500. He kept ringing and the boat kept having to back to shore; the captain cursed so loud the ladies had to withdraw to the dining-saloon; “Ah,” said Miles, with a wheezy sigh, “the good old days are gone, Cud’n Cynthia!”THERE is a type of people, often reared by cities, whose one idea of life is doing what everybody else does. Without any clear desires of their own, they have, nevertheless, a steady movement toward what by imitation and envy they have come to want. They are sometimes even avaricious and greedy about this; and often, in a sterile way, they get their ends. The McGehees had cousins like that in New Orleans: Francis Scott Eppes and his mother Mrs. Cynthia Marigny Eppes. In her youth Cynthia had had a very fine voice which she used as an excuse for spending most of her time in the city, and her talent was so great that both her parents and her singing master were persuaded that she practised many hours more than she really did. Her husband, Francis Collier Eppes, was kin to the Montrose McGehees and Edward McGehee at Woodville through their grandmother Collier, at Portobello in Virginia. The first Eppes in Virginia had been Colonel Francis, gentleman of the bedchamber to King Charles I, who, after the Royalist defeat, emigrated to the colonies. Sir Francis Eppes was celebrated as fighting duels on every possible pretext, and Francis Collier Eppes, Cynthia’s husband, had inherited an over-amount of this talent. In the course of the duelling fever that struck New Orleans, he had fallen in a duel with Pepe Lulla, the famous maître d’armes, whom he should have known better than to call out, even in the cause of a slandered prima donna.
Up to that time the family had divided the years among three places: their sugar plantation (Beaux Anges on the Bayou des Glaises), Paris, and New Orleans. They kept a box at the opera in both New Orleans and in Paris. After her husband’s death Cynthia lived entirely in the two cities, with her one child Francis Scott, whom all the McGehee kin called Scott and she called François. She left Beaux Anges to a manager and overseers, and in bad years raised money by mortgages. A great deal of the money was spent, partly on cards, for which François inherited a taste that his mother (from whom he got it) considered excessive. They had been obliged to give up Paris, but they clung to New Orleans, passing never more than six or eight weeks on the plantation. Cynthia’s family was Catholic, and the conditions of the marriage had required the children to be so. Francis, if in late years intermittently, had gone all his life to confession in the shadowed chapels of St. Louis Cathedral. Father Palissy, their priest, had come straight from St. Cloud, a tall, rosy man with charming manners, who explained the mysteries of religion so that any sensible person could grasp them easily.
“Nobody can assert,” Cynthia said, “that I neglect my duties.” She would open the case that her jeweller had made for her, with her opera glasses on one side and her prayer book on the other. “Though I once said to my confessor when he got too finicky, ‘Father, I may as well tell you, I get my hats and my absolutions in Paris.’ ”
In the early autumn of 1861 President Davis, after some urging, at last appointed Mr. Slidell of New Orleans to go, together with Mason, as resident Commissioner for the Confederate States in Paris and London. Slidell had come many years before from New York, fleeing the consequences of a duel, to Louisiana; where in time he had married one of the Deslondes; and where in time, by fair means and foul, with none too good a reputation, he had succeeded in making himself a man of wealth and political influence. Mr. and Mrs. Slidell with their son and two daughters had made the journey overland to Charleston, avoiding the perils of the Federal blockade, and from Charleston had gone first to Nassau and then Havana, where he joined Mason and waited for a vessel to Europe.
When Cynthia heard of this it seemed to her that with her son as an attaché of the Confederate Commissioner, they had found an excellent means of getting abroad. She had absorbed both the New Orleans and then the French attitude that each of these cities was the only place in the world where one could possibly exist. They had spoken of this that same night to their cousin Miles MeGehee, with whom they were dining at the St. Charles Hotel. He was one of those men who eat well, drink well, and think almost any proposal that any person desires to execute is a good idea. Since he was taking the Magnolia up the river that evening on his way to his home on Lake St. Joseph, he had invited them to accompany him. They would stop over at Natchez for a visit to Montrose, which he had not seen for ten months. He told them of having been engaged with a commission from the governor of Louisiana for cloth to be made at the Woodville factory, which, he went on, belonged to his brother Edward, and was the first factory of its kind run by slave labor to be built in the South. To Cynthia, drawing out the fingers of her gloves, this was only another assurance of the South’s victory; and Francis Scott remembered that he had not been up the river in a long time and then thought of those two card sharpers who had got on at Baton Rouge dressed like parsons. His mother recalled also that the Edward McGehees, at Woodville, would know Mr. Jefferson Davis, whose parents lived only two or three miles away.
