mother possessed, to
rout. He was an infant of moods and tenses, and
those not of any regular verb. He would cry of
nights, and he would be taken up of mornings,
and he would not suck his thumb, nor a bundle
of caraway-seed tied in a rag and dipped in sweet

milk, with which the good gossips in vain endeavored
to pacify him. He fought manfully with his
two great fat fists the battle of babyhood, utterly
reversed all nursery maxims, and reigned as baby
over the whole prostrate household. When old
enough to run alone, his splendid black eyes and
glossy rings of hair were seen flashing and bobbing
in every forbidden place and occupation.
Now trailing on his mother's gown, he assisted
her in salting her butter by throwing in small contributions
of snuff or sugar, as the case might be;
and again, after one of those mysterious periods
of silence which are of most ominous significance
in nursery experience, he would rise from the demolition
of her indigo-bag, showing a face ghastly
with blue streaks, and looking more like a gnome
than the son of a respectable mother. There was
not a pitcher of any description of contents left
within reach of his little tiptoes and busy fingers
that was not pulled over upon his giddy head
without in the least seeming to improve its steadiness.
In short, his mother remarked that she was
thankful every night when she had fairly gotten
him into bed and asleep; James had really got
through one more day and killed neither himself
nor any one else.

As a boy, the case was little better. He did not
take to study, — yawned over books, and cut out
moulds for running anchors when he should have

been thinking of his columns of words in four
syllables. No mortal knew how he learned to
read, for he never seemed to stop running long
enough to learn anything; and yet he did learn
and used the talent in conning over travels, seavoyages,
and lives of heroes and naval commanders
Spite of father, mother, and brother, he seemed to
possess the most extraordinary faculty of running
up unsavory acquaintances. He was hale-fellow
well-met with every Tom and Jack and Jim and
Ben and Dick that strolled on the wharves, and
astonished his father with minutest particulars of
every ship, schooner, and brig in the harbor, together
with biographical notes of the different
Toms, Dicks, and Harrys by whom they were
worked.

There was but one member of the family that
seemed to know at all what to make of James,
and that was their negro servant, Candace.

In those days, when domestic slavery prevailed
in New England, it was quite a different thing
in its aspects from the same institution in more
southern latitudes. The hard soil, unyielding to
any but the most considerate culture, the thrifty,
close, shrewd habits of the people, and their untiring
activity and industry, prevented, among the
mass of the people, any great reliance on slave
labor.

Added to this, there were from the very first,

in New England, serious doubts in the minds of
thoughtful and conscientious people in reference
to the lawfulness of slavery; this scruple prevented
many from availing themselves of it, and
proved a restraint on all, so that nothing like
plantation-life existed, and what servants were
owned were scattered among different families, of
which they came to be regarded and to regard
themselves as a legitimate part and portion. Slavery
was something foreign, grotesque, and picturesque
in a life of the most matter-of-fact sameness;
it was even as if one should see clusters
of palm-trees scattered here and there among Yankee
wooden meeting-houses, or open one's eyes
on clumps of yellow-striped aloes growing among
hardhack and huckleberry bushes in the pastures.

Mr. Marvyn, as a man of substance, numbered
two or three in his establishment, among whom
Candace reigned chief. The presence of these
tropical specimens of humanity, with their wide,
joyous, rich, physical abundance of nature, and
their hearty abandon of outward expression, was a
relief to the still clear-cut lines in which the picture
of New England life was drawn, that an
artist must appreciate.

No race has ever shown such infinite and rich
capabilities of adaptation to varying soil and circumstances
as the negro. Alike to them the
snows of Canada, the hard, rocky land of New

England, with its set lines and orderly ways, or
the gorgeous profusion and loose abundance of the
Southern States. Sambo and Cuffy expand under
them all. New England yet preserves among her
hills and valleys the lingering echoes of the jokes
and jollities of various sable worthies, who saw
alike in orthodoxy and heterodoxy, in Dr. This-side
and Dr. That-side, only food for more abundant
merriment; — in fact, the minister of those
days not unfrequently had his black shadow, a
sort of African Boswell, who powdered his wig,
brushed his boots, defended and patronized his
sermons, and strutted complacently about as it
through virtue of his blackness he had absorbed
every ray of his master's dignity and wisdom. In
families, the presence of these exotics was a godsend
to the children, supplying from the abundant
outwardness and demonstrativeness of their nature
that aliment of sympathy so dear to childhood,
which the repressed and quiet habits of New England
education denied. Many and many a New
Englander counts among his pleasantest early recollections
the memory of some of these genial creatures,
who by their warmth of nature were the first
and most potent mesmerizers of his childish mind.

Candace was a powerfully built, majestic black
woman, corpulent, heavy, with a swinging majesty
of motion like that of a ship in a ground-swell.
Her shining black skin and glistening white teeth

were indications of perfect physical vigor which
had never known a day's sickness; her turban, of
broad red and yellow bandanna stripes, had even
a warm tropical glow; and her ample skirts were
always ready to be spread over every childish
transgression of her youngest pet and favorite,
James.

