2024-Aug 18th _ [A KENTUCKY PRINCESS by Mary Hartwell Catherwood]

Time, 1857

 

The perfection of summer noon, when acres of corn tassels seemed in a trance and the blueness of far-off hills suggested incense rising, was not without its effect on Miss Sally Vandewater as she rode toward General Poynton’s plantation. The turnpike, stretching its ash-colored ribbon across the greenness of the country, rang like a causeway of rock to the beat of horseshoes.

From this plantation or from that, as hill or sweep of woodland revealed them, shone marble stones in family burial lots.

Occasionally Miss Sally met girls or young men on dashing horses, and these merry people saluted her cordially in passing. But in all that blue-grass region, where each member of every comfortable family had his own gaited saddle-horse, there was not a finer animal than Miss Sally’s Pacer. Cæsar and his fortune were aboard when she mounted. Pacer was her entire capital in life, carrying her on visits among good families whereby she subsisted, and furnishing colts for her pin-money. The camel is not more to the Bedouin. Had Pacer failed Miss Sally in any point, she must have fallen into the straits of a reduced gentlewoman, instead of carrying a high head through all the best houses of the county.

She rode at a steady hand gallop through the sultry day, though a young colt whinnied behind her; increasing her speed past one pillared brick house set far up an avenue. The woods about it were close trimmed and free from underbrush, like all Kentucky woodland. Some evergreens made gloom about its eaves, but not such gloom as the reputation of the house itself. There lived a man who was said to have a chain stretched across his cellar. He bought up slaves and handcuffed them in pairs along this chain until he was ready to drive them to market, when a band of musicians was employed to lead their march, cheerfully playing “Yankee Doodle.” The house was worse than haunted. Both whites and blacks hurried past its handsome gate with abhorrence—spot of mystery and abomination on those pleasant corn lands.

Miss Sally was anxious to get out of her riding-skirt at Poynton’s, and bully the black boy who would come to take her bridle. The wealthiest slave-owner in Kentucky could not exact more deference. Everybody humored her. In a country where hospitality was a social religion, her little visits of a month or two were welcomed even when they crowded dearer guests. And in spite of fine traits concealed under the haughty airs of a nomad, well did she know how to crowd people distasteful to her.

When she turned into Poynton’s avenue, the white pillared mansion seemed to doze. The quarters stretched in a long row fieldward. Miss Sally could not see the kitchen, standing by itself behind the great house. No drowsiness had settled there. A stir of preparation was going on, not only for the two o’clock dinner, but for the wedding yet a week distant. Miss Sally had omitted one place in her rounds, and shortened her visit at another, that she might be at Poynton’s in time to gather every detail of the wedding.

A yellow boy skipped out to help her at the mounting-block. He would have lounged to meet his master. Approvingly she saw him pull his hat to her.

“Miss Sally, you sho’ly bake you’se’f to-day!”

“Yes, it’s hot, Peach. And if you’re concerned for me I hope you’ll feel more concern about Pacer.” Miss Vandewater’s anxiety about her property grew in the ratio of its approach to a crib.

“Sam’ll rub her down,” promised Peachy. “I’ll tell Sam to give her a good feed.”

“You attend to it yourself,” commanded Miss Sally.

“I isn’t a stable-boy,” remonstrated Peachy. “I’se a house-boy.”

“House-boy or stable-boy, you mind what I tell you. In my father’s time—and he owned fifty—our boys did whatever they were told to do.”

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“And the poor little colt,” said Miss Sally, making that infant’s discomfort her own,—“I don’t want my colt kicked to death among a lot of wild shod heels.”

“He go with his mammy. No ha’um evah happen to you’ colts on this place, Miss Sally.”

“You see to it that none happens to it this time! All the family at home?” she stopped to inquire, with her riding-skirt gathered in her hand.

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“Has my trunk been carried up? I sent it this morning.”

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“Who’s here?” demanded Miss Vandewater, stiffening her figure.

Peachy followed her eye to the stable-yard, where stood a vehicle she never beheld with calmness. It was the handsome and shining carriage of Judge Poynton, from the county seat.

Peachy grinned. “Miss Judge come out this mawnin’ to spend the day.”

So sore does one’s pride become when chafed by poverty, that Miss Sally hated that plump and opulent woman for naught but being plump and opulent; though she would have given as her reason the airs of a woman married above her wildest expectations.

“You can fetch my riding-skirt to my room, Nancy,” said Miss Sally to the colored girl who admitted her, casting it across the stair-rail as she ascended. “I reckon I go to the same room I always have.”

“Miss Ma’ky’s things is all spread out in that bedroom,” apologized Nancy.

