THE laudanum prescribed by his doctor had put Malcolm into a sleep that the far-off noise of the guns on the river did not disturb; but Mrs. Quitman’s note a few hours after the bombardment was welcome. Mrs. Bedford learned from it that the children and Valette were safe, and callers told her what had happened in Natchez. The Federal armored gunboat, the Essex, anchored in the river, had started two small boats ashore. In Natchez the town guard, the Silver Grays, was largely old men and boys. Some of these, when they saw the boats on the river, ran to consult young Major Douglas Walworth; he was at home on sick leave, and for the moment at the dinner table. In spite of his protest they went to the landing and opened fire on the boat crews. The Essex retaliated by shelling the town. The shells fell everywhere, plenty of houses were hit; fires, broke out. The fires were worst in the town under the bluff, houses were burning there right and left.
But somebody up North had sold the government shells that would not explode, and after an hour the bombardment was obliged to stop.
Commander Porter of the Essex stated that he had sent ashore to get ice for the sick on board, and that two hundred citizens had attacked them scandalously, wounded the officers and killed one man. He therefore shelled the town, shooting, he said, at those who shot at him. In Natchez, besides the fires, a little girl had been killed by a flying piece of shell, Rosalie Beekman. When they came out of the house into the street, her father saw her fall. “Get up,” he said, and she said, “I’m killed.” He took her in his arms to the carriage, the blood running down over his clothes. The child’s screams could never be forgotten.
On the second day of July Malcolm Bedford merely said that they would leave the newspaper where it lay on the table, and his wife was glad, for it announced a truce between the Vicksburg armies to discuss the terms of the surrender. Lately the sick man’s mind had turned away from the military to the more human side of that siege, and he spoke of how, during his days at Vicksburg, the two lines would declare a truce and come out to eat the blackberries, which were good for their dysentery. At night, sometimes, men from the two armies would come out of the trenches, shake hands and sit talking together. They spoke to each other of their homes and of their troubles. They judged their leaders, the jealousy between McClernand, who was a good talker and not a bad officer, and Grant, who was kind and simple-minded but could stick at it, plus Sherman, who blustered, stood by Grant, was red-headed and hasty, but pretty straight at that. None of these three generals, the soldiers used to say, was a fine strategist like that chilly Johnston, who had to carry the burden of Pemberton on his shoulders. They told stories on these leaders.
“Darlin’,” Sallie Bedford said, drying his forehead of the cold sweat that broke out now at any time. “You know as well as I do it’s the ordinary mortal that gets driven to the shambles. Nothing new about that. Why don’t you try and go to sleep?”
“I don’t care about Grant’s whisky and I don’t care about his military skill, or Pemberton’s being a fool. What I care about—” He began to speak of the soldiers who had to bear the brunt of what these men did and of the officials in Richmond and Washington. At other times that day he rambled on about the pillaging and burning and what his people had to suffer from the Yankees. He had heard the bluecoats tell of their feasts, the ducks, guineas, hams, cordials, the whisky and wine, the molasses, and of the houses burnt. For thirty miles around, the Jackson country was a nightmare to look at. Peering furiously about the room, Malcolm would begin accounts of horrors he had seen with his own eyes, but often the story broke off, his lips moved for a moment and then stopped, and he lay with his mouth open and his nostrils quivering.
Sallie Bedford, sitting by him, keeping the trundle-bed slightly swinging, heard all this in agony. Once she laid her finger on his lips. If only Duncan were at home! But how could that be? Malcolm brushed the finger aside, and found a loud voice.
“Yes, and what’s war to you? It’s like a woman, everything’s personal. Everything’s the same importance. The moon or a button, all’s the same.”
“Oh, Darlin’, very well, lay on, MacDuff! Go on, give it to the women!”
Her pitiful air of laughing away the hate he felt toward her only provoked him further. He half sat up on the bed but sank quickly back, speaking between his teeth. “Why in hell’s name are you so busy? Always running an infernal house! If you’d sit still a minute and think—” He shut his eyes, and the tears ran down over his cheeks to the pillow. His hand, when she raised it to her face, left hers and tried to caress her head, but there was no other sign from him; and for the first time since she had been nursing him she broke down into loud sobbing.
