one spring, when the little louise was about three, i think, adèle five, fanny seven, robert nine, ben eleven, a neighbor wrote from charleston to mamma, asking if she would receive her and her two children for a night. the children had been ill with scarlet fever, but were well again, and pronounced by the doctor fit to travel; but, in order to reach their home on sandy island in one day they would have to be out late in the evening; and she feared the night air, so took the liberty of begging mamma to receive them for the night. my mother wrote she would be happy to do so, and they came, spent the night, went on their way the next day. my mother had had no fear and the children played together. she felt as the doctor had pronounced them fit to travel it was perfectly safe. a few days after the visit robert was playing, when he suddenly dropped his playthings and put his head in mamma’s lap, saying he felt sick. it was the dread disease. his illness was terrible from the first, but very short. he died. then fanny took{95} it and followed rapidly, though robert had been isolated from the moment he was taken. my poor mother was prostrated with her passionate grief. every precaution then known was taken in the way of fumigation and burning up bedding and clothing, and the plague was stayed.
a great longing to visit the home of her childhood seized my mother, and my father felt it was a great thing that she should have the desire to go, as he really feared for her mind and health. so when all possible danger of contagion was considered over, he took her and the three children who were left up to abbeville to the farm called badwell, where she was born, and where her beloved mother lay in the family burying-ground with the pasteur of the desert, jean louis gibert, her father. my father left them there and returned to his work. in a few days the beautiful little louise was taken ill and died, and was laid by her grandmother in the god’s acre! i cannot bear to think of my mother’s suffering at this time. the tragedy of it! the child named at last for her mother, on this much-longed-for visit to her mother’s home. now her three beautiful, strong children were gone, leaving only the delicate ben and the delicate and tiny seven-months’ child,{96} adèle. it seems like the crushing out of some dainty, happy creature, a beautiful, full, happy life drained of its joy, leaving only stern, exacting duty!
i know my dear father suffered terribly at this time, too, but he never spoke to me of it. he never found it possible to put his deeper feelings into words. i think he and my mother were a great comfort to each other in their grief, and i think it was this summer that my father had the desperate illness of which my mother has told me, and i believe it was his return from the jaws of death which made her first feel life held a future for her.
they were in the same isolated, remote summer house, the meadows. papa came home from his harvest work on the plantation much exhausted, went at once to bed, and when mamma followed him at midnight she knew he was desperately ill—a burning, consuming fever, and his rapid whispered speech showed him delirious. she called the servants, wrote a note to doctor sparkman, asking him to come at once, telling him how suddenly papa had been taken, put a man on horseback and sent him off in the night, telling him to go from place to place until he found the doctor. then{97} she proceeded to do what she could for the patient to reduce the awful fever. cloths wrung out in water fresh from the spring on head and face and hands was all she could do to cool it, as there was no ice. then she had a tub of hot water brought and with the help of hynes, the house-servant, put his feet to the knees in that, covering him with blankets to produce steam. mercifully this quieted him and the jabbering ceased and he slept. daylight came, no doctor, no sound came to her listening ear of horse-hoofs. the heavy sleep as of one drugged lasted until she was frightened, but she feared to wake him. she looked after the children, having hynes, who was very faithful and intelligent, to sit by papa and fan him. she gave the children their breakfast and tried to eat, herself, for she knew she would need all her strength. dinner-time came, evening, night. oh, the long hours, how they dragged! she thought of her desperate, passionate grief for her children, feeling she could not bear it. had god heard her rebellious murmurings, and was he going to show her now how blessed she had then been, having her husband left to her! how unutterably worse this grief would be! how hopeless, indeed, would life be without him!{98}
and so the hours wore on, but she was not idle; she thought of everybody and did everything for the comfort of the house. just at midnight the dogs began to bark. she went on the piazza and heard wheels approaching. she had kept the dinner-table laid with flowers and silver and candles, all bright and cheery. as soon as she heard wheels she ordered the servants to bring in dinner, and when the doctor entered and said, “how is colonel allston?” she said, “doctor, sit down and dine first, and then i will take you in to see him.” he sat down, and she went to the sick-room, where things were unchanged, the same drugged sleep and heavy breathing. as soon as the doctor had finished, he came and listened to her accurate account of all the symptoms. then the fight began. i do not know what he gave or what he did, but he remained doing all that his skill and science suggested, for thirty-six hours, and then he felt for the first time that there was hope, and left to see after his other patients. he told my mother that he had been with a desperately ill patient on santee, thirty miles south of his home, for twenty-four hours; when he returned to his home he found mamma’s note and the servant, and without going into the house, though{99} he was famished for food after a thirty-mile drive, he had had a fresh horse put in and came right on. then he said: “oh, mrs. allston, if every one thought of the doctor as you do, the life of a country doctor would be a different thing, and fewer of them would become dependent on stimulants. i was exhausted, but expected to see and prescribe for the patient before having food. when i saw that delicious dinner of roast duck and vegetables i was completely surprised, but i blessed you and felt how much clearer my brain, how much better my condition to prescribe for the patient, and how much better chance it gave him for life, though, i confess, when i first saw colonel allston i did not feel there was any chance of saving him.” i tell all this just as my mother told it to me. it shows what a woman she was. my father recovered slowly, and it was the last summer they spent at the meadows, the distance from all help in illness being too great.
