to their friends. They had few tastes in common, except that both had a
passionate love for books. Baillie Pegram was fond of fishing and
shooting and riding to hounds. He loved a horse from foretop to fetlock.
His friend cared nothing for sport of any kind, and very often he walked
over long distances rather than "jolt on horseback," as he explained. He
was thoroughly manly, but of dreamy, introspective moods and quiet
tastes. But these two agreed in their love of books, and especially of
such rare old books as abounded in the Warlock library, the accumulation
of generations of cultivated and intellectual men and women. They
agreed, too, in their fondness for each other.
Marshall Pollard was never regarded as a guest at Warlock, or treated as
such. He came and went at will, giving no account of either his comings
or his goings. He did precisely as he pleased, and so did his host,
neither ever thinking it necessary to offer an apology for leaving the
other alone for a day or for a week, as the case might be. Pollard had
his own quarters in the rambling old house, with perfect liberty for
their best furnishing. Often the two friends became interested together
in a single subject of literary or historical study, and would pore over
piles of books in the great hallway if it rained, and out under the
spreading trees on the lawn if the weather were fair. Often, on the
other hand, their moods would take different courses, and for days
together they would scarcely see each other except at meal-times. Theirs
was a friendship that trusted itself implicitly.
"It's an ideal friendship, this of yours and mine," said Marshall, in
his dreamy way, one day. "It never interferes with the perfect liberty
of either. What a pity it is that it must come to an end!"
"But why should it come to an end?" asked his less introspective friend.
"O, because one or the other of us will presently take to himself a
wife," was the answer.
"But why should that make a difference? It will not if I am the one to
marry first. That will only make your life at Warlock the pleasanter for
you. It will give you two devoted friends instead of one."
"It will do nothing of the kind," answered Pollard, with that confidence
of tone which suggests that a matter has been completely thought out.
"Our friendship is based upon the fact that we both care more for each
other than for anybody else. When you get married, you'll naturally and
properly care more for your wife than for me. You'd be a brute if you
didn't, and I'd quarrel with you. After your marriage we shall continue
to be friends, of course, but not in the old way. I'll come to Warlock
whenever I please, and go away whenever it suits me to go, just as I do
now. But I shall make my bow to my lady when I come, and my adieus to
her when I take my departure. I'll enjoy doing that, because I know that
your wife will be a charming person, worthy of your devotion to her. But
it will not be the same as now. And it will be best so. 'Male and female
created he them,' and it would be an abominable shame if you were to
remain single for many years to come. It is your duty, and it will
presently be your highest pleasure to make some loving and lovable woman
as happy as God intended her to be. Better than that--the love of a good
woman will make your life richer and worthier than it is now. It will
ennoble you, and fit you for the life that your good qualities destine
you to lead. You see I've been studying your case, Baillie, and I've
made up my mind that there never was a man who needed to marry more than
you do. You're a thoroughly good fellow now--but that's about all.
You'll be something mightily better than that, when you have the
inspiration of a good woman's love to spur you out of your present
egotistic self-content, and give you higher purposes in life than those
of the well-bred, respectable citizen that you are. You pay your debts;
you take excellent care of your negroes; you serve your neighbours as an
unpaid magistrate and all that, and it is all very well. But you are
capable of much higher things, and when you get yourself a wife worthy
of you, you'll rise to a new level of character and conduct."
"And how about you?" the friend asked.
"O, as for me, I don't count. You see, I'm that anomalous thing, a
Virginian who doesn't ride horses or care for sport. I'm abnormal. Women
like me in a way, and the more elderly ones among them do me the honour
to approve me. But that is all. Young women are apt to fall in love with
robuster young fellows."
"But you are robust," quickly answered Baillie, "and altogether manly."
