DURING the siege of Vicksburg General Grant lost his false teeth. He put them into the washbowl for the night and a negro steward threw them out with the water next morning into the river. His dentist at home, Doctor Hamlen, was sent for, and very soon afterward he was “authorized to practice his profession anywhere within this military command.” In due time this brought him to a visit among the Federals stationed at Natchez. So that when one hot August night Miss Whipple, the little Iowa seamstress, had knocked her front teeth out against a closet door, she went straight off to her countrymen’s headquarters and asked for the dentist. The set of teeth turned out not to fit very well, perhaps, or it may have been too large; however that was, from then on her expression was changed. What had been a bitten-in and cautious mouth was now always on the point of a smile.
It very likely altered Miss Whipple’s sense of herself, seeing herself both in her mirror and from the eyes of other people with that pleasing readiness about the lips. At any rate she began to be agreeable. She even gave up saying Mac Gee Hee on cloudy mornings or when she felt annoyed. The upshot was that a mature German sergeant named Bonn, billeted at Weymouth Hall, whom she had met in town during a military parade, began to call on her at Montrose, and asked her to marry him, which she did, with an army chaplain performing the ceremony, and then returned to announce her news, in the course of the evening, to the McGehees. If, according to any social code they had ever heard of, the information was to come like that, it was about on the level with the darkies’ little affairs, and so they took it. And Sergeant Bonn’s enlistment period being presently up, Miss Whipple went away with him North. During the decade of 1850 more than a million Germans had emigrated to the United States and he had many friends settled around Lake Michigan.
And so with Miss Whipple gone, there were no longer any of their outsiders at Montrose. Mr. Munger, his health greatly restored, had joined the army at Vicksburg as a chaplain or preacher. Little Mr. Trippler had written several letters since his return to Providence. He had learned that a letter—unsealed, of course, ten cents—could be enclosed in an envelope directed to General Benjamin Hager, Commander of Confederates, Norfolk, Virginia, enclosed in another envelope directed to General Wood, Fortress Monroe. But Mr. Munger had not communicated at all with Montrose; he had only sent a tract of his own writing and evidently meant to be distributed among the soldiers in camp. The envelope with the tract was addressed to Hugh McGehee, Esquire. It began, “Unsaved friend”; and asked him to pause in his hasty course and take one honest look into the future. He should put his finger on his pulse, count his heartbeats for a little while, and meditate on the fact that every heart throb is one more measure of the time before he has to meet with God. If he was under any delusion that God was going to be lenient, wake up; God would settle yet for the murder of Jesus Christ, and Hell was yawning to swallow up the wicked. Have you thought of salvation? the tract asked.
These were the questions put to Hugh by his two-years’ guest. “Do you know,” he said, when the servants were out of earshot and he had read the tract aloud to Agnes and Lucy, “I thought of one thing; how Mac Bedford would have enjoyed it. It reminds me of that day we were at Portobello and Malcolm had taken a notion——”
“He’d taken a toddy is what Uncle Mac had taken,” said Lucy, “and you know it, Papa.”
“Well, both. A toddy and a notion, then, to quote Gibbon’s saying that all religions are equally true to a believer, equally useful to a ruler, equally interesting to a philosopher.”
“Poor Brother,” Agnes said. “It’s not for us to know, I know; but I believe he is in heaven, bless his soul! At any rate, the difference is Mr. Munger hasn’t got any soul.”
“What are you perusing, Lucinda?” said her father, glancing from the tract, which he was reading again and chuckling over.
“It’s Cud’n Cynthia Eppes’ Creole recipe for eggplant. I’m tired of it plain. You take thick slices with a little water till they are cooked done. Then you make a thick sauce of tomatoes with bayleaf, majoram, eschallots, and butter, and pour it over, then let it bake slowly in the oven awhile.”
“Have you thought of salvation, Lucy?” said her father.
“What I’ve thought,” she said, mischievously and elaborately turning down the page where the recipe was, as if she were laying a plot, “is we made a mistake not having more cooking like this for Mr. Munger. It might have killed him. Cud’n Abe would be good for Brother Munger; you know the time they said Cud’n Abe drank so much peach brandy that he tried to pull his hat off with a boot-jack.”
“Lucy, Lucy,” her mother cried, “what a mind you have, child!”
“You’re laughing yourself, Mamma.”
“Well, of course.”
Meanwhile the scandal of General Butler’s New Orleans administration had spread up the river country, over the South and into Europe. In April the year before the Federal gunboats had passed the forts at the Mississippi’s mouth and taken that city hidden in the smoke of cotton bales set fire to on the wharves. Benjamin F. Butler, a Massachusetts lawyer and political schemer, had pulled wires to such effect that the Lincoln government had appointed him major-general; he was now military governor of New Orleans. He studied certain of the great contractors who were cheating the Union at Washington out of millions, and the generals who were stealing Southern cotton in their own behalf; and before long his brother joined him and sold contraband supplies to the Confederates for cotton and sugar in exchange, with immense profits. The general himself was robbing banks, robbing houses, shipping out his booty—Silver Spoons Butler, Beast Butler, they said in New Orleans and all the way up the river. It was well known that Mr. Lincoln, at least until after the coming presidential election, was afraid to tamper with him.
Agnes McGehee liked sometimes to go and sit on the bench in the Montrose graveyard. She would put on a white dress and go sit there alone. There was nothing morbid about it, she merely liked to be there, quietly among those she had loved. It was a kind of celebration of their memories.
One day as Agnes came along the path from the graveyard and had stopped to look at the amaryllis beds, she saw a young soldier standing at the gate, half hidden among the laurels, as if he tried both to watch the house and at the same time not be spied by any one coming from the highway. She remembered having seen the figure before like this, but was too used to soldiers and strangers nowadays to have thought much about it. However, she said to the soldier that she had seen him before.
“Yes, Mrs., this is three times I’ve been here,” he said, touching his cap, on which she saw he had lately shined up the buttons, “but couldn’t find the coast clear. Mrs., don’t ask me anything.” The soldier told her then that he had lately come up on a troop steamboat from New Orleans and had brought a small packet for her, he had given his promise to someone. He put the packet into Agnes’ hand and turned quickly away, cutting through the bushes and off through the grove; the packet was wrapped in green paper tied with a cord, heavily sealed.
Agnes went directly to her room, locked the door and opened the parcel. It was Charlie Taliaferro’s picture. The miniature of a little boy with black hair, in a green velvet jacket. Two of the diamonds in the oval of the frame had been pried out, the settings were scratched as if with a jackknife and the back of the miniature had a dent in it.
“Poor Charlie!” Agnes said to herself. Then she thought of his father and Lucy. “If I sent it to Cud’n Shelt he’d just break his heart over it, or right now he would, poor old thing, and the darkies would steal it. If I show it to Lucy—no—some day—” To Lucy it might mean—To Edward’s mother——
She stood there so long, leaning over the miniature where it lay on her table, that the light was fading from the windows. The little boy’s face in the frame had gone from the midst of the diamonds, which still sparkled in the sultry light. It could have been any child’s face. “In the gloaming, O my darling—” but that was only a song people sang. She took the miniature over to her desk, sprung the secret drawer, laid the green wrapping in and put the locket on top, scarcely even wondering who it was that had sent it, and when she had locked the desk, turning directly to go downstairs to the others.