The Felmeres

By Sarah Barnwell Elliott

Bound by duty and honor, to her father, the beautiful Helen marries her cousin Philip Felmere, in hopes that love will follow. That same dedication to duty and honor prevent Helen from following her heart as she meets Felix Gordon. The genuine goodness of Felix brings a spark of life to Helen and inspires her own creativity. Having been raised with

• Language: English
• Publisher: Low Country Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9780988304420

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Praise for the first edition of The Felmeres

In many places it rises to a height of absorbing interest and is everywhere interesting from a psychological point of view.

—Boston Gazette

A very clever psychological novel...The work is cleverly done, and is thoroughly worth reading.

—New York World

"Its whole diction is the instrument of a well-stored, alert and accomplished intellect. The theme, too, is notably suggestive—indeed, the author of Middlemarch could hardly find a situation more suggestive or more deserving of elaborate and earnest treatment."

—New York Sun

The book is a production altogether out of and above the common order; a book in which the author displays a fine ability for treating a lofty subject firmly and adequately, while giving to it a warm human interest, in which is not lacking the element of dramatic force....It is a very remarkable book. Prophecies are never safe where young authors are concerned, but in the case of this particular author it may be said, at least, that she has produced the strongest and most promising book of the season.

— Philadelphia Times

This is a very solid, serious novel. It is a sincere and pious effort to cast out the goddess of reason, and enthrone in her place the angel of faith.

—Missouri Republican

"We have read The Felmeres with uncommon interest, and we call it a more than ordinarily powerful story. So well are its characters drawn, and the circumstances described, that the story is very engrossing."

—Boston Congregationalist

Also by Sarah Barnwell Elliott

Novels

A Simple Heart

Jerry

John Paget

The Durkett Sperret

An Incident and Other Happenings

The Making of Jane

Nonfiction

Sam Houston

Play

His Majesty’s Servant

First Edition by D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1879

The text of this book is in the public domain

Current edition by Low Country Press, Savannah, Georgia, 2012

Preface © 2012 Low Country Press

www.lowcountrypress.net

Low Country Press eBook ISBN

978-0-9883044-2-0

The Felmeres

A NOVEL

Sarah Barnwell Elliott

"Behold we know not anything:

I can but trust that good shall fall

At last far off at last to all,

And every winter change to spring."

—The Larger Hope, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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CONTENTS

PREFACE 7

PART  FIRST 10

CHAPTER I 11

CHAPTER II 16

CHAPTER III 20

CHAPTER IV 26

CHAPTER V  29

CHAPTER VI 35

CHAPTER VII 38

CHAPTER VIII  42

CHAPTER IX  46

CHAPTER X 53

CHAPTER XI  59

CHAPTER XII  62

CHAPTER XIII  65

CHAPTER XIV 69

CHAPTER XV 75

CHAPTER XVI 80

PART SECOND 86

CHAPTER I 87

CHAPTER II 92

CHAPTER III 98

CHAPTER IV 109

CHAPTER V 116

CHAPTER VI 120

CHAPTER VII 123

CHAPTER VIII 126

CHAPTER IX 129

CHAPTER X 133

PART THIRD 137

CHAPTER I 138

CHAPTER II 145

CHAPTER III 151

CHAPTER IV 156

CHAPTER V 163

CHAPTER VI 169

CHAPTER VII 176

CHAPTER VIII 182

CHAPTER IX 192

CHAPTER X 196

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 200

PREFACE

LIKE THE STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS IN HER NOVELS, Sarah Elliott’s own life cut against the grain of the cultural expectations of the Southern aristocracy into which she was born. She is almost always described as the daughter of The Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott, Jr. the first Episcopal Bishop of Georgia. Her relationship with her father did significantly shape her thinking as one can read so clearly in this her first novel. Yet Sada, as she preferred to be called, was very much her own person.

Born the fifth of six children to the Bishop, Sarah Bull Barnwell Elliott (November 29, 1848 - August 30, 1928) entered a life of priviledge. She counted four colonial governors among her recent ancestors. While she was the first woman of letters in the family, her father and grandfather were known for their oratory and scientific writing respectively.

Her grandfather Stephen Elliott (1771-1830) was a plantation owner near Beaufort, South Carolina who defined himself more by his avocation as a botanist. While he served in the state legislature and was president of the Bank of the State of South Carolina from its founding in 1812 until his death, he also had a  scientific and literary side. The family patriarch started The Southern Review and wrote the landmark text A Sketch of the Botany of South-Carolina and Georgia for which he is best known.