"No, I'm not. I'm physically strong enough, of course, but strength
isn't all of robustness. I can lift as much as you can, but I don't like
to lift, and you do. I can jump as high, but I don't like to jump, while
you do. When we were canoeing in Canada a year ago, I could shoot a
rapid as well as you, but I'd very much rather have walked down the
bank, leaving the guide to navigate the canoe, while you often sent the
guide about his business and rebuked his impertinence in offering help
where you wanted to do your own helping of yourself without any
interference on his part. I remember that just as we were starting on
the long and difficult journey to the Lake of the Woods, you dismissed
the whole crew of half-breed hangers-on, and we set out alone. I would
never have done that, greatly as I detested the unclean company. I went
with you, of course, but I went relying upon you for guidance, just as I
should have gone relying upon the half-breeds if you had not been with
me. We two are differently built, I tell you. Now, even here at Warlock,
I send for Sam when I want my studs changed from one shirt to another,
while only this morning you cleaned your own boots rather than wait for
Sam after you had whistled for him thrice. I don't think I'm lazier than
you are, and I know I'm not more afraid of anything. But you rejoice in
toilsome journeys, while I prefer to take them easily, hiring other
people to do the hard work. You relish danger just as you do red pepper,
while I prefer safety and a less pungent seasoning. Now, young women of
our kind and class prefer your kind of man to my kind, and so you are
likely to marry, while I am not. Another thing. I saw you throw aside a
copy of Shakespeare the other day without even marking your place in the
volume, because a company of gentlewomen had driven up to visit your
aunt, and you completely forgot your Shakespeare in thinking of the
gentlewomen. Now I, in a like case, should have edged a little farther
around the tree, read on to the end of the scene, marked my place, and
only then have discovered that the gentlewomen had driven up. Women like
your ways better than mine, and they are entirely right."
In all this, Marshall Pollard exaggerated somewhat, in playful fashion,
and to his own discrediting. But in the main his analysis of the
difference between himself and his friend was quite correct.
It was to this friend that Baillie Pegram spoke of the note he had
received from The Oaks ladies, saying that it read "like a joint note
from the Powers to the Grand Turk."
"Tell me about it," answered Marshall.
"O, read it for yourself," Baillie replied, handing him the sheet. "The
stilted ceremoniousness of it," he presently added, "is easy enough to
understand, but I can't, for the life of me, see why the good ladies of
The Oaks felt it incumbent upon themselves to write to me at all. They
are always scrupulously attentive to forms and conventionalities when
discharging any obligation of courtesy, and in this case they have had
the rather embarrassing duty imposed upon them of telling me not to call
upon their niece, who is also their guest. That sufficiently accounts
for the stiff formality of their rhetoric, and their scrupulous
attention to the niceties of courtesy in the embarrassing case, but--"
"Remember, also," broke in Marshall Pollard, "that they are 'maiden
ladies,' while you, my dear, unsuspicious boy, are a particularly
marriageable young man."
"Don't talk nonsense, Marshall; this is a serious matter," answered
Baillie.
"It isn't nonsense at all that I'm talking," said his friend. "I'm
speaking only words of 'truth and soberness.' The Misses Sarah and Jane
Ronald, as I understand the matter, are highly bred and blue-bloodedly
descended Virginia gentlewomen, who happen to be as yet unmarried. Very
naturally and properly they adopt a guarded manner in addressing a
missive to a peculiarly marriageable young gentleman like you, lest
their intentions be misinterpreted."
"Why, they are old enough," Baillie replied, "to be my grandmothers!"
"True," answered the other, "but you wouldn't venture to suggest that
fact to the mind of either of them, would you, Baillie?"
"Certainly not, but--"
"Certainly not. And certainly they in their turn do not give special
weight to that fact. When will you learn to understand women a little
bit, Baillie? Don't you know that no woman ever thinks of herself as
too old or too ugly or too unattractive to fascinate a young man?
Especially no well-bred spinster, accustomed to be courted in her youth,
and treated with deference in her middle age, ever realises that she is
so old as to be privileged to lay aside those reserves with which she
was trained in youth to guard her maidenly modesty against the ugly
imputation of a desire to 'throw herself at the head' of a young
gentleman possessed of good manners, good looks, an old family name, and
a plantation of five or six thousand acres? Now, don't let your vanity
run away with you, my boy. I do not mean for one moment to suggest that
either of The Oaks ladies would think of accepting an offer of marriage
from you or anybody else. I am too gallant to imagine that they have not
had abundant opportunities of marriage in their day. At the same time,
propriety is propriety, you know, and the conduct of an 'unattached
female' cannot be too carefully guarded against the possibility of
misinterpretation."
