“THERE’s your sister watching out for you now,” Mary Cherry said to Malcolm Bedford when they had been ushered to the drawing-room by William Veal, a grave, fine-looking mulatto who was the Montrose butler. “There’s Sister Agnes,” she went on, pointing boldly toward the centre of the room, where, with one hand leaning on the table and a lace fan in the other, stood a quiet figure in a flowered amber silk. Agnes McGehee had a ribbon stitched with pearl clusters around her neck and a spray of pearl flowers in her dark hair.
The room was filling with guests for the party, and the air was fragrant with the mounds of roses and the vases of gardenias and cinnamon pinks.
“I see Captain Ruffin too,” Miss Mary went on, with her elbow pushing Mrs. Bedford a little off from her. “Ah, Senator——”
“So you did get here?” Mrs. Bedford said, as she kissed her husband’s sister and turned to greet Captain Ruffin, who bowed low over her hand. “We were expecting him, Agnes, at our house.”
“I have just been telling Mrs. McGehee,” he bowed in his hostess’ direction, “the Resolute was tardy, and so we proceeded here to meet you. Colonel Harrod, who was at the landing, courteously offered us seats in his carriage. We knew we should meet you here.”
Miss Mary took away the hostess’ lace fan and began to fan herself as if it were a sturdy palm leaf. “And so you did, for here we be, eh?” she said. “What more?”
“Captain, you may not get everybody straight,” Agnes McGehee said, looking at her hand, now empty of the fan, and then around the room with her gentle, brown eyes, and smiling to some of the guests whose glance she met, “but it’s no matter, you can take it all as just one company. I always say to strangers in Natchez they would make a mistake trying to remember each separate person. Yes, I say, they must take it all as one——”
“Bouquet?” Captain Ruffin said, as if the words inside his head were oiled and perfumed as the raven locks outside it. He had made the outside at least into a Roman senator, according to the busts in the Capitol at Washington.
Mary Cherry smacked the lace fan shut and returned it to its owner. “Come, Senator, there’s something I want to discuss with you, sir.” He bowed again and gave her his arm.
“Supper will be later in the dining-room,” Agnes said. “But the punch is here.” She pointed to the long console table between the windows. “Rosa made it for us, so you can be sure——”
Miss Mary stopped and turned back a step, jerking Captain Ruffin up to a sudden halt, “I can be sure it’s that Pope punch Rosa makes.”
Agnes smiled. “Tea—green tea—and guava jelly, Miss Mary, and burnt brandy, rum, sherry, Chateau Margaux, lemon peel.”
“ ’Tought to be good, Sis Sallie, with all creation in it. I say she makes it at Portobello sometimes out of plain popery. But I’m a Methodist. You can’t tell me there’s a man alive can’t sin, pope or no pope.”
Agnes’ eyes twinkled as she turned to the captain. “The recipe was given by the valet of Pius VII to Napoleon’s valet, Constant, who gave it to my grandfather’s old Philo, in Paris. So you see, Miss Mary.”
“You’d think the Catholic Church would have something better to think about than brewing punches. However——” She moved away toward a quieter spot in the library, taking with her Captain Ruffin, who was stroking his chin as if to say that life in Washington had taught him discretion. “But tell me, now, Senator Ruffin——”
The entertainment at Montrose, the McGehees’ house, was not so gay as at Arlington, Magnolia Vale, and other Natchez places, nor so romantic and fanciful as at Clifton, where the gardens, famous up and down the whole Mississippi, were turned sometimes into a paradise of lanterns and music, or river boats stopped for their passengers to see. But Montrose was cordial and warm, full of kindness; and the china and silver were the rapture of guests. To this store a great deal of glass had lately been added. Hugh McGehee’s nephew, George, from Woodville, making the grand tour abroad, had developed an enthusiasm for Bohemian glass. All during the past spring, boxes of this glass had arrived through Mr. Lanux, the Montrose cotton-factor in New Orleans. It was white, cut with clear medallions, in which were clusters of enamelled flowers. Not only Bowling Green, George’s own home, but Montrose also overflowed with this glass, and Agnes McGehee had begun to send it quietly away for presents.
“You couldn’t say George’s father cared very much,” Mrs. Bedford said, turning to Judge McGehee, who was up from Woodville for the birthday and had at that moment joined them at the table, “so long as his son came back safe and sound; we were talking of all that glass you let your son buy.”