The next morning Malcolm made a gesture for his wife to come to him, drew her down and kissed her, and when she asked how he felt, pretended he was much better. He forced the hand that clasped hers to show a strong grip. She was so far persuaded of this that she changed her mind and decided that Dock on his trips to town should wait till tomorrow or next day to call Doctor Martin. But when the newspaper came with the brief despatch of the fall of Vicksburg, she did not take it upstairs. The stronghold of the Confederacy in the west had fallen, 31,600 prisoners, 172 cannon, 60,000 muskets.
At eleven o’clock, when he had drunk a little of the rose cordial in water, Malcolm asked for the children and was told again that the doctor had sent them away until his fever was past. When his wife told him this he shook his head, refusing to look at her. He knew that he was dying, but it seemed farther and farther from his thoughts in the midst of the death struggle between the South and the North. Some time later she was standing by the window counting the number of powders left to be given him, when she thought she heard him speak.
“Mary Hartwell,” he said, in a low, passionate voice.
With a passionate tenderness of her own she accepted it. “Yes, Darlin’.”
She was no longer jealous. He had loved this other woman, but he loved her, too; he loved her, too, and she would not be such a fool as to refuse to know that he must have loved her.
He was reaching now for her hand. “Wife?”
“Yes, my darlin’.”
“Sallie, I couldn’t have lived without you, dearest.”
“Well, if you’ll just sleep—just go to sleep.”
He frowned, smacking his shrunken lips as if to moisten them. Then he tried to say something to her but only mumbled.
“Darlin’—dearest—tell me, what is it?”
He gazed steadily into her eyes, mumbling a few more words. Then he suddenly spoke quite distinctly.
“Where’s your breastpin?”
She looked over toward the dressing-table, where the old brooch with its leaves twisting around a column, must be.
“You always wear it,” he said. “Where is it?”
“Yon ’tis, precious, I’ll get it.”
“Now that’s better,” he said, fixing his eyes on the brooch that she had pinned at her throat. “You always wear it.”
She sat down quietly, hoping to calm him, but was astonished at his strength when he began to speak of Vicksburg, cursing at Pemberton and Grant, until suddenly his voice gave out and he closed his eyes, the tears trickling down his cheeks. Then his eyes opened and he looked at her, angrily trying to move his lips. She understood that he meant for her to wipe away the tears.
“Thank you,” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “Thank you for everything.”
“Oh, Darlin’, I haven’t done anything,” she murmured, leaning down to put her cheek against his. He only turned away his face, shutting his eyes, and then a moment later turned to look up at her, as if to say, “What is there more to say? Before I can close my eyes at last? Do you want me to say anything else?”
A long while after that, it seemed to him, he must have asked again for the children; he heard his wife’s voice saying, as the air from the gently swinging trundle-bed passed over him, “Now that you’re so much better this morning, just wait a teenie bit longer, and you’ll be up, and the chillun playin’ with you.”
“Sallie, if I should die,” he began slowly, “what do you think?”
She knew he meant to ask what she thought of the soul after death, and that, counting on the change in herself since Rosa’s death, he wanted her to say that all those who love each other will meet again. But he must not be excited. She was startled by his shining eyes, looking as if they saw the very depths of her. Long ago his eyes had shone like that—and yet not quite. She felt his hand stroking hers.
“Darlin’, why think you’re goin’ to die? But, since you ask what I think, I say I’d ask you to find Pa in heaven. I’d ask you to tell him to be good to my Abner.” Abner Francis was the little boy she had lost, two years younger than Duncan. “You could just tell Pa,” she added.
A twinkle came into the dilated eyes: he remembered the obituaries he had written of her father: “Whereas of stature lofty and splendid intellect, Colonel Lucius Quintus Cassius Tate—” It was all he could remember now. His brain felt tired out with the effort. He had known his wife’s pompous father, whom her mother beheld as a god, and had finally decided that women admire in their own way, nothing else to be said. He would not mention the old colonel’s obituaries now—yes, at one place or another he had put, “Canst thou draw leviathan out with an hook?” Yes, that was it to a T. What a thought it was, drawing out old Colonel Leviathan with a hook!
Then he thought drolly, “I’ve never got an obituary written for myself after all.”
“You rascal,” his wife said, so happy at seeing him smile that she forgot everything else, “here you are talking away about dyin’ and you are so much better you can laugh. You certainly are a case, Malcolm Bedford! So you’ve got to entertain us now, or we’ll just leave you, yes, sir, and where’d you be in no time?”
