[Illustration: DOROTHY
SOUTH]
[Illustration:
“_SHALL WE HAVE ONE OF OUR OLD-TIME HORSEBACK
RIDES ‘SOON’ IN THE MORNING, DOROTHY?_”
(_See page 440._)]
[Illustration: _DOROTHY SOUTH_
A LOVE STORY _of_ VIRGINIA JUST BEFORE _the_ WAR
_By_ GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
AUTHOR _of_
“A CAROLINA CAVALIER” “THE BALE MARKED CIRCLE X” “CAMP VENTURE” “THE
LAST OF THE FLATBOATS”
ILLUSTRATED BY C. D. WILLIAMS
New York: GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers]
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED]
PUBLISHED MARCH, 1902
_12th THOUSAND, March 20_
_17th THOUSAND, May 20_
_22d THOUSAND, June 28_
_27th THOUSAND, July 25_
_32d THOUSAND, Aug. 20_
_37th THOUSAND, Nov. 4_
_40th THOUSAND, Nov. 8_
_42d THOUSAND, May 4_
BERWICK AND SMITH
PRINTERS
NORWOOD, MASS.
_CONTENTS_
[Illustration]
CHAPTER PAGE
I. TWO ENCOUNTERS 11
II. WYANOKE 25
III. DR. ARTHUR BRENT 36
IV. DR. BRENT IS PUZZLED 47
V. ARTHUR BRENT’S TEMPTATION 62
VI. NOW YOU MAY CALL ME DOROTHY 77
VII. SHRUB HILL CHURCH 91
VIII. A DINNER AT BRANTON 101
IX. DOROTHY’S CASE 117
X. DOROTHY VOLUNTEERS 135
XI. THE WOMAN’S AWAKENING 150
XII. MAMMY 156
XIII. THE “SONG BALLADS” OF DICK 166
XIV. DOROTHY’S AFFAIRS 175
XV. DOROTHY’S CHOICE 184
XVI. UNDER THE CODE 191
XVII. A REVELATION 199
XVIII. ALONE IN THE CARRIAGE 217
XIX. DOROTHY’S MASTER 222
XX. A SPECIAL DELIVERY LETTER 230
XXI. HOW A HIGH BRED DAMSEL CONFRONTED
FATE, AND DUTY 237
XXII. THE INSTITUTION OF THE DUELLO 253
XXIII. DOROTHY’S REBELLION 263
XXIV. TO GIVE DOROTHY A CHANCE 27O
XXV. AUNT POLLY’S VIEW OF THE RISKS 286
XXVI. AUNT POLLY’S ADVICE 295
XXVII. DIANA’S EXALTATION 306
XXVIII. THE ADVANCING SHADOW 314
XXIX. THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DOROTHY 322
XXX. AT SEA 346
XXXI. THE VIEWS AND MOODS OF ARTHUR BRENT 363
XXXII. THE SHADOW FALLS 377
XXXIII. “AT PARIS IT WAS” 391
XXXIV. DOROTHY’S DISCOVERY 404
XXXV. THE BIRTH OF WAR 424
XXXVI. THE OLD DOROTHY AND THE NEW 429
XXXVII. AT WYANOKE 435
XXXVIII. SOON IN THE MORNING 441
LIST _of_ ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
“_Shall we have one of our old-time horseback
rides ‘soon’ in the morning, Dorothy?_”
(_Frontispiece._)
“_Who is your Miss Dorothy?_”
(_Page 17._)
“_I won’t call you a fool because the Bible says
I mustn’t._”
(_Page 178._)
_Dorothy South._
(_Page 304._)
“_In that music my soul laid itself bare to yours
and prayed for your love._”
(_Page 417._)
_“Aunt Polly!” he said abruptly, “I want
your permission to marry Dorothy.”_
(_Page 452._)
[Illustration: DOROTHY
SOUTH]
DOROTHY SOUTH
[Illustration]
I
TWO ENCOUNTERS
_I_t was a perfect day of the kind that Mr. Lowell has celebrated in
song--“a day in June.” It was, moreover, a day glorified even beyond Mr.
Lowell’s imagining, by the incomparable climate of south side Virginia.
A young man of perhaps seven and twenty, came walking with vigor down
the narrow roadway, swinging a stick which he had paused by the wayside
to cut. The road ran at this point through a luxuriantly growing
woodland, with borders of tangled undergrowth and flowers on either
side, and with an orchestra of bird performers all around. The road was
a public highway, though it would never have been taken for such in any
part of the world except in a south side county of Virginia in the late
fifties. It was a narrow track, bearing few traces of any heavier
traffic than that of the family carriages in which the gentle, high-born
dames and maidens of the time and country were accustomed to make their
social rounds.
There was a gate across the carriage track--a gate constructed in
accordance with the requirement of the Virginia law that every gate set
up across a public highway should be “easily opened by a man on
horseback.”
Near the gate the young man slackened his vigorous pace and sat down
upon a recently fallen tree. He remembered enough of his boyhood’s
experience in Virginia to choose a green log instead of a dry one for
his seat. He had had personal encounters with chigoes years ago, and
wanted no more of them. He sat down not because he was tired, for he was
not in the least so, but simply because, finding himself in the midst of
a refreshingly and inspiringly beautiful scene, he desired to enjoy it
for a space. Besides, he was in no hurry. Nobody was expecting him, and
he knew that dinner would not be served whither he was going until the
hour of four--and it was now only a little past nine.
The young man was fair to look upon. A trifle above the medium height,
his person was symmetrical and his finely formed head was carried with
an ease and grace that suggested the reserve strength of a young bull.
