Throckmorton Book Reviews

Throckmorton by Molly Elliot Seawell Book Summary

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.

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