Now this was a very clever thing for Miss Martha to say, since it flatters Alice no end to be thought a temptress and as for Emily, it was probably just about the greatest compliment she had ever been paid. Emily is not an exceptionally ugly girl, but she is obviously a very plain person of the sort my father used to describe as having been born to be someone’s maiden aunt. Also if Emily did not drive boys away with her unattractive appearance, she certainly would do so with her tongue. No one, unless he was completely witless, would want to spend his entire life taking orders from and being continually corrected by Emily Stevenson.
I don’t suppose Miss Martha was intending to include me in the enchantress category, since I assumed I would be considered by experts in such matters to be either too young or too small to tempt anyone. Not that I’m really interested in such things, thank you.
Well, no matter. Miss Martha left the room and the others turned their attention once again to McBurney, who was starting another performance of his coughing and choking, out of jealousy this time, possibly, because our thoughts had strayed from him. Therefore, while the others were fussing over him, I decided to follow Miss Martha anyway for a quick peek at the cavalrymen, because for one thing I have many relatives in Mississippi and I thought one of these boys might quite possibly be my cousin Geoffrey or my cousin Edmond from Biloxi.
Well, it wasn’t. It was just two weary-looking country boys who were coming out of the kitchen still chewing on biscuits and cold turnips with Mattie behind, escorting them along. They were so ragged and dirty I’m sure their fine families would never have recognized them at their own front doors and they were so skinny in the bargain, I’ll bet you could have taken off their coats and shirts and counted every one of Mattie’s turnips and biscuits inside them.
I was standing on a lower step on the stairs, where it curves, peering over the rail at them as they said their farewells to Miss Martha at the door. Then I heard a noise beside me and turned to find Miss Edwina Morrow. In the excitement we had forgotten all about her.
“Are they taking Corporal McBurney with them?” she whispered.
“No,” I said softly, “we decided to keep him.”
“What do you mean ‘we’? I wasn’t asked.”
“That’s your fault,” I said. “You shouldn’t have been so rude and rushed away from the table.”
Miss Martha evidently heard one of us talking—it might have been me—and turned then to scowl at us over the shoulder of one cavalryman.
“You’re sure everything’s all right here, ma’am? There’s nothing we can do for you?” This was from the captain, or at least I assumed he was the officer because his coat had more buttons on it than the other’s, and was not worn quite so badly at the elbows. “If you’re afraid of being molested by the Yankees, we maybe could spare a few of our boys to sleep in your barn for a night or two,” he continued. “We could send one or two of them up here right now.”
“I wouldn’t mind staying on here with the ladies, captain,” the sergeant volunteered. “In fact all of you could just go on ahead and I’d catch up with you in a few days—soon as everything was safe around here. I could just unroll my blanket right here in this hallway.”
“You’re very kind,” said Miss Martha, “but we couldn’t let you do that. We cannot take you from your duties in the field.”
“Oh, it might even be some advantage to us, ma’am,” said the captain, “having somebody behind General Grant keeping an eye on him, least ’til we see what he has in mind. In fact maybe I ought to stay on here myself, sergeant, and you could ride back to the road and tell the colonel what I’m aiming to do.”
“No, no,” said Miss Martha very firmly. “I cannot permit it. One or two of you would be no protection against the whole Yankee army and your presence might just call attention to us and provoke them into setting fire to the place. Thank you for your kind interest, gentlemen. Good night.”
“I’d be proud to pay my compliments to your students,” said the captain.
“Thank you again. I’ll tell them.”
“There was singing before, wasn’t there,” said the sergeant wistfully. “I enjoy good singing.”
“I’m sure you do,” Miss Martha said. “I would have guessed that instantly. Good night, gentlemen. God be with you. Good night.” And she all but pushed them out the door and slammed it after them.
“How come you did that?” Mattie asked her. “Even if you didn’t want to say nothin about the Yankee, it don’t seem to me it would’ve hurt to let one or two of them stay in the barn.”
“You’re forgetting that the Yankee is fairly helpless at present and they are not,” said Miss Martha. “Also when I didn’t tell them about him immediately it didn’t seem wise to let them find out about him now. We are not that far from Washington here, you know. There have been known abolitionists and Yankee sympathizers in this region and General Lee’s army can burn houses and commit other depredations as well as General Grant’s.”
“I could’ve sworn to them you weren’t no abolitionist.”
“Don’t be impudent!”
“You may find out later you made a big mistake.”
“If I do, I will take the consequences,” Miss Martha said. “I know I made one great mistake in not selling you South years ago when I could have made a dollar on you!”
Then she opened the front door again and followed the soldiers out, announcing that she was going to make sure they left our premises without taking our pony and cow along. Mattie wasn’t too disturbed by Miss Martha’s remarks because she gets that sort of thing all the time.
“That poor lady just don’t trust nobody,” Mattie declared.
“With one exception,” Edwina said. “She has evidently decided to trust Corporal McBurney.”