His features were about equally marked by vigor and refinement. His was
the countenance of a man well bred, who, to his inheritance of good
breeding had added education and such culture as books, and earnest
thinking, and a favorable association with men of intellect are apt to
bring to one worthy to receive the gift.
He seemed to know the spot wherein he lingered. Indeed he had asked no
questions as to his way when less than an hour ago he had alighted from
the pottering train at the village known as the Court House. He had said
to the old station agent, “I will send for my baggage later.” Then he
had set off at a brisk walk down one of the many roads that converged at
this centre of county life and affairs. The old station master, looking
after him, had muttered: “He seems to think he knows his way. Mebbe he
does, but anyhow he’s a stranger in these parts.”
And indeed that would have been the instant conclusion of any one who
should have looked at him as he sat there by the roadside enjoying the
sweet freshness of the morning, and the exquisite abandon with which
exuberant nature seemed to mock at the little track made through the
tangled woodlands by intrusive man. The youth’s garb betrayed him
instantly. In a country where black broadcloth was then the universal
wear of gentlemen, our young gentleman was clad in loosely fitting but
perfectly shaped white flannels, the trousers slightly turned up to
avoid the soil of travel, the short sack coat thrown open, and the full
bosomed shirt front of bishop’s lawn or some other such sheer stuff,
being completely without a covering of vest. Obviously the young
pedestrian did not belong to that part of the world which he seemed to
be so greatly enjoying.
That is what Dick thought, when Dick rode up to the gate. Dick was a
negro boy of fourteen summers or about that. His face was a bright,
intelligent one, and he looked a good deal of the coming athlete as he
sat barebacked upon the large roan that served him for steed. Dick wore
a shirt and trousers, and nothing else, except a dilapidated straw hat
which imperfectly covered his closely cropped wool. His feet were bare,
but the young man made mental note of the fact that they bore the
appearance of feet accustomed to be washed at least once in every twenty
four hours.
“Does your mammy make you wash your feet every night, or do you do it of
your own accord?” The question was the young man’s rather informal
beginning of a conversation.
“Mammy makes me,” answered the boy, with a look of resentment in his
face. “Mammy’s crazy about washin’. She makes me git inter a bar’l o’
suds ev’ry night an’ scrub myself like I was a floor. That’s cause she’s
de head washerwoman at Wyanoke. She’s got washin’ on de brain.”
“So you’re one of the Wyanoke people, are you? Whom do you belong to
now?”
“I don’t jes’ rightly know, Mahstah”--Dick sounded his a’s like “aw” in
“claw.” “I don’t jes’ rightly know, Mahstah. Ole Mas’r he’s done daid,
an’ de folks sez a young Yankee mahstah is a comin’ to take position.”
“To take possession, you mean, don’t you?”
“I dunno. Somefin o’ dat sort.”
“Why do you call him a Yankee master?”
“O ’cause he libs at de Norf somewhar. I reckon mebbe he ain’t quite so
bad as dat. Dey say he was born in Ferginny, but I reckon he’s done lib
in de Norf among the Yankees so long dat he’s done forgit his manners
an’ his raisin.”
“What’s your name?” asked the young man, seemingly interested in Dick.
“My name’s Dick, Sah.”
“Dicksah--or Dick?”
“Jes’ Dick, so,” answered the boy.
“Oh! Well, that’s a very good name. It’s short and easy to say.”
“_Too_ easy!” said the boy.
“‘Too easy?’ How do you mean?” queried the young man.
“Oh, nuffin’, only it’s allus ‘Dick, do dis!’ ‘Dick do dat.’ ‘Dick go
dar,’ ’Dick come heah,’ an’ ‘Dick, Dick, Dick’ all de day long.”
“Then they work you pretty hard do they? You don’t look emaciated.”
“Maishy what, Mahstah?”
“Oh, never mind that. It’s a Chinese word that I was just saying to
myself. Do they work you too hard? What do you do?”
“Oh, I don’t do nuffin’ much. Only when I lays down in de sun an’ jes’
begins to git quiet like, Miss Polly she calls me to pick some peas in
de gyahden, er Miss Dorothy she says, ‘Dick, come heah an’ help me range
dese flowers,’ or Mammy, she says, ‘Dick, you lazy bones, come heah an’
put some wood under my wash biler.’”
“But what is your regular work?”
“Reg’lar wuk?” asked the boy, his eyes growing saucer-like in
astonishment, “I ain’t
[Illustration: “_WHO IS YOUR MISS DOROTHY?_”]
got no reg’lar wuk. I feeds de chickens, sometimes, and fin’s hens’
nests an’ min’s chillun, an’ dribes de tukkeys into de tobacco lots to
eat de grasshoppers an’ I goes aftah de mail. Dat’s what I’se a doin’
now. Leastways I’se a comin’ back wid de mail wot I done been an’ gone
after.”
“Is that all?”
“Dat’s nuff, ain’t it, Mahstah?”
“I don’t know. I wonder what your new master will think when he comes.”
“Golly, so do I. Anyhow, he’s a Yankee, an’ he won’t know how much wuk a
nigga ought to do. I’ll be his pussonal servant, I reckon. Leastways
dat’s what Miss Dorothy say she tink.”
“Who is your Miss Dorothy?” the young man asked with badly simulated
indifference, for this was a member of the Wyanoke family of whom Dr.
Arthur Brent had never before heard.
“Miss Dorothy? Why, she’s jes’ Miss Dorothy, so.”
