because I have been so busy learning to know and love Madame Le Sud. She
is the very sweetest and most charming woman I ever saw in my life. She
is a trifle less than forty--just old enough I tell her, to be my mother
if it had happened in that way. Then she asked me about my real mother
and I couldn’t tell her anything. I couldn’t even tell when she died, or
what her name had been or anything about her. Isn’t it a strange thing,
Cousin Arthur, that nobody has ever told me anything about my mother? It
makes me ashamed when I think of it, and still more ashamed when I
remember that I never asked anything about her, except once. That time I
asked my father some question and he answered only by quickly rising and
going out to mount his horse and ride away all alone. That is the way he
always did when things distressed him, and as I didn’t want to distress
him I never asked him anything more about my mother. But why haven’t I
been told about her? Was she bad? And is that why everybody has been so
anxious about me, fearing that I might be bad? Even if that were so they
ought to have told me about my mother, especially after I began to grow
up and know how to stand things bravely. May be when I was too little to
understand it was better to keep silent. But when I grew older there was
no excuse for not telling me the truth. I don’t think there ever is any
excuse for that. The truth is the only thing in the world that a sane
person ought to love. I’m only seventeen years old, but I’m old enough
to have found out that much, and I don’t think I shall ever quite
forgive those who have shut out from me the truth about my mother. You,
Cousin Arthur, haven’t had any hand in that. I never asked you, but I
know. If you had known about my mother you’d have told me. You could not
have helped it. The only limitation to your ability that I ever
discovered is your utter inability to tell lies. If you tried to do that
you’d make such a wretched failure of the attempt that the truth would
come out in spite of you. So, of course, you are as ignorant as I am
about my mother.
“But I wanted to tell you about Madame Le Sud. To me she is the most
beautiful woman in the world, and yet most people would call her
hideously ugly. Indeed, I’ve heard people on the ship call her that way,
for they’re beginning at last to come out on deck and try to get well.
She has a terribly disfiguring scar. It begins in her hair and extends
down over her left eye which it has put out, and down her cheek by the
side of her nose, almost, but not quite to her upper lip. The scar is
very ugly, of course, but the woman is altogether beautiful. She
impresses me as wonderfully fine and fragile--delicate in the same way
that a piece of old Sèvres china is. She plays the violin divinely. She
wouldn’t play for me at first, and she has since confessed that she
feared to make me afraid to play for her. ‘For I am a professional
musician,’ she said, ‘or rather I was, till I got this disfiguring scar.
After that how could I present myself to an audience?’ Then she told me
how she got the scar. She was celebrating something or other with a
company of friends. They drank champagne too freely, and one of them,
taking from Madame Le Sud’s mantelpiece a perfume bottle, playfully
emptied its contents on her head. It was a perfume bottle, but it held
nitric acid which somebody had been using medicinally. In an instant
the mischief was done and Madame Le Sud’s career as a famous musician
was ended forever.
“When she got well she was very poor, having spent all her money during
her illness. A manager came to her and wanted her to go on as ‘the
veiled violinist,’ he pretending that she was some woman of
distinguished family and high social position whose love of music
tempted her to exercise her skill upon the stage, but whose social
position forbade her to show her face or reveal her name. He offered her
large sums if she would do this, but she refused to make herself a party
to such a deception. She secured employment, as she puts it, in a much
humbler capacity which enables her to turn her artistic taste to account
in earning a living, and it is in connection with this employment that
she is now on her way to Paris. She did not tell me what her employment
is, and of course I did not ask her. But now that I have learned
something of her misfortunes, and have seen how bravely she bears them,
I love her better than ever.
“Diana has come upon deck at last, ‘dressed and in her right mind.’ She
is very proud of having been ‘seasick jes’ like white folks.’ She so far
asserts her authority as to order Edmonia--who is quite herself
again--and me to array ourselves in some special gowns of her personal
selection for the captain’s dinner today. It is to be a notable affair
and Madame Le Sud is to play a violin solo. They asked me to play also,
but I refused, till Madame Le Sud asked me to give ‘Home, Sweet Home,’
with her to play second violin. Think of it! This wonderful musical
artist volunteering to ‘play second fiddle’ to a novice like me! But she
insists upon liking my rendering of the dear old melody and she has
taken the trouble to compose a special second part, which, she
generously says, ‘will bring out the beauty’ of my performance.