“Then listen here,” he said, refreshed by the happy sound in her voice and noticing at that moment Dock, who had come to relieve her, “You let Dock take care of me and you go get The Gazette and we’ll see what’s happened.”
When she was gone, he turned to the Indian: “See here, Dock, you’re worth a thousand dead Chickasaws—” he used the old saying from the days he and Dock had hunted together, but his eyes were fixed intently on the Indian—“do me a favor. Go look on that window pane, the left, the top. And spell me what you see there.”
The Indian, shading his eyes against the afternoon glare, spelt out the name on the pane: Mary Hartwell.
“1832,” Dock read.
“I’m obliged to you. Come sit down here.”
When his wife entered the door she saw his eyes watching for her. He kept them on her face, with a look of love and trust. He said nothing, but raised his index finger as if to warn her she should read him the news. She read only the line that said Vicksburg had fallen; then she paused to look at him. The fact seemed slowly taking hold on his mind. She heard him give a moan and then a sort of whimper, as he turned his face away.
From that time on for eleven days Malcolm’s eyes were closed. “Darlin’, General Lee is back in Virginia, I’m glad to know,” Mrs. Bedford said one morning after the newspaper had come. But she did not mention that Natchez had been occupied, not to speak of ten thousand bales of cotton having been captured that day by a Federal garrison. He opened his eyes but made no reply.
“There’s no use in my coming,” the doctor said. “It’s just that way, no use at all.”
Just before sundown on the day when Malcolm lay dying, Sallie Bedford saw from the window their negroes going across the garden. They were making their way from the quarters to the carriage gate. She knew what it was; there had been, what little time she had had downstairs, a curious air of whispering and insolence lately about the place. They were leaving. That was why when she went down for the newspaper the kitchen part of the house had been so still. She stood at the window and watched the negroes, recognizing one and then another. She saw, also, two or three strangers among them, negro men, that she had never seen before. They were on their way to the stockades that had been established on the river flats below the town, for slaves fleeing from their masters to the protection offered by the Union. Reports had come from Jackson of the ten miles of negroes deserting the plantations to follow General Sherman toward Vicksburg, when it should surrender. In the Natchez stockade crowds of runaways were already huddled together, under the protection of a Federal gunboat. Once in, it was not easy to leave; permission had to be secured from Washington and that took time. Already, in the heat, disease had broken out and the negroes were dying, sometimes at the rate of a hundred a day.
As Mrs. Bedford heard Dock in the hall downstairs shutting and bolting the doors to the house, she reminded herself that old Mary and French Nancy and some of the darkey children would be left behind at the quarters and she found herself thinking that one or another of their negroes would not be found among those leaving. Then she saw Mammy among those in the rear.
The figure on the trundle-bed had scarcely stirred. Now and then his wife saw a quick spasm pass over his body. She was only waiting for the end.
Shortly after midnight, she saw that it was death and no longer the motionless silence, and that the eyelids were only half open in a glazed stare at the candlelight. So Darlin’ was gone, and the world had changed. It was all over. Everything was changed. The hour would strike and there Were things for her to do, since nobody else was left at Portobello to help with anything. She washed and dressed him, took a linen handkerchief from a box to tie up the chin, and pressed down the eyelids till they were set. She put a clean sheet on the bed, and called Dock, who lifted the body on it. She told him then to take away the trundle-bed and to wait downstairs in the library. When that was done she sat down at the bed’s head, where Malcolm lay under the high red satin tester, looking taller than in life.
“If I was proud I asked no more of others than I did of myself,” said the proud, white, dead face.
She took a seat beside him and the great bed, sitting there small and frail like a child. “I couldn’t cry to save my life,” she thought, “I just haven’t any tears, I reckon.”
She did not touch the body.
“Where could Darlin’ be now?”
At daylight she went downstairs to the kitchen to get breakfast for Dock, who would have to saddle the mule and go to town. She took him in to the dining-room table, paying no attention to the surprise and awe on his face at being seated there, and stood watching him eat, and went to fill his cup again with coffee, but did not sit down with him. Valette and the children must come home now; and all day friends and Malcolm’s kin would be driving out to Portobello.