“You can soon move them out of the way.”

“But Miss Maria ’bleeged to have you’ trunk set in the back bedroom fo’ this week, Miss Sally.”

A solicitous hostess, trailing a muslin wrapper—for even Kentucky hospitality may be overpowered by the languors of summer midday—met the guest with outstretched hands. Miss Sally permitted her cheek to be brushed, and at once put the lady into the apologetic attitude of an overcrowded landlord.

“You ought to have sent me word if it was inconvenient to have me now, Mrs. Poynton, and I wouldn’t have skipped the Moores as I did.”

“Miss Sally, it is not inconvenient to have you now!” the delinquent pleaded. “It is never inconvenient. Only America’s things are so spread out, and we are obliged to keep dressing-rooms for the wedding, and the bridesmaids! I thought you would be less annoyed in that back room than anywhere else. I am so glad you have come!”

“The judge’s wife is here?”

“But it is only for the day,” unconsciously conciliated Mrs. Poynton. “She is not staying. Sue Bet Moore has been here, helping America to try on. Her dresses are all done. But Sue Bet has gone.”

“I knew Sue Bet was to be one of the bridesmaids,” said Miss Sally. It was not necessary to mention bridesmaids to a woman of her thorough information.

“We have all been lying down; the day is so sultry. We shall not have America’s things filling up the chambers much longer. I feel like giving her all the rooms in the house—yes, the plantation itself! If you can only make yourself comfortable a few days, we can change your room after the wedding.”

“The back bedroom makes not the slightest difference in the world to me, Mrs. Poynton”—

“O Miss Sally, I am so glad it makes no difference!”

—“but I am sorry I came at such an inconvenient time!”

Thus the duet went on, until Mrs. Poynton accepted as positive beneficence Miss Sally Vandewater’s willingness to descend from the back chamber, dine with the family, and sit down in the parlor.

Miss Sally had kept her sprightliness and her youthful shape. Her muslin dress was cut low, and her shoulders were concealed by a bertha of lace. Fine embroidered undersleeves made delicate frills about her folded hands. The curling-iron had created two large spirals at each temple, but the rest of her hair was pinned in a knot at the back of her head.

America Poynton came into the parlor in her tight-fitting habit of black velvet, and sat down with the guests, holding her riding-whip, her gauntlets, and tall hat.

“Are you going to ride in this heat?” inquired her aunt, the judge’s wife.

“We always ride Thursday afternoons, about four o’clock, if the weather is fine,” America replied.

She looked no less cool and white in the heavy fabric than in a gold dotted vaporous tissue which she had worn at dinner. Her black eyes moved with languid interest from speaker to speaker as the visiting chat ran on. America Poynton was called the proudest girl who ever appeared in the county seat from surrounding plantations. The manners of this tall beauty were considered too quiet by romping young people who danced, drove, and flirted to the limit of their privileges; yet she was sovereign among them, and ruled by a look while others expended noisy effort. It was told of her that she often sat veiled in her room to save her complexion from sun glare and wind, so matchless was it. She had a robe of black curls in which she could wrap herself when her maid let it down to brush. America was General Poynton’s only child. She had inherited from her grandmother a plantation adjoining her father’s, with more than a hundred slaves. When she went to boarding-school in the county town, one of her servants led to her every pleasant Friday evening a milk-white mule, saddled and bridled with silk, fine leather, and silver.

Though above such pastime as flirtation, America had more offers than any other girl in her set. Her low, slow voice never recounted these conquests, but the victims published themselves, wondering whom America Poynton would marry, since she was so hard to suit. When she accepted Ross Carr, therefore, the astonishment was general. He was good enough for some girls, but hardly good enough for America Poynton. He had also been a wild youth, but people said he was settling down. The Carrs ranked somewhat below the Poyntons, and Ross had no plantation of his own. Yet when the community thought it over, they were willing to accept him as America’s husband if he proved a credit to her.

“Miss Maria,” said Nancy, coming to the door with a face full of meaning, “Miss Becky Inchbald’s done lighted down by the quarters, and tied her horse.”

“What does she want?” inquired Mrs. Poynton, disturbed.

“Dunno, Miss Maria.”

“Why doesn’t she come to the house?”

“She hardly ever came to the house in her best days,” murmured the judge’s wife.

“Perhaps she’s sick,” continued Mrs. Poynton. “Some of you run and see.”

“Peachy done been down to her, and she say she just waitin’ there in the shade. Miss Becky got her baby ’long with her.”

The general’s wife heard this with rising dignity.