Baillie laughed, and presently fell into silence for a space. Finally
his companion lazily said:
"It is time for you to be off, if you are going."
"Going where?"
"Why, to dine at The Oaks, of course. You are invited for the third
Friday of each month, if I understand the matter correctly, and this is
the third Friday of April, I believe."
"Why, so it is. I hadn't thought of the date. By Jove, I'll go! There's
just a chance that she hasn't started yet."
"It's awkward, of course," said Pollard, in his meditative,
philosophical way, "especially with this war coming on. But these things
never will adjust themselves to circumstances in a spirit of rationality
and accommodation."
"What on earth do you mean, Marshall? I don't understand."
"Of course not. The bird caught in the net of the fowler does not
usually see just what is the matter with him."
"But Marshall--"
"O, I'll explain as well as I can. I mean only that you are in love with
Agatha Ronald. Of course you're totally unconscious of your state of
mind, but you'll find it out after awhile. It is an utterly irrational
state of mind for you to be in, but the malady often takes that form, I
believe, and I've done you a service in telling you about it, for as a
rule a man never finds out what's the matter with him in such a case
until some friend tells him. He just goes on making a fool of himself
until somebody else jogs his elbow with information which he alone has
need of. Now suppose you tell me all about this case. What is it that
stands between you and the young lady?"
Again Baillie laughed. But this time the laugh was accompanied by a
tell-tale flushing of the face.
"The whole thing is ridiculous," he presently said. "It couldn't have
happened anywhere but in this dear old Virginia of ours. I'll tell you
all I know about it. My grandfather whom I never saw in my life, and
Miss Agatha Ronald's father, who died before she was born, were friends,
like you and me. They owned adjoining plantations,--Warlock and The
Oaks, both held by original grants to their great-grandfathers, made in
the early colonial times. But the county clerk's office burned up, a
generation or two ago, and with it all the records that could show where
the boundaries between these two plantations lay. In trying to
determine those boundaries one unlucky day, when both had probably taken
too much or too little Madeira for dinner, the two irascible old
gentlemen fell into a dispute as to where the boundary line should run
through a wretched little scrap of ground down there on Nib's Creek,
which never had been cultivated, never has been, and never will be. The
thing was not worth a moment's thought in itself, but the gout got into
it, or in some other way the two absurd old gentlemen's dignity got
itself involved, and so they quarrelled. If there had been time, they
would have laughed the thing off presently over a mint-julep. But
unhappily one of them died, and that made a permanent family quarrel of
the dispute. All the women-kind took it up as an inherited feud, which
made it impossible that any Pegram should have aught to do with any
Ronald, or any Ronald with any Pegram. So much, it was held, was due to
the tender memory of the dead. But, after our Virginian tradition, the
individual members of both families have been held bound to treat each
other with the extreme of formal but quite unfriendly courtesy. That is
why I have been required, from my fifteenth birthday onward, to dine at
The Oaks on the third Friday of every month when I happened to be in the
county on that day. I had only the vaguest notion of the situation until
last Christmas, when circumstances brought it to my attention. Then I
made my good Aunt Catherine tell me all about it. When I learned what
the matter in dispute was, I sent for the family lawyer, and ordered him
to make out a deed to The Oaks ladies, conveying all my right, title,
and interest in the disputed piece of land to them 'for and in
consideration of the sum of one dollar in hand paid, receipt whereof is
hereby acknowledged.' I sent the deed to The Oaks ladies, with a perhaps
too effusive note, asking them to accept it as an evidence of my desire
to make an end of a quarrel which had long alienated those who should
have remained friends."
"What an idiot you made of yourself by doing that!" broke in young
Pollard.
