“WHEREAS, the Creator,” Malcolm Bedford wrote, “has seen fit to remove from the earthly scene our beloved friend, Hugh McGehee, and, whereas, Zachary Taylor, President of the United States of America, stated that Edward McGehee of Woodville, brother of the deceased, was the best man he ever knew, making him, furthermore, executor of his estate, it is the opinion here that the virtues of said Hugh McGehee were no less great.”
The light autumn wind stirring in his direction carried the sheet of paper from the arm of Malcolm Bedford’s chair, along with a moment’s drift of oak leaves, to the porch floor. When he had drunk a little too much, he used to write obituaries of people. He looked now at the paper where it lay, hesitated, let it stay there, and began another.
“On Thursday last, the 2nd of November, the noble womanhood of our parish was bereft of one of its noblest ornaments, nay, its very flowers, Eliza Turner Quitman—nay, its fairest blossoms——”
But he was not pleased with the effort and brushed it aside; it too fell fluttering to the floor and under his chair.
“Whereas, God in his mercy”—he began another—“has removed from our midst our sister Mary Cherry—” He chuckled at something that came into his mind and went back—“in his mercy and infinite wisdom,” he wrote, inserting the phrase, with a caret beneath the line, “be it said. Hallelujah——”
He stopped writing and sat brushing his lips with the tip of his silver penstaff, smiling and thinking. Then he took a sip from the toddy on a chair beside his.
“Darlin’, Eliza Quitman’s not dead,” said his wife’s voice behind him. He had not heard her light step in the doorway. “I declare, Darlin’.” She came around and stood by one of the pillars.
“Yes, my dear.”
“Darlin’, I declare.”
She leaned over and straightened his stock, and took up one of the sheets of paper—“ ‘Mary Cherry, et cetera, et cetera—be it said she was lofty in her mien, eloquent in her discourse, a lioness in her spirit.’ Well, Miss Mary brings it on herself, I reckon. Look, Yellow Ab’s bringing you out some coffee. We must have something to clear your head.”
“And what’s the objection to my head?”
“Nothing much, provided it’s clear. I told him to make it black as ink.” She turned to the boy who had come with the coffee. “Give Major Bedford the coffee, Abner, and hand me those sheets of paper off the floor. Never mind,” she went on, seeing the negro was afraid to touch the papers; he knew they concerned death. She stooped quickly and picked up the obituaries herself, with one eye on her husband, who sat drinking the coffee, in his broadcloth coat with the velvet lapels. She skimmed what he had written, holding the paper in the small, busy hands that were still delicate and white like porcelain. She smiled to see the name of Hugh McGehee, the very man whose birthday party they were going to. But she said nothing. She was a woman who naturally, in whatever ways a man seemed to her to be like a man, let him alone. These obituaries were nothing new.
“Why won’t you wear your rings?” Malcolm said, taking one of her hands, which he was very proud of.
“Very well, I will if you drink your coffee and get ready.” She sent the servant to tell Celie to bring the diamond rings and the brooch with the column and leaves, from the box on her dressing-table. There were four maids named Celie in the house, it saved trouble. You merely called Celie and said tell Celie. So she said, “Call Celie, and if she can’t find them tell her to tell Celie, she’ll know where they are.”
Mrs. Bedford wore a prune silk, as plain as she dared. The little face might have been called grim but for the eyes, which were gray, downright, and shone with some humor both friendly and tart. This was what led her to such things as saying that she enjoyed having children, it gave her a chance to lie in bed and read as much as she liked. She had been in Natchez all this time, twenty-three years since Malcolm had brought her from Alabama, and people were not yet used to this side of her.
“Where are Middleton and Frances and Hartie?” Malcolm asked, speaking of his little nephew and two daughters.
“They’re gone on in the carriage with Rosa and Valette. Miss Gilbert’s not going, for the simple reason,” said his wife—referring to the children’s governess, as she buttoned her gloves, which like all the Natchez ladies of that day, she wore too tight—“that there’s so much feeling now it’s embarrassing for the poor thing. It’s a blessing she’s going back North to her own people.”
Celie came with the rings, and Mrs. Bedford put them into her reticule, hoping if possible to escape wearing them.
