Harriet Blair was seventeen when she went with her father and mother
and her brother Austen to New Orleans, to the marriage of an older
brother, Alexander, the father's business representative at that
place. It was characteristic of the Blairs that they declined the
hospitality of the bride's family, and from the hotel attended,
punctiliously and formally, the occasions for which they had come. It
takes ease to accept hospitality.
Alexander Blair, the father, banker and capitalist, of Vermont stock,
now the richest man in Louisville, was of a stern ruggedness
unsoftened by a long and successful career in the South, while his
wife, the daughter of a Scotch schoolmaster settled in Pennsylvania,
was the possessor of a thrifty closeness and strong, practical sense.
Alexander, their oldest son, a man of thirty, to whose wedding they
had come, was what was natural to expect, a literal, shrewd man, with
a strong sense of duty as he saw it. His long, clean-shaven upper lip,
above a beard, looked slightly grim, and his straight-gazing,
blue-grey eyes were stern.
The second son, Austen, was clean-featured, handsome and blond, but he
was also, by report, the shrewd and promising son of his father, even
as his brother was reported before him.
Harriet, the daughter, was a silent, cold-looking girl, who wrapped
herself in reserve as a cover for self-consciousness but, observing
closely, thought to her own conclusions. She had a disillusioning way
of baring facts in these communings, which showed life to her very
honestly but without romance or glamour.
At the wedding, sitting in her white dress by her father and mother in
the flower-bedecked parlours of the Randolphs, Harriet looked at her
brother, standing by the girl of seventeen whom he had just married,
and saw things much as they were. In Molly, the bride of an hour, with
her child's face and red-brown hair and shadowy lashes, she saw a
descendant of pleasure-loving, ease-taking Southerners. Molly's
father, from what Austen had said, was the dispenser of a lavish and
improvident hospitality and a genial dweller on the edge of
bankruptcy, while the mother, a belle of the '40's, some one had told
the Blairs, seemed just the woman to marry her only child to a man
opposed to her people in creed, politics and habits--which in 1860
meant something--but son of one of the richest men in the South.
Harriet ate her supper close by her father and mother. She did not
know how to mix with these gay, incidental Southerners, and sitting
there, went on with her communings. She could explain it on the
Randolph side, but why Alexander was marrying Molly she could not
understand. Shy and self-conscious, she knew vaguely of a thing called
love. She had met it in her reading rather than seen its acting forces
anywhere about her. To be sure, her brother Austen had been engaged to
a Miss Ransome of Woodford County, a fashionable Kentucky beauty. The
Blairs were a narrowly religious people. Harriet, a school-girl then,
had stood at the window of the stately new stone house in Louisville
which the Blairs called home, and, watching the fashionable world flow
in and out of the high old brick cottage across the street, where Miss
Ransome spent much time with a great-aunt, had wondered.
But love had not proved such a factor after all. Austen's engagement
had been broken.
Harriet went back to Kentucky with the question of Alexander and Molly
still open.
A year later her father went South again. War was loudly threatening,
and he had large interests in Louisiana and Mississippi. There was a
certain sympathy and understanding between the stern, silent man and
his daughter, and he suggested that she go with him and see the child
newly born to Alexander and Molly.
But, reaching New Orleans to find his son gone to Mobile, concerning
these same interests, Mr. Blair decided to join him, and Molly being
about to leave for her father's plantation with the baby and nurse,
that she might the more rapidly convalesce, it was decided that
Harriet accompany her.
The two weeks at Cannes Brulee were strange to the girl, thus
introduced to a Southern house overflowing with guests and servants,
and she moved amid the idling and irresponsibility, the laughter and
persiflage, with a sense of being outside of it all, and the fault,
try as she would, her own.
This feeling was strongest that Sunday afternoon when the gaiety and
badinage seemed to centre about a new arrival, a handsome,
silver-aureoled Catholic priest, confessor to half the parish. Genial,
polished, and affable, his very charm seemed to the Calvinistic-bred
Harriet to invest him the more with the seductions of Romanism, as
she had been taught to regard them.
There were music, cards, a huge bowl frosted with the icy beverage
within, and to the stunned young Puritan the genial little priest in
the midst seemed smiling a bacchanalian benediction over all.
Suddenly, above chatter and music Molly's voice arose, gay but
insistent, Molly there in the big chair, pale and big-eyed, her
strength so slow to return, herself a child in her little muslin
dress.
"Baby is four weeks old," Molly was declaring, "and here is Father
Bonot from service at Cannes Brulee and so with his vestments. I'm
here and Harriet's here, and mamma's here, and everybody else is a
cousin or something. I'm sure I don't know when I can get to church.
P'tite shall be baptized here, now."
