WHILE all this talk of politics and North and South was going on, Agnes McGehee sat on a sofa by the library window with her sister-in-law, Edward McGehee’s wife, who had come up from Woodville with him for the birthday.
Tonight these two women, who had so much affection for each other and so often exchanged notes between the two plantations, sat there together, both silent. Both had the same foreboding, and for both this talk of the war had the same dangerous burden. Through the long window they could see Mrs. Ruffin, the Captain’s wife, on the gallery with the children. She had spent the evening there, doing as she pleased like a child herself. The sound of the talking, the negroes’ guitars strumming in the garden, and Mrs. Ruffin’s tiny voice telling a story, was suddenly broken off when the children sprang up, shouting “Cousin Edward! Cousin Edward!” ran to meet him. Mrs. Ruffin flew in to find Agnes.
“You could see him from the gallery,” she said, as they rushed down the steps. “He must have left the boat and driven up—there he is—will you look, a uniform!—from Bayou Sara!”
A few minutes later the guest that so many of the family had been asking about entered by the door at the far end of the drawing-room. His father and mother followed. The two Bedford children had got themselves somehow past everybody and rushed to their cousin again. Mary Cherry, as if charging their attack, advanced to be the first who should greet this young man. He did not lean down and kiss them then, but put his left arm around both their necks, holding out his right to Miss Cherry and saying he was glad to see her.
“My goodness, you look healthy, Edward!” she said, looking at the red lips and the white teeth.
People crowded around him. He had to kiss a score of the family, and many of the girls now had to be called more formally by the Miss, not merely by their names, so fast were they growing into young ladies. What had been Louise was now Miss Louise Prynelle, Felicia Fleming was Miss Felicia, and so on; these were delicate matters not to be forgotten. “But not Miss Valette,” he said, laughing as she leaned toward him for a light kiss.
Mary Cherry’s exclamations on Edward’s healthy looks may have been partly because he was blushing a little at so much commotion. It ended at last, however, and he was left free among the others there.
Sallie Bedford thought Edward lacked a certain fire which she required in men and which no one could say her own son Duncan, at the University of Virginia, was without. Edward’s was one of those faces that are in no sense childish, but that remind you of a child. The light brown hair, fine as a child’s, was parted at one side and brushed across the wide forehead, the nose was straight, the gray eyes were too clear not to be a little sad. People looked at him, expecting him to smile, a smile that they would take, perhaps, more as a sign of sweetness and character than of happiness.
Captain Ruffin had started the political discussion again. “Did not President Buchanan himself declare in his message that the general government has no power to coerce a State? Were not those his exact words? I myself was present and heard them.”
The Captain paused then, smiling affably. He was one of those lucky men who, in their way, have grown more attractive as they have grown vainer.
Miss Percy, from her seat on the yellow sofa, had beckoned Edward’s mother, and drawing her down to her said something in her ear, with a gesture of the transparent little hand, so heavily jewelled, in his direction. The hand, or its fingertips, alighted finally at her bosom, on a spray of diamond flowers, as if to say there were thoughts more precious than mere nature.
It was not one of those elaborate Natchez parties with half the town there and Monsieur Le Roi’s orchestra up from New Orleans to play for the dancing, but merely people coming in for the birthday. William Veal had carried notes around the day before. Taking each note from his pocket he would present it with a bow at the door of Clifton, Monteigne, Arlington, Monmouth, Melrose, Rosalie, or Kenilworth, and, however snobbishly he might frown along the roadside, with the same formality at whatever other houses were not so fine.
Double doors, all save those of the dining-room, where supper would be announced at any moment, had been thrown open and the whole first floor of the house could be seen. Sixty feet away the mirrors at the end of the second drawing-room reflected the lights of the chandeliers, the crystals of the candelabra on the two mantelpieces, the single candles in the hurricane shades on the console tables, and the company in their midst.
Agnes McGehee leaned down again to Miss Percy’s lips, as she saw Colonel Harrod, a Natchez millionaire and a windbag, coming to offer his arm.
“Is that not Colonel Harrod coming for me?” Miss Percy whispered.
“No less.”
“I shall be blown quite away. My dear, what a pleasure to see your Edward! La beauté d’homme!” The lovely old voice went on: “He will not go to war because it defends his interests. Nor because he hates the North. He’ll go because it’s right for himself to go. For no reason. And for a young man that’s the best of all reasons! That’s the noblest.”
“It’s the reason most like Edward,” said Agnes.
“It’s what I should expect from the son of his charming mother.”
The eyes of Agnes shone with pleasure. She was subject to flattery, not out of vanity but from a kind of loneliness, perhaps.