The Marrow of Tradition

by Charles W. Chesnutt

  XXX

  THE MISSING PAPERS

  Mrs. Carteret was very much disturbed. It was supposed that the shock ofher aunt's death had affected her health, for since that event she hadfallen into a nervous condition which gave the major grave concern. Muchto the general surprise, Mrs. Ochiltree had left no will, and noproperty of any considerable value except her homestead, which descendedto Mrs. Carteret as the natural heir. Whatever she may have had on handin the way of ready money had undoubtedly been abstracted from the cedarchest by the midnight marauder, to whose visit her death was immediatelydue. Her niece's grief was held to mark a deep-seated affection for thegrim old woman who had reared her.

  Mrs. Carteret's present state of mind, of which her nervousness was asufficiently accurate reflection, did in truth date from her aunt'sdeath, and also in part from the time of the conversation with Mrs.Ochiltree, one afternoon, during and after the drive past Miller's newhospital. Mrs. Ochiltree had grown steadily more and more childish afterthat time, and her niece had never succeeded in making her pick up thethread of thought where it had been dropped. At any rate, Mrs. Ochiltreehad made no further disclosure upon the subject.

  An examination, not long after her aunt's death, of the papers foundnear the cedar chest on the morning after the murder had contributed toMrs. Carteret's enlightenment, but had not promoted her peace of mind.

  When Mrs. Carteret reached home, after her hurried exploration of thecedar chest, she thrust into a bureau drawer the envelope she had found.So fully was her mind occupied, for several days, with the funeral, andwith the excitement attending the arrest of Sandy Campbell, that shedeferred the examination of the contents of the envelope until near theend of the week.

  One morning, while alone in her chamber, she drew the envelope from thedrawer, and was holding it in her hand, hesitating as to whether or notshe should open it, when the baby in the next room began to cry.

  The child's cry seemed like a warning, and yielding to a vagueuneasiness, she put the paper back.

  "Phil," she said to her husband at luncheon, "Aunt Polly said somestrange things to me one day before she died,--I don't know whether shewas quite in her right mind or not; but suppose that my father had lefta will by which it was provided that half his property should go to thatwoman and her child?"

  "It would never have gone by such a will," replied the major easily."Your Aunt Polly was in her dotage, and merely dreaming. Your fatherwould never have been such a fool; but even if he had, no such willcould have stood the test of the courts. It would clearly have been dueto the improper influence of a designing woman."

  "So that legally, as well as morally," said Mrs. Carteret, "the willwould have been of no effect?"

  "Not the slightest. A jury would soon have broken down the legal claim.As for any moral obligation, there would have been nothing moral aboutthe affair. The only possible consideration for such a gift was animmoral one. I don't wish to speak harshly of your father, my dear,but his conduct was gravely reprehensible. The woman herself had noright or claim whatever; she would have been whipped and expelled fromthe town, if justice--blind, bleeding justice, then prostrate at thefeet of slaves and aliens--could have had her way!"

  "But the child"--

  "The child was in the same category. Who was she, to have inherited theestate of your ancestors, of which, a few years before, she wouldherself have formed a part? The child of shame, it was hers to pay thepenalty. But the discussion is all in the air, Olivia. Your father neverdid and never would have left such a will."

  This conversation relieved Mrs. Carteret's uneasiness. Going to her roomshortly afterwards, she took the envelope from her bureau drawer anddrew out a bulky paper. The haunting fear that it might be such a willas her aunt had suggested was now removed; for such an instrument, inthe light of what her husband had said confirming her own intuitions,would be of no valid effect. It might be just as well, she thought, tothrow the paper in the fire without looking at it. She wished to thinkas well as might be of her father, and she felt that her respect for hismemory would not be strengthened by the knowledge that he had meant toleave his estate away from her; for her aunt's words had been open tothe construction that she was to have been left destitute. Curiositystrongly prompted her to read the paper. Perhaps the will contained nosuch provision as she had feared, and it might convey some request ordirection which ought properly to be complied with.

  She had been standing in front of the bureau while these thoughts passedthrough her mind, and now, dropping the envelope back into the drawermechanically, she unfolded the document. It was written on legal paper,in her father's own hand.

  Mrs. Carteret was not familiar with legal verbiage, and there wereseveral expressions of which she did not perhaps appreciate the fulleffect; but a very hasty glance enabled her to ascertain the purport ofthe paper. It was a will, by which, in one item, her father devised tohis daughter Janet, the child of the woman known as Julia Brown, the sumof ten thousand dollars, and a certain plantation or tract of land ashort distance from the town of Wellington. The rest and residue of hisestate, after deducting all legal charges and expenses, was bequeathedto his beloved daughter, Olivia Merkell.