Miles McGehee kept a special chair for himself on every boat that went up the river. They were large and easy, for he weighed 400 pounds. Cynthia and Francis were sitting with him on deck when they came in sight of the Natchez bluffs. “Yes, yes, of course, my brothers know Jeff Davis. But they don’t think he’s any great shakes. When Brother Edward heard Davis was elected President of the Confederacy, he walked the floor all night.”
“Fancy!” said Cynthia, who took walking the floor all night as a mere operatic phrase.
“For that matter Jeff Davis’ brother’s the one made him what he is. Clever man, lives next to us at St. Joseph’s. You know President Zachary Taylor, who was a great friend of our family, was Jeff Davis’ father-in-law.”
She knew that. Mr. Davis’ first wife, the one who died singing that pet of a song, yes, it was “Fairy Bells”; and he himself was lying desperately sick of the fever and couldn’t go to her. If President Taylor hadn’t died from eating too much iced cherries and milk, he’d have lived to be proud of his son-in-law surely.
“No doubt,” Miles said, and began to tell them the story of the time he bribed the captain to let him ring the bell as much as he liked. 500. He kept ringing and the boat kept having to back to shore; the captain cursed so loud the ladies had to withdraw to the dining-saloon; “Ah,” said Miles, with a wheezy sigh, “the good old days are gone, Cud’n Cynthia!”
“C’est la vie, c’est la vie. Was that our captain, St. Clair Thompson?”
“No, no, God A’mighty, ’twarn’t the Magnolia, ’twas the Southern Belle.”
Her cousin’s manners were cut to suit himself, but Cynthia had been in sophisticated society long enough to relish characters with some go to them. Two of the plantations that Miles had pointed out first on the east, then on the west side of the river, as they came upstream, belonged to him, some of the rest to his brothers. She had long since observed how much more fitting it was when oddities, characters, and independents were rich. Like everybody with any kin in Panola or Natchez, Cynthia knew all about Mary Cherry, and she was delighted when Miles spoke of the old woman’s being at Montrose now. Miss Mary had no plantations and said the world owed her a living, but Miss Mary was a character with a vengeance.
Francis Scott had left them to stroll among the passengers, who had increased with every landing. Even on deck you could smell the bouquets that had been sent aboard for the captain.
At Montrose, after their first flourish of greeting the cousins, Cynthia and Francis Scott could not say enough of the steamboat, the staterooms with four-poster beds, mosquito bars and toilet tables, the walls in pale yellow and gilt. Said Cynthia, stretching her dark eyes, “Indeed, while we were on the river everything, everything for this earth, seemed perfect. À minuit tous les chats sont gris.”
“But, Maman,” Francis said, “but——”
“Go on, young man,” Miss Mary said, chuckling hoarsely. Francis, for some reason, had already won her good graces.
“I was only going to say to Maman that when Gautier said that he meant something else, ah, yes, Miss Mary, Gautier meant something else.”
“Well, now, I studied the French language when I was a gal; at midnight all cats are black, is what that saying means. My old uncle, who lost a kidney at the Battle of New Orleans, used to say he’d seen a cherry-colored cat. You were supposed to exclaim, and it turned out he meant a black cat. ‘Ain’t there black cherries?’ Uncle Pelham said.”
“The pun is,” said Francis, bowing to Miss Mary, “gris also means tipsy, at midnight everybody’s tight.”
Mrs. Bedford and Valette arrived with Judge Winchester, Doctor and Mrs. Martin for supper, and when the greetings were over, Cynthia left her son with them and turned to Lucy.
“And how does the singing go, chérie? Ah, to sing!” She threw a kiss with the tips of her fingers with a sigh deep enough for opera, and began to tell them about singing at Compiègne for the Empress Eugenie. “I had a mauve gown of Worth’s. Naturally I had spoken good French all my life, could I forget my father’s old friend General Humbert, who had the San Domingo affair with Pauline Bonaparte and died drunk in New Orleans reciting Corneille? But I was careful to sing with a strong Creole accent. It reminded the Emperor of his grandmother, the Empress Josephine from Martinique, and it brought back the rich careless warmth of her Andalusia to Eugenie—what chic Her Majesty had!” She did not say that among other plantations belonging to other Louisiana ladies, M. Worth had a mortgage on one of hers.
