“SHALL WE HAVE ONE OF OUR OLD-TIME HORSEBACK RIDES ‘SOON’ IN THE MORNING, DOROTHY?”

([See page 440.])

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

LIST of ILLUSTRATIONS

Dorothy South

I
TWO ENCOUNTERS

IT 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

“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

HALF 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

ARTHUR 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

DOROTHY 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.”

“Well, I’ll tell you part of what I know. I know that you have a low pitched voice—a contralto it would be called in musical nomenclature. It has no jar in it—it is rich and full and sweet, and while you always speak softly, your voice is easily heard. I should say that you sing.”

“No. I must not sing.”

“Must not? How is that?”

The girl seemed embarrassed—almost pained. The young man, seeing this, apologized:

“Pardon me! I did not mean to ask a personal question.”

“Never mind!” said the girl. “You were not unkind. But I must not sing, and I must never learn a note of music, and worst of all I must not go to places where they play fine music. If I ever get to liking you very well indeed, perhaps I’ll tell you why—at least all the why of it that I know myself—for I know only a little about it. Now tell me what else you know about me. You see you were wrong this time.”

“Yes, in a way. Never mind that. I know that you are a rigid disciplinarian. You keep your hounds under a sharp control.”

“Oh, I must do that. They would eat somebody up if I didn’t. Besides it is good for them. You see dogs and women need strict control. A mistress will do for dogs, but every woman needs a master.”

The girl said this as simply and earnestly as she might have said that all growing plants need water and sunshine. Arthur was astonished at the utterance, delivered, as it was, in the manner of one who speaks the veriest truism.

“Now,” he responded, “I have encountered something in you that I not only do not understand but cannot even guess at. Where did you learn that cynical philosophy?”

“Do you mean what I said about dogs?”

“No. Though ‘cynic’ means a dog. I mean what you said about women. Where did you get the notion that every woman needs a master?”

“Why, anybody can see that,” answered the girl. “Every girl’s father or brother is her master till she grows up and marries. Then her husband is her master. Women are always very bad if they haven’t masters, and even when they mean to be good, they make a sad mess of their lives if they have nobody to control them.”

If this slip of a girl had talked Greek or Sanscrit or the differential calculus at him, Arthur could not have been more astounded than he was. Surely a girl so young, so fresh, and so obviously wholesome of mind could never have formulated such a philosophy of life for herself, even had she been thrown all her days into the most complex of conditions and surroundings, instead of leading the simplest of lives as this girl had manifestly done, and seeing only other living like her own. But he forbore to question her, lest he trespass again upon delicate ground, as he had done with respect to music. He was quick to remember that he had already asked her where she had learned her philosophy, and that she had nimbly evaded the question—defending her philosophy as a thing obvious to the mind, instead of answering the inquiry as to whence she had drawn the teaching.

Altogether, Arthur Brent’s mind was in a whirl as he left the luncheon table. Simple as she seemed and transparent as her personality appeared to him to be, the girl’s attitude of mind seemed inexplicable even to his practised understanding. Her very presence in the house was a puzzle, for Aunt Polly had offered no explanation of the fact that she seemed to belong there, not as a guest but as a member of the household, and even as one exercising authority there. For not only had the girl apologized for leaving Aunt Polly to order the luncheon, but at table and after the meal was finished, it was she, and not the elder woman who gave directions to the servants, who seemed accustomed to think of her as the source of authority, and finally, as she withdrew from the dining room, she turned to Arthur and said:

“Doctor, it is the custom at Wyanoke to dine at four o’clock. Shall I have dinner served at that hour, or do you wish it changed?”

The young man declared his wish that the traditions of the house should be preserved, adding playfully—“I doubt if you could change the dinner hour, Miss Dorothy, even if we all desired it so. I remember Aunt Kizzey, the cook, and I for one should hesitate to oppose my will to her conservatism.”

“Oh, as to that,” answered the girl, “I never have any trouble managing the servants. They know me too well for that.”

“What could you do if you told Kizzey to serve dinner at three and she refused?” asked the young man, really curious to hear the answer.

“I would send for Aunt Kizzey to come to me. Then I would look at her. After that she would do as I bade her.”

“I verily believe she would,” said the young man to himself as he went to the sideboard and filled one of the long stemmed pipes. “But I really cannot understand why.”

He had scarcely finished his pipe when Dorothy came into the hall accompanied by a negro girl of about fourteen years, who bore a work basket with her. Seating herself, Dorothy gave the girl some instruction concerning the knitting she had been doing, and added: “You may sit in the back porch to-day. It is warm.”

“Is it too warm, Miss Dorothy, for you to make a little excursion with me to the stables?”

“Certainly not,” she quickly answered. “I’ll go at once.”

“Thank you,” he said, “and we’ll stop in the orchard on our way back and get some June apples. I remember where the trees are.”

“You want me to show you the horses, I suppose,” she said as the two set off side by side.

“No; any of the negroes could do that. I want you to render me a more skilled service.”

“What is it?”

“I want you, please, to pick out a horse for me to ride while I stay at Wyanoke.”

“While you stay at Wyanoke!” echoed the girl. “Why, that will be for all the time, of course.”

“I hardly think so,” answered the young man, with a touch of not altogether pleased uncertainty in his tone. “You see I have important work to do, which I cannot do anywhere but in a great city—or at any rate,”—as the glamour of the easy, polished and altogether delightful contentment of Virginia life came over him anew, and its attractiveness sang like a siren in his ears,—“at any rate it cannot be so well done anywhere else as in a large city. I have come down here to Virginia only to see what duties I have to do here. If I find I can finish them in a few months or a year, I shall go back to my more important work.”

The girl was silent for a time, as if pondering his words. Finally she said:

“Is there anything more important than to look after your estate? You see I don’t understand things very well.”

“Perhaps it is best that you never shall,” he answered. “And to most men the task of looking after an ancestral estate, and managing a plantation with more than a hundred negroes—”

“There are a hundred and eighty seven in all, if you count big and little, old and young together,” broke in the girl.

“Are there? How did you come to know the figures so precisely?”

“Why, I keep the plantation book, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” he answered.

“Yes,” she said, “I’ve kept it ever since I came to Wyanoke three or four years ago. You see your uncle didn’t like to bother with details, and so I took this off his hands, when I was so young that I wrote a great big, sprawling hand and spelled my words ever so queerly. But I wanted to help Uncle Robert. You see I liked him. If you’d rather keep the plantation book yourself, I’ll give it up to you when we go back to the house.”

“I would much rather have you keep it, at least until you make up your mind whether you like me or not. Then, if you don’t like me I’ll take the book.”

“Very well,” she replied, treating his reference to her present uncertainty of mind concerning himself quite as she might have treated his reference to a weather contingency of the morrow or of the next week. “I’ll go on with the book till then.”

By this time the pair had reached the stables, and Miss Dorothy, in that low, soft but penetrating voice which Arthur had observed and admired, called to a negro man who was dozing within:

“Ben, your master wants to see the best of the saddle horses. Bring them out, do you hear?”

The question “do you hear?” with which she ended her command was one in universal use in Virginia. If an order were given to a negro without that admonitory tag to it, it would fall idly upon heedless ears. But the moment the negro heard that question he gathered his wits together and obeyed the order.

“What sort of a horse do you like, Doctor?” asked the girl as the animals were led forth. “Can you ride?”

“Why, of course,” he answered. “You know I spent a year in Virginia when I was a boy.”

“Oh, yes, of course—if you haven’t forgotten. Then you don’t mind if a horse is spirited and a trifle hard to manage?”

“No. On the contrary, Miss Dorothy, I should very much mind if my riding horse were not spirited, and as for managing him, I’m going to get you to teach me the art of command, as you practise it so well on your dogs, your horse and the house servants.”

“Very well,” answered the girl seeming not to heed the implied compliment. “Put the horses back in their stalls, Ben, and go over to Pocahontas right away, and tell the overseer there to send Gimlet over to me. Do you hear? You see, Doctor,” she added, turning to him, “your uncle’s gout prevented him from riding much during the last year or so of his life, and so there are no saddle horses here fit for a strong man like you. There’s one fine mare, four years old, but she’s hardly big enough to carry your weight. You must weigh a hundred and sixty pounds, don’t you?”

“Yes, about that. But whose horse is Gimlet?”

“He’s mine, and he’ll suit you I’m sure. He is five years old, nearly seventeen hands high and as strong as a young ox.”

“But are you going to sell him to me?”

“Sell him? No, of course not. He is my pet. He has eaten out of my hand ever since he was a colt, and I was the first person that ever sat on his back. Besides, I wouldn’t sell a horse to you. I’m going to lend him to you till—till I make up my mind. Then, if I like you I’ll give him to you. If I don’t like you I’ll send him back to Pocahontas. Hurry up, Ben. Ride the gray mare and lead Gimlet back, do you hear?”

“You are very kind to me, Miss Dorothy, and I—”

“Oh, no. I’m only polite and neighborly. You see Wyanoke and Pocahontas are adjoining plantations. There comes Jo with your trunks, so we shall not have time for the June apples to-day—or may be we might stop long enough to get just a few, couldn’t we?”

With that she took the young man’s hand as a little girl of ten might have done, and skipping by his side, led the way into the orchard. The thought of the June apples seemed to have awakened the child side of her nature, completely banishing the womanly dignity for the time being.

V
ARTHUR BRENT’S TEMPTATION

DURING the next three or four days Arthur was too much engaged with affairs and social duties to pursue his scientific study of the young girl—half woman, half child—with anything like the eagerness he would have shown had his leisure been that of the Virginians round about him. He had much to do, to “find out where he stood,” as he put the matter. He had with him for two days Col. Majors the lawyer, who had the estate’s affairs in charge. That comfortable personage assured the young man that the property was “in good shape” but that assurance did not satisfy a man accustomed to inquire into minute details of fact and to rest content only with exact answers to his inquiries.

“I will arrange everything for you,” said the lawyer; “the will gives you everything and it has already been probated. It makes you sole executor with no bonds, as well as sole inheritor of the estate. There is really nothing for you to do but hang up your hat. You take your late uncle’s place, that is all.”

“But there are debts,” suggested Arthur.

“Oh, yes, but they are trifling and the estate is a very rich one. None of your creditors will bother you.”

“But I do not intend to remain in debt,” said the young man impatiently. “Besides, I do not intend to remain a planter all my life. I have other work to do in the world. This inheritance is a burden to me, and I mean to be rid of it as soon as possible.”

“Allow me to suggest,” said the lawyer in his self-possessed way, “that the inheritance of Wyanoke is a sort of burden that most men at your time of life would very cheerfully take upon their shoulders.”

“Very probably,” answered Arthur. “But as I happen not to be ‘most men at my time of life’ it distinctly oppresses me. It loads me with duties that are not congenial to me. It requires my attention at a time when I very greatly desire to give my attention to something which I regard as of more importance than the growing of wheat and tobacco and corn.”

“Every one to his taste,” answered the lawyer, “but I confess I do not see what better a young man could do than sit down here at Wyanoke and, without any but pleasurable activities, enjoy all that life has to give. Your income will be large, and your credit quite beyond question. You can buy whatever you want, and you need never bother yourself with a business detail. No dun will ever beset your door. If any creditor of yours should happen to want his money, as none will, you can borrow enough to pay him without even going to Richmond to arrange the matter. I will attend to all such things for you, as I did for your late uncle.”

“Thank you very much,” Arthur answered in a tone which suggested that he did not thank him at all. “But I always tie my own shoe strings. I do not know whether I shall go on living here or not, whether I shall give up my work and my ambitions and settle down into a life of inglorious ease, or whether I shall be strong enough to put that temptation aside. I confess it is a temptation. Accustomed as I am to intensity of intellectual endeavor, I confess that the prospect of sitting down here in lavish plenty, and living a life unburdened by care and unvexed by any sense of exacting duty, has its allurements for me. I suppose, indeed, that any well ordered mind would find abundant satisfaction in such a life programme, and perhaps I shall presently find myself growing content with it. But if I do, I shall not consent to live in debt.”

“But everybody has his debts—everybody who has an estate. It is part of the property, as it were. Of course it would be uncomfortable to owe more than you could pay, but you are abundantly able to owe your debts, so you need not let them trouble you. All told they do not amount to the value of ten or a dozen field hands.”

“But I shall never sell my negroes.”

“Of course not. No gentleman in Virginia ever does that, unless a negro turns criminal and must be sent south, or unless nominal sales are made between the heirs of an estate, simply by way of distributing the property. Far be it from me to suggest such a thing. I meant only to show you how unnecessary it is for you to concern yourself about the trifling obligations on your estate—how small a ratio they bear to the value of the property.”

“I quite understand,” answered Arthur. “But at the same time these debts do trouble me and will go on troubling me till the last dollar of them is discharged. This is simply because they interfere with the plans I have formed—or at least am forming—for so ordering my affairs that I may go back to my work. Pray do not let us discuss the matter further. I will ask you, instead, to send me, at your earliest convenience, an exact schedule of the creditors of this estate, together with the amount—principal and interest—that is owing to each. I intend to make it my first business to discharge all these obligations. Till that is done, I am not my own master, and I have a decided prejudice in favor of being able to order my own life in my own way.”

Behind all this lay the fact that Arthur Brent was growing dissatisfied with himself and suspicious of himself. The beauty and calm of Wyanoke, the picturesque contentment of that refined Virginia life which was impressed anew upon his mind every time a neighboring planter rode over to take breakfast, dinner, or supper with him, or drove over in the afternoon with his wife and daughters to welcome the new master of the plantation—all this fascinated his mind and appealed strongly to the partially developed æsthetic side of his nature, and at times the strong, earnest manhood in him resented the fact almost with bitterness.

There was never anywhere in America a country life like that of Virginia in the period before the war. In that state, as nowhere else on this continent, the refinement, the culture, the education and the graceful social life of the time were found not in the towns, but in the country. There were few cities in the state and they were small. They existed chiefly for the purpose of transacting business for the more highly placed and more highly cultivated planters. The people of the cities, with exceptions that only emphasized the general truth, were inferior to the dwellers on the plantations, in point of education, culture and social position. It had always been so in Virginia. From the days of William Byrd of Westover to those of Washington, and Jefferson and Madison and John Marshall, and from their time to the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been the choice of all cultivated Virginians to live upon their plantations. Thence had always come the scholars, the statesmen, the great lawyers and the masterful political writers who had conferred untold lustre upon the state.

Washington’s career as military chieftain and statesman, had been one long sacrifice of his desire to lead the planter life at Mount Vernon. Jefferson’s heart was at Monticello while he penned the Declaration of Independence, and it was the proud boast of Madison that he like Jefferson, quitted public office poorer than he was when he undertook such service to his native land, and rejoiced in his return to the planter life of his choice at Montpélièr.

In brief, the entire history of the state and all its traditions, all its institutions, all its habits of thought tended to commend the country life to men of refined mind, and to make of the plantation owners and their families a distinctly recognized aristocracy, not only of social prestige but even more of education, refinement and intellectual leadership.

To Arthur Brent had come the opportunity to make himself at once and without effort, a conspicuous member of this blue blooded caste. His plantation had come to him, not by vulgar purchase, but by inheritance. It had been the home of his ancestors, the possession and seat of his family for more than two hundred years. And his family had been from the first one of distinction and high influence. One of his great, great, great grandfathers, had been a member of the Jamestown settlement and a soldier under John Smith. His great, great grandfather had shared the honor of royal proscription as an active participant in Bacon’s rebellion. His great grandfather had been the companion of young George Washington in his perilous expeditions to “the Ohio country,” and had fallen by Washington’s side in Braddock’s blundering campaign. His grandfather had been a drummer boy at Yorktown, had later become one of the great jurists of the state and had been a distinguished soldier in the war of 1812. His father, as we know, had strayed away to the west, as so many Virginians of his time did, but he had won honors there which made Virginia proud of him. And fortunately for Arthur Brent, that father’s removal to the west was not made until this his son had been born at the old family seat.

“For,” explained Aunt Polly to the young man, in her own confident way, “in spite of your travels, you are a native Virginian, Arthur, and when you have dropped into the ways of the country, people will overlook the fact that you have lived so much at the north, and even in Europe.”

“But why, Aunt Polly,” asked Arthur, “should that fact be deemed something to be ‘overlooked?’ Surely travel broadens one’s views and—”

“Oh, yes, of course, in the case of people not born in Virginia. But a Virginian doesn’t need it, and it upsets his ideas. You see when a Virginian travels he forgets what is best. He actually grows like other people. You yourself show the ill effects of it in a hundred ways. Of course you haven’t quite lost your character as a Virginian, and you’ll gradually come back to it here at Wyanoke; but ‘evil communications corrupt good manners,’ and I can’t help seeing it in you—at least in your speech. You don’t pronounce your words correctly. You say ‘cart’ ‘carpet’ and ‘garden’ instead of ‘cyart’ ‘cyarpet’ and ‘gyarden.’ And you flatten your a’s dreadfully. You say ‘grass’ instead of ‘grawss’ and ‘basket’ instead of ‘bawsket’ and all that sort of thing. And you roll your r’s dreadfully. It gives me a chill whenever I hear you say ‘master’ instead of ‘mahstah.’ But you’ll soon get over that, and in the meantime, as you were born in Virginia and are the head of an old Virginia family, the gentlemen and ladies who are coming every day to welcome you, are very kind about it. They overlook it, as your misfortune, rather than your fault.”