  Mrs. Carteret breathed a sigh of relief. Her father had not preferredanother to her, but had left to his lawful daughter the bulk of hisestate. She felt at the same time a growing indignation at the thoughtthat that woman should so have wrought upon her father's weakness as toinduce him to think of leaving so much valuable property to herbastard,--property which by right should go, and now would go, to herown son, to whom by every rule of law and decency it ought to descend.

  A fire was burning in the next room, on account of the baby,--there hadbeen a light frost the night before, and the air was somewhat chilly.For the moment the room was empty. Mrs. Carteret came out from herchamber and threw the offending paper into the fire, and watched itslowly burn. When it had been consumed, the carbon residue of one sheetstill retained its form, and she could read the words on the charredportion. A sentence, which had escaped her eye in her rapid reading,stood out in ghostly black upon the gray background:--

  "All the rest and residue of my estate I devise and bequeath to mydaughter Olivia Merkell, the child of my beloved first wife."

  Mrs. Carteret had not before observed the word "first." Instinctivelyshe stretched toward the fire the poker which she held in her hand, andat its touch the shadowy remnant fell to pieces, and nothing but ashesremained upon the hearth.

  Not until the next morning did she think again of the envelope which hadcontained the paper she had burned. Opening the drawer where it lay, theoblong blue envelope confronted her. The sight of it was distasteful.The indorsed side lay uppermost, and the words seemed like a mutereproach:--

  "The Last Will and Testament of Samuel Merkell."

  Snatching up the envelope, she glanced into it mechanically as she movedtoward the next room, and perceived a thin folded paper which hadheretofore escaped her notice. When opened, it proved to be acertificate of marriage, in due form, between Samuel Merkell and JuliaBrown. It was dated from a county in South Carolina, about two yearsbefore her father's death.

  For a moment Mrs. Carteret stood gazing blankly at this faded slip ofpaper. Her father _had_ married this woman!--at least he had gonethrough the form of marriage with her, for to him it had surely been nomore than an empty formality. The marriage of white and colored personswas forbidden by law. Only recently she had read of a case where boththe parties to such a crime, a colored man and a white woman, had beensentenced to long terms in the penitentiary. She even recalled thecircumstances. The couple had been living together unlawfully,--theywere very low people, whose private lives were beneath the publicnotice,--but influenced by a religious movement pervading the community,had sought, they said at the trial, to secure the blessing of God upontheir union. The higher law, which imperiously demanded that the purityand prestige of the white race be preserved at any cost, had intervenedat this point.

  Mechanical
ly she moved toward the fireplace, so dazed by this discoveryas to be scarcely conscious of her own actions. She surely had notformed any definite intention of destroying this piece of paper when herfingers relaxed unconsciously and let go their hold upon it. The draughtswept it toward the fireplace. Ere scarcely touching the flames itcaught, blazed fiercely, and shot upward with the current of air. Amoment later the record of poor Julia's marriage was scattered to thefour winds of heaven, as her poor body had long since mingled with thedust of earth.

  The letter remained unread. In her agitation at the discovery of themarriage certificate, Olivia had almost forgotten the existence of theletter. It was addressed to "John Delamere, Esq., as Executor of my LastWill and Testament," while the lower left hand corner bore thedirection: "To be delivered only after my death, with seal unbroken."

  The seal was broken already; Mr. Delamere was dead; the letter couldnever be delivered. Mrs. Carteret unfolded it and read:--

  MY DEAR DELAMERE,--I have taken the liberty of naming you as executor ofmy last will, because you are my friend, and the only man of myacquaintance whom I feel that I can trust to carry out my wishes,appreciate my motives, and preserve the silence I desire.

  I have, first, a confession to make. Inclosed in this letter you willfind a certificate of marriage between my child Janet's mother andmyself. While I have never exactly repented of this marriage, I havenever had the courage to acknowledge it openly. If I had not marriedJulia, I fear Polly Ochiltree would have married me by main force,--asshe would marry you or any other gentleman unfortunate enough to fall inthe way of this twice-widowed man-hunter. When my wife died, three yearsago, her sister Polly offered to keep house for me and the child. Iwould sooner have had the devil in the house, and yet I trembled withalarm,--there seemed no way of escape,--it was so clearly and obviouslythe proper thing.