“Would you have voted for his staying here, if you had been with us earlier, Edwina?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “I like him, I think . . . but I’m not sure that his staying here will be a good thing for him . . . or for us.”
Well naturally if everyone else at the school was in favor of something Edwina would have to be opposed to it. It was very unusual, however, to hear her say she liked anyone or anything. I don’t ever remember hearing her make such a remark before and as far as I know, she never made it again, even about McBurney.
We went back to the parlor then, where I was reprimanded for disobeying orders, first by Miss Harriet and later by Miss Martha when she returned from outside. This is the price one must pay for independence and I have learned to put up with it. I don’t know what else anyone could expect from a member of a family which my father says has a history of arguing with the headsman even while the blade is falling. I am just a person who has always been accustomed to making up her own mind—if the truth must out, my own dear mother and I quite often disagreed over this and it happens to be one big reason I am in attendance at this isolated Protestant school—and I am too set in my ways now to ever change them.
I mentioned this out of the side of my mouth to Corporal McBurney. It was after Miss Martha had ended her lecture and Miss Harriet had gone back to the harpsichord. I also asked him how he was planning to repay my goodness.
“How’s that again, little darlin?”
“You said a while ago you hoped you could repay my goodness someday.”
“Oh yes,” he muttered. “Well then, when’s your birthday?”
“July eighteenth.”
“The same month as mine. Mine’s the third of July. All right then, you’ll get a fine present on your birthday as a reward for being so nice to me.”
“What sort of present will it be?”
“Oh I can’t tell you that. It’s going to be a surprise.”
Well I couldn’t imagine where he was planning to get this wonderful present since there are no good shops of any kind nearer than
Richmond, and he didn’t seem to have brought anything of any value with him. However I didn’t consider it mannerly to question him any further and also there was no immediate opportunity because the singing was about to begin again.
For the first selection after the intermission we had a volunteer solo by Miss Emily Stevenson who sang Somebody’s Darling which, if you are not familiar with it, is a fairly recent and very sad song about a young soldier with blue eyes and curly hair who is dying in a hospital. Emily, I can tell you, brings nothing but enthusiasm to any song she attempts but this particular number is so very sad, I suppose it would cause tears to flow if it were performed by a flock of crows.
We had hardly recovered from Emily’s selection when Corporal McBurney offered to try something similar which it seems is popular with the Union troops. This one was called Just Before The Battle, Mother and it told the story of a young man who was preparing to go into battle, apparently without any hope of surviving, and was thinking that he would much rather be at home with his mother than where he was, which I guess was a natural enough desire under the circumstances.
Corporal McBurney really had a surprisingly good tenor voice together with a very dramatic way of rendering a sad song and as a result we had just about all broken down by the time he reached the final chorus and that included Miss Martha Farnsworth, Miss Edwina Morrow—and believe it if you can—me. I don’t know when I ever wept before at an evening song recital but I must admit I was sobbing right along with the loudest of them on that occasion.
Well, McBurney paused only briefly to survey the destruction he had wrought and then began a very brisk and jolly number, without accompaniment this time, since Miss Harriet’s eyes were too wet to see the keyboard. Now, amazingly, this second song seemed so funny and McBurney himself was so comical as he sang it, making all sorts of exaggerated faces and at one point leaning precariously over the back of the settee in the manner of an intoxicated Irishman, that we all just turned instantly from tears to laughter. I don’t suppose the song really was so awfully clever—in fact I heard Miss Harriet say some time later that she thought it rather vulgar, except of course on that evening she laughed as hard as anyone else, even while she was still mopping her eyes from the Mother number—but McBurney just performed it like a veteran of the music halls.
If I can recall it went something like this—in McBurney’s brogue, of course.
Arrah, none of your boardin school misses,
Your sweet, timid craythurs for me,
Who rave about cupid and blisses,
Yet know not what ayther may be;
I don’t feel at all sintimintal,
For romance I care niver a rap,
But give me a plump, jolly and gintle
Young widdy in weeds and a cap.
Oh her thremors o’ girlhood are over,
Love’s blossom has ripened to fruit,
And her first love, asleep under clover,
Is the sile where my passion sthrikes root.
It is pleasant to know the departed
Was so tindherly cared to the last,
And that she will not die broken-hearted
If I should pop off just as fast!
There was much more of it but that is all I can recall right now.
After that, Alice, who loiters at the gate so much she knows all the marching songs, struck out with Yellow Rose of Texas and Goober Peas with the rest of us trailing along where we could, and following that Edwina, whom we also found to have a nice clear little voice and who had never bothered to exhibit it much at prior singing sessions, offered us a solo version of Virginia, Virginia, The Land of the Free, and then blushed so much when she was finished that I just felt awfully sorry for her.
