my heart out by consenting to give you up to him. You were rapidly
growing in intelligence and I perfectly knew that such bringing up as I
could give you would ruin your life in one way or another. Never mind
the painful memory of all that. I consented at last to let your father
take you back to Pocahontas and bring you up in a way suited to your
birth and condition. Mammy went with you of course. Your father begged
for the privilege of providing for my support in comfort while I should
live, but I refused. I begged him to go into the courts and free himself
from me. He could have got his divorce in Virginia upon the ground of my
desertion. I shall never forget his answer. ‘When I married you,
Dorothy’--for your name, my child, is the same as my own--‘When I
married you, Dorothy, it was not during good behavior but forever. You
are my wife, and you will be always the one woman I love, the one woman
whose name I will protect at all hazards and all costs. No complaint of
you has ever passed my lips. I have suffered no human being to say aught
to your hurt in my presence or within my knowledge. Nor shall I to the
end. You are my wife. I love you. That is all of it.’
“‘He went away sorrowful, leaving me broken hearted. I could appear in
public now and I returned to my profession. The beauty which had been so
great an aid to me before, was impaired, and the old vivacity was gone.
But I could play still and sing, and with my violin and my voice I
easily earned enough for all my wants, until I got the scar. After that
I sank into a wretched poverty, and was glad at last to secure
employment as a stage dresser. My illness here has lost me that--.’
“I cannot tell you any more, Cousin Arthur. It pains me too much. But I
am going to take my mother with me to America and provide for her in
some way that she will permit. She has recovered from the surgery now,
and I have simply taken possession of her. She refuses to go to
Pocahontas, or in any other way to take her position as my father’s
widow. But if this war comes, as you fear it will, she has decided to go
into service as a field nurse, and you must arrange that for her.
“I understand now why my father forbade me to learn music, and why he
taught me that a woman must have a master. I can even guess what
Jefferson Peyton meant when I rejected his suit. My father, I suppose,
planned to provide a master for me; but I decline to serve the one he
selected. I am a woman and a proud one. I will never consent to be
disposed of in marriage by the orders of other people as princesses and
other chattel women are. But, oh, you cannot know how sorrowful my soul
is, and how I long to be at home again! I hope the war will come. That
is wicked in me, I suppose, but I cannot help it. I must have occupation
or I shall go mad. I shall set to work at once, on my return, fitting up
our laboratory, and there I’ll find work enough to fill all my hours,
and it will be useful, humane, patriotic work, such as it is worth a
woman’s while to do.”
XXXV
THE BIRTH OF WAR
_I_t was the seventeenth of April, 1861. It was the fateful day on which
the greatest, the most terrible, the most disastrous of modern wars was
born.
On that day the long struggle of devoted patriots to keep Virginia in
the Union and to throw all her influence into the scale of peace, had
ended in failure.
A few days before, Fort Sumter had been bombarded and had fallen. Still
the Virginia convention had resisted all attempts to drag or force the
Mother State into secession. Then had come Mr. Lincoln’s call upon
Virginia for her quota of troops with which to make war upon the
seceding sister states of the South and the alternative of secession or
dishonor presented itself to this body of Union men. They decided at
once, and on that seventeenth day of April they made a great war
possible and indeed inevitable, by adopting an ordinance of secession
and casting Virginia’s fate, Virginia’s strength, and Virginia’s
matchless influence, into the scale of disunion and war.
Richmond was in delirium--a delirium which moved men to ecstatic joy or
profound grief, or deeply rooted apprehension, according to their
several temperaments. The thoughtless went parading excitedly up and
down the streets singing songs, and making a gala time of it, wearing
cockades by day and carrying torches by night, precisely as if some long
hoped for and supremely desired good fortune had come upon the land of
their birth. The more thoughtful looked on and kept silent. But mostly
the spirit manifested was one of grim determination to meet fate--be it
good or bad--with stout hearts and calmly resolute minds.
In that purpose all men were as one now. The vituperation with which the
people’s representatives in the convention had been daily assailed for
their hesitation to secede, was absolutely hushed. The sentiment of
affection for the Union which had been growing for seventy years and
more, gave way instantly to a determination to win a new independence or
sacrifice all in the attempt.