“We expect to make land during tonight, and by day after tomorrow, I’ll
mail this letter at Liverpool.”
XXXI
THE VIEWS AND MOODS OF ARTHUR BRENT
_W_hen Dorothy had gone Arthur Brent felt a double necessity for
diligence in the ordering of plantation affairs. He realized for the
first time what he had done in thus sending Dorothy away. For the first
time he began to understand his own condition of mind and the extent to
which this woman had become a necessity to his life. Quite naturally,
too, her absence and the loss of his daily association with her served
to depress him, as nothing else had ever done before. The sensation of
needing some one was wholly novel to him, and by no means agreeable.
“What if I should never have her with me again--never as _my_ Dorothy?”
he reflected. “That may very easily happen. In fact I sent her away in
order that it might happen, if it would. Her affection for me is still
quite that of a child for one much older than herself. Edmonia does not
so regard it, but perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps her conviction that
Dorothy the woman loves me even more than Dorothy the child ever did,
and that her love will survive acquaintance with other and more
attractive men, and other and more attractive ways of life, is born only
of her eager desire to have that come about. A year’s absence will not
make Dorothy forget me or even love me less than she does now. But how
much does she love me now, in very truth? May it not happen that when
she returns a year hence she will have given her woman’s heart to some
other, bringing back to me only the old, child love unchanged? I must be
prepared for that at all events. I must school myself to think of it as
a probability without the distress of mind it gives me now. And I must
be ready, when it happens, to go away from here at once and take up
again my life of strenuous endeavor and absorbing study. I mustn’t let
this thing ruin me as it might some weakling in character.”
In order that he might be ready thus to leave Virginia when the time
should come, rejoicing instead of grieving over Dorothy’s good fortune
in finding some fitter life than his to share, Arthur knew that he must
this year discharge the last dollar of debt that rested upon the Wyanoke
estate. He must be a free man on Dorothy’s return--free to reënter the
world of scientific work, free to make and keep himself master of his
own mind, as he had always been until this strange thing had come over
his life.
He thus set himself two tasks, one of which he might perhaps fulfil by
hard work and discreet management. The other promised to be greatly more
difficult. He made a very bad beginning at it by sitting up late at
night to read and ponder Dorothy’s letters, to question them as to the
future, to study every indication of character or impulse, or temporary
mood of mind they might give.
With the debt-paying problem he got on much better. He had now a whole
year’s accumulated income from his annuity, and he devoted all of it at
once to the lightening of this burden. He studied markets as if they had
been problems in physics, and guided himself in his planting by the
results of these studies. He had sold apples and bacon and sweet
potatoes the year before, as we know, with results that encouraged him
to go further in the direction of “Yankee farming.” This year he planted
large areas in watermelons and other large areas in other edible things
that the people of the cities want, but which no south side Virginia
planter had ever thought of growing for sale.
He was laughed at while doing all this, and envied when the results of
it appeared.
He deliberately implicated Dorothy in these his misdeeds, also, doing on
her plantation precisely as he did on his own, so that when late in the
autumn he gave account of his stewardship he was able to inform the
court, to its astonishment and to that of the entire community, that he
had discharged every dollar of debt that had rested upon his ward’s
estate. The judge applauded such management of a trust estate, and
Arthur Brent’s neighbors wondered. Some of them saw in his success
ground of approval of “Yankee farming”; all of them conceived a new
respect for the ability of a man who had thus, in so brief a time, freed
two old estates from the hereditary debts that had been accumulating for
slow generations.
Arthur had been additionally spurred and stimulated to the
accomplishment of this end, by the forebodings of evil in connection
with national politics which had gravely haunted him throughout the
year.