“But what’s her other name?”
“I dunno. I reckon she ain’t got no other name. Leastways I dunno.”
“Is Wyanoke a fine plantation?”
“Fine, Mahstah? It’s de very finest dey is. It’s all out o-doors and I
reckon dey’s a thousand cullud people on it.”
“Oh, hardly that,” answered the young man--“say eight or nine
hundred--or perhaps one hundred would be nearer the mark.”
“No, _Sir_! De Brents is quality folks, Mahstah. Dey’s got more’n a
thousan’ niggas, an’ two or three thousan’ horses, an’ as fer cows an’
hawgs you jes’ cawn’t count ’em! Dey eats dinner offen chaney plates
every day an’ de forks at Wyanoke is all gold.”
“How many carriages do they keep, Dick?”
“Sebenteen, besides de barouche an’ de carryall.”
“Well, now you’d better be moving on. Your Miss Polly and your Miss
Dorothy may be waiting for their letters.”
As the boy rode away, Dr. Arthur Brent resumed his brisk walk. He no
longer concerned himself with the landscape, or the woods, or the wild
flowers, or the beauty of the June morning, or anything else. He was
thinking, and not to much purpose.
“Who the deuce,” he muttered, “can this Miss Dorothy be? Of course I
remember dear old Aunt Polly. She has always lived at Wyanoke. But who
is Dorothy? As my uncle wasn’t married of course he had no daughter.
And besides, if he had, she would be his heir, and I should never have
inherited the property at all. I wonder if I have inherited a family,
with the land? Psha! Dick invented Miss Dorothy, of course. Why didn’t I
think of that? I remember my last stay of a year at Wyanoke, and
everything about the place. There was no Dorothy there then, and pretty
certainly there is none now. Dick invented her, just as he invented the
gold forks, and the thousand negroes, and all those multitudinous
horses, carriages, cows and hogs. That black rascal has a creative
genius--a trifle ill regulated perhaps, but richly productive. It failed
him for the moment when I demanded a second name for Dorothy. But if I
had persisted in that line of inquiry he would pretty certainly have
endowed the girl with a string of surnames as completely fictitious as
the woman herself is. I’ll have some fun out of that boy. He has
distinct psychological possibilities.”
Continuing his walk in leisurely fashion like one whose mind is busy
with reflection, Dr. Arthur Brent came at last to a great gate at the
side of the road--a gate supported by two large pillars of hewn stone,
and flanked by a smaller gate intended for the use of foot farers like
himself.
“That’s the entrance gate to the plantation,” he reflected. “I had
thought it half a mile farther on. Memory has been playing me its usual
trick of exaggerating everything remembered from boyhood. I was only
fifteen or sixteen when I was last at Wyanoke, and the road seems
shorter now than it did then. But this is surely the gate.”
Passing through the wicket, he presently found himself in a forest of
young hickory trees. He remembered these as having been scarcely higher
than the head of a man on horseback at the time of his last visit. They
had been planted by his uncle to beautify the front entrance to the
plantation, and, with careful foresting they had abundantly fulfilled
that purpose. Growing rather thickly, they had risen to a height of
nearly fifty feet, and their boles had swelled to a thickness of eight
or ten inches, while all undergrowth of every kind had been carefully
suppressed. The tract of land thus timbered by cultivation to replace
the original pine forest, embraced perhaps seventy-five or a hundred
acres, and the effect of it in a country where forest growths were
usually permitted to lead riotous lives of their own, was impressive.
As the young man turned one of the curves of the winding carriage road,
four great hounds caught sight of him and instantly set upon him. At
that moment a young girl, perched upon a tall chestnut mare galloped
into view. Thrusting two fingers of her right hand into her mouth, she
whistled shrilly between them, thrice repeating the searching sound.
Instantly the huge hounds cowered and slunk away to the side of the
girl’s horse. Their evident purpose was to go to heel at once, but their
mistress had no mind for that.
“Here!” she cried. “Sit up on your haunches and take your punishment.”
The dogs obediently took the position of humble suppliants, and the girl
dealt to each, a sharp cut with the flexible whip she carried slung to
her pommel. “Now go to heel, you naughty fellows!” she commanded, and
with a stately inclination of her body she swept past the young man, not
deigning even to glance in his direction.
“By Jove!” exclaimed Dr. Brent, “that was done as a young queen might
have managed it. She saved my life, punished her hounds to secure their
future obedience, and barely recognizing my existence--doing even that
for her own sake, not mine--galloped away as if this superb day belonged
to her! And she isn’t a day over fifteen either.” In that Dr. Brent was
mistaken. The girl had passed her sixteenth birthday, three months ago.
“I doubt if she is half as long as that graceful riding habit she is
wearing.” Then after a moment he said, still talking to himself, “I’ll
wager something handsome that that girl is as shy as a fawn. They always
are shy when they behave in that queenly, commanding way. The shyer they
are the more they affect a stately demeanor.”
Dr. Arthur Brent was a man of a scientific habit of mind. To him
everything and everybody was apt to assume somewhat the character of a
“specimen.” He observed minutely and generalized boldly, even when his
“subject” happened to be a young woman or, as in this case, a slip of a
girl. All facts were interesting to him, whether facts of nature or
facts of human nature. He was just now as earnest in his speculations
concerning the girl he had so oddly encountered, as if she had been a
new chemical reaction.
Seating himself by the roadside he tried to recall all the facts
concerning her that his hasty glance had enabled him to observe.