But in her rooms as her maid changed her into the gown of purple velvet with its full hoop and its ripples of Valenciennes at the neck and wrists, Cynthia knew that the tone of their conversation at Montrose so far had not been quite right—François had known it too. She had seen him glancing at her.
“And it’s not at all because”—she thought.—“Here, Elise,” she said to the maid, “for goodness’ sake, don’t make me tell you every time, the brooch.” It was the one the Empress Eugenie had given her, a round cluster of garnets. Yes, the tone of the conversation had been not quite right. It was not because the McGehee cousins were stupid. That serene-looking Cousin Agnes McGehee, for one, was capable of poking you under the ribs. And everybody had made François and herself feel as welcome as the May. No, it was Cynthia who felt the compunctions herself. How easy it is, she thought, to be a little flighty! Descending the stair into the parlor she went on with these thoughts. No, no. Admiring for so long the library, the painted Bohemian glass with the fine medallions let into the white, the long concert Steinway piano that Hugh had gone to New York to choose, was not the right note at Montrose; though why should one not expatiate on the collection of 10,000 books chosen with such pains and abundance, and the glass bought by François’ young and headlong cousin, George McGehee from Woodville, travelling abroad? No reason. “No reason in the world,” she said to herself, as Hugh offered her his arm to go in to supper. “But here ’tis, yes, it’s the fortissimo where I go wrong. Running on so. Too much plumage. Spreading your tail, that’s it. Among these dear people. Makes me feel vulgar. Mais non alors par exemple,” and immediately on top of these thoughts, she exclaimed to her cousins, as they entered the dining-room. “But I must adore such silver!”
“Ah, then, if you like plate we must take you to Routhlands where they’re really superb. For one thing there are to the service fifteen great silver platters,” said Agnes.
The idea of her condescension one way or another would never have occurred to anybody at Montrose. Cynthia knew it; knew she would be only a fool if she felt condescending; she wanted to push in her ribs, which seemed to be swelling out. “There’s something in me that’s like a brass band,” she thought; and looking at Hugh with gentle melancholy, she asked if he remembered the opera ball where she had presented to him her fiancé?
He nodded. “And the same bloom on your cheeks today.”
“I put it on even then.”
“But she’s not as red as she’s painted, Cousin Hugh,” Francis said, sitting between Mrs. Bedford and Lucinda. This mot, not so ancient at Montrose as in the Bois de Boulogne, set everybody laughing.
“Maman, do you hear?” Francis said, with his flattering voice. “This is the Judge Winchester who educated the first lady of the Confederacy.”
“Impossible, my darling, that would be an old man.”
“This is he, Maman.”
“Then, my dear judge, is it true that Mrs. Davis reads Latin as well as the President?”
“As Doctor Johnson said of Queen Elizabeth, Miss Varina had learning enough to be a bishop,” the judge replied. “I say she had, not has; after marriage the ladies often desert the classic groves, Mrs. Eppes.”
“Dear Cousin Hugh, you answer Judge Winchester for I can’t. In Paris Garcia, Malibran’s brother, gave me lessons. If I’d only had any sense—but now even if I had studied well I should only squawk. Rossini took the piano for me one evening. How bad I was! I was behind. ‘Dear lady,’ he said, ‘shall we make a rendezvous at the bottom of the page?’ ”
She drew out her lace handkerchief and passed it lightly over her lips. The scent she used was not of flowers, such scents as were preferred by the Natchez ladies; it was heavy, exotic, and reminded Hugh of the chromo upstairs called “Moonlight on the Nile.”
“Or, at least,” Cynthia went on, looking at him now with a downright, disarming twinkle, “I daresay he said it. Every woman that ever sang for him says Rossini told her that. So why not me, eh, Cousin Hugh?”
“Indeed, why not, Cousin Cinthy?”
Mary Cherry, beside Mrs. Martin on the sofa, was watching Francis and the two girls leaning over the music-stand. His figure in the blue coat with its tall velvet collar had great elegance, she thought.
‘Sister,” she said to Mrs. Martin, “what do you make of him?”
“Sheep’s eyes at the girls maybe?” Mrs. Martin said.