Next Corporal McBurney announced that as far as he was concerned the greatest song of the entire war was Dixie and he led us in several rousing choruses of that which I’m sure must have rang in the ears of the poor cavalry sergeant were he as far away away already as the Orange Pike Road. And what may have seemed more unusual to that troop cavalry was the song we moved to next, John Brown’s Body, which Emily, in a burst of good will, suggested, and which we all went to as willingly as to any songs of our own.
Then our guest very generously called for a reprise of Bonny Blue Flag with which we really shook the rafters and finally we closed the evening with Home Sweet Home, which brought on the tears again but they were sort of smiling tears this time, if you know what I mean.
I don’t believe we ever sang so well or cried so much or felt so happy either before or after that particular evening. I must say in all honesty that the people in this school are not individually or as a group the greatest singers I have ever heard, but that evening I believe we could have brought down the house at the Opera in New Orleans.
Furthermore I think everyone here could testify that we never felt so warm and good and friendly to each other as we did on that night. Everyone was kissing and hugging everyone else and murmuring compliments about each other’s fine voice and remarking on each other’s particularly nice appearance, which it seemed everyone had just noticed for the first time—all this in a way that I would normally have found quite sickening, but on this occasion I was right up there in the thick of it myself, just jumping up and down in my eagerness to be nice to somebody, I just didn’t care who.
And of course Corporal McBurney was the hub of all this good fellowship. It seemed as though everyone present was standing in line to tell him what a marvelous singer and good Christian and brave young man he was, and similar loose statements like that, and if we all didn’t come right out and say them, I’m sure we all felt like it, because on that particular night we couldn’t possibly have seen anything wrong in Corporal McBurney. We were ready to trust him with our money and our virtue—those of us who had any—and our lives.
And he was enjoying it. He had probably never been such a center of attention before in his entire life as he had managed to become in one day and a half at this school. There was certainly no thought then in anyone’s mind of turning him over to our troops or to his own troops either, even when he had recovered. In those few hours he had made himself such a welcome member of our little band that, if he had played his cards carefully and kept us all in the spirit of that night, Corporal McBurney could have stayed with us forever.
But that is getting into another part of the story. The end of this part was our prayers, which went very smoothly for a change and in which McBurney participated as easily as though he had been born and raised a Protestant. When requests for blessings were invited by Miss Martha, he joined right in and asked for the Lord’s protection of everyone in the school who had been so good to him and then to embroider it a bit, for the Lord’s forgiveness of all the sinners in both armies, suggesting graciously that there probably were a lot more of them in his army than in ours. Well, it takes one to know one, as my father says.
Miss Martha responded generously with a request that the Lord watch over all the brave soldiers in both armies and that He especially guard and keep from harm our guest who was so far from home. To which we all added—oddly enough, it seems now—a very resounding Amen.
We were dismissed then in order that Miss Martha and Mattie might have a look at Corporal McBurney’s leg and prepare him for the night. None of us were exactly willing to break up such a happy gathering but when McBurney, who wisely seldom disagreed with authority in public, declared that he was very tired, we all very cheerfully took our leave of him.
“Well, your treasured woods specimen seems to have won all hearts here,” I remarked to my roommate, Amelia Dabney, as we went up the stairs. “I don’t think you need to worry about him. He certainly doesn’t lack for friends.”
“It doesn’t seem so, does it,” said Amelia. “However we must remember that it is easy to be friendly to a person when you have no personal reason to feel otherwise. We must keep that
in mind and stay on our guard so that we can help Corporal McBurney if he ever needs it.”
“Corporal McBurney can help himself a great deal,” I informed her, “if he minds his own business and doesn’t give people personal reasons to dislike him.”
And with that comment I went to bed. My last thought, I remember now, before I went to sleep was to wonder whether Miss Martha would remember to take her father’s old pistol back to her room with her when she retired. As I recalled, she had put the pistol on the parlor table when the singing began. I wondered now if she would forget that it was there, although Miss Martha was not the kind of person to forget much of anything. Perhaps, I thought, she will leave it there deliberately as evidence of her trust in Corporal McBurney, or even more likely, she might leave it there, unloaded maybe, in order to test him. She might have taken the charge out of it secretly and might be watching him now from behind the partly closed door to see if he will take the pistol and try to conceal it. But then I thought, Corporal McBurney may be every bit as clever as Miss Martha and will know that if the pistol is there, it is there for a reason and therefore he will not touch it.
With these speculations I fell asleep and by the next day I had forgotten all about the pistol myself.
Amelia Dabney
Corporal McBurney seemed to be improving rapidly from his severe wound and loss of blood. He grew stronger every day and before the week was out he was talking about getting up and trying to walk.
Miss Martha was opposed to this because she felt there had not been time for the splintered part of the bone to reknit and for the wound itself to heal properly. However, along about the sixth day, when it seemed he was determined to try it anyway, Miss Martha’s permission or no, she allowed Miss Harriet to fetch an old family cane for him and then we all stood around the settee holding our breaths while she and Mattie helped him to his feet.
The Beguiled Page 19