“If I were an untrained observer,” he reflected, “I should argue from
her stately dignity and the reserve with which she treated me--she
being only an unsophisticated young girl who has not lived long enough
to ‘adopt’ a manner with malice aforethought--I should argue from her
manner that she is a girl highly bred, the daughter of some blue blooded
Virginia family, trained from infancy by grand dames, her aunts and that
sort of thing, in the fine art of ‘deportment.’ But as I am not an
untrained observer, I recall the fact that stage queens do that sort of
thing superbly, even when their mothers are washerwomen, and they
themselves prefer corned beef and cabbage to truffled game. Still as
there are no specimens of that kind down here in Virginia, I am forced
to the conclusion that this young Diana is simply the highly bred and
carefully dame-nurtured daughter of one of the great plantation owners
hereabouts, whose manner has acquired an extra stateliness from her
embarrassment and shyness. Girls of fifteen or sixteen don’t know
exactly where they stand. They are neither little girls nor young women.
They have outgrown the license of the one state without having as yet
acquired the liberty of action that belongs to the other.” Thus the
youth’s thoughts wandered on. “That girl is a rigid disciplinarian,” he
reflected. “How sternly she required those hounds to sit on their
haunches and take the punishment due to their sins! I’ll be bound she
has herself been set in a corner for many a childish naughtiness. Yet
she is not cruel. She struck each dog only a single blow--just
punishment enough to secure better manners in future. An ill tempered
woman would have lashed them more severely. And a woman less
self-controlled would have struck out with her whip without making the
dogs sit up and realize the enormity of their offence. A less well-bred
girl would have said something to me in apology for her hounds’
misbehavior. This one was sufficiently sensible to see that unless I
were a fool--in which case I should have been unworthy of attention--her
disciplining of the dogs was apology enough without supplementary
speech. I must find out who she is and make her acquaintance.”
Then a sudden thought struck him; “By Jove!” he exclaimed aloud, “I
wonder if her name is Dorothy!”
Then the young man walked on.
II
WYANOKE
_H_alf an hour later Arthur Brent entered the house grounds of
Wyanoke--the home of his ancestors for generations past and his own
birthplace. The grounds about the mansion were not very large--two acres
in extent perhaps--set with giant locust trees that had grown for a
century or more in their comfortable surrounding of closely clipped and
luxuriant green sward. Only three trees other than the stately locusts,
adorned the house grounds. One of these was a huge elm, four feet thick
in its stem, with great limbs, branching out in every direction and
covering, altogether, a space of nearly a quarter acre of ground, but so
high from the earth that the carpet of green sward grew in full
luxuriance to the very roots of the stupendous tree. How long that
aboriginal monarch had been luxuriating there, the memory of man could
make no report. The Wyanoke plantation book, with its curiously minute
record of everything that pertained to the family domain, set forth the
fact that the “new mansion house”--the one still in use,--was built in
the year 1711, and that its southeasterly corner stood “two hundred and
thirty nine feet due northwest of the Great Elm which adorns the lawn.”
A little later than the time of Arthur Brent’s return, that young man of
a scientific mental habit made a survey to determine whether or not the
Great Elm of 1859 was certainly the same that had been named “the Great
Elm” in 1711. Finding it so he reckoned that the tree must be many
hundreds--perhaps even a thousand years of age. For the elm is one of
the very slowest growing of trees, and Arthur Brent’s measurements
showed that the diameter of this one had increased not more than six
inches during the century and a half since it had been accepted as a
conspicuous landmark for descriptive use in the plantation book.
The other trees that asked of the huge locusts a license to live upon
that lawn, were two quick-growing Asiatic mulberries, planted in
comparatively recent times to afford shade to the front porch.
The house was built of wood, heavily framed, large roomed and gambrel
roofed. Near it stood the detached kitchen in the edge of the apple
orchard, and farther away the quarters of the house servants.
As Arthur Brent strolled up the walk that led to the broad front doors
of the mansion his mind was filled with a sense of peace. That was the
dominant note of the house and all of its surroundings. The great,
self-confident locust trees that had stood still in their places while
generations of Brents had come and gone, seemed to counsel rest as the
true philosophy of life. The house itself seemed to invite repose. Even
the stately peacock that strolled in leisurely laziness beneath the
great elm seemed, in his very being, a protest against all haste, all
worry, all ambition of action and change.
“I do not know,” thought the young man, as he contemplated the
immeasurably restful scene, “what the name Wyanoke signifies in the
Indian tongue from which it was borrowed. But surely it ought to mean
rest, contentment, calm.”
That thought, and the inspiration of it, were destined to play their
part as determinative influences in the life of the young man whose mind
was thus impressed. There lay before him, though he was unconscious of
the fact, a life struggle between stern conviction and sweet
inclination, between duty and impulse, between intensity of mind and
lassitude of soul. There were other factors to complicate the problem,
but these were its chief terms, and it is the purpose of this chronicle
to show in what fashion the matter was wrought out.
Advancing to the porch, Arthur rapped thrice with the stick that he
carried. That was because he had passed the major part of his life
elsewhere than in Virginia. If such had not been the case he would have
interpreted the meaning of the broad open doors aright, and would have
walked in without any knocking at all.
As it was, Johnny, the “head dining room servant,” as he was called in
Virginia--the butler, as he would have been called elsewhere--heard the
unaccustomed sound of knocking, and went to the door to discover what it
might mean. To him Arthur handed a visiting card, and said simply: “Your
Miss Polly.”
