VAUCLUSE
Somehow, their plan to settle at Jacksonville, Illinois, fell through and the little family went back instead to Vaucluse in Virginia, the home of Monimia's father.
By this time, old Thomas Fairfax was nearing his end, for he died the next year at the age of eighty-six. As his days drew to a close, what was passing through that old head ? If we are to believe John Galsworthy, old men dwell chiefly upon the romances of their lost youth. But we must
remember that Galsworthy was a writer of romances. No doubt Thomas Fairfax was steeped in romantic literature when his world was young, for why else should he have named his children Orlando, Reginald, Aurelia, Eugenia, Lavinia and Monimia? Incredible as it may have seemed to the grandchildren who scurried by the door of the room where the old man sat, Thomas Fairfax had actually managed, long ago, it is true, to marry three wives !
But now that he was told that his youngest daughter with her husband and their little children were back again quartered within his house, what train of thought was flowing through the mind behind those stern and somewhat peevish features? Although nearly a century has passed since that day, let us venture upon a guess as to his thoughts: 'No use my marrying off daughters, they always come back. Well, I shall probably die before Nimmie, like the rest, becomes a widow. Never did want her to marry Archy Cary. Don't like those clever fellows. Too many Fairfax-Cary marriages. This makes the eighth. Well, I didn't marry a Cary. He says he's going to name his next son Clarence. Name him after a royal duke! How that would have made General Washington laugh! He did so like to laugh. How he laughed that day in Belvoir woods when he stopped to change his clothes before going up to
Belvoir House! A pedlar went off by mistake with his saddle-bags and left him nothing to put on but packets of pins and needles. He rolled over and over on the ground shouting with laughter. 'Not very comfortable having Archy Cary in the house. A fellow who goes around shooting members of State legislatures. Careless with firearms, anyway. Always around with guns. Served him right getting his thumb shot off! What silly names he gives his children: Falkland and Contance. Why doesn't he give them proper names, as I did mine ?
'Annoying, this tiresome business with the British Min-ister in Washington. Wants me to go there and sign before him a quit-claim deed to Towlston, as 'Fairfax.' But I have refused to be a peer--don't want to be. Anyway I've vowed never to set foot outside Virginia again. I won't go, and I won't sign 'Fairfax.' That Englishman will have to come here if he wants me to sign. British minister or not, he'll have to come over to Virginia. Suppose its only decent for me to sign that deed and so right an old wrong. Our people never should have sold Towlston, the last of our properties in Yorkshire. And when they did sell, they should have given a sound title. Never did like George William Fairfax anyway.
'There's nothing to this Lord business, and I've always known it. All this talk I've heard all my life makes me weary. They'll never get me to use the old title. No use for Lords--nor for Kings either. They've kept telling me I couldn't get rid of the title of Baron of Cameron--will stick to me like a tick all my life. Silly my old father going to England and claiming the title, and paying all those fees to Erskine. All fuss and feathers. Glad I'm a Republican. I didn't like that visit to England. Somehow the English didn't seem to understand me. Then they made fun of my father's purple vestments. Only dressed as a Virginia clergyman should. 'Glad I didn't have to be Lord Proprietor--we're free from all that bother since the Revolution. Didn't like the way the Carters took all that land--King Carter, when he was agent for Lord Fairfax got too much of the land for himself and his family. Not fair. 'What an annoying fool my brother Ferdinando has been. And that sarcastic George William Fairfax in England passing over me, the eldest son, and leaving all that Virginia property to stupid Ferdinando. Well, he got himself
into a mare's nest with all those law suits and hiring John Marshall as his lawyer. Now Marshall has all the lands, and Ferdinando has nothing. So much money I've had to lend him ! 'What flummery my father used as rector of Christ Church. Couldn't stand it myself. Had to get Dr. Cabell and Colonel Bob Carter to help me in bringing the Church of New Jerusalem to America. Only true faith. No nonsense
there. Where's that last number of the New Jerusalem magazine? I suppose that Archy Cary has torn it all up to make gun wads. 'Annoying reading that book the other day about the Restoration. Saucy fellow pointing directly at the third Lord and saying out loud so that everybody could hear him: "There sits dull old Fairfax." What impertinence! Suppose, in a way, there have been dull Fairfaxes. Won-
der if they think I'm dull? 'What a lot of daughters I have. Too many widows. Talk too much. Shouldn't have married so often. How those widows talk. I wish people would leave me in peace. Think I shall go to Ashgrove tomorrow. Quiet there. Well, they won't get any of my negroes when I've passed on. Absolutely wrong that slavery. I'm freeing all of mine and giving them lands in Pennsylvania.
'I'm tired now.'
Let us leave old Lord Fairfax to his nap, and see how his son-in-law Archibald Cary felt upon returning to Vaucluse.
Life as an almost penniless dependent, with a wife and small children in the house of afather-in-law whom he disliked, was a sore trial to proud Archibald. Only true and unselfish sympathy, with patient understanding of his difficulties on the part of his wife could have smoothed the path of this disappointed man. But in all the family chronicles, Monimia is invariably referred to as a saint, and a saint no doubt she was. Even one saint creates a rarified atmosphere where the ordinary man of clay finds respira- tion difficult. But wherever he turned Archibald was completely surrounded by saints. His mother, Mrs. Virginia Cary was one of the leading saints of the era, and in the background loomed the imposing figure of his former guardian General John Hartwell Cocke. General Cocke was the foremost reformer of his day, and the first nationwide prohibitionist. Another noble experiment he urged upon his fellow Virginians was to stop smoking tobacco. Since most of them had always lived by
raising tobacco, this proposed reform did not enjoy wide-spread approval. If the saints had an organization of uplift, General Cocke must have been their president. The cool light of his halo still shone upon Archibald Cary, dimmed, it is true by the memory of four lively years spent in unregenerate Mississippi.