And before the slower comprehension of the dazed Harriet had grasped
the meaning of the ensuing preparations--the draping of the
pier-table, the lighting of waxen candles--a sudden silence had
fallen; the gay abandon of these mercurial Southerners had given place
to reverent awe, even to tears, as the new-born representative of the
Puritan Blairs was brought in, in robes like cascades of lace, while
of all that followed, the one thing seeming to reach the comprehension
of Harriet was the chanting monotone of Father Bonot saying above the
child, "Mary Alexina--"
Later Molly and Harriet went back to New Orleans, to find Alexander
there but his father gone up to Vicksburg. Molly was to keep Harriet
with her until his return.
Only the girl knew what it meant to find herself near her brother. It
was as if here was something sane, rational, stable, by which to
re-establish poise and standards. Harriet would have trembled to
oppose her brother, so that to see Molly and Alexander together was a
revelation. His sternness and his displeasure alike broke as a wave
upon Molly, and as a wave receded, leaving her, as a wave would leave
the sand, pretty and sparkling and smiling. Other things were
revelations to Harriet, too.
Going down to breakfast one morning, she found her brother
clean-shaven, immaculate, monosyllabic, awaiting the overdue meal. The
French windows were open to the scent of myriads of roses outside, and
also to the morning sun, far too high. The negro servants were
hurrying to and fro, Molly nowhere visible.
Later, as the dishes were being uncovered, she appeared, her
unstockinged little feet thrust into pretty French slippers, and her
cambric nightgown by no means concealed by a negligee, all lace and
ribbons, hastily caught together. Yet she was pretty, pretty like a
lovely and naughty child.
Nor did the embarrassment of Harriet, the presence of the servants, or
her husband's cold preoccupation with his breakfast disturb Molly, who
trailed along with apparent unconcern until, reaching his elbow, she
threw a wicked glance at Harriet, then kissed him on that spot on his
head which, but for a few carefully disposed strands, must have been
termed bald.
At the thing, absurd as it was, there swept over Harriet the hot
shrinking of one made conscious of sex for the first time. With
throbbing at throat and ears, she gazed into her plate, her feeling,
oddly enough, centring in keen revulsion against her brother.
But Molly was dragging a chair to his elbow. "What's the fricassee
made of, Alexander?"
Her husband vouching her no reply, she slipped an arm about his neck,
and, leaning over, drew his fork to her mouth and tasted the morsel
thereon.
Then she turned her head sideways to regard him. "Don't frown it back,
Alec, the smile I mean. I adore you when you don't want to and have to
let it come. Acknowledge now, this is the way to breakfast."
And Harriet, who had been led to regard playfulness as little less
than vice, was conscious of Molly trying to force a ripe fig between
Alexander's lips, repressed, thin lips upon which softening sat as if
afraid of itself and her.
"You see," Molly was explaining, "I couldn't get down sooner. P'tite
was making the most absurd catches at her mosquito bar, and Celeste
refusing to laugh at her. You haven't finished your breakfast? Why
must you always hurry off? No"--her hand against his mouth, he, risen
now, she on a knee in her chair, clinging to him--"don't tell me any
more about Sumter having been fired upon, and your being worried over
business. I hate business. What's anything this moment, if you would
only see it, compared with me, and ripe figs dipped in cream?"
And then the triumph of her laugh as, his arms suddenly around her, he
grasped her, lifted, enfolded her for a moment, then as fiercely put
her from him and went out, leaving Harriet sick, shaken, at this sight
of human passion seen for the first time.
The following day Harriet's father returned and she went home.
When she next saw her brother it was in Louisville, where he was
driven back to his own people by reason of his Northern creed and
sympathies. His father-in-law had been among the first to fall in
defence of the Confederacy, and with Alexander, now, was his
mother-in-law, widowed and dependent, and a wife in this sense changed
from child to woman--that she was a fiercely avowed Southerner to the
fibre of her.
With his little family he remained in Louisville a year. If his own
people wondered at the extravagance of his wife and mother-in-law at a
time when incomes were so seriously shrunken, Alexander was too much a
Blair for even a Blair to approach the subject.
The child was sent daily to his mother's--he saw to that--a pretty
baby, the little Mary Alexina, and robed like a young princess; but
beyond this he seemed to discourage intimacy between the households.
Certainly there was no common ground, the business judgment, large
experience, and the integrity of the Blairs being in the constant
service of the government, while rumor had it that the home of young
Mrs. Alexander Blair was the social rallying place for Southern
sympathizers generally.
Suddenly, in the midst of big affairs, Alexander arranged otherwise
for the maintenance of his wife's mother, whom it was his to support
for the few remaining years of her life, and went to Europe with Molly
and the child. Long after it came to Harriet's hearing that the
frequent presence of a young Confederate officer at his house had led
to the step.
It was four years from this time, in 1867, that Alexander Blair, the
senior, died, to be shortly followed by his wife.
Though the son Alexander returned to Louisville of necessity,
following these events, he left Molly and the child in Washington with
some of her people there. And though his interests became centred in
Louisville again, he never brought his family back, but went and came
between the two places. In domestic infelicity it is our own people we
would hide it from longest. It was two years after, in '69, that
Alexander met his end with the shocking suddenness of accidental death
as he was returning East to Molly and the child.