Jubal A. Early, who had from the beginning opposed secession with all
his might, reckoning it not only insensate folly but a political crime
as well, voted against it to the last, and then, instantly sent to Gov.
Letcher a tender of his services in the war, in whatever capacity his
state might see fit to employ him. In the same way William C. Wickham,
an equally determined opponent of secession, quitted his seat in the
convention only to make hurried preparation for his part as a military
leader on the Southern side.
No longer did men discuss the merits and demerits of one policy or
another; there could be but one policy now, one course of action, one
sentiment of devotion to Virginia, and an undying determination to
maintain her honor at all hazards and at all costs.
The state of mind that was universal among Virginians at that time, has
never been quite understood in other parts of the Union. These men’s
traditions extended back to a time before ever the Union was thought of,
before ever Virginia had invited her sister states to unite with her, in
a convention at Annapolis, called for the purpose of forming that “more
perfect Union,” from which, in 1861, Virginia decided to withdraw.
Devotion to the Union had been, through long succeeding decades, as
earnest and as passionate in Virginia as the like devotion had been in
any other part of the country. Through three great wars the Virginians
had faltered not nor failed when called upon to contribute of their
substance or their manhood to the national defence.
The Virginians loved the Union of which their state had been so largely
the instigator, and they were self-sacrificingly loyal to it. But they
held their allegiance to it to be solely the result of their state’s
allegiance, and when their state withdrew from it, they held themselves
absolved from all their obligations respecting it. Their very loyalty to
it had been a prompting of their state, and when their state elected to
transfer its allegiance to another Confederacy, they regarded themselves
as bound by every obligation of law, of honor, of tradition, of history
and of manhood itself, to obey the mandate.
Return we now to Richmond, on that fateful seventeenth day of April,
1861. There had been extreme secessionists, and moderate ones,
uncompromising Union men, and Union men under conditions of
qualification. There were none such when that day was ended. Waitman T.
Willey and a few others from the Panhandle region, who had served in the
convention, departed quickly for their homes, to take part with the
North in the impending struggle, in obedience to their convictions of
right. The rest accepted the issue as determinative of Virginia’s
course, and ordered their own courses accordingly. They were, before all
and above all Virginians, and Virginia had decided to cast in her lot
with the seceding Southern States. There was an end of controversy.
There was an end of all division of sentiment. The supreme moment had
come, and all men stood shoulder to shoulder to meet the consequences.
XXXVI
THE OLD DOROTHY AND THE NEW
_J_ust as Arthur Brent was quitting his seat in the convention on that
day so pregnant of historic happenings, a page put a note into his
hands. It was from Edmonia, and it read:
“We have just arrived and are at the Exchange Hotel and Ballard House.
We are all perfectly well, though positively dazed by what you statesmen
in the convention have done today. I can hardly think of the thing
seriously--of Virginia withdrawing from the Union which her legislature
first proposed to the other states, which her statesmen--Washington,
Jefferson, Marshall, Madison, Mason, and the rest so largely contributed
to form, and over which her Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe,
Harrison and Tyler have presided in war and peace. And yet nothing could
be more serious. It seems to me a bad dream from which we shall
presently wake to find ourselves rejoicing in its untruth.
“You will come to the hotel to a six o’clock dinner, of course. I want
to show you what a woman Dorothy has grown to be. Poor dear girl! She
has been greatly disturbed by the hearing of her mother’s story, and she
is a trifle morbid over it. However, you’ll see her for yourself this
evening. We were charmingly considerate, I think in not telegraphing to
announce our coming. We shall expect you to thank us properly for thus
refraining from disturbing you. Come to the hotel the moment your public
duties will let you.”
Arthur hastily left the convention hall and hurried across Capitol
Square and on to the big, duplex hostelry. He entered on the Exchange
Hotel side and learned by inquiry at the office that Edmonia’s rooms
were in the Ballard House on the other side of the street. It had begun
to rain and he had neither umbrella nor overcoat, having forgotten and
left both in the cloak room of the convention. So he mounted the
stairway, and set out to cross by the covered crystal bridge that
spanned the street connecting the two great caravansaries. The bridge
was full of people, gathered there to look at the pageant in the streets
below, where companies of volunteer cavalry from every quarter of
eastern Virginia were marching past, on their way to the
newly-established camp of instruction on the Ashland race track. For
Governor Letcher had so far anticipated the inevitable result of the
long debate as to establish two instruction camps and to accept the
tenders of service which were daily sent to him by the volunteer
companies in every county.