“That is certainly very kind of them, Aunt Polly. I can’t imagine anything more generous in the mind than that. But—well, never mind.”

“What were you going to say, Arthur?”

“Oh, nothing of any consequence. I was only thinking that perhaps my Virginia neighbors do not lay so much stress upon these things as you do.”

“Of course not. That is one of the troubles of this time. Since we let the Yankees build railroads through Virginia, everybody here wants to travel. Why, half the gentlemen in this county have been to New York!”

“How very shocking!” said Arthur, hiding his smile behind his hand.

“That’s really what made the trouble for poor Dorothy,” mused Aunt Polly. “If her father hadn’t gone gadding about—he even went to Europe you know—Dorothy never would have been born.”

“How fortunate that would have been! But tell me about it, Aunt Polly. You see I don’t quite understand in what way it would have been better for Dorothy not to have been born—unless we accept the pessimist philosophy, and consider all human life a curse.”

“Now you know, I don’t understand that sort of talk, Arthur,” answered Aunt Polly. “I never studied philosophy or chemistry, and I’m glad of it. But I know it would have been better for Dorothy if Dr. South had stayed at home like a reasonable man, and married—but there, I mustn’t talk of that. Dorothy is a dear girl, and I’m fitting her for her position in life as well as I can. If I could stop her from thinking, now, or—”

“Pray don’t, Aunt Polly! Her thinking interests me more than anything I ever studied,—except perhaps the strange and even inexplicable therapeutic effect of champagne in yellow fever—”

“There you go again, with your outlandish words, which you know I don’t understand or want to understand, though sometimes I remember them.”

“Tell me of an instance, Aunt Polly.”

“Why, you said to me the other night that Dorothy was a ‘psychological enigma’ to your mind, and that you very much wished you might know ‘the conditions of heredity and environment’ that had produced ‘so strange a phenomenon.’ There! I remember your words, though I haven’t the slightest notion what they mean. I went upstairs and wrote them down. Of course I couldn’t spell them except in my own way—and that would make you laugh I reckon if you could see it, which you never shall—but I haven’t a glimmering notion of what the words mean. Now I want to tell you about Dorothy.”

“Good! I am anxious to hear!”

“Oh, I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear. That would be gossip, and no Virginia woman ever gossips.”

That was true. The Virginians of that time, men and women alike, locked their lips and held their tongues in leash whenever the temptation came to them to discuss the personal affairs of their neighbors. They were bravely free and frank of speech when telling men to their faces what opinions they might hold concerning them; but they did that only when necessity, or honor, or the vindication of truth compelled. They never made the character or conduct or affairs of each other a subject of conversation. It was the very crux of honor to avoid that.

“Then tell me what you are minded to reveal, Aunt Polly,” responded Arthur. “I do not care to know anything else.”

“Well, Dorothy is in a peculiar position—not by her own fault. She must marry into a good family, and it has fallen to me to prepare her for her fate.”

“Surely, Aunt Polly,” interjected the young man with a shocked and distressed tone in his voice, “surely you are not teaching that child to think of marriage—yet?”

“No, no, no!” answered Aunt Polly. “I’m only trying to train her to submissiveness of mind, so that when the time comes for her to make the marriage that is already arranged for her, she will interpose no foolish objections. It’s a hard task. The girl has a wilful way of thinking for herself. I can’t cure her of it, do what I will.”

“Why should you try?” asked Arthur, almost with excitement in his tone. “Why should you try to spoil nature’s fine handiwork? That child’s intellectual attitude is the very best I ever saw in one so young, so simple and so childlike. For heaven’s sake, let her alone! Let her live her own life and think in her own honest, candid and fearless way, and she will develop into a womanhood as noble as any that the world has seen since Eve persuaded Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge and quit being a fool.”

“Arthur, you shock me!”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Polly, but I shall shock you far worse than that, if you persist in your effort to warp and pervert that child’s nature to fit it to some preconceived purpose of conventionality.”

“I don’t know just what you mean, Arthur,” responded the old lady, “but I know my duty, and I’m going to do it. The one thing necessary in Dorothy’s case, is to stop her from thinking, and train her to settle down, when the time comes, into the life of a Virginia matron. It is her only salvation.”

“Salvation from what?” asked Arthur, almost angrily.

“I can’t tell you,” the old lady answered. “But the girl will never settle into her proper place if she goes on thinking, as she does now. So I’m going to stop it.”

“And I,” the young man thought, though he did not say it, “am going to teach her to think more than ever. I’ll educate that child so long as I am condemned to lead this idle life. I’ll make it my business to see that her mind shall not be put into a corset, that her extraordinary truthfulness shall not be taught to tell lies by indirection, that she shall not be restrained of her natural and healthful development. It will be worth while to play the part of idle plantation owner for a year or two, to accomplish a task like that. I can never learn to feel any profound interest in the growing of tobacco, wheat and corn—but the cultivation of that child into what she should be is a nobler work than that of all the agriculturists of the south side put together. I’ll make it my task while I am kept here away from my life’s chosen work.”

That day Arthur Brent sent a letter to New York. In it he ordered his library and the contents of his laboratory sent to him at Wyanoke. He ordered also a good many books that were not already in his library. He sent for a carpenter on that same day, and set him at work in a hurry, constructing a building of his own designing upon a spot selected especially with reference to drainage, light and other requirements of a laboratory. He even sent to Richmond for a plumber to put in chemical sinks, drain pipes and other laboratory fittings.

VI
“NOW YOU MAY CALL ME DOROTHY”

ARTHUR BRENT had now come to understand, in some degree at least, who Dorothy South was. He remembered that the Pocahontas plantation which immediately adjoined Wyanoke on the east, was the property of a Dr. South, whom he had never seen. At the time of his own boyhood’s year at Wyanoke he had understood, in a vague way that Dr. South was absent somewhere on his travels. Somehow the people whom he had met at Wyanoke and elsewhere, had seemed to be sorry for Dr. South but they never said why. Apparently they held him in very high esteem, as Arthur remembered, and seemed deeply to regret the necessity—whatever it was—which detained him away, and to all intents and purposes made of Pocahontas a closed house. For while the owner of that plantation insisted that the doors of his mansion should always remain open to his friends, and that dinner should be served there at the accustomed hour of four o’clock every day during his absence, so that any friend who pleased might avail himself of a hospitality which had never failed,—there was no white person on the plantation except the overseer. Gentlemen passing that way near the dinner hour used sometimes to stop and occupy places at the table, an event which the negro major-domo always welcomed as a pleasing interruption in the loneliness of the house. The hospitality of Pocahontas had been notable for generations past, and the old servant recalled a time when the laughter of young men and maidens had made the great rooms of the mansion vocal with merriment. Arthur himself had once taken dinner there with his uncle, and had been curiously impressed with the rule of the master that dinner should be served, whether there were anybody there to partake of it or not. He recalled all these things now, and argued that Dr. South’s long absence could not have been caused by anything that discredited him among the neighbors. For had not those neighbors always regretted his absence, and expressed a wish for his return? Arthur remembered in what terms of respect and even of affection, everybody had spoken of the absent man. He remembered too that about the time of his own departure from Wyanoke, there had been a stir of pleased expectation, over the news that Dr. South was soon to return and reopen the hospitable house.

He discovered now that Dr. South had in fact returned at that time and had resumed the old life at Pocahontas, dispensing a graceful hospitality during the seven or eight years that had elapsed between his return and his death. This latter event, Arthur had incidentally learned, had occurred three years or so before his own accession to the Wyanoke estate. Since that time Dorothy had lived with Aunt Polly, the late master of Wyanoke having been her guardian.

So much and no more, Arthur knew. It did not satisfy a curiosity which he would not satisfy by asking questions. It did not tell him why Aunt Polly spoke of the girl with pity, calling her “poor Dorothy.” It did not explain to him why there should be a special effort made to secure the girl’s marriage into a “good family.” What could be more probable than that that would happen in due course without any managing whatever? The girl was the daughter of as good a family as any in Virginia. She was the sole heir of a fine estate. Finally, she promised to become a particularly beautiful young woman, and one of unusual attractiveness of mind.

Yet everywhere Arthur heard her spoken of as “poor Dorothy,” and he observed particularly that the universal kindness of the gentlewomen to the child was always marked by a tone or manner suggestive of compassion. The fact irritated the young man, as facts which he could not explain were apt to do with one of his scientific mental habit. There were other puzzling aspects of the matter, too. Why was the girl forbidden to sing, to learn music, or even to enjoy it? Where had she got her curious conceptions of life? And above all, what did Aunt Polly mean by saying that this mere child’s future marriage had been “already arranged?”

“The whole thing is a riddle,” he said to himself. “I shall make no effort to solve it, but I have a mind to interfere somewhat with the execution of any plans that a stupid conventionality may have formed to sacrifice this rarely gifted child to some Moloch of social propriety. Of course I shall not try in any way to control her life or direct her future. But at any rate I shall see to it that she shall be compelled to nothing without her own consent. Meanwhile, as they won’t let her learn music, I’ll teach her science. I see clearly that it will take me three or four years to do what I have planned to do at Wyanoke—to pay off the debts, and set the negroes up as small farmers on their own account in the west. During that time I shall have ample opportunity to train the child’s mind in a way worthy of it, and when I have done that I fancy she will order her own life with very little regard to the plans of those who are arranging to make of her a mere pawn upon the chess board. Thank heaven, this thing gives me a new interest. It will prevent my mind from vegetating and my character from becoming mildewed. It opens to me a duty and an occupation—a duty untouched with selfish indulgence, an occupation which I can pursue without a thought of any other reward than the joy of worthy achievement.”

“Miss Dorothy,” he said to the girl that evening, “I observe that you are an early riser.”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “You see I must be up soon in the morning”—that use of “soon” for “early” was invariable in Virginia—“to see that the maids begin their work right. You see I carry the keys.”

“Yes, I know, you are housekeeper, and a very conscientious one I think. But I wonder if your duties in the early morning are too exacting to permit you to ride with me before breakfast. You see I want to make a tour of inspection over the plantation and I’d like to have you for my guide. The days are so warm that I have a fancy to ride in the cool of the morning. Would it please you to accompany me and tell me about things?”

“I’ll like that very much. I’m always down stairs by five o’clock, so if you like we can ride at six any morning you please. That will give us three hours before breakfast.”

“Thank you very much,” Arthur replied. “If you please, then, we’ll ride tomorrow morning.”

When Arthur came down stairs the next morning he found the maids busily polishing the snow-white floors with pine needles and great log and husk rubbers, while their young mistress was giving her final instructions to Johnny, the dining room servant. Hearing Arthur’s step on the stair she commanded the negro to bring the coffee urn and in answer to the young master’s cheery good morning, she handed him a cup of steaming coffee.

“This is a very pleasant surprise,” he exclaimed. “I had not expected coffee until breakfast time.”

“Oh, you must never ride soon in the morning without taking coffee first,” she replied. “That’s the way to keep well. We always have a big kettle of coffee for the field hands before they go to work. Their breakfast isn’t ready till ten o’clock, and the coffee keeps the chill off.”

“Why is their breakfast served so late?”

“Oh, they like it that way. They don’t want anything but coffee soon in the morning. They breakfast at ten, and then the time isn’t so long before their noonday dinner.”

“I should think that an excellent plan,” answered the doctor. “As a hygienist I highly approve of it. After all it isn’t very different from the custom of the French peasants. But come, Miss Dorothy, Ben has the horses at the gate.”

The girl, fresh-faced, lithe-limbed and joyous, hastily donned her long riding skirt which made her look, Arthur thought, like a little child masquerading in some grown woman’s garments, and nimbly tripped down the walk to the gate way. There she quickly but searchingly looked the horses over, felt of the girths, and, taking from her belt a fine white cambric handkerchief, proceeded to rub it vigorously on the animals’ rumps. Finding soil upon the dainty cambric, she held it up before Ben’s face, and silently looked at him for the space of thirty seconds. Then she tossed the handkerchief to him and commanded:—“Go to the house and fetch me another handkerchief.”

There was something almost tragic in the negro’s humiliation as he walked away on his mission. Arthur had watched the little scene with amused interest. When it was over the girl, without waiting for him to offer her a hand as a step, seized the pommel and sprang into the saddle.

“Why did you do that, Miss Dorothy?” the young man asked as the horses, feeling the thrill of morning in their veins, began their journey with a waltz.

“What? rub the horses?”

“No. Why did you look at Ben in that way? And why did it seem such a punishment to him?”

“I wanted him to remember. He knows I never permit him to bring me a horse that isn’t perfectly clean.”

“And will he remember now?”

“Certainly. You saw how severely he was punished this time. He doesn’t want that kind of thing to happen again.”

“But I don’t understand. You did nothing to him. You didn’t even scold him.”

“Of course I didn’t. Scolding is foolish. Only weak-minded people scold.”

“But I shouldn’t have thought Ben fine enough or sensitive enough to feel the sort of punishment you gave him. Why should he mind it?”

“Oh, everybody minds being looked at in that way—everybody who has been doing wrong. You see one always knows when one has done wrong. Ben knew, and when I looked at him he saw that I knew too. So it hurt him. You’ll see now that he’ll never bring you or me a horse on which we can soil our handkerchiefs.”

“Where did you learn all that?” asked Arthur, full of curiosity and interest.

“I suppose my father taught me. He taught me everything I know. I remember that whenever I was naughty, he would look at me over his spectacles and make me ever so sorry. You see even if I knew I had done wrong I didn’t think much about it, till father looked at me. After that I would think about it all day and all night, and be, oh, so sorry! Then I would try not to displease my father again.”

“Your father must have been a very wise as well as a very good man!”

“He was,” and two tears slipped from the girl’s eyes as she recalled the father who had been everything to her from her very infancy. “That is why I always try, now that he is gone, never to do anything that he would have disliked. I always think ‘I won’t do that, for if I do father will look at me.’ You see I must be a great deal more careful than other girls.”

“Why? I see no reason for that.”

“That’s because you don’t know about—about things. I was born bad, and if I’m not more careful than other girls have to be, I shall be very bad when I grow up.”

“Will you forgive me if I say I don’t believe that?” asked Arthur.

“Oh, but it’s true,” answered the girl, looking him straight in the face, with an expression of astonishment at his incredulity.

Arthur saw fit to change the conversation. So he returned to Ben’s case.

“Most women would have sent Ben to the overseer for punishment, wouldn’t they?”

“Some would, but I never find that necessary. Besides I hate your overseer.”

“Why? What has he done to incur your displeasure, Miss Dorothy?”

“Now you’re mocking me for minding things that are none of my business,” said the girl with a touch of contrition in her voice.

“Indeed I am not,” answered the young man with earnestness. “And you have not been doing anything of the kind. I asked you to tell me about things here at Wyanoke, because it is necessary that I should know them. So when you tell me that you hate the overseer here, I want to know why. It is very necessary for me to know what sort of man he is, so that I may govern myself accordingly. I have great confidence in your judgment, young as you are. I am very sure you would not hate the overseer without good cause. So you will do me a favor if you’ll tell me why you hate him.”

“It is because he is cruel and a coward.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve seen it for myself. He strikes the field hands for nothing. He has even cruelly whipped some of the women servants with the black snake whip he carries. I told him only a little while ago that if I ever caught him doing that again, I’d set my dogs on him. No Virginia gentleman would permit such a thing. Uncle Robert—that’s the name I always called your uncle by—would have shot the fellow for that, I think.”

“But why did Uncle Robert employ such a man for overseer?”

“He never did. Uncle Robert never kept any overseer. He used to say that the authority of the master of a plantation was too great to be delegated to any person who didn’t care for the black people and didn’t feel his responsibility.”

“But how did the fellow come to be here then? Who employed him?”

“Mr. Peyton did—Mr. Madison Peyton. When your uncle was ill, Mr. Peyton looked after things for him, and he kept it up after Uncle Robert died. He hired this overseer. He said he was too busy on his own plantation to take care of things here in person.”

“Uncle Robert was quite right,” said Arthur meditatively. “And now that I am charged with the responsibility for these black people, I will not delegate my power to any overseer, least of all to one whom you have found out to be a cruel coward. Where do you suppose we could find him now?”

“Down in the tobacco new grounds,” the girl answered. “I was going there to-day to set my dogs on him, but I remembered that you were master now.”