"Of course, and I soon found it out. The Oaks ladies wrote that they had
never, by any act or word, recognised the existence of a quarrel; that
if such quarrel existed, it lay between the dead, who had not
authorised them or me to adjust it; and that they, holding only a life
interest in The Oaks, by virtue of their 'poor brother's' kindly will,
were not authorised either to alienate any part of the fee, or to add to
it, by deed of gift or otherwise; that their 'poor brother' had never
been accustomed to accept gifts of land or of anything else from others,
and finally that they were sure his spirit would not sanction the
purchase, for the miserable consideration of one dollar, of a piece of
land which, till the time of his death, he had believed to be absolutely
his own. There was no use arguing such a case or explaining it. So I
have let it rest, and have gone once a month to dine with The Oaks
ladies, as a matter of duty. It's all absurd, but--"
"But it interferes with your interest in Miss Agatha," broke in the
friend. "Take my advice, and don't let it. Off with you to The Oaks, and
ten to one you'll find the young lady still there. The date of her
departure was not fixed when this diplomatic note was despatched, and as
you were not expected to receive the communication for a week to come,
she is probably still there. If so, by the way, please don't mention my
presence at Warlock. You see--well, I have met the young lady at her
grandfather's, and properly I ought to pay my respects to her, now that
she's a guest on a plantation adjoining that on which I am staying. But
I don't want to. Your saddle-horses jolt so confoundedly, and besides,
I've discovered up-stairs a copy of old T. Gordon's seventeenth century
translation of Tacitus, with his essays on that author, and his
bitter-tongued comments on all preceding translations of his favourite
classic. I want an afternoon with the old boy."
"You certainly are a queer fellow, Marshall," said Baillie.
"How so? Because I like old books? Or is it because I don't like the
jolting of your horses?"
"Why haven't you told me that you knew Miss Agatha Ronald?"
"I have told you--within the last minute."
"But why didn't you tell me before?"
"O, well,--perhaps I didn't think of it. Never mind that. It is time for
you to be off, unless you want the soup and your welcome to grow cold
while waiting for you."
When Baillie had ridden away, Marshall Pollard sat idly for a time in
the porch. Then tossing aside the book he had been holding in his hand
but not reading, he rose and went to his room. There he searched among
his belongings for a little Elzevir volume, and took from between its
leaves a sprig of dried yellow jessamine.
"It is a poisonous flower," he said, as he tossed it out of the window.
"She warned me of that when I took it from her hand. She was altogether
right."
Apparently pursuing a new-born purpose, the young man returned to the
porch, broke off a sprig of honeysuckle leaves--for the vine was not yet
in flower--and carefully placed it between the pages of the Elzevir.
"The honeysuckle," he said to himself, "is unlike the yellow jessamine.
It is sweet and wholesome. So is the friendship of the man from whose
vine I have plucked it."
IV
_IN REVOLT_
When Agatha reached The Oaks, mounted upon Baillie Pegram's mare, her
reception at the hands of her aunts was one of almost stunned
astonishment. The two good ladies had learned an hour before her coming
that she had ridden away alone that morning while yet they had slept,
and they had carefully prepared a lecture upon that exceeding
impropriety, for delivery on the young woman's return.
But when they saw her dismount from Baillie Pegram's mare, they were
well-nigh speechless with horror at her depravity. The deliverance that
had been so carefully prepared for her chastening no longer met the
requirements of the case. A new and far severer rebuke must be
extemporised, and the necessity of that was an additional offence on the
part of the young woman who had forced it upon them. They were not
accustomed to speak extemporaneously on any subject of importance. To do
so involved the danger of saying too much, or saying it less effectively
than they wished, or--worse still--leaving unsaid things that they very
much wished to say. In response to their horrified questionings, Agatha
made the simplest and most direct statement possible.
"The morning was fine, and I wanted to ride. I rode as far as Dogwood
Branch. There my poor horse--the one that my grandfather sent down for
me to ride while here--met with a mishap. His foot went through a hole
in the bridge, and in his struggle to extricate it, he broke his leg.
Mr. Pegram came along and released the poor beastie's foot, but it was
too late. So he insisted upon my taking his mare, and showed me that I
couldn't refuse. He sent his servant to ride on a mule behind me in case
I should have trouble with his only partially broken mare. He promised
to put my poor horse out of his misery. There. That's all there is to
tell."