The comely and intelligent serving man was puzzled by the card. He had
not the slightest notion of its use or purpose. In his bewilderment he
decided that the only thing to be done with it was to take it to his
“Miss Polly,” which, of course, was precisely what Arthur Brent desired
him to do. There was probably not another visiting card in all that
country side--for the Virginians of that time used few formalities, and
very simple ones in their social intercourse. They went to visit their
friends, not to “call” upon them. Pasteboard politeness was a factor
wholly unknown in their lives.
Miss Polly happened to be at that moment in the garden directing old
Michael,--the most obstinately obstructive and wilful of gardeners,--to
do something to the peas that he was resolutely determined not to do,
and to leave something undone to the tomatoes which he was bent upon
doing. On receipt of the card, she left Michael to his own devices, and
almost hurried to the house. “Almost hurried,” I say, for Miss Polly was
much too stately and dignified a person to quicken a footstep upon any
occasion.
She was “Miss Polly” to the negro servants. To everybody else she was
“Cousin Polly,” or “Aunt Polly,” and she had been that from the period
described by the old law writers as “the time whereof the memory of man
runneth not to the contrary.” How old she was, nobody knew. She looked
elderly in a comfortable, vigorous way. Gray hair was at that time
mistakenly regarded as a reproach to women--a sign of advancing age
which must be concealed at all costs. Therefore Aunt Polly’s white locks
were kept closely shaven, and covered with a richly brown wig. For the
rest, she was a plump person of large proportions, though not in the
least corpulent. Her dignity was such as became her age and her
lineage--which latter was of the very best. She knew her own value, and
respected, without aggressively asserting it. She had never been
married--unquestionably for reasons of her own--but her single state had
brought with it no trace or tinge of bitterness, no suggestion of
discontent. She was, and had always been, a woman in perfect health of
mind and body, and the fact was apparent to all who came into her
comfortable presence.
She had a small but sufficient income of her own, but, being an
“unattached female”--as the phrase went at a time when people were too
polite to name a woman an “old maid,”--she had lived since early
womanhood at Wyanoke; and since the late bachelor owner of the estate,
Arthur Brent’s uncle, had come into the inheritance, she had been
mistress of the mansion, ruling there with an iron rod of perfect
cleanliness and scrupulous neatness, according to housekeeping standards
from which she would abate no jot or tittle upon any conceivable
account. Fortunately for her servitors, there were about seven of them
to every one that was reasonably necessary.
She was a woman of high intelligence and of a pronounced wit,--a wit
that sometimes took humorous liberties with the proprieties, to the
embarrassment of sensitive young people. She was well read and well
informed, but she never did believe that the world was round, her
argument being that if such were the case she would be standing on her
head half the time. She also refused to believe in railroads. She was
confident that “the Yankees” had built railroads through Virginia, with
a far seeing purpose of overrunning and conquering that state and
possessing themselves of its plantations. Finally, she regarded Virginia
as the only state or country in the world in which a person of taste and
discretion could consent to be born. Her attitude toward all dwellers
beyond the borders of Virginia, closely resembled that of the Greeks
toward those whom they self assertively classed as “the barbarians.” How
far she really cherished these views, or how far it was merely her humor
to assert them, nobody ever found out. To all this she added the
sweetest temper and the most unselfish devotion to those about her,
that it is possible to imagine. She was very distantly akin to Arthur,
if indeed she was akin to him at all. But in his childhood he had
learned to call her “Aunt Polly,” and during that year of his boyhood
which he had spent at Wyanoke, he had known her by no other title. So
when she came through the rear doors to meet him in the great hall which
ran through the house from front to rear, he advanced eagerly and
lovingly to greet her as “Aunt Polly.”
The first welcome over, Aunt Polly became deeply concerned over the fact
that Arthur Brent had walked the five or six miles that lay between the
Court House and Wyanoke.
“Why didn’t you get a horse, Arthur, or better still why didn’t you send
me word that you were coming? I would have sent the carriage for you.”
“Which one, Aunt Polly?”
“Why, there’s only one, of course.”
“Why, I was credibly informed this morning that there were seventeen
carriages here besides the barouche and the carryall.”
“Who could have told you such a thing as that? And then to think of
anybody accusing Wyanoke of a ‘carryall!’”
“How do you mean, Aunt Polly?”
“Why, no _gentleman_ keeps a carryall. I believe Moses the storekeeper
at the Court House has one, but then he has nine children and needs it.
Besides he doesn’t count.”
“Why not, Aunt Polly? Isn’t he a man like the rest of us?”
“A man? Yes, but like the rest of us--no. He isn’t a gentleman.”
“Does he misbehave very grossly?”
“Oh, no. He is an excellent man I believe, and his children are as
pretty as angels; but, Arthur, he _keeps a store_.”
Aunt Polly laid a stress upon the final phrase as if that settled the
matter beyond even the possibility of further discussion.
“Oh, that’s it, is it?” asked the young man with a smile. “In Virginia
no man keeps a carryall unless he is sufficiently depraved to keep a
store also. But I wonder why Dick told me we had a carryall at Wyanoke
besides the seventeen carriages.”
“Oh, you saw Dick, then? Why didn’t you take his horse and make him get
you a saddle somewhere? By the way, Dick had an adventure this morning.
Out by the Garland gate he was waylaid by a man dressed all in white
‘jes’ like a ghos’,’ Dick says, with a sword and two pistols. The fellow
tried to take the mail bag away from him, but Dick, who is
quick-witted, struck him suddenly, made his horse jump the gate, and
galloped away.”