In May the Republican party had nominated Mr. Lincoln, and about the
same time the Democrats made his election a practical certainty. There
was clearly a heavy majority of the people opposed to his election, but
the division of that opposition into three hostile camps with three
rival candidates, rendered Republican success a foregone conclusion. By
some at least of the politicians the division was deliberately intended
to produce that result, while the great mass of the people opposed to
Mr. Lincoln and seriously fearing the consequences of his election,
deeply deplored the condition thus brought about.
The Republican party at that time existed only at the North. For the
first time in history the election threatened the country with the
choice of a president by an exclusively sectional vote, and in
opposition to the will of the majority of the people. On the popular
vote, in fact, Mr. Lincoln was in a minority of nearly a million, and
every electoral vote cast for him came from the northern states. In most
of the southern states indeed there was no canvass made for him, no
electoral nominations presented in his behalf.
Added to this was the fact that the one point on which his party was
agreed, the one bond of opinion that held it together for political
action, the one impulse held in common by all its adherents, was
hostility to slavery, which the men of the South construed to mean
hostility--intense and implacable--to the states in which that
institution existed and even to the people of those states.
The “platform” on which Mr. Lincoln was nominated, did indeed protest,
as he had himself done in many public utterances, that this was a
misinterpretation of attitude and purpose; that the party disclaimed all
intent to interfere with slavery in the slave states; that it held
firmly to the right of each state to regulate that matter for itself,
and repudiated the assumption of any power on the part of the Federal
government to control the action of the several states or in any wise to
legislate for them on this subject.
But these pledges were taken at the South to mean no more than a desire
to secure united action in an election. The party proclaimed its
purpose, while letting slavery alone in the states, to forbid its
extension to the new territories. This alone was deemed a program of
injustice by that very active group of Southern men who, repudiating the
teachings of Jefferson, and Wythe and Henry Clay, had come to believe in
African slavery as a thing right in itself, a necessity of the South, a
labor system to be upheld and defended and extended, upon its own
merits. These men contended that the new territories were the common and
equal possession of all the people; that any attempt by Federal
authority to deny to the states thereafter to be formed out of those
territories, the right to determine for themselves whether they would
permit or forbid slavery, was a wrong to the South which had contributed
of its blood and treasure even more largely than the North had done to
their acquisition. They further contended that any such legislation
would of necessity involve an assumption of Federal authority to control
states in advance of their formation,--an assumption which might easily
be construed to authorize a like Federal control of states already
existing, including those that had helped to create the Union.
All this Arthur Brent contemplated with foreboding from the first. He
anticipated Mr. Lincoln’s election from the beginning of the absurd
campaign. And while he could not at all agree with those who were
prepared to see in that event an occasion for secession and revolution,
he foreboded those calamities as results likely in fact to follow. And
even should a kindly fate avert them for a time, he saw clearly that the
alignment of parties in the nation upon sectional issues must be
productive of new and undreamed of irritations, full of threatening to
the peace of the Republic.
No more than any of his neighbors could he forecast the events of the
next few years. “But,” he wrote to Dorothy in the autumn “I see that the
election of Mr. Lincoln is now a certainty; I foresee that it will lead
to a determined movement in the South in favor of secession and the
dissolution of the Federal Union. It ought to be possible, if that must
come, to arrange it on a basis of peaceable agreement to disagree--the
Southern States assuming all responsibility for slavery till they can
rid themselves of it with safety to society, and the Northern people
washing their hands once for all of an iniquity from which they have
derived the major part of the profit. This they did, particularly during
those years after 1808, in which the African slave trade was prohibited
by law, but was carried on by New England ship masters and New England
merchants with so great a profit that Justice Joseph Story of the United
States supreme court, though himself a New Englander, was denounced by
the New England press and even threatened with a violent ejection from
the bench, because he sought to prevent and punish it, in obedience to
the national statute.
“But I am wandering from my theme,” he continued. “I wanted to say that
while I think there is no real occasion for a disruption of the Union, I
gravely fear that it is coming. And while I think it should be possible
to accomplish it peaceably I do not believe it will be done in that way.
There are too many hot heads on both sides, for that. There is too much
gunpowder lying around, and there will be too many sparks flying about.
Listen, Dorothy! I foresee that Mr. Lincoln will be elected in November.