“Oh, just that French Paris.”
“Maybe. What a patrician Lucy appears! I don’t call her tall.”
“Animation would help her, I say.”
“Nobody could say she looks insipid. She’s reserved,” Mrs. Martin said.
“There’s something makes Lucinda sad, yes, of that I’m positive. But I’ve never heard tell what. My conscience, the McGehees are clannish!”
“She may be in love,” said Mrs Martin.
“Then why don’t she say so?”
At once, Valette, when she was asked, sat down at the piano. She liked to sing, and it seemed to her that you gave people a song as you might give them a flower, what was there unusual about that? The accompaniment began.
“Ah,” said Francis, “listen, Maman, we shall have ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.’ ”
His mother sighed, and leaving her chair she came up to the piano and stood listening, absorbed.
Everybody applauded, Francis most loudly and most gracefully of all; but Valette, instead of waiting to begin another song, turned at once to Cynthia and asked her if she liked her voice, blushing with delight when she heard the praise.
“But one song’s enough from just me,” she said, catching Lucy by the hand and drawing her nearer the piano.
“Go on, honey, let Valette play,” Mrs. Bedford called to Lucy, “I tell the little rascal she sings better perched on a stool, like a wren on a bough. Let her play and you sing us ‘Kathleen Mavourneen.’ The last time I saw your brother Ed he was talking about your singing that.”
Valette began the music before Lucy could reply, and suddenly the mezzo voice took up the air. It was a low voice and Lucy sang the words and the thought as if they were all of it, and the music her own feeling. As the voice grew proud and full, the feeling seemed more veiled. It was not easy singing to compliment, however one liked it; and Doctor Martin, who could not tell one tune from another, served the graces most easily. He had one compliment for every singer and every song. “Mockbird could not have been sweeter,” he said, and Valette, springing up laughing and seizing the singer’s hand, made Lucy bow with herself like two prima donnas.
Old Cynthia surpassed them both. Without having started with any notion of singing, for she had given it up long ago, she found herself seated at the piano.
“Una voce poco fa, una voce poco fa—” “Ah, Cyndy,” she said, having launched thus far into this aria from “The Barber of Seville,” “that was off, madam. Basta!” and so had them all laughing and listening at once. Then they heard Cynthia beginning a Louisiana song, Les Deux Oiseaux du Lac. By some miracle of taste she seemed to be perfect; whatever voice was left seemed to be enough. Hugh McGehee looked at that sagging face so full of vanity and folly, and never having thought much about a theory of art, felt humbled and perplexed, and turning to his wife, saw that she had forgotten everybody in the room. The song had ended. Francis, without any of his fine manners at all, went up to his mother and kissed her hand covered with rings; and for the moment he was all one might have fancied him to be. The miracle too had ended, which nobody but Francis, in his sharp and exotic perception, had understood, though they had been carried away by it. Something had been in the room, like a presence; and now Cynthia again looked merely fashionable.
Judge Winchester rose and escorted her to a place beside him on the sofa, and she launched into how Garcia would beat on the piano when a student sang flat. “He’d look at you,” she said, crossing her eyes and going into a gale of laughter, “look and bleat. Bah! I kept the poor man bleating every other note I tried to sing. Do re mi—bah! bah! la fa la si—bah! If I hadn’t married so early, I’d have turned Garcia into mutton!”
“An old male sheep,” said Valette, laughing. There were tears in her eyes, nevertheless, old Cynthia saw that; Cynthia was one of those people who are moved by youth, not only from vanity and a sense of what they have lost, but because they feel only in youth the tears of things.
“Were you so flat, Cousin? I can’t believe it,” said Agnes. “And the Empress giving you the brooch.”
“Exactly. There you are.”
“I’ll tell you, Sis Cynthia,” Mary Cherry said. “I had some singing lessons once when I was a gal. From the choir master at our church. During choir practice he stopped, ‘Please, please,’ says he, ‘you’re off the key,’ stopped me four or five times, ‘you’re off the key.’ But I got him. Next time he stopped me and said off the key, I said, here, if you’ll hush your mouth, sir, and listen a minute, I’ll give you my A.”
Both Cynthia and Francis went into peals of laughter over that, and Miss Mary sat looking at one and then the other, very much delighted.