“Don’t annoy her,” she commanded. “Let the poor girl alone.”

“Law, Miss Maria, nobody won’t say nothin’ to Miss Becky. But all the little niggehs has come out to look at her.”

“Go yourself and see if she needs anything.”

“I have heard,” remarked Miss Vandewater, through the silence which followed, “that Becky Inchbald, for all she was so close-mouthed at first, threatens now to carry her child to its father.”

Mrs. Poynton, with an instant’s pause on the subject, hoped he could be found and made to do his duty. The judge’s wife heard with a mere lifting of the eyebrows. She thought it scarcely a fit topic to mention before America. But America’s plane was so much above Becky Inchbald that she had never even disapproved of the girl.

Becky Inchbald’s people were not poor whites, for they owned land and slaves; but their raw unfitness for encountering the old stock held them on the verge of society. That Becky was uneducated was her own fault. She had become the mother of a hapless baby and the scandal of the neighborhood before America Poynton’s engagement was announced.

“She’s spiteful about that baby,” pursued Miss Sally. “There’ll be trouble somewhere before sundown, if she’s started out with it.”

“I do not see that Inchbald’s affairs need disturb us,” suggested the judge’s wife, making dimples at the finger roots of one hand as she smoothed her polished hair.

“Some women are never disturbed about any of the sin in the world,” said Miss Vandewater incisively, “until it comes into their houses and takes their children by the throat.”

“That can never be said of you, Miss Sally,” the judge’s indolent wife responded, smiling. Though she generally bore Miss Sally’s attacks as a lady should, and felt indulgent sympathy for the migratory spinster, she sometimes allowed herself to retort.

“Aunt and Miss Sally, kiss and make up,” said America, with the deliberate accent that gave weight to all her words. But without response one of the combatants sat glowering, while the other, waving a lazy fan, indicated through the window Ross Carr cantering to his appointment, man and steed moving like one, so perfect was his horsemanship.

America’s mother, impatiently anxious to go on recounting to Miss Sally the silver and linen bought for America’s new home, resigned herself for a few moments. Ross Carr threw his bridle to the groom, who was walking Miss Poynton’s saddled thoroughbred.

He entered the room. America gave him her hand with a light word, and he stood holding his hat, talking to her elders.

It was the culminating moment of her betrothal, a dot of time separating ease and care-free thoughts from what followed.

The young man chatted idly with four women, when another screamed out behind him:—

“Here it is, Ross Carr! So you’ve got to take it, and no words betwixt us—for I won’t take care of it any longer!”

“Why, Miss Becky!—why, Miss Becky!” Mrs. Poynton herself ran gasping forward to interpose between such scandalous outcry and America’s lover. “Come away with me, Miss Becky, and let me help you with your baby—and don’t speak that way before the gentlemen!”

A shaker bonnet fell back from the girl’s hot and furious face. She had narrow sunken temples like a hen’s. Her entire profile was chicken beaked, yet a fluff of golden down made her comely. The wrathful rings in her eyes sent out their fires toward Ross Carr.

“He thinks he’s a great gentleman, and he thinks he’s going to get a great lady”—

“Becky Inchbald, sit down in that chair!” commanded America, standing at the other side of the room. Her hat and gloves and whip lay on the floor. The other women, even her mother, waited, sitting blanched.

Carr remained with his hand on the back of the chair, like a frozen figure, while Becky Inchbald placed herself in it and stretched the baby across her lap. Her first courage leaving her, she began to cry.

The men of the west do not cower when found out in their sins. Ross Carr stood six feet and one inch high; a handsome, light-haired Kentuckian, the man most abundant in vitality, and the best horseman in Bourbon County. A culprit waiting to be shot, he looked his death in the face, erect, but blighted through every outline. He had carried this guilt a long time, trying to shape it for disclosure; while day after day continued to separate him farther from the Ross Carr of the past, and to make more incomprehensible the deeds which he inherited from that miserable wretch.

When you or I stand, on our day of judgment, to be looked at through the dark medium of our basest moments, may some eye among our contemners discern the angel shape struggling in remorse and anguish behind the bar.

“Is this your child?” America demanded of her lover, pointing to it for his identification.

The baby, oppressed by the jaunt, under arm, or on lap, according to its mother’s convenience in riding, was covered all over its visible surface by that prickly rash which nurses call “heat.” It was gowned in pink calico, and diffused a sour odor.

Ross Carr looked down at it with the slighting masculine eye, which since Saturn has seen little to admire in extremely young offspring. He controlled the muscles of his lips to reply.

“I reckon it is.”

“Answer me on your word as a man—is this your child?”

“Yes. It is.”