I anticipate an almost immediate attempt on the part of the cotton
states to dissolve the Union by secession. I shall do everything I can
to help other sober minded Virginians to keep Virginia out of this
movement, and if Virginia can be kept out of it, the other border states
will accept her action as controlling, and they too will stay out of the
revolutionary enterprise. In that case the states farther South will be
amenable to reason, and if there is reason and discretion exercised at
Washington and in the North, some means may possibly be found for
adjusting the matter--Virginia and Kentucky perhaps acting successfully
as mediators. But I tell you frankly, I do not expect success in the
program to which I intend to devote all my labors and all I have of
influence. I look to see Virginia drawn into the conflict. I look for
war on a scale far more stupendous than any this country has ever seen.
“I can no more foresee what the result of such a war will be than you
can--so far at least as military operations are concerned. But some of
the results I think I do see very clearly. Virginia will be the
battle-ground, and Virginia will be desolated as few lands have ever
been in the history of the world. Another thing, Dorothy. If this war
comes, as I fear it will, it will make an end of African slavery in this
country. For if we of the South are beaten in the conflict of arms, the
complete extinction of slavery will be decreed as a part of the penalty
of war and the price of peace. If we are successful, we shall have set
up a Canada at our very doors. The Ohio and the Potomac will become a
border beyond which every escaping negro will be absolutely free, and
across which every conceivable influence will be brought to bear upon
the negroes to induce them to run away. Under such conditions the
institution must become an intolerable as well as an unprofitable
annoyance, and it will speedily disappear.
“Now I come to what I set out to say. Before election day this present
fall I shall have paid off every dollar of the debts that rest upon
Pocahontas and Wyanoke. You and I will be free, at least, from that
source of embarrassment, and whatever the military or political, or
legal or social results of the war may be, you and I will be owners of
land that is subject to no claim of any kind against us. I have
grievously compromised your dignity as well as my own in my efforts to
bring this about, but you are not held responsible for my ‘Yankee
doings,’ at Pocahontas, and as for me, I am not thin-skinned in such
matters. I’d far rather be laughed at for paying debts in undignified
ways than be dunned for debts that I cannot pay.”
This letter reached Dorothy in Paris, on her return through Switzerland,
from an Italian journey, undertaken in the early summer before the
danger of Roman fever should be threatening. Had such a letter come to
her a few months earlier, her response to it would have been an utterly
submissive assent to all that her guardian had done, with perhaps a
wondering question or two as to why he should feel it necessary to ask
her consent to anything he might be minded to do, or even to tell her
what he had done. But Dorothy had grown steadily more reserved in her
writing to him, as experience had slowly but surely awakened womanly
consciousness in her soul. She was still as loyally devoted as ever to
Arthur, but she shrank now as she had not been used to do, from too
candid an expression of her devotion. The child had completely given
place to the woman in her nature and the woman was far less ready than
the child had been to reveal her feelings. A succession of suitors for
her hand had taught Dorothy to think of herself as a woman bound to
maintain a certain reserve in her intercourse with men. They had
awakened in her a consciousness of the fact, of which she had scarcely
even thought in the old, childish days, that Arthur Brent was a young
man and Dorothy South a young woman, and that it would ill become
Dorothy South to reveal herself too frankly to this young man. She did
not quite know what there was in her mind to reveal or to withhold from
revelation, but she instinctively felt the necessity strong upon her to
guard herself against her own impulsive truthfulness. She had no more
notion that she had dared give her woman’s love to Arthur unasked, than
she had that he--who had never asked for it--desired her love. He
remained to her in fact the enormously superior being that she had
always held him to be, but she found herself blushing sometimes when
she remembered the utter abandon with which she had been accustomed to
lay bare her innermost thoughts and sentiments, her very soul, indeed,
to his scrutiny.
She knew of no reason why she should now alter her attitude or her
demeanor towards him, and she resolutely determined that she would not
in the least change either, yet the letter she wrote to him on this
occasion was altogether unlike that which she would have written a few
months earlier upon a like occasion. She expressed her approval of all
that he had done with respect to her estate, where in like case a few
months earlier she would have asked him wonderingly what she had to do
with things planned and accomplished by him. She expressed acquiescence
as one might who has the right to approve or to criticise, where before
she would have concerned herself only with rejoicings that her guardian
had got things as he wanted them, in accordance with his unquestioned
and unquestionable right to have everything as he wanted it to be in a
world quite unworthy of him.
