A SECRET ENGAGEMENT

Corbin Braxton Bryan (Mary calls him "Brax") was born in 1852 at Eagle Point, JR Bryan's home near Gloucester, Virginia. The family fled Eagle Point early in the Civil War and repaired to the elder Bryan's other house, called Carysbrook, west of Richmond in Fluvanna County. The younger Bryan attended the University of Virginia and the Virginia Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1879. He had a parish in Princess Anne County and there took to visiting Ingleside, described in Sister Sally's Recollections as William Copeland Scott's home near Norfolk.

Scott's daughter Sally (by this time married and about 41) and her sister visited their brother, Dr. William Walter Scott, in Lenoir, in western North Carolina in the fall of 1880, and brought their niece, Mary, back to Ingleside for a six-month visit. This was where Brax and Mary met. One day, which Brax refers to as "our grand day," they agreed to marry, but decided that the engagement must be a secret until Mary could get back home and Brax could write to her father.

Mary's two aunts at Ingleside seem to have been quite fond of young Brax, and pleased with the match (which they can only guess and hint at). I wonder if they planned it? It does not occur to Brax, even when Girt tells him he should be thankful for her old bones, because it was on account of them that she and Sally went to Lenoir. He is grateful to both older women, and offers to have them embalmed! Though Sally and Girt are pleased with the suspected impending engagement, Brax worries that Mary's sister Patty "would pluck me like a chicken if she could." He says in a letter to Mary, "you must tame her down before she gets a chance at me."

LETTERS TO MARY

"Oh it goes hard, Mary!" He writes. "It is a miserable business my dear is it not, this being separated?" He writes that she may now have gotten her letter - and that her father may have gotten his(below). He is giddy with joy. "And now my dear love, this is what I expect to do, sit down and wite to you letters long or short, glad or sad, just as I feel. And you must do so too." She writes that she wants to know eveything he is doing, and he obliges.

...down I went to Mr. Macon's - within a mile of the sea, just a mile north of where we had our grand day. There I spent the night lulled by the roar of the breakers. And bytimes in the morning got up and went down to see the sun rise out of the ocean, a sight I had never seen. It was a lovely morning. A walk of a mile all by myself brought me to the beach just as the sun peeped over the "far away." A grand sight it was! He lifted himself leisurely out of the water, and in about 2½ minutes from the time he came in sight he was fully up and seemed to float on the water like a great glowing ball, the light so mellowed that you could look at it with wide-open eyes. There the giant seemed to loll and rest a while and take breath in before running his race. The sublime beauty and power of the scene waked in me feelings akin those I imagine they must have had who first worshiped the great sun, and it was sweet to kneel down on the sand and make my morning prayer to Him who made not only the bridegroom but the far away chamber of the sea and sky out of which he appeared to come. And so at five o'clock Saturday morning I was alone with God and nature, and I prayed for my dear Mary.

Ingleside, 9:30 p.m., Sunday, May 1, 1881.

Letters to Mary

Six days before their wedding he says he will leave on Monday and arrive in Lenoir on Wednesday. "Am I never to write to Miss Mary Sidney Caldwell Scott again? Yes! I will write again tomorrow and for aught I know tonight! For I love you! I love you! I love you!" (Millwood, Clarke Co. Virginia, Friday, Feb. 3, 1882)

Locks of hair
These are curls of their first two daughters' hair,
clipped four years later, in 1885.
Delia's hair is red. Elizabeth my grandmother's hair is blond.

LETTER TO DR. SCOTT

The young Reverend Bryan is asking for Mary's father's blessing.

Ingleside
May 2, 1881

Dr. W.W. Scott
Lenoir, N.c.

My dear Sir:

You are perhaps aware of the attachment I have formed for your daughter Mary. It is my great happiness to believe that she loves me as well as I love her. I would have written to you sooner of this state of affairs, which has existed for some weeks, but the young lady asked me not to communicate with you on the subject until after she had returned home.

I am conscious that it is very much that I ask in requesting you to sanction our love, the more so because you have never seen the man who loves your daughter. But, I beg that you will let your confidence in your child take the place in my behalf of personal knowledge.

I have nothing to offer her but devotion and my own exertions. And both of these as you know have already been pledged to the utmost to Another. But certainly His hand, which I thankfully recognize in this whole matter, will be sufficient. And I believe you will be none the less ready to trust your daughter to me because I am pledged to and trust in Him.

With sincerest regard for your self and all your household, I am very truly yours,

C.B. Bryan

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