Judge McGehee stood looking down from his great height into her droll eyes and smiled, but said nothing—“let” was a strange word for his son George, who could play any instrument he ever touched, would buy ten at a time, take them off with him and nobody ever hear of them again. He saw Mrs. Bedford’s face growing serious as she added, “I tell Darlin’, soon it’ll be no time for boys galavantin’. As Lord Byron says, ‘and we’ll go no more a roaming by the light of the moon.’ That’s the way it seems to me.” She was thinking of her son Duncan in Virginia at the university. “Though there’s nothing yet. I reckon Washington is only too full of Southern oratory and Yankee tricks.”
Malcolm Bedford’s face, naturally proud, reddened angrily. “It’s the hot heads will ruin us yet”—he said bitterly.
The subject of the Union and the South was uppermost in every one’s mind, but was to be avoided for the moment because the evening belonged to pleasure and happiness. And yet there were the debates going on in Washington; and the great questions of state’s rights and the extension of slavery into the new territories were in the air. People even at a Natchez party, a thousand miles from Washington, could not very well look into each other’s eyes without coming to it. The subject was fortunately switched by a movement at the far end of the room. Guests were standing around the piano there, the young men were showing ladies to seats and taking their places beside them, leaning over and putting up their hands to see if their stocks were in place, as they stood to listen. At the long concert piano, which Hugh McGehee had himself selected in New York and sent down to Montrose, clearly seen by all now, as if she were a prima donna on the stage, sat a young girl in a dress of white tulle without ornaments. She was not very tall, with dark hair, pale olive skin, and a red mouth. Word had somehow passed to the servants that Miss Valette was going to sing, and two or three of them had stolen into the room along the wall. Miss Whipple, the little seamstress from Iowa, had also stolen in and taken a good armchair near the door. Their mistress made a sign to one of the maids to snuff the candles on the mantelpiece; and, with the lights thus brighter, the face, the young neck and arms, the hands on the piano keys seemed to grow more shining and fragile. No one spoke. You could hear only Mary Cherry clear her throat at the library door, where she had come with Captain Ruffin; and then the captain clearing his throat somewhat more positively. The girl made a little run over the keys of the piano, whose tone they were so proud of at Montrose. Then she turned the lovely eyes to Rosa Tate, who sat not far away, with Hugh McGehee, his hand on the back of her armchair, standing beside her.
“Auntie, what shall I sing?”
Rosa Tate looked up at Hugh McGehee, and he leaned down and whispered in her ear.
“I dreamt I dwelt”—she said.
“I dreamt I dwelt—I’d like to sing that,” the girl said, with a pretty gravity, already absorbed in the thought of the song, and beginning the accompaniment before the hum of approval in the company could cease.
“I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls”
It was one of those voices, very pure and fresh, which the moment they begin are a singing sound and no other. And though she had for some time had lessons with the Chevalier La Tour, who came up twice a month from New Orleans to his pupils in Natchez, what she did was more or less natural to her; and, since she sang for the sense, for the words rather than the mere melody, the persuasion and feeling were felt by every listener in the room.
The voice stopped, there was a second’s hush. Many of the ladies had put on romantic expressions. To every one there she was a figure of youth, and, as the case might be, the dream of some desire, or the ghost of memory.
“Bravo!” Captain Ruffin shouted above all the applause and the sighs, clapping his hands so that the seals of his watch chain jingled. “Now, ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ ah, could you not, Miss Valette?”
When she had sung it, Valette rose, touching the fingers of one hand lightly to her bosom, and smiling to the applause and the compliments. She was on the way to Miss Rosa when she stopped suddenly before an old lady with long dark eyes and a face as white as alabaster, who sat on the sofa. This lady was known to all Natchez as Miss Percy. The Duc d’Orleans, accompanied by his brother, the Duc de Montpensier, and the Comte de Beaujolais, travelling in exile, had visited Natchez as the guest of her father; and later on, when he came to the throne as Louis Philippe, Miss Percy had been lady-in-waiting at the French court. A slight, stooped little figure, she wore a gown of white silk with cascades of lace, and across her breast a spray of diamond flowers given to her by the Queen of France. Valette caught the look of those eyes, and all at once, as if unexpectedly even for herself, dropped on her knee, lifted the shaky hand with its heavy rings, and kissed it.
