Col. Hicky had a birthday dinner, when he was eighty-two, and a grand dinner it was, to be sure. Sam Moore—I never knew just who he was, or why he was so essential at every function—sat at the host’s right. The Colonel was too deaf to hear all the bon mots, and Sam interpreted for him, and read in a loud voice all the toasts, some of which were very original and bright. Anyone remembering Col. Winthrop, or better still, Judge Avery, can understand there was no lack of wit and sparkle in any toast they might make.
XXVII
PEOPLE I HAVE ENTERTAINED
I imagine all of us have read “People I Have Smiled With,” or, “People I Have Known,” but not many are writing about “People I Have Entertained.” Rocking away the remnant of a long and varied life, I find myself dreamingly entertaining guests who are long since departed to the “House of Many Mansions,” guests who came and stayed, and went, some of whom I had never seen before, and some I never heard from after, but there are guests and guests, as every housewife knows. Particularly country house guests come, whose city houses are not open to what a neighbor of mine calls “trunk visitors.” In the days of which I write, every house, especially every plantation house, had a conspicuous latch string outside the door. I amuse my grandchildren with tales of the varied assortment of visitors I had “befo’ de war,” just as I had conjured to rest their mothers and fathers when they clamored to be told again about the gentleman who brought his own sheets and coffee pot, or the lady who wanted to pray all the time. I feel I am telling these tales for the last time. They don’t point a moral, for no guest can do to-day, nor will hereafter, the things some of my guests did, let us think, in the innocence of their hearts.
The first visitor I recall when I was a bride in my new home, was a distinguished, eccentric, literary man, a bachelor, and a Creole, brim full of cranks and kinks, but a delightful conversationalist withal. Before he arrived I knew he was coming from a visit to an adjacent parish where his great heart had been touched by the witchery of a young girl. With his Sancho, the Don Quixote had been storming the citadel, and to continue the simile he struck a windmill, and so was put to flight. Now he was accepting my husband’s invitation to rest, and salve his wounds at our home. I was amazed when my housemaid told me he had not only brought his valet, but his own linen sheets and his coffee pot! I understood then why he was not an acceptable suitor. Linen sheets and the coffee pot would scare any prospective housewife. When I knew what a blunder he had committed, I confess to little sympathy in his discomfort. That old gentleman died full of honors and deeply lamented, in New Orleans, a few years ago.
Mrs. Breckinridge was our guest, while her husband was vice-president. The presidential candidates, almost forgotten now, were Buchanan and Breckinridge. She was active and eager to have her husband mount to the top of the ladder of preferment, and did no little engineering in his behalf that winter. Mrs. Breckinridge was charming, a delightful visitor, a relative by marriage to us, but so remote, that if she had not been so lovely and the vice-president so distinguished, the dim connection would never have been thought of. Her aspirations were not realized, and he was tail to another presidential kite, that could not be made to fly. We did not meet Mrs. Breckinridge after that long visit, and the last time I saw her husband he was a fleeing Confederate general in Havana, without incumbrance of any kind, so he was not our “trunk visitor.”
During the early fifties a planter from Bayou Lafourche bought a plantation on the Mississippi River, fully five miles from us, and on the opposite side of the river, as well. My husband, in his grandiloquent flamboyant manner, invited him to bring his family to our house to stay till their lares et penates were settled in their new home. The man, in the same grandiloquent, flamboyant style, accepted. When I asked how many there were in the family, my hospitable husband replied that he only heard mention of a wife. In due time a little Lafourche packet, with ever so much turning and backing, blowing of whistle and ringing of bells, as if to announce a surprise (which it certainly did), ran out a plank at our levee, and a whole procession walked that plank and filed up the path to the house. I looked from an upper window, and counted the guests as they marched up, in twos and threes: A man and his wife, her aged mother and brother, four boys, ranging from three to ten years, and a darky with the baby in arms!
One guest room had been made ready, but three additional chambers were at once put in commission. By the time wraps had been removed and fresh fires made all over the house—it was mid-winter—I was ten times more breathless than my unexpected crowd. Every day for over a week the man and his wife were conveyed to their new home in our carriage, and there they stayed from morn to dewy eve. The aged grandmother was left in my special care. She was unable to cope with the untrained boys, as, indeed, all of us were. The uncle had rheumatism or something that confined him to his bed most of the time. So the boys were left to their own devices, to gallop in and out of doors, from the muddy garden to the Brussels carpets, all hours of the day. The baby squalled, and the nurse spanked it, and I didn’t care.
One stormy day the boys found occupation indoors that was very diverting. They extracted every button from a tufted, upholstered chair in the library, the one their grandmother most affected, and with hairpin and nail, scratched hieroglyphics all over a newly-painted mantel, till it looked like it had been taken from some buried city of Egypt. Thank goodness! Visits don’t last forever. In the course of time the family moved into the new home, and gave a house-warming ball within the next week—vive la bagatelle!