As Arthur was making his way through the throng of sight-seers on the
glass bridge some movement in the crowd brought him into contact with a
gentlewoman, to whom he hastily turned with apologetic intent.
It was Dorothy! Not the Dorothy who had bidden him good-by a year ago,
but a new, a statelier Dorothy, a Dorothy with the stamp of travel and
society upon her, a Dorothy who had learned ease and self-possession and
dignity by habit in the grandest drawing rooms in all the world. Yet the
old Dorothy was there too--the Dorothy of straight-looking eyes and
perfect truthfulness, and for the moment the new Dorothy forgot herself,
giving place to the old.
“Oh, Master!” she cried, impulsively seizing both his hands, and,
completely forgetful of the crowd about her, letting the glad tears slip
out between her eyelashes. “I was not looking at the soldiers; I was
looking for you, and wondering when you would come. Oh, I am so happy,
and so glad!”
An instant later the new Dorothy reasserted herself, and Arthur did not
at all like the change. The girl became so far self-conscious as to grow
dignified, and in very shame over her impulsive outbreak, she
exaggerated her dignity and her propriety of demeanor into something
like coldness and stately hauteur.
“How you have grown!” Arthur exclaimed when he had led her to one of the
parlors almost deserted now for the sight-seeing vantage ground of the
bridge.
“No,” she answered as she might have done in a New York or a Paris
drawing room, addressing some casual acquaintance. “I have not grown a
particle. I was quite grown up before I left Virginia. It is a Paris
gown, perhaps. The Parisian dressmakers know all the art of bringing out
a woman’s ‘points,’ and they hold my height and my slenderness to be my
best claims upon attention.”
Arthur felt as if she had struck him. He was about to remonstrate, when
Edmonia broke in upon the conversation with her greeting. But Dorothy
had seen his face and read all that it expressed. The old Dorothy was
tempted to ask his forgiveness; the new Dorothy dismissed the thought
as quite impossible. She had already sufficiently “compromised” herself
by her impulsiveness, and to make amends she put stays upon her dignity
and throughout the evening they showed no sign of bending.
Arthur was tortured by all this. Edmonia was delighted over it. So
differently do a man and a woman sometimes interpret another woman’s
attitude and conduct.
Arthur was compelled to leave them at nine to meet Governor Letcher, who
had summoned him for consultation with respect to the organization of a
surgical staff, of which he purposed to make Arthur Brent one of the
chiefs. Before leaving he asked as to Edmonia’s and Dorothy’s home-going
plans. Learning that they intended to go by the eight o’clock train the
next morning, he said:
“Very well, I’ll send Dick up by the midnight train to have the Wyanoke
carriage at the station to meet you.”
“Is Dick with you?” Dorothy asked with more of enthusiasm than she had
shown since her outbreak on the bridge. “How I do want to see Dick!
Can’t you send him here before train time, please?”
Already grieved and resentful, Arthur was stung by the manner of this
request. For the moment he was disposed to interpret it as an intended
affront. He quickly dismissed that thought and answered with a laugh:
“Yes, Dorothy, he shall come to you at once. Perhaps he has a ‘song
ballad’ ready for your greeting. At any rate he at least will pleasantly
remind you of the old life.”
“I wonder why he put it in that way--why he said ‘he _at least_,’” said
Dorothy when Arthur had gone and the two women were left alone.
“I think I know,” Edmonia answered. But she did not offer the
explanation. Neither did Dorothy ask for it.
XXXVII
AT WYANOKE
_I_t was three days later before Arthur Brent was able to leave the
duties that detained him in Richmond. When at last he found himself
free, one of the infrequent trains of that time had just gone, and there
would be no other for many hours to come. His impatience to be at
Wyanoke was uncontrollable. For three days he had brooded over Dorothy’s
manner to him at the hotel, and wondered, with much longing, whether she
might not meet him differently at home. He recalled the frankly
impulsive eagerness with which she had greeted him in the first moment
of their meeting, and he argued with himself that her later reserve
might have been simply a reaction from that first outburst of joy, a
maidenly impulse to atone to her pride for the lapse into old, childlike
manners. This explanation seemed a very probable one, and yet--he
reflected that there were no strangers standing by when she had relapsed
into a reserve that bordered upon hauteur--nobody before whom she need
have hesitated to be cordial. He had asked her about her mother,
thinking thus to awaken some warmth of feeling in her and reëstablish a
footing of sympathy. But her reply had been a business-like statement
that Madame Le Sud would remain in New York for a few days, to secure
the clothing she would need for her field ministrations to the wounded,
after which she would take some very quiet lodging in Richmond until
duty should call her.