“He knows it’s his, and he’s got to take care of it and support it—it’s his place to take care of it, not mine,” sobbed Becky, her head wagging.

America directed her face to Becky. “Do you intend to turn it off entirely?”

“Yes. I do! It’s his, and he ought to keep it!”

“But you are its mother!”

“I won’t be its mother!” exploded Becky, flinging the ill-kept and wretched infant about on her knees with a vicious grip. “I’ll leave it on a doorstep first!”

The child put up a piteous lip and uttered those cries by which bruised infancy protests against tormentors whom it feels but does not know.

America stared at the girl; her alabaster face was suddenly drained of horror at the wrong done a woman, and filled with passionate contempt.

“Then I’ll be its mother! Give it to me.”

She gathered it off Becky’s lap and laid its heat-blotched face against her shoulder. The tiny creature discharged a mouthful of its wretchedness there. America stanched the spot, and made a softer rest for its cheek with her rose-scented handkerchief. Her unconscious sweep of figure in taking the child and standing up publicly with it, thrilled beholders like piercing music or the sight of great works of art. The mother-spirit, which has brooded for centuries over this world—the passion to foster and protect and train—shone white and large in her face. She was that fair impersonation men call the Goddess of Liberty, holding the outcast to her breast. She was Mother Mary, with a reminder of the Heavenly Infant in her arms.

No one remonstrated or spoke a word to her as she moved from the room.

 

Becky Inchbald, pulling her shaker over her face, went out and mounted her horse.

America was at the top of the stairs when she heard Ross Carr speak hoarsely at the foot. She stood looking at him over the balustrade. The baby was quiet.

“One word, America!—It’s all over—between us?”

He could hear his watch ticking; and outdoor sounds buzzed in his ears.

“No,” answered America. “It is not all over between us.”

Ross Carr dropped his groping hand on the stair newel, his next sentence also coming in fragments.

“There won’t be any use—Shall I come here—for the ceremony—next Thursday?”

“Thursday,” spoke the low, slow voice above him, “at two o’clock, was the time we set.”

The culprit lifted his eyes to her and exclaimed:—

“America, tell me what you want me to do!”

“I want you,” she said, “to be a father to your child!” Her mouth struggled. She flung out the rest in a wail—“and never speak to me of this again!”

Not fit to prostrate himself before her virgin motherhood, the tarnished man hid his face on his arm against the stair-rail. She carried his child out of sight.

There was scarcely a negro on the plantation who did not know what had happened when Ross Carr staggered out of the house and passed his chafing horse and the groom as if he had forgotten his own property.

Baseless mountains which had been piling lucent peak over peak, now seemed to sink in smoke to the effacement of the sun. Stretches of forest and road, plantation and dimpled hill, from horizon to horizon, ceased smiling; for the day’s heat was about to pass off in drenching rain.

This cloudy interval before the thunder-burst was just the time for stealing corn to roast at the quarters in the evening. So Peachy crept on all fours down narrow avenues to avoid agitating the corntops, such telltales are the tassel fingers. His sack already bulged; but unexpectedly he came against a man stretched out in the dirt face downward—Miss Ma’ky’s Mist’ Ross Carr!

Peachy backed away from the spectacle, the grinding of teeth and the swelling of veins on a man’s neck! Not until many cornstalks screened him had Peachy the courage to burst recklessly down a slim alley, spilling his stolen ears, while corn leaves slashed his face with their edged sabres. The superstitious African instinctively fled from anguish so dumb and dreadful.

While the county was shocked by America Poynton’s adoption of Ross Carr’s child, her beauty as a bride softened all critics. She went to live with her husband on her plantation, and there the baby grew into robust and happy boyhood. Reticence on the subject of Becky Inchbald was diffused through her small world. At that date a small world held all the acts of many lives.

Even Miss Sally Vandewater, swelling her visiting list with another hospitable home, grew into complete harmony with the judge’s wife on this delicate subject.

Becky Inchbald went on a long visit to Tennessee. News came back that she had married there; and in the course of years that she had died.

So far as human knowledge goes, Ross Carr’s wife took no shrewish revenge, though a woman of her nature must have suffered from the blot. She always spoke of his son as “our eldest boy,” and he grew up among brothers and sisters without noting that he was part alien, until some neighbor dropped the fact in his ear. Personally he was much like his father, whose sin matured its bitterest fruit when that child threw himself on the ground to sob in secret agony because the beautiful and tender woman he loved with such devotion was really not his mother.

 

 

From: The Queen of the Swamp, and other plain Americans

By Mary Hartwell Catherwood

Original publication: 1899