“What was the special occasion for your anger this time?” Arthur asked in a certain quiet, seemingly half indifferent tone which Dorothy found inscrutable.

“He whipped poor old Michael, the gardener last night,” answered the girl with a glint as of fire in her eyes. “He had no right to do that. Michael isn’t a field hand, and he isn’t under the overseer’s control.”

“Do you mean the shambling old man I saw in the garden yesterday? Surely he didn’t whip that poor decrepit old man!”

“Yes, he did. I told you he was a cruel coward.”

“Let’s ride to the tobacco new grounds at once,” said Arthur quite as he might have suggested the most indifferent thing. But Dorothy observed that on the way to the new grounds Arthur Brent spoke no word. Twice she addressed him, but he made no response.

Arrived at the new grounds Arthur called the overseer to him and without preface asked him:

“Did you strike old Michael with your whip last night?”

“Yes, and there wan’t a lick amiss unless I made a lick at him and missed him.”

The man laughed at his own clumsy witticism, but the humor of it seemed not to impress the new master of the plantation. For reply he said:

“Go to your house at once and pack up your belongings. Come to me after I have had my breakfast, and we’ll have a settlement. You are to leave my plantation to-day and never set foot upon it again. Come, Miss Dorothy, let’s continue our ride!”

With that the two wheeled about, the girl saying:

“Let’s run our horses for a stretch.” Instantly she set off at breakneck speed across the fields and over two stiff fences before regaining the main plantation road. There she drew rein and turning full upon her companion she said:

“Now you may call me Dorothy.”

VII
SHRUB HILL CHURCH

THE following day was Sunday, and to Arthur’s satisfaction it was one of the two Sundays in the month, on which services were held at Shrub Hill Church. For Arthur remembered the little old church there in the woods, with the ancient cemetery, in which all the Brents who had lived before him were buried, and in which rested also all the past generations of all the other good families of the region round about.

Shrub Hill Church represented one of the most attractive of Virginia traditions. Early in his career as statesman, Thomas Jefferson had rendered Virginia a most notable service. He had secured the complete separation of church from state, the dissolution of that unholy alliance between religion and government, with which despotism and class privilege have always buttressed the fabric of oppression. But church and family remained, and in the course of generations that relation had assumed characteristics of a most wholesome, ameliorating and liberalizing character.

Thus at Shrub Hill all the people of character and repute in the region round about, found themselves at home. They were in large degree Baptists and Presbyterians in their personal church relations, but all of them deemed themselves members of Shrub Hill—the Episcopal church which had survived from that earlier time when to be a gentleman carried with it the presumption of adherence to the established religion. All of them attended service there. All contributed to the cost of keeping the edifice and the graveyard grounds in repair. All of them shared in the payment of the old rector’s salary and he in his turn preached scrupulously innocuous sermons to them—sermons ten minutes in length which might have been repeated with entire propriety and acceptance in any Baptist or Presbyterian pulpit.

When the Easter elections came, all the gentlemen of the neighborhood felt themselves entitled to vote for the wardens and vestrymen already in office, or for the acceptable person selected by common consent to take the place of any warden or vestryman who might have been laid to rest beneath the sod of the Shrub Hill churchyard during the year. And the wardens and vestrymen were Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians or gentlemen professing no faith, quite indifferently.

These people were hot debaters of politics and religion—especially religion. When the question of immersion or pedo-baptism was up, each was ready and eager to maintain the creed of his own church with all the arguments that had been formulated for that purpose generations before and worn smooth to the tongue by oft-repeated use. But this fervor made no difference whatever in the loyalty of their allegiance to their old family church at Shrub Hill. There they found common ground of tradition and affection. There they were all alike in right of inheritance. There all of them expected to be buried by the side of their forefathers.

It has been said already that services were held at Shrub Hill on two Sundays of the month. As the old rector lived within a few minutes’ walk of the church, and had no other duty than its ministry, there might have been services there every Sunday in the year, except that such a practice would have interfered with the desire of those who constituted its congregation to attend their own particular Baptist or Presbyterian churches, which held services on the other Sundays. It was no part of the spirit or mission of the family church thus to interfere with the religious preferences of its members, and so, from time immemorial, there had been services at Shrub Hill only upon two Sundays of the month.

Everybody attended those services—every gentleman and every gentlewoman at least. That is to say, all went to the church and the women with a few of the older men went in. The rest of the gentlemen gathered in groups under the trees outside—for the church stood in the midst of an unbroken woodland—and chatted in low tones while the service was in progress. Thus they fulfilled their gentlemanly obligations of church going, without the fatigue of personal participation in the services.

The gentlemen rode to church on horseback. The ladies, old and young alike, went thither in their family carriages. Many of these, especially the younger ones, were accustomed to go everywhere else in the saddle, but to church, propriety and tradition required them to go decorously in the great lumbering vehicles of family state.

The gentlemen arrived first and took their places at the church door to greet the gentlewomen and give them a hand in alighting from the high-hung carriages.

As soon as the service was over the social clearing-house held its session. It was not known by that name, but that in fact was what it amounted to. Every young woman present invited every other young woman present to go home with her to dinner and to stay for a few days or for a week. There was a babel of insistent tongues out of which nothing less sagacious than feminine intelligence could have extracted a resultant understanding. But after a few minutes all was as orderly as the domestic arrangements over which these young women were accustomed to preside. Two or three of them had won all the others to their will, and the company, including all there was of young and rich voiced femininity in the region round about, was divided into squads and assigned to two or three hospitable mansions, whither trunks would follow in the early morning of the Monday.

The young men accommodated themselves at once to these arrangements, each accepting at least a dinner invitation to the house, to which the young woman most attractive to himself had elected to go. As there was no afternoon or evening service, the religious duties of the day were at an end before one of the clock.

Out under the trees before and during the service the men discussed affairs of interest to themselves, and on this his first Sunday, Arthur found that his own affairs constituted the subject of most general interest. He was heartily welcomed as the new master of Wyanoke, the welcome partaking somewhat of the nature of that given to one who returns to right ways of living after erratic wanderings. There was a kindly disposition to recognize Arthur’s birthright as a Virginian, together with a generous readiness to forgive his youthful indiscretion in living so much elsewhere.

Only one man ventured to be censorious, and that was Madison Peyton, who was accustomed to impress himself upon the community in ways which were sometimes anything but agreeable, but to which everybody was accustomed to submit in a nameless sort of fear of his sharp tongue—everybody, that is to say, except Aunt Polly and John Meaux.

Aunt Polly was not afraid of Madison Peyton for several reasons. The first was that Aunt Polly was not accustomed to stand in awe of anybody. The second was that her blood was quite the bluest in all that part of the State and she had traditions behind her. Finally she was a shrewdly penetrative person who had long ago discovered the nature of Madison Peyton’s pretensions and subjected them to sarcastic analysis. As for John Meaux, everybody knew him as by odds the most successful planter and most capable man of business in the county. Madison Peyton could teach him nothing, and he had a whiplash attachment to his tongue, the sting of which Peyton did not care to invoke.

For the rest, Madison Peyton was dominant. It was his habit to lecture his neighbors upon their follies and short-comings and rather arrogantly, though with a carefully simulated good nature, to dictate to them what they should or should not do, assuming with good-natured insolence an authority which in no way belonged to him. In this way, during the late Robert Brent’s last illness, Peyton had installed as overseer at Wyanoke, a man whom the planters generally refused to employ because of his known cruelty, but whose capacity to make full crops was well attested by experience.

Arthur Brent had summarily dismissed this man as we know, and Peyton was distinctly displeased with him for doing so. Taking the privilege of an old friend of the young man’s uncle, Peyton called him by his first name, without any prefix whatever.

“Why in the world, Arthur,” he said by way of introducing the subject, “why in the world have you sent Williams away?”

Something in Peyton’s manner, something that was always in his manner, had given Arthur a feeling of resentment when the man had called upon him soon after his arrival. This direct interrogatory concerning a matter exclusively his own, almost angered the young man, as the others saw when, instead of answering it directly, he asked:

“Are you specially interested in Williams’s welfare, Mr. Peyton?”

Peyton was too self-satisfied to be sensitive, so he took the rebuff with a laugh.

“Oh, no,” he answered. “It is you that I’m troubled about. Knowing nothing of planting you need a capable overseer more than anybody else does, and here you’ve sent away the best one in the county without even consulting anybody.”

“I did not need to consult anybody,” answered Arthur, “in order to know that I did not want that man on my plantation.”

“Oh, of course! But you can’t get another overseer at this time of year, you know.”

“On the whole, I don’t think I want another at any time of year.”

“You imagine perhaps that you know something about planting. I’ve known other young men to make the same mistake.”

“Perhaps I can learn,” answered Arthur in placid tones. “I have learned some things quite as difficult in my life.”

“But you don’t know anything about planting, and if you try it without an overseer you’ll find your account at your commission merchant’s distressingly short at the end of the year.”

“I don’t know about that,” broke in John Meaux. “You predicted the same thing in my case, you remember, Mr. Peyton, when I came back after graduating at West Point, and yet I’ve managed to keep some hams in my meat house for fifteen years now,—and I never had an overseer.”

Ignoring Meaux’s interruption Peyton said to Arthur:

“And you know you’ve got a law-suit on your hands.”

“Have I? I didn’t know it.”

“Why, of course, Williams will sue. You see he was engaged for the year, and the contract lasts till January.”

“Who made the contract?” asked Arthur.

“Well, I did—acting for your uncle.”

“Had you my uncle’s power of attorney to bind him to a year’s arrangement?”

“Of course not. He was ill and I merely did a neighbor’s part.”

“Then suppose Williams should sue you instead of me? You see it is you who are liable for non-fulfilment of that contract. You bargained with this man to serve you for a year as overseer on my plantation, and I have declined to accept the arrangement. If he has a right of action against anybody, it is against you. However, I don’t think he will sue you, for I have paid him his wages for the full year. Fortunately I happened to have money enough in bank for that. There is the voluntary—let’s go into church.”

Arthur Brent entered the place of service, one or two of the gentlemen following him.

He had made an enemy of Madison Peyton—an enemy who would never admit his enmity but would never lose an opportunity to indulge it.

VIII
A DINNER AT BRANTON

IT fell to Arthur Brent’s share to dine on that Sunday at Branton, the seat of the most princely hospitality in all that part of Virginia. The matter was not at all one of his own arranging, although it was altogether agreeable to him. The master of Branton—a young man scarcely older than himself, who lived there with his only sister, Edmonia Bannister, had been the first of all the neighbors to visit Arthur, dining with him and passing the night at Wyanoke. He had been most kindly and cordial in his welcome and Arthur had been strongly drawn to him as a man of character, intelligence and very winning manners. No sooner had Arthur dismounted at church on that first Sunday, than young Archer Bannister had come to shake his hand and say—“I want to preëmpt you, Doctor Brent. All your neighbors will clamor for your company for the dinner and the night, but I have done my best to establish the priority of my claim. Besides my good sister wants you—and as a confidence between you and me, I will tell you that when my sister wants anything she is extremely apt to get it. I’m something of a laggard at dressing myself for church, but this morning she began upon me early, sending three servants to help me put on my clothes, and laying her particular commands upon me to be the first man to arrive at Shrub Hill, lest some other get before me with an invitation to dinner. So you are to be my guest, please, and I’ll send one of my people over to Wyanoke for anything you want. By the way I’ve cleared out a wardrobe for you at Branton, and a dressing case. You’ll need to send over a supply of linen, coats, boots, underwear, and the like and leave it in your room there, so that you shall be quite at home to come and go at your will, with the certainty of always finding ready for you whatever you need in the way of costume.”

Arthur Brent’s one extravagance was in the matter of clothes. He always dressed himself simply, but he was always dressed well, and especially it was his pleasure to change his garments as often as the weather or the circumstances might suggest the desirability of a change. Accordingly he had brought fat trunks to Wyanoke, but by the time that three others of his new neighbors had informed him, quite casually and as a matter of course, that they had prepared rooms for him and expected him to send to those rooms a supply of clothing sufficient for any need, he was pleased to remember that he had left careful measurements with his tailor, his shirt maker, his fabricator of footwear, and his “gents’ furnisher” in New York. And he had also acquired a new and broader conception than ever before, of the comprehensive heartiness of Virginia hospitality.

“You see,” said young Bannister, later in the day, “Branton is to be one of your homes. As a young man you will be riding about a good deal, and you mustn’t be compelled to ride all the way to Wyanoke every time you want to change your coat or substitute low quarter shoes for your riding boots. If you’ll ask little Miss Dorothy to show you my room at Wyanoke you’ll find that I have everything there that any gentleman could possibly need with which to dress himself properly for any occasion, from a fish fry to a funeral, from a fox hunt to a wedding. You are to do the same at Branton. You don’t do things in that way in a city, of course, but here it is necessary, because of the distance between plantations. A man doesn’t want all his belongings in one place when that place may be ten or a dozen miles away when he wants them.”

Arthur found Branton to be substantially a reproduction of Wyanoke, except that the great gambrel-roofed house had many wings and extensions, and several one storied, two roomed “offices” built about the grounds for the accommodation of any overflow of guests that might happen there. The house had been built about the time at which the Wyanoke mansion had come into being. It was of wood, but by no means of such structure as we now expect in a wooden house. The frame was made of great hewn timbers of forest pine, twelve inches square as to floor beams and rafter plates, and with ten inch timbers in lieu of studding. The vast chimneys were supported, not upon arches nicely calculated to sustain their superincumbent weight with a factor of safety, but upon a solid mass of cellar masonry that would have sustained the biggest of Egyptian monoliths. The builders of the old colonial time may not have known the precise strength of materials or the niceties of calculation by which the supporting capacity of an arch is determined, but they knew—and they acted upon the knowledge—that twelve inch, heart pine timbers set on end will sustain any weight that a dwelling is called upon to bear, and that a chimney built upon a solid mass of masonry, twenty feet in diameter, is not likely to fall down for lack of underpinning.

One full half of the ground floor of the great mansion constituted the single drawing room, wainscoted to the ceiling and provided with three huge fire places built for the burning of cord wood. The floors were as white as snow, the wainscoting as black as night with age and jealous polishing with beeswax. After the architectural manner of the country, there was a broad porch in front and another in rear, each embowered in honeysuckles and climbing rose bushes. A passageway, more than twenty feet in width ran through the building, connecting the two porches and constituting the most generally used sitting room of the house. It had broad oaken doors reaching across its entire width. They stood always open except during the very coldest days of the mild Virginia winter, there being no thought of closing them even at night. For there were no criminal classes in that social fabric, and if there had been, the certainty that the master of the mansion slept upon its ground floor and knew what to do with a shot gun, would have been a sufficient deterrent to invasion of the premises.

There were two large fire places in the hall for winter use. But the glory of the place was the stairway, with its broad ashen steps and its broader landings. Up and down it had passed generations of happy maidens and matrons. Up and down it, prattling children had played and romped and danced in happy innocence. Up and down it wedding guests and funeral attendants had come and gone, carrying their burdens of flowers for the bride and blossoms for the bier. Upon it had been whispered words of love and tenderness that prepared the way for lives of happiness, and sorrowful utterances that soothed and softened grief. Upon its steps young men of chivalric soul had wooed maidens worthy of their devotion. Upon its landings young maidens had softly spoken those words of consent which ushered in lives of rejoicing.

The furniture of the house was in keeping with its spaciousness and its solidity. Huge sofas were everywhere, broad enough for beds and long enough for giants to stretch their limbs upon. Commodious, plantation-made chairs of oak invited every guest to repose in the broad hallway. In the drawing room, and in the spacious dining hall the sedate ticking of high standing clocks marked time only to suggest its abundance in that land of leisure, and to invite its lavish use in enjoyment.

Now add to all this still life, the presence of charming people—men of gracious mien and young women of immeasurable charm, young women whose rich and softly modulated voices were exquisite music, and whose presence was a benediction—and you may faintly understand the surroundings in which Arthur Brent found himself on that deliciously perfect Sunday afternoon in June, in the year of our Lord, 1859.

Is it surprising that the glamour of it all took hold upon his soul and tempted him to rest content with a life so picturesquely peaceful? Is it surprising that his set purpose of speedily returning to his own life of strenuous, scientific endeavor, somewhat weakened in presence of a temptation so great? All this was his for the taking. All of it was open to him to enjoy if he would. All of it lay before him as a gracious inheritance. Why should he not accept it? Why should he return to the struggle of science, the pent life of cities? Why should he prowl about tenement houses in an endeavor to solve the problem of mephitic gases, when all this free, balsamic air offered itself gratis to his breathing? He had but one life to live, he reflected. Why should he not live it here in sweet and wholesome ways? Why should he not make himself a part of this exquisitely poised existence?

All these vexed and vexing questions flitted through his brain even before he had opportunity to meet his hostess in her own home, surrounded by her bevy of variously attractive young women.