It was still not late in the evening when the servant brought in two visitors’ cards and Mr. Dix, the mayor of Natchez, came in. There were usually guests with the Dix family at Kenilworth, and this time it was an officer from Colonel Wheat’s regiment, Captain Derosse, who was in Natchez on a military matter. Captain Derosse was a dapper little man of forty, with cotton in one ear, but he heard well enough; and soon after he had been presented, a discussion started about the war in Virginia. The western slopes of Virginia had refused to secede and had been recognized by President Lincoln as a new State. After the Confederate victory at Bull Run in June, the war had moved across the State in the struggle for these slopes with their outlet toward the West and the Mississippi Valley. The campaign had been a failure and public opinion turned on General Lee. He had just been removed from his command and put in charge of coast defenses from South Carolina to Florida.
“Nevertheless,” Captain Derosse said to Hugh, “though the public is right—vox populi—in a sense, the trouble behind it all is the politicians. What’s more, General Lee suffers from lack of authority and the power to enforce discipline, and President Davis is bound and determined to remain our military chief if the army were camped a thousand miles away. General Wise demanding to be detached from General Floyd’s command—and so on—General Lee obliged to use tact with them instead of ordering them shot.”
“You are right,” said Hugh.
“You mean to tell me our victory at Bull Run did not establish the South’s supremacy, Captain Derosse,” said Cynthia, pushing down her flounces and then standing with her hands clasped as if about to sing an aria.
“I mean to say the loss of West Virginia is an inconceivable calamity.”
“Never believe it.”
The captain only bowed.
“One thing, Captain,” Hugh said, looking gravely at the officer’s lively face, “more people are beginning to see now that the war will not be a matter of a few months.”
“Most statesmen thought it would be only a matter of ninety days or so,” said the captain, vaguely; he had just noticed that his feet fitted exactly into a wreath in the velvet carpet. “It is a fact, however,” he went on, now lively again, “that General Lee knew better, and even better the United States Commander-in-chief, 300,000 men, plus an able general, might carry off the business, he said, I mean General Winfield Scott.”
Nobody replied at once to this remark of the captain’s.
“I don’t fancy my brother Edward at Woodville will be flattered to hear so, but he has held to the same opinion—he and General Scott are the same age. This war we are in may last a long time.”
“By the way, sir,” the captain said, “that reminds me. One of the pleasures of this visit was to deliver a message from my mother. She used to know General Scott very well, when he was stationed down here at Washington, a young man, fifty years ago.”
“Our Montrose Arabians,” said Hugh politely, “all go back to one brought down from Kentucky for a present to General Scott when he should pass through after the war in Mexico.”
The captain went on to say that his mother had received a letter from General Scott. As a friend not unmindful of the past, he deplored the tragic chances of war in this country and could only regret that his decision was in favor of the Union, against Secession, and contrary to some of his kinsmen. “And so my mother asked me to tell you this,” said the captain.
“Thank you.”
“Valette, child,” Mrs. Bedford said quickly, trying to rush into the breach, “it’s nigh the moment we set out for home. No use trying to do anything about General Scott, I suppose.” She went on impishly. “Not a bit of use. Nisi Dominus, frustra, as Pa used to tell us, which means ‘unless God did it, you’re wasting your time.’ Pa would say it when we tried to bleach or make ourselves pretty, Nisi Dominus, frustra! Honestly, if Latin phrases left a bruise when they hit you, by the time Pa was through with us we’d all been black and blue.”
Captain Derosse was lost again in his feet on the carpet pattern when he heard Lucy saying, “I’ll tell you, Captain——”
“Do, please,” he said.
“Papa is mild as cream when he gives an opinion, but I think I know mighty well what he’d at least like to say.”
“And what would that be?”
“To send his compliments to your mother. But otherwise as for General Winfield Scott to tell her that it’s all very well what General Scott says about war and that it might be known to her already that General Scott’s Papa’s cousin.”
“But certainly,” said the captain, blushing very red, “that’s why she sent the message.”
“Papa’s mother having been Nancy Scott of Portobello, eight miles out from Williamsburg, Virginia, and that General Scott can go to the devil.”
“Lucy, my dear!” her mother cried, reprovingly.
“Was I the one or was it Papa ordered the old fool’s portrait down off the wall there?” said Lucy.
The captain had gone into uncontrollable laughter. To tell the truth, it was exactly what his mother thought, too, he said; he would give her the message.