“Mais cette petite—elle faisait mon travail léger—I forget everything, but Victor Hugo himself recited the poem for me—faisait mon ciel bleu—doux ange aux candides pensées,” said the little old lady, with her strong Parisian accent, and with an air of listening to what she herself had just said. She spoke French as a delicate compliment, for she remembered Valette’s New Orleans origin.
“Merci, chère Mademoiselle,” Valette replied, in the softer speech of Louisiana. “Chère Mademoiselle, comme vous êtes belle”—she hesitated and tears came into her eyes, “et vous êtes triste.”
The old lady bowed with a formal grace, putting her satin slipper, on which were paste buckles with some of the sets missing, out a little from her skirt; she had heard in Paris that the great Goethe once said that the only beauty time cannot take from a woman is her foot.
“What’d the child say, Sis Sallie?” Mary Cherry asked, watching Valette cross the room.
“She said Miss Percy was beautiful, then she said ‘and sad.’ ”
“No use being sad, but she shows proper respect. I never could abide that polly vous français fracas.”
“She wasn’t ten years old when I took her, but the poor little thing has that ear for French. Yes, an ear’s an ear.”
“The epidemic of 1853 was about the worst yellow fever ever did, I presume,” said Miss Mary.
“Yes, faisait mon ciel bleu, that was what Monsieur Hugo wrote,” said Miss Percy quickly, as if she expected Miss Mary to say more, which she did:
“It’s a blessing for the little thing you were caught there at the time and quarantined in town, Sis Sallie. You went one morning to see your friend, and there at the gate was the garbage cart and the man yelling bring out your dead, bring out your dead, and that cart already piled up with packages, corpses wrapped in sheets, so they just carted them off to the cemetery and trampled them down in trenches.”
“Mon dieu, mon dieu, mademoiselle!” Miss Percy gasped, dabbing her brow with a lace handkerchief.
Agnes changed the subject, hoping to escape the memory of the plague; “William Veal tells me we have forty-three varieties of our roses tonight, Miss Mary.”
“All I’m saying and I repeat it, it’s a good thing you were there to adopt that child.”
“Fortunate for me, I’d lost my own little girl not long before.”
“Be that as it may, Sis Sallie.”
Valette called her foster mother “My Dumplin’,” not Mamma, like the other children. They had not changed her name, Julia Valette Somerville. Her father was a Virginian. The Julie Valette, which it should have been, not Julia, was for an old French countess, a family friend, perhaps a distant cousin of her mother’s when they lived in Chartres Street—la Comtesse Julie Valette de—everybody had forgotten the rest of it; but Valette had some of her lace.
“It’s a good thing all the New Orleans boats are not as slow as the Princess, Sis Sallie,” Mary Cherry said. “I reckon every livin’ soul’s asking Sister Agnes when her Edward will get here. It’s going on nine o’clock now. How old’s Edward, Sis Sallie.”
“Edward’s eighteen.”
“Well, it’s going on nine o’clock.”
Valette, who had been beckoned to the window by the little boy Middleton, returned to them. She threw her arms around her foster mother’s neck and kissed her and Mrs. Bedford gave that low chuckle of hers, “Who said you were a nightingale, you little wretch?”
“I’d rather have you say it, My Dumplin’, than anybody.”
“Go way from here.”
Valette had already left them when Mrs. Carroll from Crescent Hood Plantation came up with her son Francis, a very stiff young man that people who did not dislike him said was on his way to being president of the bank where he was cashier. He stuck to his mother because he was more at ease when he was admired.
“My son tells me,” Mrs. Carroll said, “that King Cotton is already in danger. What will happen to our Southland if that’s true? I mean—but you say it, Francis.”
“If cotton falls below wheat and if the Northern manufacturers control the government,” said Francis.
“Exactly,” said Miss Percy, in her charming voice, and looked at him as if to say, “I suppose now we shall hear about a surplus of cotton and that power is passing from us to the industrialists.”
Francis went on to explain just that. He was one of those people with whom everything they say we know to be true and yet each time wonder why they said it. Mrs. Carroll, not understanding anything said, gave a motherly smile.
Presently they saw Valette with young Walworth on the gallery outside, where other young people were sitting, and where four negroes with their guitars, who had planned this birthday surprise for their master, were playing in the garden. In the dusk of the porch they could see Valette’s cloudy dress, and hear her laughter.