Edmonia Bannister was everywhere recognized as the belle of the state in which she lived. Suitors for her hand had come from afar and anear to woo this maiden of infinite charm, and one by one they had gone away sorrowing but with only the kindliest memory of the gentleness with which she had withheld her consent to their wooings.

She was scarcely beautiful. The word “comely” seemed a better one with which to describe her appearance, but her comeliness was allied to a charm at once indefinable and irresistible. John Meaux had said that “it is a necessary part of every young man’s education to fall in love with Edmonia Bannister at least once,” and had predicted that fate for Arthur Brent. Whether the prediction was destined to be fulfilled or not, Arthur could not decide on this his first day as a guest at Branton. He was sure that he was not in love with the girl at the end of his visit, but he drew that assurance chiefly from his conviction that it was absurd to fall in love with any woman upon acquaintance so slight. While holding firmly to that conviction he nevertheless felt strongly that the girl had laid a spell upon him, under control of which he was well nigh helpless. He was by no means the first young man to whom this experience had come, and he was not likely to be the last.

And yet the young woman was wholly free from intent thus to enslave those who came into her life. Her artlessness was genuine, and her seriousness profound. There was no faintest suggestion of frivolity or coquetry in her manner. She was too self-respecting for that, and she had too much of character. One of those who had “loved and lost” her, had said that “the only art she used was the being of herself,” and all the rest who had had like experience were of the same mind. So far indeed was she from seeking to bring men to her feet that on more than one occasion she had been quick to detect symptoms of coming love and had frankly and solemnly said to prospective wooers for whom she felt a particular kindness—“please don’t fall in love with me. I shall never be able to reciprocate the sentiment, and it would distress me to reject your suit.” It is not upon record, however, that any one of those who were thus warned profited by the wise counsel. On the contrary, in many instances, this mark of kindliness on her part had served only to precipitate the catastrophe she sought to avert.

Arthur Brent had a stronger shield. He saw clearly that for him to marry this or any other of that fair land’s maidens would make an end of his ambitions.

“If I should fall in love down here in Virginia,” he reflected, “I should never have strength of mind enough to shake off the glamour of this life and go back to my work. The fascination of it all is already strong upon me. I must not add another to the sources of danger. I must be resolute and strong. That way alone safety lies for me. I will set to work at once to carry out my mission here, and then go away. I shall know this week how matters stand with the estate. I shall busy myself at once with my fixed purpose. I shall find means of discharging all the debts of the plantation. Then I shall sell the land and with the proceeds take the negroes to the west and settle them there on little farms of their own. Then I shall be free again to resume my proper work in the world. Obviously I must not complicate matters by marrying here or even falling in love. A man with such a duty laid upon him has no right to indulge himself in soft luxury. I must be strong and resolute.”

Nevertheless Arthur Brent felt an easily recognizable thrill of delight when at dinner he found himself assigned to a seat on Edmonia Bannister’s left hand.

There were sixteen at dinner, and all were happy. Arthur alone was a guest unused to occupy that place at Branton, and to him accordingly all at table devoted special attention. Three at least of the younger men present, had been suitors in their time for their hostess’s hand, for it was a peculiarity of Edmonia’s rejections of her wooers, that they usually soothed passion into affection and made of disappointed lovers most loyal friends. Before the dinner came to an end, Arthur found himself deliberately planning to seek this relation of close friendship without the initiatory process of a love making. For he found his hostess to be wise in counsel and sincere in mind, beyond her years. “She is precisely the person to advise me in the delicate affairs that I must manage,” he thought. “For in the present state of public feeling”—it was the era of Kansas-Nebraska bills and violent agitation—“it will require unusual tact and discretion to carry out my plans without making of myself an object of hatred and loathing. This young woman has tact in infinite measure; she has discretion also, and an acquaintance with sentiment here, such as I cannot even hope to acquire. Above all she has conscience, as I discover every time she has occasion to express an opinion. I’ll make her my friend. I’ll consult her with regard to my plans.”

By way of preparation for this he said to Edmonia as they sat together in the porch one evening: “I am coming often to Branton, because I want you to learn to know me and like me. I have matters in hand concerning which I very much want your counsel. Will you mind giving it to me if I behave well, resist the strong temptation to pay court to you as a lover, and teach you after a while to feel that I am a friend to whom your kindliness will owe counsel?”

“If you will put matters on that level, Cousin Arthur, and keep them there I shall be glad to have it so. I don’t know that I can give you advice of any account, but, at any rate, as I think your impulses will be right and kindly, I can give you sympathy, and that is often a help. I’ll give you my opinion also, whenever you want it—especially if I think you are going wrong and need admonition. Then I’ll put on all the airs of a Minerva and advise you oracularly. But remember that you must win all this, by coming often to Branton and—and the rest of it.”

“I’ll come often to Branton, be sure of that,” he answered. But he did not feel himself quite strong enough of purpose, to promise that he would not make love to the mistress of the mansion.

At the dinner each gentleman had a joint or a pair of fowls before him to carve, and every gentleman in that time and country was confidently expected to know how to carve whatever dish there might be assigned to him. Carving was deemed as much a necessary part of every gentleman’s education as was the ability to ride and shoot and catch a mettlesome fish. The barbarity of having the joints clumsily cut up by a butler at a side table and served half cold in an undiscriminating way, had not then come into being. Dining was a fine art in that time and country, a social function, in which each carver had the joy of selecting tidbits for those he served, and arranging them daintily and attractively upon the plate brought to him for that purpose by a well trained servant. Especially each took pleasure in remembering and ministering to the particular fancies of all the rest in the act of helping. Refined people had not yet borrowed from barbaric Russians the practice of having themselves fed, like so many cattle, by servitors appointed to deal out rations.

There was no wine served with the meal. That came later in its proper place. Each gentleman had been invited to partake of a “toddy”—a mild admixture of whiskey, water, sugar and nutmeg—before sitting down to the meal. After that there was no drink served until the meal was over. When the cloth was removed after the dessert, there came upon the polished board some dishes of walnuts of which all partook sparingly. Then came the wine—old sherry or, if the house were a fortunate one, rare old Madeira, served from richly carved decanters, in daintily stemmed cut glasses. The wine was poured into all the glasses. Then the host proposed “the ladies,” and all drank, standing. Then the host gallantly held the broad dining room door open while the ladies, bowing and smiling, graciously withdrew. After that politics and walnuts, religion and raisins, sherry and society divided the attention of the gentlemen with cigars that had been kept for a dozen years or more drying in a garret. For the modern practice of soaking cigars in a refrigerator and smoking them limp and green was an undreamed of insult to the tongues and palates of men who knew all about tobacco and who smoked for flavor, not for the satisfaction of a fierce and intemperate craving for narcotic effect.

After half an hour or so over the rich, nutty wine, the gentlemen joined the gentlewomen in the drawing room, the hallway or the porches according to the weather, and a day well spent ended with a light supper at nine o’clock. Then there was an ordering of horses and a making of adieux on the part of such of the gentlemen as were not going to remain over night.

“You will stay, Cousin Arthur,” Edmonia said. “You will stay, of course. You and I have a compact to carry out. We are to learn to like each other. It will be very easy, I think, but we must set to work at it immediately. Will you ride with me in the morning—soon?”

She called him “Cousin Arthur,” of course. Had not a distant relative of his once married a still more distant kinswoman of her own? It would have been deemed in Virginia a distinct discourtesy in her not to call him “Cousin Arthur.”

IX
DOROTHY’S CASE

AFTER a few weeks of work Arthur Brent’s laboratory was ready for use, with all its apparatus in place and all its reserve supply of chemicals safely bestowed in a small, log built hut standing apart.

His books too had been brought to the house and unpacked. He provided shelf room for them in the various apartments, in the broad hallway, and even upon the stairs. There were a multitude of volumes—largely the accumulations of years of study and travel on his own and his father’s part. The collection included all that was best in scientific literature, and much that was best in history, in philosophy and in belles lettres. To this latter department he had ordered large additions made when sending for his books—this with an eye to Dorothy’s education.

There was already a library of some importance at Wyanoke, the result of irregular buying during two hundred years past. Swift was there in time stained vellum. The poets, from Dryden and Pope to the last quarter of the eighteenth century were well represented, and there were original editions of “Childe Harold,” and “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” on the shelves. Scott was present in leathern cuirass of binding—both in his novels and in his poems. But there was not a line of Coleridge or Wordsworth or Shelley or Rogers or Campbell or John Keats, not a suggestion of Matthew Arnold. Tennyson, Browning and their fellows were completely absent, though Bailey’s “Festus” was there to represent modern poetry.

The latest novels in the list, apart from Scott, were “Evelina,” “The Children of The Abbey,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” “Scottish Chiefs” and some others of their kind. But all the abominations of Smollett, all the grossness of Fielding, all the ribaldry of Richardson, and all the sentimental indecency of Laurence Sterne were present in full force—on top shelves, out of consideration for maidenly modesty.

In history there were Josephus and Rollin, and scarcely anything else. Hume was excluded because of his scepticism, and Gibbon had been passed over as a monster of unbelief.

Arthur found that Dorothy had browsed somewhat in this old library, particularly among the British Essayists and in some old volumes of Dramas. Her purity had revolted at Fielding, Smollett and their kind, and she had found the sentimentalities of Miss Burney insipid. But she knew her “Don Quixote” almost by heart, and “Gil Blas” even more minutely. She had read much of Montaigne and something of Rousseau in the original also, and the Latin classics were her familiars. For her father had taught her from infancy, French and Latin, not after the manner of the schools, as grammatical gymnastics, but with an eye single to the easy and intelligent reading of the rich literatures that those languages offer to the initiated. The girl knew scarcely a single rule of Latin grammar—in text book terms at least—but she read her Virgil and Horace almost as easily as she did her Bible.

It was with definite reference to the deficiencies of this and other old plantation libraries, that Arthur Brent ordered books. He selected Dorothy’s own sitting room—opening off her chamber—as the one in which to bestow the treasures of modern literature—Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, Coleridge, Keats, Rogers, Campbell, Shelley and their later successors—Longfellow, Bryant, Willis, Halleck, and above all Irving, Paulding and Hawthorne.

In arranging these treasures in Dorothy’s outer room, Arthur resorted to a little trick or two. He would pick up a volume with ostensible purpose of placing it upon a shelf, but would turn to a favorite passage and read a little aloud. Then, suddenly stopping, he would say:—

“But you’ll read all that for yourself,” and would add some bit of comment or suggestion of a kind to awaken the girl’s attention and attract her to the author in question. Before he had finished arranging the books in that room Dorothy was almost madly eager to read all of them. A new world was opening to her, a world of modern thought far more congenial to her mind than the older literature which alone she had known before. Here was a literature of which she had scarcely known even the existence. It was a clean, wholesome, well-aired literature; a literature founded upon modern ways of thinking; a literature that dealt with modern life and character; a literature instinct with the thought and sentiment of her own time. The girl was at once bewildered by the extent of it and fascinated by its charm. Her sleep was cut short in her eagerness to read it all. Its influence upon her mind and character became at once and insistently manifest.

“Here endeth the first lesson,” quoted Arthur Brent when he had thus placed all that is best in modern literature temptingly at this eager girl’s hand. “It will puzzle them to stop her from thinking now,” he added, “or to confine her thinking within their strait-laced conventions. Now for science.”

The age of Darwin, Huxley and Herbert Spencer had not yet come, in 1859. Haeckel was still unheard of, outside of Berlin and Jena. The science of biology, in which all other science finds its fruition and justifies its being, was then scarcely “a borning.” Otherwise, Arthur Brent would have made of Dorothy’s amateurish acquaintance with botany the basis of a systematic study, leading up to that conception which came later to science, that all life is one, whether animal or vegetable; that species are the results of differentiation by selection and development, and that the scheme of nature is one uniform, consistent whole, composed of closely related parts. But this thought had not yet come to science. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was not published until later in that year, Wallace was off on his voyages and had not yet reached those all embracing conclusions. Huxley was still only a young man of promise. Virchow was bound in those trammels of tradition from which he was destined never quite to disentangle himself, even with the stimulus of Haeckel, his wonderful pupil. But the thought that has since made science alive had been dreamed of even then. There were suggestions of it in the manuscripts,—written backwards—of Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe had foreshadowed much of it.

Nevertheless, it was not for such sake or with a purpose so broad that Arthur Brent set out to interest Dorothy South in science. His only purpose was to teach her to think, to implant in her mind that divine thirst for sound knowledge which he clearly recognized as a specific remedy for conventional narrowness of mind.

The girl was quick to learn rudiments and general principles, and in laboratory work she soon surpassed her master as a maker of experiments. In such work her habits of exactitude stood her in good stead, and her conscientiousness had its important part to play.

But science did not become a very serious occupation with Dorothy. It was rather play than study at first, and when she had acquired some insight into it, so that its suggestions served to explain the phenomena about her, she was fairly well content. She had no passion for original research and of that Arthur was rather glad. “That sort of thing is masculine,” he reflected, “and she is altogether a woman. I don’t want her to grow into anything else.”

But to her passion for literature there was no limit. “Literature concerns itself with people,” she said to Arthur one day, “and I care more for people than for gases and bases and reactions.”

But literature, in its concern for people, records the story of human life through all the centuries, and the development of human thought. It includes history and speculative philosophy and Dorothy manifested almost a passion for these.

It was at this point that trouble first arose. So long as the girl was supposed to be devouring novels and poetry, the community admired and approved. But when it was noised abroad that she knew Gibbon as familiarly as she did her catechism, that she had read Hume’s Essays and Locke on the Understanding, together with the elder Mill, and Jeremy Bentham and much else of like kind, the wonder was not unmixed with doubt as to the fitness of such reading for a young girl.

For a time even Aunt Polly shared this doubt but she was quickly cured of it when Madison Peyton, with his customary impertinence protested. Aunt Polly was not accustomed to agree in opinion with Madison Peyton, and she resented the suggestion that the girl could come to any harm while under her care. So she combated Peyton’s view after a destructive fashion. When he spoke of this literature as unfit, Aunt Polly meekly asked him, “Why?” and naturally he could not answer, having never read a line of it in his life. He sought to evade the question but Aunt Polly was relentless, greatly to the amusement of John Meaux and Col. Majors, the lawyer of the old families. She insisted upon his telling her which of the books were dangerous for Dorothy to read. “How else can I know which to take away from her?” she asked. When at last he unwisely ventured to mention Gibbon—having somehow got the impression, which was common then, that the “Decline and Fall” was a sceptical work, Aunt Polly—who had been sharing Dorothy’s reading of it,—plied him with closer questions.

“In what way is it harmful?” she asked, and then, quite innocently, “what is it all about any how, Madison?”

“Oh, well, we can’t go into that,” he said evasively.

“But why not? That is precisely what we must go into if we are to direct Dorothy’s reading properly. What is this book that you think she ought not to read? What does it treat of? What is there in it that you object to?”

Thus baited on a subject that he knew nothing about, Peyton grew angry, though he knew it would not do for him to manifest the fact. He unwisely, but with an air of very superior wisdom, blurted out:—

“If you had read that book, Cousin Polly, you wouldn’t like to make it the subject of conversation.”

“So?” asked the old lady. “It is in consideration of my ignorance then that you graciously pardon my discretion?”

“It’s a very proper ignorance. I respect you for never having indulged in such reading,” he answered.

“Then you must respect me less,” calmly responded the old lady, “for I have read the book and I’m reading it a second time. I don’t see that it has hurt me, but I’ll bow to your superior wisdom if you’ll only tell me what there is in the book that is likely to undermine my morals.”

The laugh that followed from Col. Majors and John Meaux—for the idea that anything, literary or otherwise, could undermine the vigorous morals of this high bred dame was too ludicrous to be resisted—nettled Peyton anew. Still further losing his temper he broke out:

“How should I know what is in the book? I never read such stuff. But I know it is unfit for a young girl, and in this case I have a right to dictate. I tell you now, Cousin Polly, that I will not have Dorothy’s mind perverted by such reading. My interest in this case is paramount and I mean to assert it. I have been glad to have her with you for the sake of the social and moral training I expected you to give her. But I tell you now, that if you don’t stop all this kind of reading and all this slopping in a laboratory, trying to learn atheistical science—for all science is atheistical as you well know—”

“Pardon me, Madison,” broke in the old lady, “I didn’t know that. Won’t you explain it to me, please?”—this with the meekness of a reverent disciple, a meekness which Peyton knew to be a mockery.

“Oh, everybody knows that,” testily answered the man. “And it is indecent as well. I hear that Arthur has been teaching Dorothy a lot about anatomy and that sort of thing that no woman ought to know, and—”

“Why shouldn’t a woman know that?” asked Aunt Polly, still delivering her hot shot as if they had been balls of the zephyr she was knitting into a nubia. “Does it do her any harm to know how—”

“Oh, please don’t ask me to go into that, Cousin Polly,” the man impatiently responded. “You see it isn’t a proper subject of conversation.”