The barouche was waiting before a little white building with columns, like a small temple, which stood near the house at that side and served for the plantation office. Twilight was coming on, and the shadow of the oak trees and the thick leaves of the camellia bushes fell on the barouche and the horses, one of which was champing the ground now and then. There was a soft shade everywhere in that spot of the garden.
In a corner of the barouche, sitting upright against the cushions, was a lady in a black silk, and black bonnet with sprays of wired beads on the front of it. She sat high, as it were, on the seat but yet gaunt, like some great Amazonian in buckram. She was Mary Cherry, and had taken her place some time before.
Miss Cherry had these last two years deserted the north part of the State, Panola County, where she had lived so long visiting the diverse houses, mostly the McGehees; and had come to their cousins and connections here in the Natchez neighborhood and Woodville farther south. She would arrive for a week, a month, or several months, as things turned out. She had been, this time, at Portobello since the end of June.
“Well,” Miss Mary said to her hosts, giving her skirt a slap out of their way, “I was about to take root.”
Mrs. Bedford took her place on the front seat of the barouche. “Never mind, Miss Mary,” she said, “we’ll be there soon.”
“Aye.” Miss Mary turned away her head abruptly. Her left eye was blind, so that by turning her head like that she could put them out of her range of vision.
“Darlin’, you sit there,” said Mrs. Bedford.
“She calls me darlin’ when she scolds me, and darlin’ when she pets me,” Malcolm said, as he obeyed his wife and took the seat beside Miss Cherry. “So I never know whether she loves me or not.”
“Go on, go on, and sit down, Brother Malcolm. All I say is no all-fired man ever lived that I’d sit backward for. I’d as soon ride the waves. Phew, my goodness!” she went on, waving her handkerchief before her nose at the smell of the whiskey.
At the end of the avenue the driver got down to open the big gate and took the carriage through. Something about the chain to be adjusted kept him busy for a moment and they were left sitting there, the horses headed for the town. The three in the carriage sat looking back at the house they had just come from. Along the avenue the light struck here and there on the statues with their marble pedestals, and on the walks with their green borders; and at the far end you saw the house, on which the last glow of the twilight rested, standing out among the garden trees. It was not like the usual house of the day, a classic front with a pediment and tall columns. Two galleries with fluted columns, one row above the other, ran across the main portion of the house, beyond whose gabled ends were one-story wings with little columned porches set deep into the garden. The whole air of the house was that of a retreat, a lovely and secret place, strangely formal and domestic at the same time, extravagant but never beyond taste, the product of romantic feeling and thought.
Of the three people there, Malcolm Bedford should have been the one to know best what this place meant. He had built it for his first wife, who had died soon afterward. She was Mary Hartwell McGehee, the young sister of the man whose birthday they were on their way to celebrate. Malcolm had taken her to Europe while the house was building, and they had travelled there, buying the furniture with rose-red damask, the brocade curtains in the same color, the carpets, silver, the lustres, and candlesticks, with which the house was full. They had bought the classic statues along the avenue, the statues in the Louis XV style of the four continents that stood in a semi-circle facing the house, and the fluted alabaster vases, sending back with them from France an artist to design a garden. And in Philadelphia on their journey home they had stayed to be painted by Sully; the pictures hung in the dining-room.
Two lovers forever young: Malcolm saw them always as if they were people in a dream. They had named the place Portobello after a Virginia house in her family, though this Mississippi house was nothing like the one in Virginia, which was designed to suggest a ship. On Mary Hartwell’s mother’s side, a young Collier had gone off with Lawrence Washington to the British war in the Caribbean; and when they returned they had built two houses, and in their enthusiasm named them out of the war. Lawrence Washington named his house for the admiral: Mt. Vernon; and Collier named his for the battle: Portobello.
It was all here still: the house Malcolm Bedford had built for his bride, and what was in it; the garden with the box walks, the tiny pavilions in blue lattice, the camellias, roses, azaleas, jasmines, gardenias. He had brought home its second mistress, but little at Portobello had changed. It was all here still, and Sallie had seen her husband looking back at the house in the evening light and had turned her head away. Malcolm had not forgotten the days this house was built, but he loved her too, what more could she ask? And if the house had been for another woman, she had kept it well and when her first little girl was born she had named her for Mary Hartwell, who had died childless—what more was there to do?
As they drove along Mrs. Bedford heard Mary Cherry asking if Malcolm’s nephew Edward would be coming up for his father’s birthday, and Malcolm reply that the military academy had given Edward leave.