  But she herself gave me my opportunity. I was on the point ofconsenting, when she demanded, as a condition of her coming, that Idischarge Julia, my late wife's maid. She was laboring under amisapprehension in regard to the girl, but I grasped at the straw, anddid everything to foster her delusion. I declared solemnly that nothingunder heaven would induce me to part with Julia. The controversyresulted in my permitting Polly to take the child, while I retained themaid.

  Before Polly put this idea into my head, I had scarcely looked at Julia,but this outbreak turned my attention toward her. She was a handsomegirl, and, as I soon found out, a good girl. My wife, who raised her,was a Christian woman, and had taught her modesty and virtue. She wasfree. The air was full of liberty, and equal rights, and all theabolition claptrap, and she made marriage a condition of her remaininglonger in the house. In a moment of weakness I took her away to a placewhere we were not known, and married her. If she had left me, I shouldhave fallen a victim to Polly Ochiltree,--to which any fate waspreferable.

  And then, old friend, my weakness kept to the fore. I was ashamed ofthis marriage, and my new wife saw it. Moreover, she loved me,--toowell, indeed, to wish to make me unhappy. The ceremony had satisfied herconscience, had set her right, she said, with God; for the opinions ofmen she did not care, since I loved her,--she only wanted to compensateme, as best she could, for the great honor I had done myhandmaiden,--for she had read her Bible, and I was the Abraham to herHagar, compared with whom she considered herself at a great advantage.It was her own proposition that nothing be said of this marriage. If anyshame should fall on her, it would fall lightly, for it would beundeserved. When the child came, she still kept silence. No one, sheargued, could blame an innocent child for the accident of birth, and inthe sight of God this child had every right to exist; while among herown people illegitimacy would involve but little stigma. I need notsay that I was easily persuaded to accept this sacrifice; but touched byher fidelity, I swore to provide handsomely for them both. This I havetried to do by the will of which I ask you to act as executor. Had Ileft the child more, it might serve as a ground for attacking the will;my acknowledgment of the tie of blood is sufficient to justify areasonable bequest.

  I have taken this course for the sake of my daughter Olivia, who is dearto me, and whom I would not wish to make ashamed; and in deference topublic opinion, which it is not easy to defy. If, after my death, Juliashould choose to make our secret known, I shall of course be beyond thereach of hard words; but loyalty to my memory will probably keep hersilent. A strong man would long since have acknowledged her before theworld and taken the consequences; but, alas! I am only myself, and theatmosphere I live in does not encourage moral heroism. I should like tobe different, but it is God who hath made us, and not we ourselves!

  Nevertheless, old friend, I will ask of you one favor. If in the futurethis child of Julia's and of mine should grow to womanhood; if sheshould prove to have her mother's gentleness and love of virtue; if, inthe new era which is opening up for her mother's race, to which,unfortunately, she must belong, she should become, in time, an educatedwoman; and if the time should ever come when, by virtue of her educationor the development of her people, it would be to her a source of shameor unhappiness that she was an illegitimate child,--if you are stillalive, old friend, and have the means of knowing or divining this thing,go to her and tell her, for me, that she is my lawful child, and askher to forgive her father's weakness.

  When this letter comes to you, I shall have passed to--the Beyond; but Iam confident that you will accept this trust, for which I thank you now,in advance, most heartily.

  The letter was signed with her father's name, the same signature whichhad been attached to the will.

  Having firmly convinced herself of the illegality of the papers, and ofher own right to destroy them, Mrs. Carteret ought to have felt relievedthat she had thus removed all traces of her dead father's folly. True,the other daughter remained,--she had seen her on the street only theday before. The sight of this person she had always found offensive, andnow, she felt, in view of what she had just learned, it must be evenmore so. Never, while this woman lived in the town, would she be able tothrow the veil of forgetfulness over this blot upon her father's memory.

  As the day wore on, Mrs. Carteret grew still less at ease. To herself,marriage was a serious thing,--to a right-thinking woman the mostserious concern of life. A marriage certificate, rightfully procured,was scarcely less solemn, so far as it went, than the Bible itself. Herown she cherished as the apple of her eye. It was the evidence of herwifehood, the seal of her child's legitimacy, her patent ofnobility,--the token of her own and her child's claim to social placeand consideration. She had burned this pretended marriage certificatebecause it meant nothing. Nevertheless, she could not ignore theknowledge of another such marriage, of which every one in the townknew,--a celebrated case, indeed, where a white man, of a family quiteas prominent as her father's, had married a colored woman during themilitary occupation of the state just after the civil war. The legalityof the marriage had never been questioned. It had been fully consummatedby twenty years of subsequent cohabitation. No amount of socialpersecution had ever shaken the position of the husband. With an ironwill he had stayed on in the town, a living protest against theestablished customs of the South, so rudely interrupted for a few shortyears; and, though his children were negroes, though he had neverappeared in public with his wife, no one had ever questioned thevalidity of his marriage or the legitimacy of his offspring.