“Oh, isn’t it? I didn’t know, you see. And as you will not enlighten me, let us return to what you were about to say. I beg pardon for interrupting.”

“I don’t remember what I was going to say,” said Peyton, anxious to end the discussion. “Besides it was of no consequence. Let’s talk of something else.”

“Not yet, please,” placidly answered the old lady. “I remember that you were about to threaten me with something. Now I never was threatened in my life, and I’m really anxious to know how it feels. So please go on and threaten me, Madison.”

“I never thought of threatening you, Cousin Polly, I assure you. You’re mistaken in that, surely.”

“Not at all. You said you had been pleased to have Dorothy under my charge. I thank you for saying that. But you added that if I didn’t stop her reading and her scientific studies you’d—you didn’t say just what you’d do. That is because I interrupted. I beg pardon for doing so, but now you must complete the sentence.”

“Oh, I only meant that if the girl was to be miseducated at Wyanoke, I should feel myself obliged to take her away to my own house and—”

“You need not continue,” answered the old lady, rising in stately wrath. “You have said quite enough. Now let me make my reply. It is simply that if you ever attempt to put such an affront as that upon me, you’ll wish you had never been born.”

She instantly withdrew from the piazza of the house in which all were guests, John Meaux gallantly accompanying her. She paid no more heed to Peyton’s clamorous protestations of apology than to the buzzing of the bees that were plundering the honeysuckles of their sweets.

When she had gone Peyton began to realize the mistake he had made. In that Col. Majors, who was left alone with him, greatly assisted him. In the slow, deliberate way in which he always spoke, Col. Majors said:

“You know, Peyton, that I do not often volunteer advice before I am asked to give it, but in this case I am going to do so. It seems to me that you have overlooked certain facts which present themselves to my mind, as important, and of which I think the courts would take cognizance.”

“Oh, I only meant to give Cousin Polly a hint,” broke in Peyton. “Of course I didn’t seriously mean that I would take the girl away from her.”

“It is well that you did not,” answered the lawyer, “for the sufficient reason that you could not do that if you were determined upon it.”

“Why, surely,” Peyton protested. “I have a right to look after the girl’s welfare?”

“Absolutely none whatever.”

“Why, you forget the arrangement between me and Dr. South.”

“Not at all. That arrangement was at best a contract without consideration, and therefore nonenforcible. Even if it had been reduced to writing and formally executed, it would be so much waste paper in the eyes of a court. Dorothy is a ward in chancery. The court would never permit the enforcement of a contract of that kind upon her, so long as she is under age; and when she attains her majority she will be absolutely free, if I know anything of the law, to repudiate an arrangement disposing of her life, made by others without her consent.”

“Do you mean that on a mere whim of her own, that girl can upset the advantageous arrangements made for her by her father and undo the whole thing?”

“I mean precisely that. But pardon me, the time has not come to consider that question. What I would impress upon your mind at present is that on the whole you’d better make your peace with Miss Polly. She has the girl in charge, and if you antagonize her, she may perhaps train Miss Dorothy to repudiate the arrangement altogether. In that case you may not wish that you had never been born, as Miss Polly put the matter, but you’ll wish that you hadn’t offended the dear old lady.”

“Then I must take the girl away from her at once,” exclaimed Peyton in alarm. “I mustn’t leave her for another day under Cousin Polly’s influence.”

“But you cannot take her away, Peyton. That is what I am trying to impress upon your mind.”

“But why not? Surely I have a right—”

“You have absolutely no rights in the premises. The will of the late Dr. South, made Robert Brent Dorothy’s guardian.”

“But Robert Brent is dead,” broke in Peyton, impatiently, “and I am to be the girl’s guardian after the next term of the court.”

“Perhaps so,” answered the lawyer. “The court usually allows the ward to choose her guardian in such a case, and if you strongly commend yourself to her, she may choose you. But I may be allowed to suggest that that will depend a good deal upon what advice Miss Polly may give her. She is very fond of Miss Polly, and apt to be guided by her. However that again is a matter that has no bearing upon the question in hand. Even were you already appointed guardian of Miss Dorothy’s estate you could not take the girl away from Miss Polly.”

“Why not? Has a guardian no authority?”

“Oh, yes—a very large authority. But it happens in this case that by the terms of the late Dr. South’s will, Miss Polly is made sole and absolute guardian of Miss Dorothy’s person until such time as she shall come of age or previously marry with Miss Polly’s consent. Neither Robert Brent, during his life, nor any person appointed to succeed him as guardian of Miss Dorothy’s estate, had, or has, or can have the smallest right to take her away from the guardian of her person. That could be done only by going into court and showing that the guardian of the person was of immoral life and unfit to have charge of a child. It would be risky, to say the least of it, to suggest such a thing as that in the case of Miss Polly, wouldn’t it? She has no very near relatives but there isn’t a young or a middle-aged man in this county who wouldn’t, in that case, adopt the relation of nearest male relation to her and send inconvenient billets-doux to you by the hands of insistent friends.”

“Oh, that’s all nonsense,” answered Peyton. “Of course nobody would think of such a thing as questioning Cousin Polly’s eminent fitness to bring up a girl.”

“And yet that is precisely what you did, by implication at least, a little while ago. My advice to you is to repair your blunder at the earliest possible moment.”

Peyton clearly saw the necessity of doing so, especially now that he had learned that Dorothy must in any case remain in Aunt Polly’s charge. It would ruin all his plans to have Aunt Polly antagonize them even passively. But how to atone for his error was a difficult problem. With anybody else he would have tried his favorite tactics of “laughing the thing off,” treating it as a jest and being more good naturedly insolent than ever. But with Aunt Polly he could not do that. She was much too shrewdly penetrative to be deceived by such measures and much too sensitively self-respectful to tolerate familiarity as a substitute for an apology.

Moreover he knew that he needed something more than Aunt Polly’s forgiveness. He wanted her coöperation. For the dread which had inspired his blundering outbreak, was not mainly, if at all, a dread of English literature as a perverting educational force. He knew next to nothing of literature and he cared even less. Under ordinary circumstances he would never have bothered himself over any question of Dorothy’s reading. But Dorothy was doing her reading under the tutelage and with the sympathy of Arthur Brent, and Madison Peyton foresaw that the close, daily association of the girl—child as she was—with a man so gifted and so pleasing was likely, after a year or two at least to grow into a warmer attachment. And even if that should not happen, he felt that her education under the influence of such a man might give her ideals and standards which would not be satisfied by the life plans made for her between himself and her father.

It was not to remove her from Aunt Polly’s control, or even to save her from too much serious reading—though he was suspicious of that—that he cared. He wanted to keep her away from Arthur Brent’s influence, and it was in a blundering attempt to bring that about that he had managed to offend Aunt Polly, making a possible enemy of his most necessary ally.

It was with a perturbed mind therefore that he rode away from the hospitable house where the discussion had occurred, making some hastily manufactured excuse to the hostess, for not remaining to dinner.

X
DOROTHY VOLUNTEERS

ALL this while Arthur Brent was a very busy man. It was true, as Madison Peyton had said, that he knew little of planting, but he had two strong coadjutors in the cultivation of his crops. John Meaux—perhaps in unconscious spite of Peyton—frequently rode over to Wyanoke and visited all its fields in company with the young master of the plantation. There was not much in common between Meaux and Arthur, not much to breed a close intimacy. Meaux was an educated man, within the rather narrow limits established by the curriculum at West Point—for Robert E. Lee had not yet done his work of enlargement and betterment at the military academy when Meaux was a cadet in that institution—but he was not a man of much reading, and intellectually he was indolent. Nevertheless he was a pleasant enough companion, his friendship for Arthur was genuine, and he knew more about the arts of planting than anybody else in that region. He freely gave Arthur the benefit of his judgment and skill greatly to the advantage of the growing crops at Wyanoke.

Archer Bannister, too, was often Arthur’s guest. He came and went as he pleased, sometimes remaining for three or four days at a time, sometimes staying only long enough to advise Arthur to have a tobacco lot cut before a rain should come to wash off the “molasses”—as the thick gum on a ripening tobacco leaf was called. He was himself a skilful planter and his almost daily counsel was of great value to Arthur’s inexperience.

But it was not of things agricultural only that these two were accustomed to talk with each other. There had quickly grown up between them an almost brotherly intimacy. They were men of congenial tastes and close intellectual sympathies, and there was from the first a strong liking on either side which was referable rather to similarity of character than to anything merely intellectual. Both men cherished high ideals of conduct, and both were loyal to those ideals. Both were thoroughly educated, and both had been broadened by travel. Both indulged in intellectual activities not always attractive even to men of culture. Arthur loved science with the devotion of a disciple; Archer rejoiced in a study of its conclusions and their consequences rather than of its processes, its methods, its details. Above all, so far as intellectual sympathies were concerned, both young men were almost passionately devoted to literature. Between two such men, thrown together in that atmosphere of leisure which was the crowning glory of Virginia plantation life, it was inevitable that something more and stronger than ordinary friendship should grow up. And between them stood also Archer’s sister Edmonia—a woman whom both held in tender affection, the one loving her as a sister, the other as—he scarcely knew what. She shared the ideas, the impulses, the high principles of both, and in her feminine way she shared also their intellectual tastes and aspirations.

Arthur had still another coadjutor in his management of affairs, in the person of Dorothy. Throughout the summer and autumn the girl rode with him every morning during the hours before breakfast, and, in her queer, half childish, half womanly way, she instructed him mightily in many things. Her habits of close observation had given her a large and accurate knowledge of plantation affairs which was invaluable to him, covering as it did many points of detail left unmentioned by Meaux and Bannister.

But his interest in the girl was chiefly psychological. The contradiction he observed between her absolutely child-like simplicity and the strangely sage and old way she had of thinking now and then, interested him beyond measure. Her honesty was phenomenal—her truthfulness astonishing.

One morning as the two rode together through the corn they came upon a watermelon three fourths grown. Instantly the girl slipped to the ground with the request:—

“Lend me your knife, please.”

He handed her the knife wondering what she would do with it. After an effort to open it she handed it back, saying: “Won’t you please open it? Knives are not fit for women’s use. Our thumb nails are not strong enough to open them. But we use them, anyhow. That’s because women’s masters are not severe enough with them.”

Receiving the knife again, with a blade opened, the girl stooped and quickly scratched Arthur’s initials “A. B.,” upon the melon.

“I’ve observed you do that before, Dorothy,” said Arthur as the girl again mounted Chestnut, without assistance. “Why do you do it?”

“To keep the servants from stealing the melon,” she replied. “Everybody does that. I wonder if it’s right.”

“But how can that keep a negro from taking the melon some dark night after it is ripe and secretly eating it?”

“Oh, that’s because of their ignorance. They are very ignorant—much more so than you think, Cousin Arthur. I may call you ‘Cousin Arthur,’ may I not? You see I always called your uncle ‘Uncle Robert,’ and if your uncle was my uncle, of course you and I are cousins. Besides I like to call you ‘Cousin Arthur.’ ”

“And I like to have you call me so. But tell me about the marking of the watermelon.”

“Oh, that’s simple enough. When you have marked your initials on a melon, the negroes know you have seen it and so they are afraid to steal it.”

“But how should I know who took it?”

“That’s their ignorance. They never think of that. Or rather I suppose they think educated people know a great deal more than they do. I wonder if it is right?”

“If what is right, Dorothy?”

“Why, to take advantage of their ignorance in that way. Have educated people a right to do that with ignorant people? Is it fair?”

“I see your point, Dorothy, and I’m not prepared to give you an answer, at least in general terms. But, at any rate, it is right to use any means we can to keep people from stealing.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve thought of that. But is it stealing for the negroes to take a watermelon which they have planted and cultivated? They do the work on the plantation. Aren’t they entitled to all they want to eat?”

“Within reasonable bounds, yes,” answered Arthur, meditatively. “They are entitled to all the wholesome food they need, and to all the warm clothing, and to comfortable, wholesome quarters to live in. But we mustn’t leave the smoke house door unlocked. If we did that the dishonest ones among them would take all the meat and sell it, and the rest would starve. Besides, the white people are entitled to something. They take care of the negroes in sickness and in childhood and in old age. They must feed and clothe them and nurse them and have doctors for them no matter what it may cost. It is true, the negroes do the work that produces the food and clothing and all the rest of it, but their masters contribute the intelligent management that is quite as necessary as the work. Imagine this plantation, Dorothy, or your own Pocahontas, left to the negroes. They could do as much work as they do now, but do you suppose their crops would feed them till Christmas if there were no white man to manage for them?”

“Of course not. Indeed they never would make a crop. Still I don’t like the system.”

“Neither do I, Dorothy, but in the present state of the public mind neither of us must say so.”

“Why not, Cousin Arthur? Is there any harm in telling the truth?”

“Sometimes I suppose it is better to keep silence,” answered Arthur, hesitating.

“For women, yes,” quickly responded the girl. “But men can fight. Why shouldn’t they tell the truth?”

“I don’t quite understand your distinction, Dorothy.”

“I’m not sure,” she answered, “that I understand it myself. Oh, yes, I do, now that I think of it. Women tell lies, of course, because they can’t fight. Or, if they don’t quite tell lies they at least keep silent whenever telling the truth would make trouble. That’s because they can’t fight. Men can fight, and so there’s not the slightest excuse for them if they tell lies or even if they keep silent.”

“But, Dorothy, I don’t yet understand. Women can’t fight, of course, but then they are never called upon to fight. Why—”

“That’s just it, Cousin Arthur. If a woman speaks out, nobody can hold her responsible. But anybody can hold her nearest male friend responsible and he must fight to maintain what she has said, whether he thinks she was right in saying it or not. The other day Jeff. Peyton—Mr. Madison Peyton’s son, you know,—was over at Wyanoke, when you had gone to Branton. So I had to entertain him.” Dorothy did not know that the youth had been sent to Wyanoke by his father for the express purpose of being entertained by herself. “I found him a pretty stupid fellow, as I always do, but as he pretends to have been a student at the University, I supposed he had read a great deal. So I talked to him about Virgil but he knew so little that I asked him if he had read ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ and he told me a deliberate lie. He professed a full acquaintance with that book, and presently I found out that he had never read a line of it. I was so shocked that I forgot myself. I asked him, ‘Why did you lie to me?’ It was dreadfully rude, of course, but I could not help it. Now of course he couldn’t challenge me for that. But if he had been a man of spirit, he would have challenged you, and you see how terribly wrong I should have been to involve you in a quarrel of that kind. Of course if I had been a man, instead of a woman—if I had been answerable for my words—I should have been perfectly free to charge him with lying. But what possible right had I to risk your life in a duel by saying things that I might as well have left unsaid?”

“But you said the other day,” responded Arthur, “that you did not believe in duelling?”

“Of course I don’t. It is a barbarous thing. But it is the custom of our country and we can’t help it. I’ve noticed that if a man fights a duel on proper provocation, everybody says he ought not to have done it. But if he refuses to fight, everybody says he’s a coward. So, under certain circumstances, a man in Virginia who respects himself is absolutely compelled to fight. If Jefferson Peyton had asked you to meet him on account of what I said to him, you couldn’t have refused, could you, Cousin Arthur?”

“I wouldn’t,” was all the answer the young man made; but he put a strong stress upon the last word.

“Oh, I know you wouldn’t,” answered the girl, treating his response as quite a matter of course. “But you see now why a woman must keep silent where a man should speak out. If a man tells the truth he can be called to account for it; so if he is manly he will tell it and take the consequences. But a woman has to remember that if she tells the truth, and the truth happens to be ugly, some man must be shot at for her words.”

“Dorothy,” asked Arthur, with unusual seriousness, “are you afraid of anything?”

“Afraid? No. Of course not.”

“If you were needed very badly for the sake of other people—even negroes—if you could save their lives and ease their sufferings, you’d want to do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Why, of course, Cousin Arthur. I’ve read in Aunt Polly’s old newspapers, how you went to Norfolk in the yellow fever time, and how bravely you—never mind. I’ve read all about that, over and over again, and it’s part of what makes me like you.”

“But courage is not expected of women.”

“Oh, yes, it is,” quickly responded the girl. “Not the courage of fighting, of course—but that’s only because men won’t fight with women, except in mean ways. Women are expected to show courage in other ways, and they do it too. In the newspapers that tell about your heroism at Norfolk, there is a story of how one of your nurses went always to the most dangerous cases, and how, when she died, you officiated at her funeral, instead of the clergyman who had got scared and run away like a coward that did not trust his God. I remember what the newspaper says that you said at the grave, Cousin Arthur. I’ve got it all by heart. You said, at the end of your address:—‘We are accustomed to pay honor and to set up monuments to men who have dared, where daring offered its rich reward of fame and glory. Let us reverently bow our heads and abase our feeble, selfish souls, in presence of the courage of this frail woman, who, in her weakness, has achieved greater things in the sight of God than any that the valor and strength of man have ever accomplished since the foundations of the world were laid. Let us reverently and lovingly make obeisance to the courage of a devoted woman—a courage that we men can never hope to match.’ You see I remember all that you said then, Cousin Arthur, and so you needn’t tell me now that you do not expect courage at the hands of women.”