Her father, Stephen Elliott Jr. (1806-1866) was an attorney in Beaufort until a vivid conversion experience caused him to seek Holy Orders in The Episcopal Church in 1833. Elliott was a noted orator in a time and place when speeches were more highly prized than other works of literature. Bishop Elliott’s sermons, especially those preached on significant occasions during the Civil War, were published and widely distributed almost before the echoes died in the church.

Bishop Elliott was a champion of education, including the education of women. He started a Female Institute at Montpelier Springs, Georgia, where Sada was born. This school fit the Bishop’s goal of enlightening young women and men alike with a progressive education to prepare them to lead the South. It was on the grounds of this school that Sada spent her earliest years. The Institute was intended to be a self-sustaining operation through an 800-acre campus with farms tended by enslaved workers to provide income. That income never kept up with the costs and the debts were guaranteed personally by Bishop Elliott. The school’s failure bankrupted the Elliott family. By 1852, the once wealthy landowner was scraping by on his salary as Bishop.

A strong proponent of religious education for slaves, Elliott was nevertheless strongly partisan in the Civil War. He preached the rightness of the South and made battlefield visits to Confederate soldiers when the fighting came to Georgia. It was said that he died of a broken heart for the lost cause, when he collapsed at the dinner table at home following a parish visit in 1866. Sada was 18 years old at the time of his death.

Bishop Elliott’s interest in education had also led him to be one of three founding Bishops who created the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, where Sada Elliott would spend most of her life.

With well regarded men in view, it is easy to see how Sada came to be described in relation to the Elliott men. Yet in the shadow of these noted men of their times grew a unique woman who defied social expectations to forge a substantial body of well-reviewed and widely read books together with shorter pieces in national magazines, many literary reviews, a biography, and a play.

She moved to Sewanee with her mother in 1871, the year after classes started at the university. Other than living in New York City from 1896 to 1904, she would live at Sewanee the remainder of her life.

It was while living at Sewanee, when Sada was 31 years old, that The Felmeres was published by D. Appleton Company of Chicago.

The story of the beautiful Helen Felmere, whose unbending devotion to duty and honor lead to tragic consequences, interested reviewers who did not anticipate serious themes from a Southerner, much less a female writer. The conflict of faith and reason had occupied her father’s ministry in the antebellum period. Sada works through Helen’s internal struggles with doubt and the cost of going against cultural expectations and offers a window into the pyschological dilemmas faced by women of the time who did not intend to conform to the culture. While Helen Felmere is very different from Sada Elliott, the essential strength of purpose in being true to oneself drew from the author’s personal experience.

Following the success of this novel, she began to publish a number of short pieces. She traveled to Texas where her brother Robert had been elected as Missionary Bishop of Western Texas in 1875. There she wrote articles for Church Record that showed her writer’s eye for details. She had been schooled by private tutors except for the summer of 1886 when she attended classes at Johns Hopkins University. The following year, her Texas trip helped shape A Simple Heart, a novel serialized in the Independent. This novel, which was a tribute to her brother’s work, was her first foray into writing in dialect and presents the introduction of local color in her fiction, for which she is best remembered. Sales of the novel helped fund a trip with Robert to the Holy Land. On that trip she wrote a series of dispatches for the Louisville Courier-Journal. Her beloved brother Robert returned home early from the trip. Sada had to cut her trip short as well when she learned of Robert’s death on his return to the United States.

She worked hard to chart her own course in crafting novels with strong female characters. She wrote her most successful novel, Jerry, in 1891. Then in 1898, her book The Durket Sperret stayed close to home, portraying the tensions on the Cumberland Plateau as university and mountain societies came to live side by side at Sewanee. Sada’s final novel, written in 1901 was The Making of Jane, which made her boldest statement of her ideal of the self-reliant woman.

Then she set her literary career aside to raise her two orphaned nephews. Once the boys were raised to successful men, she turned to the women’s suffrage movement, serving as president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association from 1912-1914.

By the time she died in 1928, most of her major works were already out of print, as in 1915, her publisher, Holt, disposed of the plates to most of her works. Readers of fiction had moved on from their interest in the local color of regional writers.

Reading The Felmeres more than 130 years after its first publication, one cannot help but be struck at once both by how current her concerns remain as well as how time has drastically changed the social norms which constrained Helen Felmere’s actions. Yet time has not dimmed the clarity of the author’s voice as a woman of letters in a culture that did not tend to value either the opinions of women or the writings of its own regional authors. She writes with passion and conviction. The author’s own struggle to make her voice heard is the heartbeat that drives The Felmeres and her other works.