The little speech was made in a tone and with a manner that suggested
difficult self-restraint. When it was ended the two good aunts sat for
a full minute looking at the girl with eyes that were eloquent of
reproach--a reproach that for the moment could find no fit words for its
expression. At last the torrent came--not with a rushing violence of
speech, but with a steady, overwhelming flow. The girl stood still,
seemingly impassive.
"Will you not be seated?" presently asked Aunt Sarah.
"If you don't mind, I prefer to stand," she answered, in the gentlest,
most submissive tone imaginable, for Agatha--angry and outraged--was
determined to maintain her self-control to the end. Her gentle
submissiveness of seeming deceived her censors to their undoing.
Satisfied that they might rebuke her to their hearts' content, they
proceeded, adding one word of bitter reproach and condemnation to
another, and waxing steadily stronger in their righteous wrath. Still
the girl stood like a soldier under a fire which he is forbidden to
return. Still she controlled her countenance and restrained herself from
speech. Only a slight flushing of the face, and now and then a tremor
of the lip, gave indication of emotion of any kind.
Not until the storm had completely expended its wrath upon her head did
Agatha Ronald open her lips. Then she spoke as Agatha Ronald:
"Will you please order my carriage to be ready for me on Saturday
morning, Aunt Sarah? My maid is too ill to travel to-morrow or the next
day. But by Saturday morning she will be well enough, and I shall begin
my journey to Willoughby at nine o'clock, if you will kindly order a cup
of coffee served half an hour before the usual breakfast-time on
Saturday."
She departed instantly from the room, giving no time or opportunity for
reply or remonstrance.
"Perhaps we have spoken too severely, Jane," said Aunt Sarah.
Perhaps they had. At any rate, it had been Agatha's purpose to remain a
full month longer at The Oaks before beginning the long homeward
carriage journey which alone Colonel Archer permitted to his grandchild.
Railroads were new in those days, and Colonel Archer had not reconciled
himself to them.
"They are convenient for carrying freight," he said, "but a young lady
isn't freight. She should travel in her own carriage."
Later in the day Agatha reappeared, as gentle and smiling as usual, and
as attentive as ever to the comfort of her aunts. Her manner was perfect
in its docility, for she had decided that so long as she should remain
under their roof, it was her duty to herself, and incidentally to her
aunts, to minister in every way she could to their pleasure, and to obey
their slightest indicated wishes implicitly. They were misled somewhat
by her manner, which they construed to be an indication of submission.
"You will surely not think of leaving us on Saturday, dear, now that you
have thought the matter over calmly," said Aunt Sarah; "and perhaps we
spoke too severely this morning. But you will overlook that, I am sure,
in view of the concern we naturally feel for your bringing up."
A bitter and convincing speech was on the girl's lips ready for
delivery,--a speech in which she should declare her independence, and
assert her right as a woman fully grown to determine her conduct for
herself within the limits of perfect innocence,--but she drove it back
into her heart, and restrained her utterance to the single sentence:
"I shall begin my journey on Saturday morning."
Agatha Ronald was in revolt against an authority which she deemed
oppressive, and such revolt was natural enough on the part of a daughter
of Virginia whose ancestry included three signers of the Declaration of
Independence, and at least half a dozen fighting soldiers of the
Revolution. It was in her blood to resent and resist injustice and to
defy the authority that decreed injustice. But after the fashion of
those revolutionary ancestors of hers, she would do everything with due
attention to "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." She had
decided to quit The Oaks because she could not and would not longer
submit to a discipline which she felt to be arbitrary, unreasonable, and
unjust. But she was determined to be as gentle and as gentlewomanly as
possible in the manner of her leaving. It was her fixed purpose never
again to visit that plantation--her birthplace--until she should be
summoned thither to take possession as its sole inheritor, but she let
slip no hint of this determination to distress her aunts, who, after
all, meant only kindness to her by their severity.
"I'll say nothing about it," she resolved. "I'll just go back to
Chummie. He understands me, and I'll never leave him again."
V
_AT THE OAKS_