No thunderbolt ever fell more crushingly upon the unsuspecting than did these awful words from the lips of my uncle! I know not how I reached my room, but once there I wept passionately throughout the night and much of the following morning. Within my own heart I accused my erstwhile hero of the rankest perfidy; of villainy of every imaginable quality; and in this recoil of injured pride perished my first love dream, vanished the heroic wrappings of my quondam knight!
Having finished the curriculum of the institute presided over by Miss Brooks, I was sent to the “Female Academy” at Nashville, Tennessee, to perfect my studies in music and literature, whence I returned to Tuscaloosa all but betrothed to Alexander Keith McClung, already a famous duellist. I met him during a visit to my Uncle Fort’s home, in Columbus, Mississippi, and the Colonel’s devotion to me for many months was the talk of two States. He was the gallantest lover that ever knelt at a lady’s feet! Many a winsome girl admired him, and my sweet cousin, Martha Fort, was wont to say she would “rather marry Colonel McClung than any man alive”; but I—I loved him madly while with him, but feared him when away from him; for he was a man of fitful, uncertain moods and given to periods of the deepest melancholy. At such times he would mount his horse “Rob Roy,” wild and untamable as himself, and dash to the cemetery, where he would throw himself down on a convenient grave and stare like a madman into the sky for hours. A man of reckless bravery, in after years he was the first to mount the ramparts of Monterey shouting victory. As he ran, carrying his country’s flag in his right hand, a shot whizzing by took off two fingers of his left.
I was thrown much in the company of Colonel McClung while at my uncle’s home, but resisted his pleading for a binding engagement, telling him with a strange courage and frankness, ere I left Columbus, my reason for this persistent indecision. Before leaving for the academy at Nashville, I had met, at my Uncle Collier’s, in Tuscaloosa, the young legislator, Clement C. Clay, Jr., and had then had a premonition that if we should meet when I returned from school I would marry him. At that time I was an unformed girl, and he, Mr. Clay, was devoted to a young lady of the capital; but this, as I knew, was a matter of the past. I would surely meet him again at Uncle Collier’s (I told Mr. McClung), and, if the attraction continued, I felt sure I would marry him. If not, I would marry him, Colonel McClung. So we parted, and, though at that time the Colonel did not doubt but that mine was a dreaming girl’s talk, my premonitions were promptly realised.
Upon my return to our provincial little capital, then a community of six thousand souls, I found it thronging with gallants from every county in the State. The belles of the town, in preparation for the gayety of the legislative “season” of two months, were resplendent in fresh and fashionable toilettes. Escritoires were stocked with stationery suitable for the billet-doux that were sure to be required; and there, too, were the little boxes of glazed mottoed wafers, then all the fashion, with which to seal the pretty missives. All the swains of that day wrote in verse to the ladies they admired, and each tender rhyme required a suitably presented acknowledgment. I remember, though I have preserved none save those my husband wrote me, several creditable effusions by Colonel McClung, one of which began:
“Fearful and green your breathless poet stands,” etc.
Shortly after my return from Columbus, I attended a ball where I danced with William L. Yancey, even then recognised for the splendour of his intellectual powers and his eloquence in the forum. I had heard him speak, and thought his address superb, and I told him so.
“Ah,” he answered gayly, “if it had not been for one pair of hazel eyes I should have been submerged in a mere sea of rhetoric!”
On the night of my dance with him I wore a white feather in my hair, and on the morrow a messenger from Mr. Yancey bore me some charming verses, addressed “To the lady with the snow-white plume!”
I have said my strange premonitions regarding Mr. Clay were realised. Ten days after we met we were affianced. There was a hastily gathered trousseau selected in part by Mme. LeVert in Mobile, and hurried on to my aunt’s home. A month later, and our marriage was celebrated with all the éclat our little city could provide, and the congratulations of a circle of friends that included half the inhabitants. It is sixty years since that wonderful wedding day, and of the maidens who attended me—there were six—and the happy company that thronged Judge Collier’s home on that crisp February morning when I crossed the Rubicon of life, all—even the bridegroom—have passed long since into the shadowy company of memory and the dead.
That marriage feast in the morn of my life was beautiful; the low, spacious house of primitive architecture was white with hyacinths, and foliage decorated every available space. The legislature came in a body, solons of the State, and young aspirants for fame; the president and faculty of the State University, of which Mr. Clay was a favoured son; Dr. Capers, afterward Bishop of South Carolina, officiated, and, in that glorious company of old Alabamians, my identity as Virginia Tunstall was merged forever with that of the rising young statesman, Clement C. Clay, Jr.