Perhaps, then, this explains why Sarah Bull Barnwell Elliott has come to be described in relation to the men in her life. Not so much because her relevance is only as the daughter and granddaughter of known Southern aristocrats, but because she continues the Elliott legacy far beyond its antebellum trajectory. She was a product of the liberal education and the progressive household in which she was raised. Sada charted an independent course that might have surprised her father and grandfather had they known of her writing the petition calling on the Tennessee legislature to grant women the right to vote. Yet, given the support of her brothers, Robert and Habersham, we can imagine her father and grandfather too might have changed to see the world a little differently if they had viewed it through Sada’s eyes as we all can in reading The Felmeres.

PART  FIRST

"An immense solitary specter waits:

It has no shape, it has no sound; it has

No place, it has no time; it is, and was,

And will be; it is never more nor less,

Nor glad nor sad. Its name is Nothingness.

Power walketh high; and misery doth crawl;

And the clepsydron drips; and the sands

Fall down in the hour-glass; and the shadows sweep

Around the dial; and men wake and sleep,

Live, strive, regret, forget, and love and hate,

And know it. This specter saith, I wait;

And at the last it beckons, and. they pass;

And still the red sands fall within the glass,

And still the shades around the dial sweep;

And still the water-clock doth drip and weep.

And this is all."

—Siege of Constantinople, Edward Bulwer Lytton

CHAPTER I

"About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,

And o’er it, many, round, and small,

The cluster’d marish mosses crept.

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarled bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray."

—Mariana, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A SQUARE CHURCH STANDING AT THE FOOT OF A LOW LINE OF HILLS; farther out, beyond the damp, moss-grown churchyard, a lonely stone house built on the end of the long tongue of land that runs far into the marsh. From this as far as the eye can reach, out even to the line of light on the horizon where lies the sea, there stretches a level waste of marsh, an unbroken green monotony, save where in one place the river shows itself moving slow toward the sea. A barren, desolate picture, lying hot and shadowless under the glare of the summer sky. There is no sound save now and then the sharp quarreling of the marsh hens; no motion, save the throbbing of the heated air. There is not wind enough to stir the reed tops, or to lift the leaves of the solitary maple keeping guard among the sleepers in the churchyard.

And the sun glares down upon the still, dead picture, until the day begins to wane; then the martins come in crowds wheeling about the lonely stone hall, cheery little martins, swooping in and out from under the deep eaves, chattering and chirping to each other, and making the air alive with their busy doings.

Down in the hall garden a little child is watching them so intently that she does not heed the falling of her hat, nor the woebegone picture made by her battered doll, which, held by one arm, droops downward in a desolate manner. For a long time the child watches the queer little birds, that look so black against the amber sky, and seem so busy about nothing. She has often watched them, but never yet has found out what they were after: she wished her father would take her up to see; perhaps he would some day. Then she turned away, and, pushing open a dilapidated gate, made her way down to the marsh. She stopped one moment to gather up her doll, then, with an unchildish, over-thoughtful step, followed a narrow cattle path leading out to the river. Slowly she went, and quietly, until she stood far out on the very bank of the stream—a lonely little figure on the wide green waste.

There she stood and listened to the gentle song the river sang so sweetly all the while. Where did it come from, and how far was it down to the sea? The sea! Why was that sad sound she heard called the sea? Had her father named it? It must be a very big place, this sea; for the sun and the moon, the fish and the birds, the wind and the darkness all lived in it, did they not? And the sound of it fascinated her, awed and almost frightened her; yet she loved it, and often came and stood here upon the bank, mystified and wondering.

There were many things she was afraid of, and but few that she liked, or that were really amusing, and very few of these things could talk. Nevertheless, she often spoke to the gravestones up in the churchyard, although they did not answer. What these gravestones were she hardly knew; and why they should be put up in rows, some straight up, and some half buried in the ground, and should have names cut on them, were so many mysteries to her. They were of no possible use that she could see, and her father said foolish people set them up. An especial one named Mary Dunn made her very sorry, it looked so tired: she wished it could lie down. The flowers were much more pleasant than the gravestones, for they could nod their heads to her when she talked; and, better still, the fairies lived in them. The solemn cranes and the marsh hens that rested in the flats were not in the least sociable; and the little martins in the roof heeded only themselves and their own foolish noises. But the bitterns she liked to hear; she was sure they had something to tell, their tones were so sad.

This place her father called the world was surely a curious place. She would have liked to ask some questions of Peter or Jane, but her father would not allow her to talk to the servants; and, except them and her father, nothing in all her world could answer questions.