Altogether Arthur Brent’s impatience to know the worst or
best--whichever it might be--grew greater with every hour, and when he
learned that he must idly wait for several hours for the next train, he
mounted Gimlet and set out upon the long horseback journey, for which
Gimlet, weary of the stable, manifested an eagerness quite equal to his
own.
When the young man dismounted at Wyanoke, Dorothy was the first to meet
him, and there was something in her greeting that puzzled him even more
than her manner on the former occasion had done. For Dorothy too had
been thinking of the hotel episode, and repenting herself of her
coldness on that occasion. She understood it even less than Arthur did.
She had not intended to be reserved with him, and several times during
that evening she had made an earnest effort to be natural and cordial
instead, but always without success, for some reason that she could not
understand. So she had carefully planned to greet him on his
home-coming, with all the old affection and without reserve. To that end
she had framed in her own mind the things she would say to him and the
manner of their saying. Now that he had come, she said the things she
had planned to say, but she could not adopt the manner she had intended.
The result was something that would have been ludicrous had it been less
painful to both the parties concerned. It left Arthur worse puzzled than
ever and obviously pained. It sent Dorothy to her chamber for that “good
cry,” which feminine human nature holds to be a panacea.
At dinner Dorothy “rattled” rather than conversed, as young women are
apt to do when they are embarrassed and are determined not to show their
embarrassment. She seemed bent upon alternately amusing and astonishing
Aunt Polly, with her grotesquely distorted descriptions of things seen
and people encountered during her travels. Arthur took only so much
part in the conversation as a man thinking deeply, but disposed to be
polite, might.
When the cloth was removed he lighted a cigar and went to the stables
and barns, avowedly to inquire about matters on the plantation.
When he returned, full of a carefully formed purpose to “have it out”
with Dorothy, he found guests in the house who had driven to Wyanoke for
supper and a late moonlight drive homeward. From that moment until the
time of the guests’ departure, he was eagerly beset with questions
concerning the political situation and the prospects of war.
“The war is already on,” he answered, “and we are not half prepared for
it. Fortunately the North is in no better case, and still more
fortunately, we are to have with us the ablest soldier in America.”
“Who? Beauregard?”
“No, Robert E. Lee, to whom the Federal administration a little while
ago offered the command of all the United States armies. He has resigned
and is now in Richmond to organize our forces.”
Arthur talked much, too, of the seriousness of the war, of the certainty
in his mind, that it would last for years, taxing the resources of the
South to the point of exhaustion. For this some of his guests called him
a pessimist, and applauded the prediction of young Jeff Peyton, that
“within twenty days we shall have twenty thousand men on the Potomac,
and after perhaps one battle of some consequence we shall dictate terms
of peace in Washington.” He added: “You must make haste to get into the
service, Doctor, if you expect to see the fun.”
“I do not expect to see the fun,” Arthur answered quietly. “I do not see
the humorous side of slaughter. But in my judgment you, sir, will have
ample time in which to wear out many uniforms as gorgeous as the one you
now have on, before peace is concluded at Washington or anywhere else.
An army of twenty thousand men will be looked upon as a mere detachment
before this struggle is over. We shall hear the tramp of armies
numbering hundreds of thousands, and their tramping will desolate
Virginia fields that are now as fair as any on earth. We shall see
historic mansions vanish in smoke, and thousands of happy homes made
prey by the demon War. War was never yet a pastime for any but the most
brutish men. It is altogether horrible; it is utterly hellish, if the
ladies will pardon the term, and only fools can welcome it as a holiday
pursuit. Unhappily there are many such on both sides of the Potomac.”
As he paused there was a complete hush among the company for thirty
seconds or so. Then Dorothy advanced to Arthur, took his hand, and said:
“Thank you, Master!”