“He may be at home by now,” Malcolm said.
“On what?”
“The Princess.”
“Not from what I hear of that steamboat. She backed into the bank her last trip, at Bayou Sara, so they tell. The captain’s not got his mind on his business more’n likely. My, your sister Agnes is proud of Edward!”
“And well she might be.”
“Yes, Edward’s mighty fine. Though I prefer your Duncan. I must say give me Duncan any day. There’s a young man for you. I don’t care if he is way off in Virginia. Duncan I can tell you is A Number One.”
“I won’t deny that, Miss Mary. But Edward McGehee’s a fine boy.”
“Aye,” she said, “the McGehees are fine men, but they need a woman to pull ’em.”
“Well, I’d say push ’em.”
“First they push ’em, and then they pull ’em.”
They were on the old Natchez Trace, the Indian road that had run nobody knew how many centuries northward to what was now Nashville. Like many of the old roads it was sunk below the banks at either side, in places higher than the carriage top. The trees rose in a high wall of green, now almost black; the sky, swept with rose light and the dusk, shone in a bright lane far overhead; the horses’ hoofs sounded clear and hard.
It had not taken long for the settlers pouring over the Southern States to find their levels and divide. There were the adventurers, the drifters, the scum, and wreckage of life in the older colonies and abroad; they lingered, dropped lower, or passed on. There were those who wished to make homes, to own land, to found a society in which their families might live. At the same time, scattered here and there in the South, were certain communities that from the very start had been made up of a special class who in their turn drew others like them.
This old town, toward which the Bedfords’ carriage was rolling along the hard, dry dirt of the road, lay high up on the bluffs above the Mississippi, which spread out below in a vast curve, with its yellow current and its timeless air of volume and full movement to the gulf. It was this elevation, in contrast to the woods, the swamps, the low-lying river lands—the richest land in the world—for miles about Natchez and also across the river to the west, that had given the town its fortunes. The village of the Natchez tribe, coming up from Mexico nobody knew when, was found here by De Soto’s Spaniards, in the year 1543, and he himself was thought to be buried in Lake St. John. The French came, then the British, then the Spanish again for nineteen years, until 1798 when Natchez became a United States territory. Tobacco and indigo gave place to cotton; for which the climate and soil were so richly adapted that it was not uncommon to see a piece of land pay itself out of the purchase price in two or three seasons. Most of the fine houses of Natchez belonged to the planter class.
There were still a world of the piney-woods whites, the squatters, the people back among the bayous, the people on their way to the West. Natchez-under-the-Hill was still a proverb for vice over all America and even in Europe: the place most of all where met fantastic river romance, scum, and all that the frontier had spelled. But neither of these, the rough frontier nor the human dregs of the river, concerned the town of Natchez itself nor the society of the great plantation houses.
All the people the Bedfords or the McGehees knew, except for a preacher now and then, or a mechanic or clerk, belonged to this planter class. All their virtues, all their faults were characteristic of it.
The evening cool had restored Malcolm and he sat watching the scenery along the road, with now and then a glance at his wife and Mary Cherry.
“Speaking of houses,” said Miss Mary—nobody had mentioned a house, “for the life of me I can’t see what Hugh McGehee wants with that old Spanish house rambling around. You say Spaniard to me, and I say black wretch, he’ll cut your heart out.” Along the quiet road her voice was like a trumpet.
Malcolm crossed his legs smiling:
“As a matter of fact that house was built a hundred years ago. by a Scotchman. He called it Dundee, but nobody could pronounce it to suit him so he changed to something or other, and then Hugh changed it to Montrose. Of course, it is like the Spanish governor’s house, however, Concord.”
“Riding along like this, when it’s all so green and rich, so lush and abundant,” Sallie Bedford said, “I think of all the things have happened in this country. I think of what calamity will be hanging over us now.”
Neither Malcolm nor Mary Cherry made any reply, and a silence fell.
They entered the town itself, driving past Green Leaves and then Arlington, whose columns they saw faintly in the grove about it. The road had passed into the open, with a sweep of sky above. The east was already starry, and the evening star, with its small star near, had risen. How sweetly the day had drawn to its due close! Mrs. Bedford sat looking up around her quietly. She had a knowledge like a shepherd’s of the heavens and the signs in the night sky.