She used to hold him entranced long winter-evenings,
while she sat knitting in the chimney-corner,
and crooned to him strange, wild African
legends of the things that she had seen in her
childhood and early days, — for she had been stolen
when about fifteen years of age; and these
weird, dreamy talks increased the fervor of his
roving imagination, and his desire to explore the
wonders of the wide and unknown world. When
rebuked or chastised, it was she who had secret
bowels of mercy for him, and hid doughnuts in
her ample bosom to be secretly administered to
him in mitigation of the sentence that sent him
supperless to bed; and many a triangle of pie,
many a wedge of cake, had conveyed to him surreptitious
consolations which his more conscientious
mother longed, but dared not, to impart. In
fact, these ministrations, if suspected, were winked
at by Mrs. Marvyn, for two reasons: first, that
mothers are generally glad of any loving-kindness
to an erring boy, which they are not responsible
for; and second, that Candace was so set in her

ways and opinions that one might as well come
in front of a ship under full sail as endeavor to
stop her in a matter where her heart was engaged.

To be sure, she had her own private and special
quarrels with “Massa James” when he disputed
any of her sovereign orders in the kitchen,
and would sometimes pursue him with uplifted
rolling-pin and floury hands when he had snatched
a gingernut or cookey without suitable deference
or supplication, and would declare, roundly, that
there “never was sich an aggravatin' young un.”
But if, on the strength of this, any one else ventured
a reproof, Candace was immediately round
on the other side: — “Dat ar' chile gwin' to be
spiled, 'cause dey's allers a-pickin' at him; — he's
well enough, on'y let him alone.”

Well, under this miscellaneous assortment of
influences, — through the order and gravity and
solemn monotone of life at home, with the unceasing
tick-tack of the clock forever resounding
through clean, empty-seeming rooms, — through the
sea, ever shining, ever smiling, dimpling, soliciting,
like a magical charger who comes saddled and
bridled and offers to take you to fairyland, —
through acquaintance with all sorts of foreign, outlandish
ragamuffins among the ships in the harbor,
— from disgust of slow-moving oxen, and long-drawn,
endless furrows round the fifteen-acre lot

— from misunderstandings with grave elder brothers,
and feeling somehow as if, he knew not why,
he grieved his mother all the time just by being
what he was and couldn't help being, — and,
finally, by a bitter break with his father, in which
came that last wrench for an individual existence
which some time or other the young growing
mind will give to old authority, — by all these
united, was the lot at length cast; for one evening
James was missing at supper, missing by the
fireside, gone all night, not at home to breakfast,
— till, finally, a strange, weird, most heathenish-looking
cabin-boy, who had often been forbidden
the premises by Mr. Marvyn, brought in a letter,
half-defiant, half-penitent, which announced that
James had sailed in the “Ariel” the evening before.

Mr. Zebedee Marvyn set his face as a flint, and
said, “He went out from us because he was not
of us,” — whereat old Candace lifted her great
floury fist from the kneading-trough, and, shaking
it like a large snowball, said, “Oh, you go 'long,
Massa Marvyn; ye'll live to count dat ar' boy for
de staff o' your old age yet, now I tell ye; got
de makin' o' ten or'nary men in him; kittles dat's
full allers will bile over; good yeast will blow out
de cork, — lucky ef it don't bust de bottle. Tell
ye, der's angels has der hooks in sich, and when
de Lord wants him dey'll haul him in safe and

sound.” And Candace concluded her speech by
giving a lift to her whole batch of dough and
flinging it down in the trough with an emphasis
that made the pewter on the dresser rattle.

This apparently irreverent way of expressing her
mind, so contrary to the deferential habits studiously
inculcated in family discipline, had grown to
be so much a matter of course to all the family
that nobody ever thought of rebuking it. There
was a sort of savage freedom about her which
they excused in right of her having been born
and bred a heathen, and of course not to be expected
to come at once under the yoke of civilization.
In fact, you must all have noticed, my
dear readers, that there are some sorts of people
for whom everybody turns out as they would for
a railroad-car, without stopping to ask why; and
Candace was one of them.

Moreover, Mr. Marvyn was not displeased with
this defence of James, as might be inferred from
his mentioning it four or five times in the course
of the morning, to say how foolish it was, — wondering
why it was that Candace and everybody
else got so infatuated with that boy, — and ending,
at last, after a long period of thought, with
the remark, that these poor African creatures often
seemed to have a great deal of shrewdness in
them, and that he was often astonished at the
penetration that Candace showed.

At the end of the year James came home,
more quiet and manly than he had ever been
before, — so handsome with his sunburnt face, and
his keen, dark eyes, and glossy curls, that half the
girls in the front gallery lost their hearts the first
Sunday he appeared in church. He was tender
as a woman to his mother, and followed her with
his eyes, like a lover, wherever she went; he
made due and manly acknowledgments to his
father, but declared his fixed and settled intention
to abide by the profession he had chosen; and he
brought home all sorts of strange foreign gifts for
every member of the household. Candace was
glorified with a flaming red and yellow turban of
Moorish stuff, from Mogadore, together with a
pair of gorgeous yellow morocco slippers with
peaked toes, which, though there appeared no
call to wear them in her common course of life,
she would put on her fat feet and contemplate
with daily satisfaction. She became increasingly
strengthened thereby in the conviction that the
angels who had their hooks in Massa James's
jacket were already beginning to shorten the line.