AFTER the burning of Montrose the McGehees moved into a cottage two or three hundred yards from the house. It consisted of five rooms partly of logs, and was known as Don’s Retreat. Markings on some of the timbers showed that they had once been part of a ship. This house had been there as far back as any one could remember, and was thought to be of the Spanish times. It stood behind a small wood of holly trees and magnolias, invisible from the old house but touching on the garden. Into this the sofa and four chairs were put and the concert piano, with five blankets, which, after other beds and mattresses had been lent from Monmouth and Arlington, made up the furnishings.
When the negro regiment had gone, and the fire died down that day at Montrose, Confederate stragglers returned and helped Hugh when he went through the quarters to find what had been secreted there. They found Agnes’ wedding dress, her embroidered purse or handkerchief bag, but not the veil, and some of Hugh’s clothing. In the ashes of Montrose itself they found one chocolate cup of Dresden, the roses on it still fresh though the handle was gone.
Presently the carriage was brought back. Black Dave, the driver, had removed the taps from the wheels, and after dragging it as far as the gate the soldiers had abandoned it. The Montrose silver had been spared. William Veal told nobody where he had hidden it. On the eleventh, five days after the fire, Belle’s child was born, a girl; and the day following died and was buried in the Montrose graveyard to the left of Edward; the space on his right was for his father and mother. On a small headstone brought out from Natchez, they had the words carved, “We shall not forget thee, nor shall God forsake thee, in the peace of love.” Agnes wrote down these words for the stonemason in Natchez; and the old man himself, whose son had died in the Federal prison at Alton, Illinois, though the words were of love, cursed the invaders and wished the blackest hell on them.
The negro guards whom the major put over the belongings saved from the Montrose fire had broken open the trunks and distributed the contents among whatever slaves would promise to leave the plantation. The Federals had established not only the stockades by the river for such negroes, but had also had put some of them in Natchez houses. The Confederate Major-General Martin’s house had been looted and turned over to scalawags and blacks. The chandeliers and mirrors were smashed, and horses were stalled in the drawing-rooms. Wagons and harness had been collected from Montrose as had been done from the surrounding plantations; and what was not wanted for Federal purposes had been burned.
During the week word came from Woodville that Edward McGehee’s house had suffered almost exactly the same treatment. Bowling Green had been sacked and burned by a negro company under Colonel Osborn, commanding the Third Brigade U. S. Cavalry, Eleventh and Fourth Illinois, colored, and mostly full of grog. A letter came from Mary McGehee describing it.
On December 31, Saturday night, Agnes McGehee sat down to write in her journal. When she was a girl her Grandmother Randolph one day had taken her into the library and read aloud passages out of letters from her cousin, Thomas Jefferson, to prove what the cultivation of one’s talents may do; and from this had argued for the keeping of a diary. This diary, long abandoned in the busy Montrose days, had perished in the fire. And now, confined as she was to the small house, with few duties any more, Agnes began the writing down of notes. There was no volume like the old one presented by her grandmother, bound in purple velvet with a medallion of painted Dresden set in, and gilt edges; she pasted the new pages into an old garden book from the bottom of one of the trunks. She liked at times to write. Indeed there were moments when she thought herself too pleased over some passage that she had composed, and feared lest her conscience should reproach her for vanity and pride.
Lucy had been sent to one of the places belonging to the Miles McGehees, in the pine wood country; the trouble in her lungs was gone. Stella had returned to Baton Rouge. Hugh McGehee, a lonely man, moving gently among his guests when there were guests at Don’s Retreat, wishing them to enjoy the moment, grave and gentle himself, sat not rarely in silence. Lately he had had a letter from Duncan and talked of him a good deal. Southern cavalrymen supplied their own horses, and Duncan’s Arabian was shot under him a few weeks after Yellow Tavern. Duncan wrote in the letter of Stuart’s death at Yellow Tavern and of his white plume and yellow sash and gold spurs, trying to make up in spirit for his cavalry what they lacked in resources. The dismounted men of the cavalry, unable to find horses for themselves, went into Company Q, a hash of good cavalrymen, derelicts and riff-raff. Duncan had no mind to be one of them, and for that matter he scorned, when Stuart was gone, to follow any other cavalry leader. Four or five months now he had been one of General Lee’s sharpshooters. And that night he had gone to bed soon after supper.
“The last night of the old year,” Agnes wrote in the journal, “and almost the last hour of that night! What thronging memories crowd upon me! And how far removed I seem to be from this night one year ago. Is it wrong this yearning for home? I stretch out my arms toward the home that was mine, with a feeling of desire and love and hopelessness. Is this sinful? I am thankful for the fire this bitter December, for the food that sustains me, for the presence of my husband. This evening I have lived over the past year. I think I can say ‘I submit,’ that I give up all will of my own, and do honestly and truly say ‘on God’s anvil to be laid.’
“From room to room I have passed—in memory—I turn to our own chamber—that sweet, bright, quiet room—whose east windows looked out on the beech woods and admitted the first ruddy glow of the winter morning, as it brightened the orchard boughs, and from which at night I always glanced up to watch for the Pleiades and Orion’s constellation. How often the heavy and motionless leaves of the cucumber tree reminded me of a tree carved in stone. I see it tonight. I smell the south wind with the odors of roses and heliotrope in the garden. I see the moon too, and the clouds as they sometimes hid her from sight or sometimes formed a majestic pavilion around her. A thousand thousand times I have thrilled with pleasure as I traced the shadows of tree and shrub, blackening the grass and making brighter by contrast the silvery light beyond.
“This was Edward’s room, and in the next room his books, some of them marked, some of them——”
She had not the heart to finish, but laid down the pen and pushed aside the ink-stand, the little bronze drum, which casual chance had saved from the wreck, with only a few of the gilt cards bent. She sat gazing at her fingers, as they lay on one of the other parts of the book, and beyond her fingers she saw the writing there. “November 29. We heard today of new orders in the town and that the Yankees had men on the roads coming this way. My husband was at Bayou Sara, where our plantation is falling to ruin, and we did not think it prudent to wait till he should return. We hastened to prepare for the coming soldiers. This was not easy, perched in this open field as Don’s Retreat is, and the negro quarters between us and the forest. We did what we could and waited, listening to the sound of negro voices mingled with the jangling of spurs and the clatter of sabres. I pictured to myself our former gardener Aleck, inflated with pride at his new dignity of corporal, coming in with insolence and insults demanding watches and money. This perpetually recurring dread and horror makes night a terror and life a torment. Oh, if we women and helpless old men and children were only where we might feel safe from negro insults, negro violence, and from the constant fear of these things! God help us—I look at the graves of our beloved ones and think with thankfulness of the rest which is theirs.”—New Year’s Eve, 1864——
She closed the book, already praying, her eyes fixed on the last embers of the fire, her whole body quiet with some strong force that made life dear to her—and believed that God saw in every heart its own sorrows.