“Aunt Polly,” said the young man with a quizzical look on his face,
“would you mind sending for Dick to come to me? I very much want to hear
his story at first hands, for now that I am to be master of Wyanoke, I
don’t intend to tolerate footpads and mail robbers in the neighborhood.
Please send for Dick. I want to talk with him.”
Aunt Polly sent, but Dick was nowhere to be found for a time. When at
last he was discovered in a fodder loft, and dragged unwillingly into
his new master’s presence, the look of consternation on his face was so
pitiable that Arthur Brent decided not to torture him quite so severely
as he had intended.
“Dick,” he said, “I want you to get me some cherries, will you?”
“‘Cou’se I will, Mahstah,” answered the boy, eagerly and turning to
escape.
“Wait a minute, Dick. I want you to bring me the cherries on a china
plate, and give me one of the gold forks to eat them with. Then go to
the carriage-house and have all seventeen of my carriages brought up
here for me to look at. Tell the hostlers to send me one or two hundred
of the horses, too. There! Go and do as I tell you.”
“What on earth do you mean, Arthur?” asked Aunt Polly, who never had
quite understood the whimsical ways of the young man. “I tell you there
is only one carriage--”
“Never mind, Aunt Polly. Dick understands me. He and I had an interview
out there by the Garland gate this morning. Mail robbers will not
trouble him again, I fancy, now that his ‘Yankee Master’ is ‘in
position,’ as he puts it. But please, Aunt Polly, send some one with a
wagon to the Court House after my trunks.”
III
DR. ARTHUR BRENT
_A_rthur Brent had been born at Wyanoke, twenty seven years or so before
the time of our story. His father, one of a pair of brothers, was a man
imbued with the convictions of the Revolutionary period--the convictions
that prompted the Virginians of that time to regard slavery as an
inherited curse to be got rid of in the speediest possible way
compatible with the public welfare. There were still many such
Virginians at that time. They were men who knew the history of their
state and respected the teachings of the fathers. They remembered how
earnestly Thomas Jefferson had insisted upon writing into Virginia’s
deed of cession of the North West Territory, a clause forever
prohibiting slavery in all the fair “Ohio Country”--now constituting
Indiana, Illinois and the other great states of the Middle West. They
held in honor, as their fathers before them had done, the memory of
Chancellor George Wythe, who had well-nigh impoverished himself in
freeing the negroes he had inherited and giving them a little start in
the world. They were the men to whom Henry Clay made confident appeal in
that effort to secure the gradual extirpation of the system which was
the first and was repeated as very nearly the last of his labors of
statesmanship.
These men had no sympathy or tolerance for “abolitionist” movements.
They desired and intended that slavery should cease, and many of them
impoverished themselves in their efforts to be personally rid of it. But
they resented as an impertinence every suggestion of interference with
it on the part of the national government, or on the part of the
dwellers in other states.
For these men accepted, as fully as the men of Massachusetts once did,
the doctrine that every state was sovereign except in so far as it had
delegated certain functions of sovereignty to the general government.
They held it to be the absolute right of each state to regulate its
domestic affairs in its own way, and they were ready to resent and
resist all attempts at outside interference with their state’s
institutions, precisely as they would have resisted and resented the
interference of anybody with the ordering of their personal households.
Arthur Brent’s father, Brandon Brent, was a man of this type. Upon
coming of age and soon afterwards marrying, he determined, as he
formulated his thought, to “set himself free.” When Arthur was born he
became more resolute than ever in this purpose, under the added stimulus
of affection for his child. “The system” he said to his wife, “is
hurtful to young white men, I do not intend that Arthur shall grow up in
the midst of it.”
So he sold to his brother his half interest in the four or five thousand
acres which constituted Wyanoke plantation, and with the proceeds
removed those of the negroes who had fallen to his share to little farms
which he had bought for them in Indiana.
This left him with a wife, a son, and a few hundred dollars with which
to begin life anew. He went West and engaged in the practice of the law.
He literally “grew up with the country.” He won sufficient distinction
to represent his district in Congress for several successive terms, and
to leave behind him when he died a sweetly savored name for all the
higher virtues of honorable manhood.
He left to his son also, a fair patrimony, the fruit of his personal
labors in his profession, and of the growth of the western country in
which he lived.
At the age of fifteen, the boy had been sent to pass a delightful year
at Wyanoke, while fitting himself for college under the care of the same
tutor who had personally trained the father, and whose influence had
been so good that the father invoked it for his son in his turn. The old
schoolmaster had long since given up his school, but when Brandon Brent
had written to him a letter, attributing to his influence and teaching
all that was best in his own life’s success, and begging him to crown
his useful life’s labors with a like service to this his boy, he had
given up his ease and undertaken the task.
Arthur had finished his college course, and was just beginning, with
extraordinary enthusiasm, his study of medicine when his father died,
leaving him alone in the world; for the good mother had passed away
while the boy was yet a mere child.
After his father’s death, Arthur found many business affairs to arrange.
Attention to these seriously distracted him, greatly to his annoyance,
for he had become an enthusiast for scientific acquirement, and grudged
every moment of time that affairs occupied to the neglect of his
studies. In this mood of irritation with business details, the young man
decided to convert the whole of his inheritance into cash and to invest
the proceeds in annuities. “I shall never marry,” he told himself. “I
shall devote my whole life to science. I shall need only a moderate
income to provide for my wants, but that income must come to me without
the distraction of mind incident to the earning of it. I must be
completely a free man--free to live my own life and pursue my own
purposes.”