So she stood by the river and listened to the dull, unceasing roar of the sea. She did not know what it was, but there was a thrill at her heart and a chill over her body as she looked on the wide green waste spread all about her. It was so silent and lonely out in the marsh, so far from everywhere. Should she stay and watch the moon come up? It came up very early sometimes, and looked so clear and beautiful fresh out from the sea.

Ah, the sea, the sea. How it called and called to her all the time. If it would only hush, she would stay longer looking at the river. Or if she could only go once and see what it wanted, maybe then it would let her alone. As it was, who knew but that the sea would come for her some day when no one was near? It really might.

She turned, the sun was fast going down behind the far-off hills, and all the flats would soon be gray and the pools black. Oh, she could not stay. One more watchful, frightened look toward the sea, then she turned and began to walk toward home as fast as her little feet could carry her. Closer she hugged her dilapidated doll, faster and faster the little steps fell; for behind her in the gathering gloom an awful something followed her. Fast and faster she fled, running with all her little strength. A giant hand seemed ever about to grasp her, a cry seemed in the passing wind. Would she never reach the gate? At last.

Panting and exhausted, she leaned against the wall: she must wait and rest here before she went into the house, for she would not let her father see her so foolishly terrified.

She knew it was foolish, now that she stood within the gate, and could hear Jane singing in the kitchen; out in the marsh it was different. Once before she had been frightened in the same way; and, running home, she had met her father at this very gate. It was then he had told her how foolish it was to be afraid of her own fancies; that there was nothing in the world but what she saw, or could see; and the darkness had never eaten any one up. Then he had taken her into the churchyard, ah, she shivered now to think of it, and made her stand there while he went off for a little time into the darkness to show her it would not destroy him. How she clung to a gravestone when he left her, and listened in terrified silence and with trembling heart to a cow cropping among the graves! She wanted to scream, but did not wish to be called foolish again. Ah, how terror-stricken she had been until she looked up and saw the stars that seemed to smile down kindly on her—so kindly that she asked them to take care of her; and they heard her, and brought her father back to her in a moment.

Even now, with all this experience to aid her, she did not feel at all safe, and she looked up for her star-friends. There they were, bright, and peaceful, and kind, seemingly quite ready to befriend her again. It was strange her father did not believe in the stars, and should say they had never been kind to him. More than this, that nothing in all the world had ever been kind to him. Poor father! She would be, always and forever, she would stay with him and love him; and she had told him so.

And I will, she said, holding up her little hand to the star, watch and see if I do not.

A half-comprehended, childish vow, maybe; but for all that — true.

She was rested now, and cool, and was glad enough to turn her steps toward the house, where one long stream of light, falling across the garden and wandering toward the shadows of the graveyard, showed her that tea was waiting in the library.

This room was the heart of the child’s world. It was a high, long room, walled in with somber books and pictures, with here and there a gleaming white statue, which, catching the scanty light from the high, deep windows, seemed to absorb it all. And the child lived here, with always a feeling of uneasiness about her heart as she felt the painted eyes of her dead ancestors following her, watching all her play and study. At times she forgot them; but one upward look, and all the time dimmed faces seemed turned toward her, and all their eyes seemed crowding on her, so that, overcome with fear, she would creep to her father’s side and nestle there until she could again forget.

What had become of all these people, she wondered; where had they gone, and why had they left their dreadful shadows behind them to watch and torment her? She liked all the statues, and made them the confidants of her many wonders and puzzles; and questions, too, she often asked them, but got no answers poor little maid, any more than from the graves and gravestones.

But her dearest friend was her doll. Ah, the comfort of that mutilated doll, who can tell? It helped her to learn her letters; it comforted her about the pictures; and the mystery of counting was solved on the fingers of this same valuable companion. Besides this doll, the child had only a few playthings put away on a little shelf near the wide fireplace, with a little pile of lesson books, a larger one of fairy lore, and a box of special treasures. Two arm chairs there were, for the doll and for the child, wherein they would sit when tea was over, and pass the evening in pleasant conversation. It is true, Cinderella could not talk, but she was a good listener, which went very far. But Helen was content, and to her Cinderella could only be described as beautiful and entertaining. Often the father would put down his book to listen to what the child was saying. Sometimes he would enter into the conversation and explain some of the mysteries that worried his little daughter; but more often he left her to her own surmises, waiting until she should be older before he solved her puzzles.

So the little girl lived on in a curious, unknown world, full of wonders, full of fears, full of things ineffable, which gave rise to thoughts and emotions that no words can translate. And the father, watching her, felicitated himself that her friends were what they were; for they could never harm her, never be false to her, never turn her against himself. She was his only hope and love, this child, and her education was his dearest task. He had sometimes wavered in the course he was pursuing, but not often nor for long. She gave fair promise of common sense, and of strength enough to stand upright without support from the much-cultivated superstitions known as beliefs.

