THROCKMORTON

CHAPTER I.


In a lowland Virginia neighborhood, strangely cut off from the rest of
the world geographically, and wrapped in a profound and charming
stillness, a little universe exists. It has its oracles of law,
medicine, and divinity; its wars and alliances. Free from that outward
contact which makes an intolerable sameness among people, its types
develop quaintly. There is peace, and elbow-room for everybody's
peculiarities.

Such was the Severn neighborhood--called so from Severn church. Every
brick in this old pile had been brought from green England two hundred
years before. It seemed as if, in those early days, nothing made with
hands should be without picturesqueness; and so this ancient church,
paid for in hogsheads of black tobacco, which was also the currency in
which the hard-riding, hard-drinking parsons took their dues, was peaked
and gabled most beautifully. The bricks, mellowed by two centuries, had
become a rich, dull red, upon which, year after year, in the enchanted
Southern summers and the fitful Southern winters, mosses and gray
lichens laid their clinging fingers. It was set far back from the broad,
white road, and gnarled live-oaks and silver beeches and the melancholy
weeping-willows grew about the churchyard. Their roots had pushed, with
gentle persistence, through the crumbling brick wall that surrounded it,
where most of the tombstones rested peacefully upon the ground as they
chanced to fall. Within the church itself, modern low-backed pews had
supplanted the ancient square boxes during an outbreak of philistinism
in the fifties. At the same time, a wooden flooring had been laid over
the flat stones in the aisles, under which dead and gone vicars--for the
parish had a vicar in colonial days--slept quietly. The interior was
darkened by the branches of the trees that pressed against the wall and
peered curiously through the small, clear panes of the oblong windows;
and over all the singular, unbroken peace and silence of the region
brooded.

The country round about was fruitful and tame, the slightly rolling
landscape becoming as flat as Holland toward the rich river-bottoms. The
rivers were really estuaries, making in from the salt ocean bays, and as
briny as the sea itself. Next the church was the parsonage land, still
known as the Glebe, although glebes and tithes had been dead these
hundred years. The Glebe house, which was originally plain and
old-fashioned, had been smartened up by the rector, the Rev. Edmund
Morford, until it looked like an old country-woman masquerading in a
ballet costume; but the Rev. Edmund thought it beautiful, and only
watched his chance to lay sacrilegious hands on the old church and to
plaster it all over with ecclesiastical knickknacks of various sorts.