So he invested all that he had in American and English annuity
companies, and when that business was completed, he found himself secure
in an income, not by any means large but quite sufficient for all his
needs, and assured to him for all the years that he might live. “I shall
leave nothing behind me when I die,” he reflected, “but I shall have
nobody to provide for, and so this is altogether best.”
Then he set himself to work in almost terrible earnest. He lived in the
laboratories, the hospitals, the clinics and the libraries. When his
degree as a physician was granted his knowledge of science, quite
outside the ordinary range of medical study was deemed extraordinary by
his professors. A place of honor in one of the great medical colleges
was offered to him, but he declined it, and went to Germany and France
instead. He had fairly well mastered the languages of those two
countries, and he was minded now to go thither for instruction, under
the great masters in biology and chemistry and physics.
Two years later--and four years before the beginning of this story,
there came to Arthur Brent an opportunity of heroic service which he
promptly embraced. There broke out, in Norfolk, in his native state, in
the year 1855, such an epidemic of yellow fever as had rarely been known
anywhere before, and it found a population peculiarly susceptible to the
subtle poison of the scourge.
Facing the fact that he was in no way immune, the young physician
abandoned the work he had returned from Paris to New York to do, and
went at once to the post of danger as a volunteer for medical service.
Those whose memories stretch back to that terrible year of 1855,
remember the terms in which Virginia and all the country echoed the
praises of Dr. Arthur Brent, the plaudits that everywhere greeted his
heroic devotion. The newspapers day by day were filled with despatches
telling with what tireless devotion this mere boy--he was scarcely more
than twenty three years of age--was toiling night and day at his self
appointed task, and how beneficent his work was proving to be. The same
newspapers told with scorching scorn of physicians and clergymen--a very
few of either profession, but still a few--who had quitted their posts
in panic fear and run away from the danger. Day by day the readers of
the newspapers eagerly scanned the despatches, anxious chiefly to learn
that the young hero had not fallen a victim to his own compassionate
enthusiasm for the relief of the stricken.
Dr. Arthur Brent knew nothing of all this at the time. His days and
nights were too fully occupied with his perilous work for him even to
glance at a newspaper. He was himself stricken at last, but not until
the last, not until that grand old Virginian, Henry A. Wise had
converted his Accomac plantation into a relief camp and, arming his
negroes for its defence against a panic stricken public, had robbed the
scourge of its terrors by drawing from the city all those whose presence
there could afford opportunity for its spread.
Dr. Arthur Brent was among the very last of those attacked by the
scourge, and it was to give that young hero a meagre chance for life
that Henry A. Wise went in person to Norfolk and brought the physician
away to his own plantation home, in armed and resolute defiance alike of
quarantine restrictions and of the protests of an angry and frightened
mob.
Such in brief had been the life story of Arthur Brent. On his recovery
from a terribly severe attack of the fever, he had gone again to Europe,
not this time for scientific study, but for the purpose of restoring his
shattered constitution through rest upon a Swiss mountain side. After a
year of upbuilding idleness, he had returned to New York with his health
completely restored.
There he had taken an inexpensive apartment, and resumed his work of
scientific investigation upon lines which he had thought out during his
long sojourn in Switzerland.
Three years later there came to him news that his uncle at Wyanoke was
dead, and that the family estate had become his own as the only next of
kin. It pleased Arthur’s sense of humor to think of a failure of “kin”
in Virginia, where, as he well remembered, pretty nearly everybody he
had met in boyhood had been his cousin.
But the news that he was sole heir to the family estate was not
altogether agreeable to the young man. “It will involve me in affairs
again,” he said to himself, “and that is what I meant should never
happen to me. There is a debt on the estate, of course. I never heard of
a Virginia estate without that adornment. Then there are the negroes,
whose welfare is in my charge. Heaven knows I do not want them or their
value. But obviously they and the debt saddle me with a duty which I
cannot escape. I suppose I must go to Wyanoke. It is very provoking,
just as I have made all my arrangements to study the problem of sewer
gas poisoning with a reasonable hope of solving it this summer!”
He thought long and earnestly before deciding what course to pursue. On
the one hand he felt that his highest duty in life was to science as a
servant of humanity. He realized, as few men do, how great a beneficence
the discovery of a scientific fact may be to all mankind. “And there are
so few men,” he said to himself, “who are free as I am to pursue
investigations untrammeled by other things--the care of a family, the
ordering of a household, the education of children, the earning of a
living! If I could have this summer free, I believe I could find out how
to deal with sewer gas, and that would save thousands of lives and
immeasurable suffering! And there are my other investigations that are
not less pressing in their importance. Why should I have to give up my
work, for which I have the equipment of a thorough training, a
sufficient income, youth, high health, and last but not least,
enthusiasm?”
He did not add, as a less modest man might, that he had earned a
reputation which commanded not only the attention but the willing
assistance of his scientific brethren in his work, that all laboratories
were open to him, that all men of science were ready to respond to his
requests for the assistance of their personal observation and
experience, that the columns of all scientific journals were freely his
to use in setting forth his conclusions and the facts upon which they
rested.
“I wish I could put the whole thing into the hands of an agent, and bid
him sell out the estate, pay off the debts and send me the remainder of
the proceeds, with which to endow a chair of research in some scientific
school! But that would mean selling the negroes, and I’ll never do that.
I wish I could set them all free and rid myself of responsibility for
them. But I cannot do that unless I can get enough money out of the
estate to buy little farms for them as my father did with his negroes. I
mustn’t condemn them to starvation and call it freedom. I wish I knew
what the debt is, and how much the land will bring. Then I could plan
what to do. But as I do not know anything of the kind, I simply must go
to Wyanoke and study the problem as it is. It will take all summer and
perhaps longer. But there is nothing else for it.”