Arthur made no immediate reply, and the two rode on in silence for a time. After a while, as they neared the house gates, he spoke.

“Dorothy,” he said, “I need your help very badly. You cannot render me the help I want without very serious danger to yourself. So I don’t want you to give me any answer to what I am about to say until tomorrow. I want you to think the matter over very carefully first.”

“Tell me what it is, Cousin Arthur.”

“Why, I find that we are to have a very dangerous epidemic of typhoid fever among the negroes here. When the first case occurred ten days ago I hoped that might be all; but two days later I found two more cases; day before yesterday there were five more. So it is obvious that we are to have an epidemic. All the cases have appeared among the field hands and their families out at the far quarters, and so I hope that the house servants and the people around the stables will escape. But the outbreak is really very serious and the disease is of the most virulent type. I must literally fight it with fire. I have already set men at work building new quarters down by the Silver Spring, a mile away from the infected place, and as soon as I can I’m going to move all the people and set fire to all the old quarters. I’ve bought an old circus tent in Richmond, and I expect it by express today. As soon as it comes I’m going to set it up on the Haw Branch hill, and put all the sick people into it, so as to separate them from those that are well. As fast as others show symptoms of the disease, I’ll remove them also to the hospital tent, and for that purpose I have ordered forty cots and a lot of new blankets and pillows.”

Dorothy ejaculated her sorrow and sympathy with the poor blacks, and quickly added the question: “What is it that I can do, Cousin Arthur? Tell me; you know I will do it.”

“But, Dorothy, dear, I don’t want you to make up your mind till you have thought it all over.”

“My mind is already made up. You want me to nurse these poor sick people, and of course I’m going to do it. You are thinking that the disease is contagious—”

“No, it is only infectious,” he broke in with the instinct of scientific exactitude strong upon him.

“Well, anyhow, it’s catching, and you think I may catch it, and you want me to think out whether I’m afraid of that or not. Very well. I’ve already thought that out. You are going to be with the sick people night and day. Cousin Arthur, I am only a girl, but I’m no more a coward than you are. Tell me what I’m to do. It doesn’t need any thinking out.”

“But, Dorothy, listen to me. These are not your people. If this outbreak had occurred at Pocahontas, the matter would have been different. You might well think that you owed a duty to the people on your own plantation, but you owe none to these people of mine.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I live at Wyanoke. Besides they are human beings and they are in need of help. I don’t know how I can help, but you are going to tell me, and I’m going to do what you want. I will not waste a day in thinking.”

“But, my child, the danger in this case is really very great. Indeed it is extremely probable that if you do what you propose to do, you will have the fever, and as I have already said, it has assumed an unusually virulent form.”

“It can’t be more dangerous than the yellow fever was at Norfolk, and you braved that in order to save the lives of people you had never heard of—people to whom you owed nothing whatever. Cousin Arthur, do you think me less brave than you are?”

“No, dear, but—”

“Very well. You shall tell me after breakfast precisely what I can do, and then I’ll do it. Women are naturally bad, and so they mustn’t lose any opportunity of doing good when they can.”

At that moment they arrived at the house gates. Slipping from her saddle, Dorothy turned her great, earnest eyes full upon her companion, and said with tense lips:

“Promise me one thing, Cousin Arthur! Promise me that if I die in this work you won’t ask any clergyman to mutter worn-out words from a prayer book over my grave, but will yourself say to my friends that I did not shirk like a coward!”

Instantly, and without waiting for the promise she had besought, the girl turned, caught up her long riding skirt and fled like a deer to the house.

XI
THE WOMAN’S AWAKENING

IT was upon a momentary impulse that Arthur Brent had suggested to Dorothy that she should help him in the battle with pestilence which lay before him. As a physician he had been accustomed to practise his profession not in the ordinary, perfunctory way, and not for gain, but in the spirit of a crusader combating disease as the arch enemy of humanity, and partly too for the joy of conquering so merciless a foe. His first thought in this case therefore had been to call to his aid the best assistance available. His chief difficulty, he clearly foresaw, would be in getting his measures intelligently carried out. He must secure the accurate, prompt and intelligent execution of his directions, whether for the administration of medicines prescribed or for hygienic measures ordered. The ignorance, the prejudice, and the inert carelessness of the negroes, he felt, would be his mightiest and wiliest foes in this, and there could be no abler adjutant for this purpose than Dorothy, with her quick wit, her scrupulous conscientiousness and her habit of compelling exact and instant obedience to all her commands. So he had thought first of calling upon Dorothy for help. But when she had so promptly responded, he began to feel that he had made a mistake. The physician in him, and the crusader too, sanctioned and approved the use of the best means available for the accomplishment of his high purpose. But the man in him, the friend, the affectionate protector, protested against such an exposure of the child to dreadful danger.

When he reflected upon the matter and thought of the peril; when he conjured up a picture of dear little Dorothy stricken and perhaps dead in a service of humanity to which no duty called her, and to which she had been induced only by her loyalty to him, he shrank back in horror from the program he had laid out.

Yet he knew that he could not easily undo what he had done. There was a child side to Dorothy, and it was that which usually presented itself to his mind when he thought of her. But there was a strong woman side to her also, as he very well knew, and over that he had established no influence or control. He had won the love of the child. He had not yet won the love of the woman. He realized that it was the masterful, woman side of her nature that he had called into activity in this matter. Now that the heroism of the brave woman’s soul was enlisted, he knew that he could not easily bid it turn back.

Yet something might be done by adroit management, and he resolved upon that. After breakfast he sent for Dorothy and said, lightly:

“I’m glad I have taught you to handle drugs skilfully, Dorothy. I shall need certain medicines frequently in this conflict. They are our ammunition for the battle, and we must have them always ready. I’m going to write some prescriptions for you to fill. I want you to spend today and tomorrow in the laboratory preparing them. One of them will tax your skill a good deal. It may take you several days to get it ready. It involves some very careful chemical processes—for you must first manufacture a part of your chemicals out of their raw materials. I’ll write detailed instructions for that, but you may fail half a dozen times before you succeed. You must be patient and you’ll get it right. You always do in the end. Then there’s another thing I want you to do for me. I’m going to burn all the clothing, bedding and so forth at the quarters. I’ll make each of the well negroes put on the freshest clothing he has before removing to the sanitary camp, and I’ll burn all the rest. I sent Dick early this morning to the Court House, telling Moses to send me all the blankets and all the cloth he has of every kind, from calico and osnaburgs to heavy woollen goods, and I’ve written to Richmond for more. We must clothe the negroes anew—men, women and children. So I want you to get together all your seamstresses—every woman on the plantation indeed who can sew even a little bit—and set them all at work making clothes. I’ve cleared out the prize barn for the purpose, and the men are now laying a rough floor in it and putting up some tables on which you and Aunt Polly can ‘cut out’—that’s what you call it, isn’t it?”

“Cousin Arthur,” said the girl, looking at him with something of reproach in her great, dark blue eyes, “I’ll do all this of course, and everything else that you want done. But please, Cousin Arthur, don’t tell lies to me, even indirectly. I couldn’t stand that from you.”

“What do you mean, child?”

“Oh, you have made up your mind to keep me busy with all these things so that I shall not go into your hospital to serve as a nurse. I’ll do these things for you, but I’ll do the nursing too. So please let us be good friends and please don’t try to play tricks.”

The young man was astonished and abashed. Under ordinary circumstances he might truthfully have pleaded that the work he was thus laying out for her was really and pressingly necessary. But Dorothy anticipated him in that.

“Don’t tell me that these things are necessary, Cousin Arthur. I know that perfectly well. But you know that I am not necessary to them—except so far as the prescriptions are concerned. Aunt Polly can direct the clothes making better than I can, and her maid, Jane, is almost as good. So after I compound the prescriptions I shall go to my duty at the hospital. I don’t think I like you very well today, Cousin Arthur, and I’ll not like you at all if you go on trying to make up things to keep me busy, away from the sick people. If you do that again I’ll stop calling you ‘Cousin Arthur’ and you’ll be just ‘Dr. Brent’ to me.”

“Please don’t do that, Dorothy,” he said very pleadingly. “I only meant—”

“Oh, I know what you meant,” she interrupted. “But you shouldn’t treat me in that way. I won’t call you ‘Dr. Brent,’ unless you do that sort of thing again, and if you let me do my duty without trying to play tricks, I’ll go on liking you just as much as ever.”

“Thank you, Dorothy,” he replied with fervor. “You must forgive me, please. I didn’t want to expose you to this danger—that was all.”

“Oh, I understand all that,” she quickly responded. “But it wasn’t treating me quite fairly—and you know I hate unfairness. And—why shouldn’t I be exposed to the danger if I can do any good? Even if the worst should happen—even if I should take the fever and die, after saving some of these poor creatures’ lives, could you or anybody have made a better use of a girl like me than that?”

Arthur looked at the child earnestly, but the child was no longer there. The eyes that gazed into his were those of a woman!

XII
MAMMY

WHEN Arthur Brent reached the “quarters” that morning he found matters in worse condition than he had feared.

“The whole spot is pestilential,” he said. “How any sane man ever selected it for quarters, I can’t imagine. Gilbert,” calling to the head man who had come in from the field at his master’s summons, “I want you to take all the people out of the crop at once, and send for all the house servants too. Take them with you over to the Haw Branch hill and put every one of them at work building some sort of huts. You must get enough of them done before night, to hold the sick people, for I’m going to clear out these quarters today. I must have enough huts for the sick ones at once. Those who are well will have to sleep out of doors at the Silver Spring tonight.”

“But, Mahstah,” remonstrated Gilbert, “dey ain’t no clapboa’ds to roof wif. Dey ain’t no nuffin—”

“Use fence rails then and cover them with pine tops. I’ll ride over and direct you presently. Send me eight or ten of the strongest young women at once, and then get everybody to work on the shelters. Do you hear?”

When the women came he instructed them how to carry the sick on improvised litters, and half an hour later, with his own hand he set fire to the little negro village. He had allowed nothing to be carried away from it, and he left nothing to chance. One of the negroes came back in frantic haste to save certain “best clothes” and a banjo that he had laboriously made. Arthur ordered him instead to fill up the well with rubbish, so that no one might drink of its waters again.

As soon as the fire was completely in possession the young master rode away to Haw Branch hill to look after the sick ones and direct the work of building shelters for them. Dorothy was already there, tenderly looking to the comfort of the invalids. The litter-bearers would have set their burdens down anywhere and left them there but for Dorothy’s quiet insistence that they should place them in such shade as she could find, and gather an abundance of broomstraw grass for them to lie upon. To Arthur she offered no explanation of her presence, nor was any needed. Arthur understood, and all that he said was:

“God bless you, Dorothy!” a sentiment to which one of the stricken ones responded:

“He’ll do dat for shuah, Mahstah, ef he knows he business.”

“Dick has returned from the Court House,” said Dorothy reporting. “He says the big tent is there and I’ve sent a man with a wagon to fetch it. These shelters will do well enough for tonight, and we’ll get our hospital tent up soon tomorrow morning.”

“Very well,” responded Arthur. “Now, Dorothy, won’t you ride over to Silver Spring and direct the men there how to lay out the new quarters? I drew this little diagram as I rode over here. You see I want the houses built well apart for the sake of plenty of air. I’m going to put the quarters there ‘for all the time’ as you express it. That is to say I’m going to build permanent quarters. I’ve already looked over the ground carefully as to drainage and the like and roughly laid out the plan of the village so that it shall be healthy. Please go over there and show the men what I want, I’ll be over there in an hour and then you can come back here. I must remain here till the doctors come.”

“What doctors, Cousin Arthur?”

“All the doctors within a dozen miles. I’ve sent for all of them.”

“But what for? Surely you know more about fighting disease than our old-fashioned country doctors do.”

“Perhaps so. But there are several reasons for consulting them. First of all they know this country and climate better than I do. Secondly, they are older men, most of them, and have had experience. Thirdly, I don’t want all the responsibility on my shoulders, in case anything goes wrong, and above all I don’t want to offend public sentiment by assuming too much. These gentlemen have all been very courteous to me, and it is only proper for me to send for them in consultation. I shall get all the good I can out of their advice, but of course I shall myself remain physician in charge of all my cases.”

The explanation was simple enough, and Dorothy accepted it. “But I don’t like anybody to think that country doctors can teach you anything, Cousin Arthur,” she said as she mounted. “And remember you are to come over to Silver Spring as soon as you can. I must be back here in an hour or so at most.”

Just as she was about to ride away Dorothy was confronted with an old negro woman—obviously very old indeed, but still in robust health, and manifestly still very strong, if one might estimate her strength from the huge burden she carried on her well poised head.

“Why, Mammy, what are you doing here?” asked the girl in surprise. “You don’t belong here, and you must go back to Pocahontas at once.”

“What’s you a talkin’ ’bout, chile?” answered the old woman. “Mammy don’t b’long heah, don’t she? Mammy b’longs jes whah somever her precious chile needs her. So when de tidins done comes dat Mammy’s little Dorothy’s gwine to ’spose herself in de fever camp jes to take kyar of a lot o’ no ’count niggas what’s done gone an’ got dey selves sick, why cou’se dey ain’t nuffin fer Mammy to do but pack up some necessary ingridiments an come over and take kyar o’ her baby. So jes you shet up yer sweet mouf, you precious chile, an’ leave ole Mammy alone. I ain’t a gwine to take no nonsense from a chile what’s my own to kyar fer.”

“You dear old Mammy!” exclaimed the girl with tears in her voice. “But I really don’t need you, and I will not have you exposed to the fever.”

“What’s Mammy kyar fer de fever? Fever won’t nebber dar tetch Mammy. Mammy ain’t nebber tuk no fevers an’ no nuffin else. Lightnin’ cawn’t hu’t Mammy anymore’n it kin split a black gum tree. G’long ’bout yer business, chile, an don’t you go fer to give no impidence to yer ole Mammy. She’s come to take kyar o’ her chile an’ she’s a gwine to do it. Do you heah?”

Further argument and remonstrance served only to make plain the utter futility of any and every endeavor to control the privileged and devotedly loving old nurse. She had come to the camp to stay, and she was going to stay in spite of all protest and all authority.

“There’s nothing for it, Cousin Arthur,” said Dorothy, with the tears slipping out from between her eyelids, “but to let dear old Mammy have her way. You see she’s had charge of me ever since I was born, and I suppose I belong to her. It was she who taught me how badly women need somebody to control them and how bad they are if they haven’t a master. She’ll stay here as long as I do, you may be sure of that, and she’ll love me and scold me, and keep me in order generally, till this thing is over, no matter what you or anybody else may say to the contrary. So please, Cousin Arthur, make some of the men build a particularly comfortable shelter for her and me. She wouldn’t care for herself, even if she slept on the ground out of doors, but she’ll be a turbulent disturber of the camp if you don’t treat me like a princess—though personally I only want to serve and could make myself comfortable anywhere.”

“I’ll see that you have good quarters, Dorothy,” answered the young man in a determined tone. “I’d do that anyhow. But what’s all that you’ve got there in your big bundle, Mammy?”

“Oh, nuffin but a few dispensable ingridiments, Mas’ Arthur. Jes’ a few blankets an’ quilts an’ pillars an’ four cha’rs an’ a feather bed an’ a coffee pot an’ some andirons an’ some light wood, an’ a lookin’ glass, and a wash bowl and pitcher an’ jes a few other little inconveniences fer my precious chile.”

For answer Arthur turned to Randall, the head carpenter of the plantation, and said:

“Randall, there’s a lot of dressed lumber under the shed of the wheat barn. I’ll have it brought over here at once. I want you to take all the men you need—your Mas’ Archer Bannister is sending over four carpenters to help and your Mas’ John Meaux is sending three—and if you don’t get a comfortable little house for your Miss Dorothy built before the moon rises, I shall want to know why. Get to work at once. Put the house on this mound. Build a stick and mud chimney to it, so that there can be a fire tonight. Three rooms with a kitchen at the back will be enough, but mind you are to have it ready before the moon rises, do you hear?”

“It’ll be ready Mahstah, er Randall won’t let nobody call him a carpenter agin fer a mighty long time. Ef Miss Dorothy is a gwine to nuss de folks while dey’s sick you kin jes bet yer sweet life de folks what’s well an’ strong is a gwine to make her comfortable.”

“Amen!” shouted three or four of the others in enthusiastic unison. Dorothy was not there to hear. She had already ridden away on her mission to direct matters at the Silver Spring.