Arthur answered only by a look. But it was a look that told her all that
she wanted to know.
When the guests were gone, Dorothy prepared for a hasty retreat to her
room, but Arthur called to her as she reached the landing of the stairs,
and asked:
“Shall we have one of our old time horseback rides ‘soon’ in the
morning, Dorothy?”
“Yes. It delights me to hear our Virginia phrase ‘soon in the morning.’
Thank you, I’ll be ready. Good night.”
XXXVIII
SOON IN THE MORNING
_I_t was Dick who brought the horses on that next morning--Dick grown
into a tall and comely fellow, and no longer dressed in the careless
fashion of a year ago. For had not Dick spent two months in Richmond as
his master’s body servant? And had he not there developed his native
dandy instincts? And had not the sight of the well-nigh universal
uniforms of that time bred in him a great longing to wear some sort of
“soldier clothes”?
His master had indulged the fancy. He meant to keep Dick as his body
servant throughout the coming war, and, at any rate while he sat as a
member of that august body the constitutional convention, he wanted his
“boy” to present the appearance of a gentleman’s servitor. So, when he
took Dick to a tailor to be dressed in suitable fashion, he readily
acquiesced in the young negro’s preference for a suit of velveteen and
corduroys with brass buttons shining all over it like the stars in Ursa
Major. The tailor, recognizing the shapeliness of the young negro’s
person as something that afforded him an opportunity to display his
skill in the matter of “fit” had brought all his art to bear upon the
task of perfecting Dick’s livery.
Dick in his turn had employed strategy in securing an opportunity to
show himself in his new glory to his “Mis’ Dorothy.” Ben, the hostler
who usually brought the horses had recently “got religion”--a bilious
process which at that time was apt to render a negro specially
indifferent to the obligations of morality with respect to “chickens
fryin’ size,” and gloomily unfit for the performance of his ordinary
duties. Dick had labored over night with “Bro’ Ben,” persuading him that
he was really ill, and inducing him to swallow two blue mass pills--the
which Dick had adroitly filched from the medicine chest in the
laboratory. And as Dick, since his service “endurin’ of de feveh,” had
enjoyed the reputation of knowing “‘mos as much as a sho’ ’nuff doctah,”
Ben readily acquiesced in Dick’s suggestion that he, Ben, should lie
abed in the morning, Dick kindly volunteering to feed and curry his
mules for him and “bring de hosses.”
Dick’s strategy accomplished its purpose, and so it was Dick,
resplendent in a livery that might have done credit to a field marshal
on dress parade, who presented himself at the gate that morning in
charge of his master’s and Dorothy’s mounts.
Arthur looked at him and asked:
“Why are you in full-dress uniform today, General Dick?”
“It’s my respec’ful compliments to Mis’ Dorothy, sah,” answered the boy.
“Thank you, Dick!” said the girl. “I appreciate the attention. But where
is Ben?”
“Bro’ Ben he dun got religion, Mis’ Dorothy, an’ he dun taken two blue
pills las’ night, an’--”
“Give him a dose of Epsom salts at once, Dick,” broke in Arthur, “or
he’ll be salivated. And don’t give him oxalic acid by mistake. I’ll
trouble you to keep your fingers out of the medicine chest hereafter.
Come, Dorothy!”
But as Dorothy was about to put her foot into Arthur’s hand and spring
from it into the saddle, Dick drew forth a white handkerchief, heavily
perfumed with a cooking extract of lemon, and offered it to Dorothy,
saying:
“You haint rubbed de hosses, Mis’ Dorothy, to see ef dey’s clean ’nuff
fer dis suspicious occasion.”
Dick probably meant “auspicious,” but he was accustomed, both in prose
and in verse, to require complaisant submission to his will on the part
of the English language.
“Did you clean them, Dick?” asked Dorothy with a little laugh.
“I’se proud to say I did,” answered the boy.
“Then there is no need for me to rub them,” she replied. “You always do
your work well. Your master tells me so. And now I want you to take this
handkerchief of mine, and keep it for your own. I bought it in Paris,
Dick. You can carry it in your breast pocket, with a corner of the lace
protruding--sticking out, you know. And if you will come to me when we
get back from our ride, I’ll give you a bottle of something better than
a cooking extract to perfume it with.”