That is how it came about that Dr. Arthur Brent sat in the great hallway
at Wyanoke, talking with Aunt Polly, when Dorothy South returned,
accompanied by her hounds.
IV
DR. BRENT IS PUZZLED
_D_orothy came up to the front gate at a light gallop. Disdaining the
assistance of the horse block, she nimbly sprang from the saddle to the
ground and called to her mare “Stand, Chestnut!”
Then she gathered up the excessively long riding skirt which the Amazons
of that time always wore on horseback, and walked up the pathway to the
door, leaving the horse to await the coming of a stable boy. Arthur
could not help observing and admiring the fact that she walked with
marked dignity and grace even in a riding skirt--a thing so exceedingly
difficult to do that not one woman in a score could accomplish it even
with conscious effort. Yet this mere girl did it, manifestly without
either effort or consciousness. As an accomplished anatomist Dr. Brent
knew why. “That girl has grown up,” he said to himself, “in as perfect a
freedom as those locust trees out there, enjoy. She is as straight as
the straightest of them, and she has perfect use of all her muscles. I
wonder who she is, and why she gives orders here at Wyanoke quite as if
she belonged to the place, or the place belonged to her.”
This last thought was suggested by the fact that just before mounting
the two steps that led to the porch, Dorothy had whistled through her
fingers and said to the negro man who answered her call:--“Take the
hounds to the kennels, and fasten them in. Turn the setters out.”
But the young man had little time for wondering. The girl came into the
hall, and, as Aunt Polly had gone to order a little “snack,” she
introduced herself.
“You are Dr. Brent, I think? Yes? well, I’m Dorothy South. Let me bid
you welcome as the new master of Wyanoke.”
With that she shook hands in a fashion that was quite child-like, and
tripped away up the stairs.
Arthur Brent found himself greatly interested in the girl. She was
hardly a woman, and yet she was scarcely to be classed as a child. In
her manner as well as in her appearance she seemed a sort of compromise
between the two. She was certainly not pretty, yet Arthur’s quick
scrutiny informed him that in a year or two she was going to be
beautiful. It only needed a little further ripening of her womanhood to
work that change. But as one cannot very well fall in love with a woman
who is yet to be, Arthur Brent felt no suggestion of other sentiment
than one of pleased admiration for the girl, mingled with respect for
her queenly premature dignity. He observed, however, that her hair was
nut brown and of luxuriant growth, her complexion, fair and clear in
spite of a pronounced tan, and her eyes large, deep blue and finely
overarched by their dark brows.
Before he had time to think further concerning her, Aunt Polly returned
and asked him to “snack.”
“Dorothy will be down presently,” she said. “She’s quick at changing her
costume.”
Arthur was about to ask, “Who is Dorothy? And how does she come to be
here?” but at that moment the girl herself came in, white gowned and as
fresh of face as a newly blown rose is at sunrise.
“It’s too bad, Aunt Polly,” she said, “that you had to order the snack.
I ought to have got home in time to do my duty, and I would, only that
Trump behaved badly--Trump is one of my dogs, Doctor--and led the others
into mischief. He ran after a hare, and, of course, I had to stop and
discipline him. That made me late.”
“You keep your dogs under good control Miss--by the way how am I to call
you?”
“I don’t know just yet,” answered the girl with the frankness of a
little child.
“How so?” asked Arthur, as he laid a dainty slice of cold ham on her
plate.
“Why, don’t you see, I don’t know you yet. After we get acquainted I’ll
tell you how to call me. I think I am going to like you, and if I do,
you are to call me Dorothy. But of course I can’t tell yet. Maybe I
shall not like you at all, and then--well, we’ll wait and see.”
“Very well,” answered the young master of the plantation, amused by the
girl’s extraordinary candor and simplicity. “I’ll call you Miss South
till you make up your mind about liking or detesting me.”
“Oh, no, not that,” the girl quickly answered. “That would be _too_
grown up. But you might say ‘Miss Dorothy,’ please, till I make up my
mind about you.”
“Very well, Miss Dorothy. Allow me to express a sincere hope that after
you have come to know what sort of person I am, you’ll like me well
enough to bid me drop the handle to your name.”
“But why should you care whether a girl like me likes you or not?”
“Why, because I am very strongly disposed to like a girl like you.”
“How can you feel that way, when you don’t know me the least little
bit?”
“But I do know you a good deal more than ‘the least little bit,’”
answered the young man smiling.
“How can that be? I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps not, and yet it is simple enough. You see I have been training
my mind and my eyes and my ears and all the rest of me all my life, into
habits of quick and accurate observation, and so I see more at a glance
than I should otherwise see in an hour. For example, you’ll admit that I
have had no good chance to become acquainted with your hounds, yet I
know that one of them has lost a single joint from his tail, and another
had a bur inside one of his ears this morning, which you have since
removed.”
The girl laid down her fork in something like consternation.
“But I shan’t like you at all if you see things in that way. I’ll never
dare come into your presence.”
“Oh, yes, you will. I do not observe for the purpose of criticising;
especially I never criticise a woman or a girl to her detriment.”
“That is very gallant, at any rate,” answered the girl, accenting the
word “gallant” strongly on the second syllable, as all Virginians of
that time properly did, and as few other people ever do. “But tell me
what you started to say, please?”
“What was it?”
“Why, you said you knew me a good deal. I thought you were going to tell
me what you knew about me.”