The atmosphere at Vaucluse was exactingly Sweden-borgian, and Archibald felt the strain of living up to a lofty creed which demanded an equal purity of thought and of deed. To be sure,the
recreation-center of the neighborhood was near at hand, for not far away stood the Theological Seminary. To do justice to that noble institution, it must be stated that this young man really enjoyed the cultivated society at the seminary, and gladly attended both of the sermons each Sunday, making full notes of his appreciations in his diary. In spite of these welcome diversions, he felt oppressed,
for on the very first page of his diary, begun on New Year's day 1845, we find the following entry:
"Life is now to me a dull unvarying round--a routine of the same unchanging feelings, the predominant caste of which being that everything in this world is alike delusive and false, and that the man who seeks happiness must have an assurance of obtaining it in the world beyond the skies, or he will most assuredly be disappointed."
We get our first glimpse of Archibald Cary's distaste for pietism in a letter from New York, October 21,1837 to his sisters in Alexandria. He has found his sister Jane absent in Philadelphia, and revolts from the thought of passing his time with his brother-in-law, the Presbyterian minister, writing: "It is needless to say that I have not spent much of my time since my arrival here in the sombre vicinity of Greenwich-Lane. My spirits have been too much depressed to add darkness to their gloomy colourings by a sojourn in the sluggish atmosphere of puritanical conventionalities."
Again, two years later, he writes from Port Gibson to his brother: "The last letter I received from Mama was four pages foolscap in which not a living or dead soul was mentioned it being a patent homily upon the disobedience of children." Instruction as to how the young should behave w
rather a hobby of Mrs. Virginia Cary. The urge was so strong in her that she broke the taboo of that day against search for publicity by ladies, and published several books. Of these, it will suffice to name but two: one was called "The Christian Parents' Assistant", and the other, issued in 1828, was entitled "Letters on Female Character, Ad- dressed to a Young Lad? on the Death of Her Mother."
The present writer, brought up to appreciate to the full the sacrosanct nature of his maternal ancestors has on several occasions tried dutifully to read his great-grandmother's books. Sad to relate, he has failed utterly. His elder brother, in a footnote to one of his writings in 1916 makes the following comment upon the "Letters on Female Character": "One of her daughters-in-law, a lady of equally
strong character but blessed with a refreshing sense of humor, who was never quite able to submit to Mrs. Virginia Cary's rule, used to tell with relish in later years how she had once treated the virtuous and didactic Letters as Becky Sharp had treated Johnson's 'Dixionary' on a cele- brated occasion."
Mr. Jefferson gave to Virginia the blessing of religious freedom. We know that this so because we read it in the inscription upon his tomb. But the latter-day Virginian may sometimes rub his eyes and take a second look to make sure. Perhaps it was the kind of freedom which the Puritan Fathers set up in New England. Or, possibly the sort of freedom which exists among us today leading to the Scopes trial in Tennessee, and to the dismissal from the State University of Alabama of a professor of biology who told his class that "a whale's mouth is studded with bones that prevent it from swallowing large objects, and hence they must not take literally the story of Jonah and the whale." (Mr. Lee Meriwether in "My Yesteryears.")
No doubt Mr. Jefferson did disestablish the church of England in Virginia, and in consequence, men no longer have to pay tithes to a state church, nor are they fined for failure to attend the services on Sunday. But with the removal of the authority of the old church a flood of pietism overflowed Virginia. As early as 1787 Mr. Jefferson wrote: "Hampden-Sydney . . . is going to nothing owing to the
religious phrensy they have inspired into the boys . . . and which their parents have no taste for."
Up to that time, a Virginian's home, like an Englishman's, had been his castle. Now, under the new dispensation, the reforming minister could penetrate the sanctum of every man without even a writ! He was usually aided in his effort to uplift by the lady of the house. The old Church of England had rather discouraged too much display of pietism and of emotionalism. Like many of the great institutions of England, their church had been somewhat of a compromise between warring sects. In an earlier age, it is true, several quite respectable Archbishops had their heads chopped off, but as established in Virginia, the Church of England was fairly moderate in tone and temper.
In England, for many human generations, their lovely little parish churches have ministered to the spiritual needs of the dwellers in those hamlets, and have helped to bind closer to one another all classes of their society. With the sheer beauty of their great cathedrals and the glorious language of their services no man of English blood, conscious of his race memories, could attend an evensong in Canterbury Cathedral or a burial service in Tewksbury Abbey without opening up his heart and offering devotion to his God.
Throughout his life, Archibald Cary was a really devout Episcopalian. Monimia, his wife, had been brought up by her father as a strict Swedenborgian. The almost superhuman standards of this creed, of which his wife was an ardent disciple, cast a shadow over his days at Vaucluse.
Monimia had been for long years a widow, softened by the noble experience of nursing at the camps of the Con- federate army, before she asked to be received into the Episcopal faith. She stood before the font clasping the hand of her sponsor in baptism--her own daughter Constanc
She always required of her daughter that she should read the whole of the bible at least once every year. To this, perhaps, we may ascribe the excellence of her daughter's literary style.