the next may, 1845, they again moved to canaan seashore, where my mother had spent her first summer of married life. they went early in may and i was born on the 29th of that month. naturally, i suppose, after all the sorrow and anxiety mamma had had, i was a miserably delicate,{100} nervous baby, and i have heard mamma say that for months they were afraid to take me out of the house at all. at the end of that time the house which papa was building on pawley’s island, just across the marsh and creek from canaan, was finished, and they determined to move the household over to the island for the rest of the summer. that was my first outing, and the times i was taken out of the room afterward were few and far between, for it seems after going out i never closed my eyes at all that night. i was a poor sleeper at any time, but after going out i was no sleeper at all. the floor of my dear mother’s room on the beach is seamed all over by the marks of the rocking-chair in which i was eternally rocked! they had a hard struggle to keep me alive. both mamma and papa wanted me named for the dear old aunt who had been such a blessing to everybody, so i was named elizabeth waties, mamma with tender sympathy giving me the name she would have borne had her dream of love materialized. i seemed to be marked for sadness, with deep lines under my eyes, as though i had already wept much, which i certainly had, only with a baby it is not weeping, but crying, with the accompaniment of much noise.{101}
the winter i was two years old, one sunday mamma had gone with papa in a boat to all saints’ church, seven miles away on the waccamaw. she looked out of the window as she listened to dear, saintly mr. glennie’s sermon, and across her vision passed a young man walking in the churchyard, holding by the hand little ben, who had been allowed to go out when the sermon began. she was much excited, because she could not imagine what stranger could possibly be there. as he passed a second time she recognized her beloved brother charles, whom she had not seen for several years. one can understand that the rest of mr. glennie’s excellent discourse was lost to her, and she could scarcely wait for the blessing, to rush out and meet the stranger.
he was in the army, having graduated from west point in 1829. he told her he was on his way to florida, and had managed to arrange to spend one day with her, but it could only be one. so when he reached the plantation and found she had gone by water to church so far away, he ordered a boat, and followed her, so as to lose nothing of his time with her. this visit was the greatest joy to my mother. he was her youngest brother and her special favorite. she was dis{102}tressed when he told her where he was going and why. the u. s. post at tampa, florida, had proved a very deadly one. one officer after another who had been sent there in command had contracted the terrible malarial fever of the country and died soon after getting there. his friend ramsay had been ordered there, and he found him in despair one day, having just received his orders. he said he had a wife and a mother, both dependent on him, and it was awful to him to be going to certain death when he thought of them and what would become of them. uncle charles said at once: “ramsay, i will take your place; if i apply for the exchange, i can get it, and i have no one dependent upon me, so i have the right to do it.” the exchange had been effected and uncle charles was on his way to take the place which west point for years sang of in their class song, “benny havens, oh!” as “tampa’s deadly shore.” uncle charles left early the next morning. by the time my next little brother came, a boy born the 31st of the next july, uncle charles had accomplished his sacrifice and fallen a victim to the fever, so the baby was named charles petigru; and everybody always loved him more than any of the other children. he was so beautiful{103} and so sweet and good that we all expected him to die, but he didn’t, but grew up to be a man and always a blessing to all around him.
mamma’s grief at her brother’s death was great, but she had learned to suffer without rebellion, and as some wise one has written, “there is great peace and strength in an accepted sorrow.” she always felt very proud of the heroism and self-sacrifice of uncle charles’s death. “no greater love is there than that a man give his life for his friend”; that is not quoted exactly, but it sets a man very high. now we are living in such a heroic time, with men giving their lives on the battle-field to save one another, every hour, that perhaps it does not seem as grand a thing. but when one thinks of a very young, handsome, popular man deliberately giving up a choice army post to take one which meant certain, unheroic, painful, and obscure death, it seems to me very, very heroic and beautiful. after uncle charles’s death—i think he was the seventh commanding officer of the tampa post who died in quick succession—the post was given up. wonderful to say, now since the science of stamping out disease has reached such a height, tampa is a health resort! and one wonders what was the cause of that{104} death-dealing miasma which made the place so fatal. on our way to the chicago exposition, having to be some hours in atlanta, we visited the military station there, and i met a captain ramsay, who told me he was the son of the officer whose life had been saved by my uncle charles petigru’s generous heroism, and seemed quite excited to meet two nieces and three great-nieces of the heroic young lieutenant to whom his family owed so much.