  The marriage certificate which Mrs. Carteret had burned dated from theperiod of the military occupation. Hence Mrs. Carteret, who was a goodwoman, and would not have done a dishonest thing, felt decidedlyuncomfortable. She had destroyed the marriage certificate, but its ghoststill haunted her.

  Major Carteret, having just eaten a good dinner, was in a very agreeablehumor when, that same evening, his wife brought up again the subject oftheir previous discussion.

  "Phil," she asked, "Aunt Polly told me that once, long before my fatherdied, when she went to remonstrate with him for keeping that Woman inthe house, he threatened to marry Julia if Aunt Polly ever said anothe
rword to him about the matter. Suppose he _had_ married her, and had thenleft a will,--would the marriage have made any difference, so far as thewill was concerned?"

  Major Carteret laughed. "Your Aunt Polly," he said, "was a remarkablewoman, with a wonderful imagination, which seems to have grown morevivid as her memory and judgment weakened. Why should your father marryhis negro housemaid? Mr. Merkell was never rated as a fool,--he had oneof the clearest heads in Wellington. I saw him only a day or two beforehe died, and I could swear before any court in Christendom that he wasof sound mind and memory to the last. These notions of your aunt weremere delusions. Your father was never capable of such a folly."

  "Of course I am only supposing a case," returned Olivia. "Imagining sucha case, just for the argument, would the marriage have been legal?"

  "That would depend. If he had married her during the militaryoccupation, or over in South Carolina, the marriage would have beenlegally valid, though morally and socially outrageous."

  "And if he had died afterwards, leaving a will?"

  "The will would have controlled the disposition of his estate, in allprobability."

  "Suppose he had left no will?"

  "You are getting the matter down pretty fine, my dear! The woman wouldhave taken one third of the real estate for life, and could have livedin the homestead until she died. She would also have had half the otherproperty,--the money and goods and furniture, everything except theland,--and the negro child would have shared with you the balance of theestate. That, I believe, is according to the law of descent anddistribution."

  Mrs. Carteret lapsed into a troubled silence. Her father _had_ marriedthe woman. In her heart she had no doubt of the validity of themarriage, so far as the law was concerned; if one marriage of such akind would stand, another contracted under similar conditions wasequally as good. If the marriage had been valid, Julia's child had beenlegitimate. The will she had burned gave this sister of hers--sheshuddered at the word--but a small part of the estate. Under the law,which intervened now that there was no will, the property should havebeen equally divided. If the woman had been white,--but the woman had_not_ been white, and the same rule of moral conduct did not, _could_not, in the very nature of things, apply, as between white people! For,if this were not so, slavery had been, not merely an economic mistake,but a great crime against humanity. If it had been such a crime, as fora moment she dimly perceived it might have been, then through the longcenturies there had been piled up a catalogue of wrong and outragewhich, if the law of compensation be a law of nature, must some time,somewhere, in some way, be atoned for. She herself had not escaped thepenalty, of which, she realized, this burden placed upon her consciencewas but another installment.

  If she should make known the facts she had learned, it would meanwhat?--a division of her father's estate, a recognition of the legalityof her father's relations with Julia. Such a stain upon her father'smemory would be infinitely worse than if he had _not_ married her. Tohave lived with her without marriage was a social misdemeanor, at whichsociety in the old days had winked, or at most had frowned. To havemarried her was to have committed the unpardonable social sin. Such ascandal Mrs. Carteret could not have endured. Should she seek to makerestitution, it would necessarily involve the disclosure of at leastsome of the facts. Had she not destroyed the will, she might havecompromised with her conscience by producing it and acting upon itsterms, which had been so stated as not to disclose the marriage. Thiswas now rendered impossible by her own impulsive act; she could notmention the will at all, without admitting that she had destroyed it.

  Mrs. Carteret found herself in what might be called, vulgarly, a moral"pocket." She could, of course, remain silent. Mrs. Carteret was a goodwoman, according to her lights, with a cultivated conscience, to whichshe had always looked as her mentor and infallible guide.

  Hence Mrs. Carteret, after this painful discovery, remained for a longtime ill at ease,--so disturbed, indeed, that her mind reacted upon hernerves, which had never been strong; and her nervousness affected herstrength, which had never been great, until Carteret, whose love for herhad been deepened and strengthened by the advent of his son, becamealarmed for her health, and spoke very seriously to Dr. Price concerningit.