“It’s queer,” thought the young master of the plantation, “how devotedly loyal all the negroes are to Dorothy. Nobody—not even Williams the overseer,—was ever so exacting as she is in requiring the most rigid performance of duty. Ever since she punished Ben for bringing her an imperfectly groomed horse, that chronically lazy fellow has taken the trouble every night to put her mare’s mane and tail into some sort of equine crimping apparatus, so that they may flow gracefully in the morning. And he does it for affection, too, for when she told him, one night, that he needn’t do it, as we were late in returning from Pocahontas, I remember the fervor with which he responded: ‘Oh, yes, Miss Dorothy, I’ll do de mar’ up in watered silk style tonight cause yar’s a gwine to Branton fer a dinin’ day tomorrer, an’ Ben ain’t a gwine fer to let his little Missus ride in anything but de bes’ o’ style.’ The fact is,” continued Arthur, reflecting, “these people understand Dorothy. They know that she is always kindly, always compassionate, always sympathetic in her dealings with them. But they realize that she is also always just. She never grows angry. She never scolds. She punishes a fault severely in her queer way, but after it is punished she never refers to it again. She never ‘throws up things,’ to them. In a word, Dorothy is just, and after all it is justice that human beings most want, and it is the one thing of which they get least in this world. What a girl Dorothy is, anyhow!”

XIII
THE “SONG BALLADS” OF DICK

IT was “endurin of de feveh”—to use his own phrase by which he meant during the fever—that Dick’s genius revealed itself. Dick had long ago achieved the coveted dignity of being his master’s “pussonal servant.” It was Dorothy who appointed him to that position and it was mainly Dorothy who directed his service and saw to it that he did not neglect it.

For many of the services of a valet, Arthur had no use whatever. It was his habit, as he had long ago said, to “tie his own shoe strings.” He refused from the first very many of Dick’s proffered attentions. But he liked to have his boots thoroughly polished and his clothing well brushed. These things he allowed Dick to attend to. For the rest he made small use of him except to send him on errands.

The position suited Dick’s temperament and ambition thoroughly and he had no mind to let the outbreak of fever on the plantation rob him of it. When Arthur established himself at the quarantine camp, taking for his own a particularly small brush shelter, he presently found Dick in attendance, and seriously endeavoring to make himself useful. For the first time Arthur felt that the boy’s services were really of value to him. He was intelligent, quick-witted, and unusually accurate in the execution of orders. He could deliver a message precisely as it was given to him, and his “creative imagination” was kept well in hand when reporting to his master and when delivering his messages to others—particularly to those in attendance upon the sick. Arthur was busy night and day. He saw every patient frequently, and often he felt it necessary to remain all night by a bedside. In the early morning, before it was time for the field hands to go to their work in the crops, he inspected them at their new quarters, and each day, too, he rode over all the fields in which crop work was going on.

In all his goings Dick was beside him, except when sent elsewhere with messages. In the camp he kept his master supplied with fuel and cooked his simple meals for him, at whatever hours of the night or day the master found time to give attention to his personal wants.

In the meanwhile—after the worst of the epidemic was over—Dick made himself useful as an entertainer of the camp. Dick had developed capacities as a poet, and after the manner of Homer and other great masters of the poetic art, it was his custom to chant his verses to rudely fashioned melodies of his own manufacture. Unfortunately Dorothy, who took down Dick’s “Song Ballads,” as he called them, and preserved their text in enduring form, was wholly ignorant of music, as we know, and so the melodies of Dick are lost to us, as the melodies of Homer are. But in the one case as in the other, some at least of the poems remain to us.

Like all great poets, Dick was accustomed to find his inspiration in the life about him. Thus the fever outbreak itself seems to have suggested the following:

Nigga got de fevah,
Nigga he most daid;
Long come de Mahstah,
Mahstah shake he haid.

Mahstah he look sorry,
Nigga fit to cry;
Mahstah he say “Nebber min’,
Git well by am by.”

Mahstah po’ de medicine,
Mix it in de cup,
Nigga mos’ a chokin’
As he drinks it up.

Nigga he git well agin
Den he steal de chicken,
Den de Mahstah kotches him
An’ den he gits a lickin’.

The simplicity and directness of statement here employed fulfil the first of the three requirements which John Milton declared to be essential to poetry of a high order, which, he tells us must be “simple, sensuous, passionate.” The necessary sensuousness is present also, in the reference made to the repulsiveness of the medicine. But that quality is better illustrated in another of Dick’s Song Ballads which runs as follows:

Possum up a ’simmon tree—
Possum dunno nuffin,
He nebber know how sweet and good
A possum is wid stuffin.

Possum up a ’simmon tree—
A eatin’ of de blossom,
Up creeps de nigga an’
It’s “good-by Mistah Possum.”

Nigga at de table
A cuttin’ off a slice,
An’ sayin’ to de chillun—
“Possum’s mighty nice.”

Here the reader will observe the instinctive dramatic skill with which the poet, having reached the climax of the situation, abruptly rings down the curtain, as it were. There is no waste of words in unnecessary explanations, no delaying of the action with needless comment. And at the end of the second stanza we encounter a masterly touch. Instead of telling us with prosaic literalness that the nigga succeeded in slaying his game, the poet suggests the entire action with the figurative phrase—“It’s ‘good-by, Mistah Possum.’ ”

There is a fine poetic reserve too in the abrupt shifting of the scene from tree to table, and the presentation of the denouement without other preparation than such as the reader’s imagination may easily furnish for itself. We are not told that the possum was dressed and cooked; even the presence of stuffing as an adjunct to the savor of the dish is left to be inferred from the purely casual suggestion made in the first stanza of the fact that stuffing tends to enrich as well as to adorn the viand.

These qualities and some others of a notable kind appear in the next example we are permitted to give of this poet’s work.

Ole crow flyin’ roun’ de fiel’,
A lookin’ fer de cawn;
Mahstah wid he shot gun
A settin’ in de bawn.

Ole crow see a skeer crow
A standin’ in the cawn;
Nebber see de Mahstah
A settin’ in de bawn.

Ole crow say:—“De skeer crow,
He ain’t got no gun,—
Jes’ a lot o’ ole clo’es
A standin’ in de sun;

Ole crow needn’t min’ him,
Ole crow git some cawn;
But he nebber see de Mahstah
A settin’ in de bawn.

Ole crow wuk like nigga
A pullin’ up de cawn—
Mahstah pull de trigga,
Ober in de bawn.

Ole crow flop an’ flutter—
He’s done got it, sho’!
Skeer crow shakin’ in he sleeve
A laughin’ at de crow.

There is a compactness of statement here—a resolute elimination of the superfluous which might well commend the piece to those modern theatrical managers who seem to regard dialogue as an impertinence in a play.

Sometimes the poet went even further and presented only the barest suggestion of the thought in his mind, leaving the reader to supply the rest. Such is the case in the poem next to be set down as an example, illustrative of the poet’s method. It consists of but a single stanza:

De day’s done gone, de wuk’s done done,
An’ Mahstah he smoke he pipe;
But nigga he ain’t done jes yit,
Cause—de watermillion’s ripe.

Here we have in four brief lines an entirely adequate suggestion of the predatory habits of “Nigga,” and of his attitude of mind toward “watermillions.” With the bare statement of the fact that the fruit in question has attained its succulent maturity, we are left to discover for ourselves the causal relation between that fact and the intimated purpose of “Nigga” to continue his activities during the hours of darkness. The exceeding subtlety of all this cannot fail to awaken the reader’s admiring sympathy.

Perhaps the most elaborately wrought out of these song ballads is the one which has been reserved for the last. Its text here follows:

Possum’s good an’ hoe cake’s fine,
An’ so is mammy’s pies,
But bes’ of all good t’ings to eat
Is chickens, fryin’ size.

How I lubs a moonlight night
When stars is in de skies!
But sich nights ain’t no good to git
De chickens, fryin’ size.

De moonlight night is shiny bright,
Jes’ like a nigga’s eyes,
But dark nights is the bes’ to git
De chickens, fryin’ size.

When Mahstah he is gone to sleep,
An’ black clouds hides de skies,
Oh, den’s de time to crawl an’ creep
Fer chickens, fryin’ size.

Fer den prehaps you won’t git kotched
Nor hab to tell no lies,
An’ mebbe you’ll git safe away
Wid chickens, fryin’ size.

But you mus’ look out sharp fer noise
An’ hush de chicken’s cries,
Fer mighty wakin’ is de squawks
Of chickens, fryin’ size.

To gross minds this abrupt, admonitory ending of the poem will be disappointing. It leaves the reader wishing for more—more chicken, if not more poetry. And yet in this self-restrained ending of the piece the poet is fully justified by the practice of other great masters of the poetic art. Who that has read Coleridge’s superb fragment “Kubla Khan,” does not long to know more of the “stately pleasure dome” and of those “caverns measureless to man” through which “Alph the sacred river ran, down to a sunless sea”?

We present these illustrative examples of Dick’s verse in full confidence that both his inspiration and his methods will make their own appeal to discriminating minds. If there be objection made to the somewhat irregular word forms employed by this poet, the ready answer is that the same characteristic marks many of the writings of Robert Burns, and that Homer himself employed a dialect. If it is suggested that Dick’s verbs are sometimes out of agreement with their nominatives, it is easy to imagine Dick contemptuously replying, “Who keers ’bout dat?”

XIV
DOROTHY’S AFFAIRS

A GOOD many things happened “endurin’ of the feveh”—if Dick’s expressive and by no means inapt phrase may again be employed.

First of all the outbreak gave Madison Peyton what he deemed his opportunity. It seemed to him to furnish occasion for that reconciliation with Aunt Polly which he saw to be necessary to his plans, and, still more important, it seemed to afford an opportunity for him to withdraw Dorothy from the influence of Dr. Arthur Brent.

Accordingly, as soon as news came to him of the epidemic, and of Arthur Brent’s heroic measures in meeting it, he hurried over to Wyanoke, full of confident plans.

“This is dreadful news, Cousin Polly,” he said, as soon as he had bustled into the house.

“What news, Madison?” answered the old lady. “What have you come to tell me?”

“Oh I mean this dreadful fever outbreak—it is terrible—”

“I don’t know,” answered Aunt Polly, reflectively. “We have had only ten or a dozen cases so far, and you had three or four times that many at your quarters last year.”

“Oh, yes, but of course this is very much worse. You see Arthur has had to burn down all the quarters, and destroy all the clothing. He’s a scientific physician, you know, and—”

“But all science is atheistic, Madison. You told me so yourself over at Osmore, and so of course you don’t pay any attention to Arthur’s scientific freaks.”

“Now you know I didn’t mean that, Cousin Polly,” answered Peyton, apologetically. “Of course Arthur knows all about fevers. You know how he distinguished himself at Norfolk.”

“Yes, I know, but what has that to do with this case?”

“Why, if this fever is so bad that a scientific physician like Arthur finds it necessary to burn all his negro quarters and build new ones, it must be very much worse than anything ever known in this county before. Nobody here ever thought of such extreme measures.”

“No, I suppose not,” answered Aunt Polly. “At any rate you didn’t do anything of the kind when an epidemic broke out in your quarters last year. But you had fourteen deaths and thus far we have had only one, and Arthur tells me he hopes to have no more. Perhaps if you had been a scientific physician, you too would have burned your quarters and moved your hands to healthier ones.”

This was a home shot, as Aunt Polly very well knew. For the physicians who had attended Peyton’s people, had earnestly recommended the destruction of his negro quarters and the removal of his people to a more healthful locality, and he had stoutly refused to incur the expense. He had ever since excused himself by jeering at the doctors and pointing, in justification of his neglect of their advice to the fact that in due time the epidemic on his plantation had subsided. He therefore felt the sting of Aunt Polly’s reference to his experience, and she emphasized it by adding:

“If you had done as Arthur has, perhaps you wouldn’t have so many deaths to answer for when Judgment Day comes!”

“Oh, that’s all nonsense, Cousin Polly,” he quickly responded. “And besides we’re wasting time. Of course you and Dorothy can’t remain here, exposed to this dreadful danger. So I’ve ordered my driver to bring the carriage over here for you this afternoon. You two must be our guests at least as long as the fever lasts at Wyanoke.”

Aunt Polly looked long and intently at Peyton. Then she slowly said:

“The Bible forbids it, Madison, though I never could see why.”

“Forbids what, Cousin Polly?”

“Why, it says we mustn’t call anybody a fool even when he is so, and I never could understand why.”

“But I don’t understand you, Cousin Polly—”

“Of course you don’t. I didn’t imagine that you would. But that’s because you don’t want to.”

“But I protest, Cousin Polly, that I’ve come over only because I’m deeply anxious about your health and Dorothy’s. You simply mustn’t remain here.”

“Madison Peyton,” answered the old lady, rising in her stately majesty of indignation, “I won’t call you a fool because the Bible says I mustn’t. But it is plain that you think me one. You know very well that you’re not in the least concerned about my health. You know there hasn’t been a single case of fever in this house

“I WON’T CALL YOU A FOOL BECAUSE THE BIBLE SAYS I MUSTN’T.”

or within a mile of it. You know you never thought of removing your own family from your house when the fever was raging in your negro quarters. You know that I know what you want. You want to get Dorothy under your own control, by taking her to your house. Very well, I tell you you cannot do that. It would endanger the health of your own family, for Dorothy has been in our fever camp for two days and nights now, as head nurse and Arthur’s executive officer. Why do you come here trying to deceive me as if I were that kind of person that the Bible doesn’t allow me to call you? Isn’t it hard enough for me to do my duty in Dorothy’s case without that? Do you imagine I find it a pleasant thing to carry out my orders and train that splendid girl to be the obedient wife of such a booby as your son is? You are making a mistake. You tried once to intimidate me. You know precisely how far you succeeded. You are trying now to deceive me. You may guess for yourself what measure of success you are achieving. There are spirits in the sideboard, if you want something to drink after —— well, after your ride. I must ask you to excuse me now, as I have to go to the prize barn to superintend the work of the sewing women.”

With that the irate old lady courtesied low, in mock respect, and took her departure, escorted by her maid.

Madison Peyton was angry, of course. That, indeed is a feeble and utterly inadequate term with which to describe his state of mind. He felt himself insulted beyond endurance—and that, probably, was what Aunt Polly intended that he should feel. But he was baffled in his purpose also, and he knew not how to endure that. He was not a coward. Had Aunt Polly been a man he would instantly have called her to account for her words. Had she been a young woman, he would have challenged her brother or other nearest male relative. As it was he had only the poor privilege of meditating such vengeance as he might wreak in sly and indirect ways. He was moved to many things, as he madly galloped away, but one after another each suggested scheme of vengeance was abandoned as manifestly foolish, and with the abandonment of each his chagrin grew greater and his anger increased. When he met his carriage on its way to Wyanoke in obedience to the orders he had given in the morning, he became positively frantic with rage, so that the driver and the black boy who rode behind the vehicle grew ashen with terror as the carriage was turned about in its course, and took up its homeward way.

A few weeks later the court met, and a message was sent to Aunt Polly directing her to bring Dorothy before the judge for the purpose of having her choose a guardian. When Dorothy was notified of this she sent Dick with a note to Col. Majors, the lawyer. It was not such a note as a young woman more accustomed than she to the forms of life and law would have written. It ran as follows:

“Dear Col. Majors:—Please tell the judge I can’t come. Poor Sally is very, very ill and I mustn’t leave her for a moment. The others need me too, and I’ve got a lot of work to do putting up prescriptions—for I’m the druggist, you know. So tell the judge he must wait till he comes to this county next time. Give my love to Mrs. Majors and dear Patty.

“Sincerely yours,
“Dorothy South.”

On receipt of this rather astonishing missive, Colonel Majors smiled and in his deliberate way ordered his horse to be brought to him after dinner. Riding over to Wyanoke he “interviewed” Dorothy at the fever camp.

He explained to the wilful young lady the mandatory character of a court order, particularly in the case of a ward in chancery.

“But why can’t you do the business for me?” she asked. “I tell you Sally is too ill for me to leave her.”

“But you must, my dear. In any ordinary matter I, as your counsel, could act for you, but in this case the court must have you present in person, because you are to make choice of a guardian and the court must be satisfied that you have made the choice for yourself and that nobody else has made it for you. So you simply must go. If you don’t the court will send the sheriff for you, and then it will punish Miss Polly dreadfully for not bringing you.”

This last appeal conquered Dorothy’s resistance. If only herself had been concerned she would still have insisted upon having her own way. But the suggestion that such a course might bring dire and dreadful “law things,” as she phrased it, upon Aunt Polly appalled her, and she consented.

“How long shall I have to leave poor Sally?” she asked.

“Only an hour or two. You and Miss Polly can leave here in your carriage about ten o’clock and as soon as you get to the Court House I’ll ask the judge to suspend other business and bring your matter on. He will ask you whom you choose for your guardian, and you will answer ‘Madison Peyton.’ Then the judge will ask you if you have made your choice without compulsion or influence on the part of anybody else, and you will answer ‘yes.’ Then he will politely bid you good morning, and you can drive back to Wyanoke at once.”