And so the days, and the months, and the years moved round the child, bringing new wonders and new learning, solving old puzzles, and sweeping away the old mysteries into dim remembrances; slowly but surely turning the fairy gold of childhood wonderings into the dried and withered leaves of positive knowledge; robbing the sea, and the wind, and the sky, and the earth of all their mystic charm, and stripping from her heart the trailing clouds of glory.

And as she watched them fade and die, she knew not why nor whence the sadness came that clung about her. She did not know that this change must ever come to us as we travel from the cloudless sunshine of childish faith into the shadow of the tree of knowledge. She did not know why the nakedness of all things should be so suddenly revealed to her eyes, or why such cold barrenness was creeping over the world and life. She had learned what death meant in the dim half-revealings that had come to her, and why gravestones were used. Concerning the church she had asked little, and had got little in return; but she often listened to the sound of music, which reached her faintly when the wind set toward the house.

Once she had seen a little into the church, but it only seemed to widen the foundation for her wonders, and not satisfy her at all. She was leaning over the gate, when deep-rolling music came floating about her, and with it voices singing. She slipped through the gate and stood listening, while a sense of intense sadness stole over her, a feeling of awe crept into her soul. She looked up; far above her, soft rose-colored clouds were floating across the sky; and she watched them with a childish feeling of soul-hunger, a longing for something to fill this great empty world and her own sad little heart.

What was it she wanted?

She drew nearer the church: perhaps she might find it there among those happy-looking people, this something she so much needed, and she crept up the steps.

Ah! And with clasped hands and bated breath she looked, and listened. Happy? Oh, no. She was not happy standing there, there was a something that seemed to cling about the music, a something that came to her when she looked at the beautiful clouds, or watched the great moon rise out of the sea. A something that seemed to wrench her heart with pain, and bring hot tears to her eyes. The people were all on their knees; perhaps if she knelt this pain in her heart would go.

Alas, a man came out and, motioning her away, closed the wide doors. She stood quite still for a moment in astonished despair and anger. What had she done that he should send her away? She ran off a little distance and, crouching behind a great tombstone, burst into tears. She was bitterly angry with all the world, it all seemed against her. The people she passed in her walks with her father looked the other way when they met her, or else stared curiously. Even Jane, the servant, seemed to regard her with doubt; and now, how had she been treated.

I shall hate you for ever! she cried, raising her hands as though invoking a curse on the church. Then she ran away, ran to the house, then up to her own room, there to sob and cry as though her heart would break. In the dusk of the evening she crept down to where her father sat in the library, and, kneeling beside his chair, told him of her adventure.

What were they doing, father, and why do the people kneel? she asked, as he clasped her little hand in his. They were doing what they call ‘praying,’ my child, he answered.

Praying? Like subjects to a king? she went on.

Yes.

But, father, I saw no king, nor any one who was listening to them; where was he?

He is only an Idea, child.

An Idea? she repeated slowly, what does ‘idea’ mean?

It means a notion.

The child pondered a moment then looked up wistfully.

Say it, father, so that I shall know. Why do they pray without anything to pray to?

The father put his hands each side the earnest face, and, looking down into her eyes, he kissed her gently.

 Trust me a few years longer, darling, then I will tell you all.

CHAPTER II

"Eternity, Eternity!

How long art thou, Eternity?

No spring hast thou, no autumn gold,

No summer’s heat nor winter’s cold;

No infant cry begins thy day,

Nor age nor anguish brings decay.

Ponder, O man Eternity!"

—Eternity! Eternity!, John Henry Hopkins

AND SO THE GIRL WAITED AND TRUSTED, asking no more questions. True, the world was becoming more and more empty every day, more and more bare and dreary. All the fables and entertaining wonders of her childhood had been educated away, and nothing put in their place. Her battered Cinderella had long been laid aside, carefully, for she still loved her, but completely. Her damp little garden, where every day she had stuck up rootless, pale, unhappy flowers, culled from among the graves, was now of more lasting growth, but scarcely less dreary than of yore. And now she watched the waterfowl come and go with an undefined longing at her heart for wings and freedom.

Her life seemed very objectless, and had grown more so every day since she could remember. What was the point of all these days and months and years? Where would they end, and how? Were languages and poetry, reading and drawing, the only things to live for? And when one had risen above laboring for one’s daily bread, was this all?

She looked with envy on