In brief, Dorothy’s letter depressed Arthur Brent almost unendurably.
Because he missed something from it that long use had taught him to
expect in all her utterances to him, he read into it much of coldness,
alienation, indifference, which it did not contain. He sat up all night,
torturing himself with doubts for which a frequent reperusal of the
letter furnished him no shadow of justification; and when the gray
morning came he ordered his horse, meaning to ride purposely nowhither.
But when the horse was brought, a new and overpowering sense of
Dorothy’s absence and perhaps her alienation, came over him. He
remembered vividly every detail of that first morning’s ride he had had
with her, and instinctively he copied her proceeding on that occasion.
Drawing forth his handkerchief he rubbed the animal’s flanks and rumps
with it to its soiling.
“I’ll not ride this morning, Ben,” he said. “I’ll go back to the house
and write a letter to your Mis’ Dorothy and I’ll enclose that
handkerchief for her inspection.”
XXXII
THE SHADOW FALLS
_W_ith the autumn came that shadow over the land which Arthur Brent had
so greatly dreaded. Mr. Lincoln’s election was quickly succeeded by the
secession of South Carolina. One after another the far Southern States
followed, and presently the seceding states allied themselves in a new
confederacy.
The whole country was in a ferment. The founders of the Union had made
no provision whatever for such a state of things as this, and even the
wisest men were at a loss to say what ought to be done or what could be
done. There seemed to be nowhere any power or authority adequate to deal
with the situation in one way or in another. All was chaos in the
coolest minds while the hotheads on either side were daily making
matters worse by their intemperate utterances and by the unyielding
arrogance of their attitude.
In the meantime the administration at Washington seemed intent only upon
preventing the outbreak of open war until its term should end on the
fourth of March, 1861, while those into whose hands the government must
pass on that date had not only no authority to act but no privilege even
of advising.
It seemed fortunate at the time, that Virginia refused to join in the
secession movement. Her refusal and her commanding influence over the
other border states seemed for a time to provide an opportunity for wise
counsels to assert themselves. There were radical secessionists in
Virginia and uncompromising opponents of secession on any terms. But the
attitude of the great majority of Virginians, as was shown in the
election of a constitutional convention on the fourth of February, was
one of earnestness for peace and reconciliation and the preservation of
the Federal Union.
The Virginians believed firmly in the constitutional right of any state
to withdraw from the Union, but the majority among them saw in Mr.
Lincoln’s election no proper occasion for the exercise of that right.
They regarded the course of the cotton states in withdrawing from the
Union as one strictly within their right, but as utterly unwise and
unnecessary. On the other hand they firmly denied the right of the
national government to coerce the seceding states or in any manner to
make war upon them.
Arthur Brent was an uncompromising believer in the right of a state to
secede, and equally an uncompromising opponent of secession as a policy.
That part of Virginia in which he lived was divided in opinion and
sentiment, with a distinct preponderance of opinion in behalf of
secession. But when the call came for the election of a constitutional
convention to decide upon Virginia’s course the secessionists of his
district were represented by two rival candidates, both fiercely
favoring secession. The only discoverable difference in their views was
that one of them wanted the convention to adopt the ordinance of
secession “before breakfast on the day of its first assembling,” while
the other contended that it would be more consonant with the dignity of
the state to have muffins and coffee first.
Neither of these candidates was a person of conspicuous influence in the
community. Neither was a man of large ability or ripe experience or
commanding social position--the last counting for much in Virginia in
those days when there was no such thing as a ballot in that state, and
when every man must go to the polls and openly proclaim his vote.
Under these circumstances a number of the conservative men of the
district got together and decided to make Arthur Brent a candidate. It
was certain that the secession vote would be in the majority in the
district, but if it were divided between the two rival candidates, as it
was certain to be, these gentlemen were not without hope that their
candidate might secure a plurality and be elected.