“Is that exactly how the thing is done?” she asked, with a peculiar look upon her face.

“Exactly. You see it will give you no trouble.”

“Oh, no! I don’t mind anything except leaving Sally. Tell the judge I’ll come.”

Col. Majors smiled at this message, but made no answer, except to say:

“I’ll be there of course, and you can sit by me and speak to me if you wish to ask any question.”

The lawyer made his adieux and rode away. Dorothy, with a peculiar smile upon her lips returned to her patients.

XV
DOROTHY’S CHOICE

THE judge himself was not so stately or so imposing of presence as was Aunt Polly, when she and Dorothy entered the court, escorted by Col. Majors. Dorothy was entirely self possessed, as it was her custom to be under all circumstances. “When people feel embarrassed,” she once said, “it must be because they know something about themselves that they are afraid other people will find out.” As Dorothy knew nothing of that kind about herself, she had no foolish trepidation, even in the solemn presence of a court.

The judge ordered her case called, and speaking very gently explained to her what was wanted.

“You are a young girl under the age at which the law supposes you to be capable of managing your own affairs. The law makes it the duty of this Court to guard you and your estate against every danger. By his will your father wisely placed your person in charge of an eminently fit and proper lady, whose character and virtues this Court and the entire community in which we live, hold in the highest esteem and honour.” At this point the judge profoundly bowed to Aunt Polly, and she acknowledged the courtesy with stately grace. The judge then continued:

“By his will your father also placed the estate which he left to you, in charge of the late Mr. Robert Brent, a gentleman in every possible way worthy of the trust. Thus far, therefore, this Court has had no occasion to take action of any kind in your behalf or for your protection. Unhappily, however, your guardian, the late Robert Brent, has passed away, and it becomes now the duty of this Court to appoint some fit person in his stead as guardian of your estate. The Court has full authority in the matter. It may appoint whomsoever it chooses for this position of high responsibility. But it is the immemorial custom of the Court in cases where the ward in chancery has passed his or her sixteenth year—an age which you have attained—to permit the ward to make choice of a guardian for himself or herself, as the case may be. If the ward is badly advised, and selects a person whom the Court deems for any reason unfit, the Court declines to make the appointment asked, and itself selects some other. But if the person selected by the ward is deemed fit, the Court is pleased to confirm the choice. It is now my duty to ask you, Miss Dorothy, what person you prefer to have for guardian of your estate.”

“May I really choose for myself?” asked the girl in a clear and perfectly calm voice, to the astonishment of everybody.

“Certainly, Miss Dorothy. Whom do you choose?”

“Did my father say in his will that I must choose some particular person?” she continued, interrogating the Court as placidly as she might have put questions to Aunt Polly.

“No, my dear young lady. Your father’s will lays no injunction whatever upon you respecting this matter.”

“Then, if you please, I choose Dr. Arthur Brent for my guardian. May we go now?”

No attention was given to the naive question with which the girl asked permission to withdraw. Her choice of guardian was a complete surprise. There was astonishment on every face except that of the judge, who officially preserved an expression of perfect self-possession. Even Aunt Polly was astounded, and she showed it. It had been understood by everybody that Madison Peyton was to succeed to Dorothy’s guardianship, and the submission of the choice to her had been regarded as a matter of mere form. Even to Aunt Polly the girl had given no slightest intimation of her purpose to defeat the prearranged program, and so Aunt Polly shared the general surprise. But Aunt Polly was distinctly pleased with the substitution as soon at least as she had given it a moment’s thought. She had come to like Arthur Brent even more in his robust manhood than she had done during his boyish sojourn at Wyanoke. She had learned also to respect his judgment, and she saw clearly, now that it was suggested, that he was obviously the best person possible to assume the office of guardian. She was pleased, too, with Madison Peyton’s discomfiture. “He needed to have his comb cut,” she reflected in homely metaphor. “It may teach him better manners.”

As for Peyton, who was present in Court, having come for the purpose of accepting the guardianship, his rage exceeded even his astonishment. He had in his youth gone through what was then the easy process of securing admission to the bar, and so, although he had never pretended to practise law, he was entitled to address the Court as an attorney. He had never done so before, but on this occasion he rose, almost choking for utterance and plunged at once into a passionate protest, in which the judge, who was calm, presently checked him, saying:

“Your utterance seems to the Court to be uncalled for, while its manner is distinctly such as the Court must disapprove. The person named by the ward as her choice for the guardianship, bears a high reputation for integrity, intelligence and character. Unless it can be shown to the Court that this reputation is undeserved, the ward’s choice will be confirmed. At present the Court is aware of nothing whatever in Dr. Brent’s character, circumstances or position that can cast doubt upon his fitness. If you have any information that should change the Court’s estimate of his character you will be heard.”

“He is unfit in every way,” responded the almost raving man. “He has deliberately undermined my fatherly influence over the girl. He has taken a mean advantage of me. He has overpersuaded the girl to set aside an arrangement made for her good and—”

“Oh, no, Mr. Peyton,” broke in Dorothy, utterly heedless of court formalities, “he has done nothing of the kind. He knows nothing about this. I don’t think he will even like it.”

“Pardon me, Miss Dorothy,” interrupted the judge. “Please address the Court—me—and not Mr. Peyton. Tell me, have you made your choice of your own free will?”

“Why, certainly, Judge, else I wouldn’t have made it.”

“Has anybody said anything to you on the subject?”

“No, sir. Nobody has ever mentioned the matter to me except Col. Majors, and he told me I was to choose Mr. Peyton, but you told me I could choose for myself, you know. I suppose Col. Majors didn’t know you’d let me do that.”

A little laugh went up in the bar, and even the judge smiled. Presently he said:

“The Court knows of no reason why it should not confirm the choice made by the ward. Accordingly it is ordered that Dr. Arthur Brent of Wyanoke be appointed guardian of the property and estate of Dorothy South, with full authority, subject only to such instructions as this Court may from time to time see fit to give for his guidance. Mr. Clerk, make the proper record, and call the next case. This proceeding is at an end. You are at liberty now to withdraw, Miss Dorothy, you and Miss Polly.”

Aunt Polly rose and bowed her acknowledgments in silence. Dorothy bowed with equal grace, but added: “Thank you, Judge. I am anxious to get back to my sick people. So I will bid you good morning. You have been extremely nice to me.”

With that she bowed again and swept out of the court room, quite unconscious of the fact that even by her courteous adieu she had offended against all the traditions of etiquette in a court of Justice. The judge bowed and smiled, and every lawyer at the bar instinctively arose, turned his face respectfully toward the withdrawing pair, and remained standing till they had passed through the outer door, Col. Majors escorting them.

XVI
UNDER THE CODE

IT was Madison Peyton’s habit to have his own way, and he greatly prided himself upon getting it, in other people’s affairs as well as in those that concerned himself. He loved to dominate others, to trample upon their wills and to impose his own upon them. In a large degree he accomplished this, so that he regarded himself and was regarded by others as a man of far more than ordinary influence. He was so, in a certain way, but it was not a way that tended to make men like him. On the contrary, the aggressive self assertion by which he secured influence, secured for him also the very general dislike of his neighbors, especially of those who most submissively bowed to his will. They hated him because they felt themselves obliged to submit their wills to his.

There was, therefore, a very general chuckle of pleasure among the crowd gathered at the Court House—a crowd which included nearly every able-bodied white man in the county—as the news of his discomfiture and of his outbreak of anger over it, was discussed. There were few who would have cared to twit him with it, and if he had himself maintained a discreet and dignified silence concerning the matter, he would have heard little or nothing about it. But he knew that everybody was in fact talking of it, out of his hearing. He interpreted aright the all pervading atmosphere of amused interest, and the fact that every group of men he approached became silent and seemed embarrassed when he joined it. After his aggressive manner, therefore, he refused to remain silent. He thrust the subject upon others’ attention at every turn. He protested, he declaimed, at times he very nearly raved over what he called the outrage. He even went further in some cases and demanded sympathy and acquiescence in his complainings. For the most part he got something quite different. His neighbors were men not accustomed to fear, and while they were politely disposed to refrain from voluntary expressions of opinion on this matter, at least in his presence, they were ready enough with answers unwelcome to him when he demanded their opinions.

“Isn’t it an outrage,” he asked of John Meaux, “that Arthur Brent has undermined me in this way?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Meaux with a drawl which always affected his speech when he was most earnest, “I cannot see it in that light. Dorothy declares that he knew nothing of her intentions, and we all know that Dorothy South never tells anything but the truth. Besides, I don’t see why he isn’t entitled to serve as her guardian if she wants him to do so. He is a man of character and brains, and I happen to know that he has a good head for business.”

“Yes,” snarled Peyton, “I know you’ve been cultivating him—”

“I’ll trouble you to leave me out of your remarks, Mr. Peyton,” interrupted Meaux. “If you don’t you may have a quarrel on your hands.”

“Oh, you know me, Meaux; you know I didn’t mean any harm so far as you are concerned. You know my way—”

“Yes, I know your way, and I don’t like it. In fact I won’t tolerate it.”

“Oh, come now, come now, John, don’t fly off the handle like that. You see I’m not angry with you, but how you can like this interloper—”

“His family is as old in Virginia as your own is,” answered Meaux, “and he is the master of the very oldest plantation in this county. Besides he was born in Virginia and—but never mind that. I’m not counsel for his defence. I only interrupted to tell you that I am accustomed to choose my own friends, and that I fully intend to adhere to that custom.”

In another group Peyton used even less temperate terms than “interloper” in characterizing Arthur, and added:

“He didn’t even dare come to court and brazen out his treachery. He left the job, like a sneak, to the little girl whose mind he has poisoned.”

Archer Bannister was standing near, and heard the offensive words. He interrupted:

“Mr. Peyton, I earnestly advise you to retract what you have just said, and to put your retraction into writing, giving it to me to deliver to my friend Dr. Brent; who is absent today, as you very well know, simply because he has imperative duties of humanity elsewhere. I assure you that I shall report your offensive utterance to him, and it will be well for you if your retraction and apology can be delivered to him at the same time. Arthur Brent is rapidly falling into Virginia ways—adopting the customs of the country, he calls it—and there is one of those customs which might subject you to a deal of inconvenience, should he see fit to adopt it.”

“What have you to do with my affairs?” asked Peyton in a tone of offence.

“Nothing whatever—at present,” answered the young man, turning upon his heel.

But the warning sobered Peyton’s anger. It had not before occurred to him that Arthur might have become so far indoctrinated with Virginia ways of thinking as to call him to account for his words, in the hostile fashion usual at that time. Indeed, relying upon the fixed habit of Virginians never to gossip, he had not expected that Arthur would ever hear of his offensive accusations. Bannister’s notification that he would exercise the privilege accorded by custom to the personal friend of a man maligned when not present to defend himself, suggested grave possibilities. He knew that custom fully warranted Bannister in doing what he had threatened to do, and he had not the smallest doubt that the young man would do it.

It was in a mood of depression, therefore, that Peyton ordered his horse and rode homeward. His plantation lay within two or three miles of the Court House, but by the time that he had arrived there he had thought out a plan of procedure. He knew that Bannister would remain at the village inn over night, having jury service to perform the next morning. There was time, therefore, in which to reach him with a placative message, and Peyton set himself at once to work upon the preparation of such a message.

“I hope you will forgive me,” he wrote, “for the rudeness with which I spoke to you today. I was extremely angry at the time, and I had reasons for being so, of which you know nothing, and of which I must not tell you anything. Perhaps in my extreme irritation, I used expressions with regard to Dr. Brent, which I should not have used had I been calmer. For my discourtesy to you personally, I offer very sincere apologies, which I am sure your generous mind will accept as an atonement. For the rest I must trust your good feeling not to repeat the words I used in a moment of extreme excitement.”

Archer Bannister wrote in reply:

“The apology you have made to me was quite unnecessary. I had not demanded it. As for the rest, I shall do my duty as a friend unless you make apology where it is due, namely to Dr. Arthur Brent whom you have falsely accused, and to whom you have applied epithets of a very offensive character. If you choose to make me the bearer of your apology to him, I will gladly act for you. I prefer peace to war, at all times.”

This curt note gave Peyton a very bad quarter hour. He was not a coward; or, to put the matter more accurately, he was not that kind of a coward that cannot face physical danger. But he was a man of middle age or a trifle more. He was the father of a family and an elder in the Presbyterian church. Conscience did not largely influence him in any case, but he was keenly sensitive to public opinion. He knew that should he fight a duel, all the terrors of religious condemnation would fall upon him. Worse still, he would be laughed at for having so entangled himself in a matter his real relation to which he was not free to explain. Madison Peyton dreaded and feared nothing in the world so much as being laughed at. Added to this, he knew that the entire community would hold him to be altogether in the wrong. Arthur Brent’s reputation achieved by his heroic devotion under fearful danger at Norfolk, had been recalled and emphasized by his conduct in the present fever outbreak on his own plantation. It was everywhere the subject of admiring comment, and Peyton very well knew that nobody in that community would for a moment believe that Arthur Brent was guilty of any meanness or cowardly treachery. His own accusations, unless supported by some sort of proof, would certainly recoil upon himself with crushing force. He could in no way explain the anger that had betrayed him into the error of making such accusations. He could not make it appear to anybody that he had been wronged by the fact that Dorothy South had chosen another than himself for her guardian. His anger, upon such an occasion, would be regarded as simply ridiculous, and should he permit the matter to come to a crisis he must at once become the butt of contemptuous jesting.

There was but one course open to him, as he clearly saw. He wrote again to Archer Bannister, withdrawing his offensive words respecting Arthur, apologizing for them on the ground of momentary excitement, asking Archer to convey this his apology to Dr. Brent, and authorizing the latter to make any other use of the letter which he might deem proper.

This apology satisfied all the requirements of “the code.”

XVII
A REVELATION

IT was Dorothy who gave Arthur the first news of his appointment as her guardian. On her return from court to the fever camp she went first to see Sally and the two or three others whose condition was particularly serious. Then she went to Arthur, and told him what had happened.

“The judge was very nice to me, Cousin Arthur, and told me I might choose anybody I pleased for my guardian, and of course I chose you.”

“You did?” asked the young man in a by no means pleased astonishment. “Why on earth did you do that, Dorothy?”

“Why, because I wanted you to be my guardian, of course. Don’t you want to be my guardian, Cousin Arthur?”

“I hardly know, child. It involves a great responsibility and a great deal of hard work.”

“Won’t you take the responsibility and undertake the work for my sake, Cousin Arthur?”

“Certainly I will, my child. I wasn’t thinking of that exactly—but of some other things. But tell me, how did you come to do this? Who suggested it to you?”

“Why, nobody. That’s what I told the judge, and when Mr. Peyton got angry and said you had persuaded me to do it, I told him he was wrong. Then the judge stopped him from speaking and asked me about the matter and I told him. Then he said very nice things about you, and said you were to be my guardian, and then he told me I might go home and I thanked him and said good day, and Col. Majors escorted us to the carriage. I wonder why Mr. Peyton was so angry about it. He seems to have been very anxious to be my guardian. I wonder why?”

“I wonder, too,” said Arthur, to whom of course the secret of Peyton’s concern with Dorothy’s affairs was a mystery. He had not been present on the occasion when Peyton entered his protest against the girl’s reading, nor had any one told him of the occurrence. Neither had he heard of Peyton’s visit to Aunt Polly on the occasion of the outbreak of fever. He therefore knew of no reason for Peyton’s desire to intermeddle in Dorothy’s affairs, beyond his well known disposition to do the like with everybody’s concerns. But Arthur had grown used to the thought of mystery in everything that related to Dorothy.

Presently the girl said, “I’m going to write a note to Mr. Peyton, now, and send it over by Dick.”

“What for, Dorothy?”

“Oh, I want to tell him how wrong and wicked he is when he says you persuaded me to do this.”

“Did he say that?”

“Yes, I told you so before, but you weren’t paying attention. Perhaps you were thinking about the poor sick people, so I’ll forgive you and you needn’t apologize. I must run away now and write my note.”

“Please don’t, Dorothy.”

“But why not?”

“He will say I persuaded you to do that, too. It would embarrass me very seriously if you should send him any note now.”

Dorothy was quick to see this aspect of the matter, though without suggestion it would never have occurred to her extraordinarily simple and candid mind.

It was not long after Dorothy left him when Edmonia Bannister made her daily visit to the fever camp, accompanied by her maid and bearing delicacies for the sick. After her visit to Dorothy’s quarters Arthur engaged her in conversation. He told her of what had happened, and expressed his repugnance to the task thus laid upon him.

“I cannot sympathize with you in the least,” said the young woman. “I am glad it has happened—glad on more accounts than one.”

“Yes, I suppose you are,” he answered, meditatively, “but that’s because you do not understand. I wish I could have a good, long talk with you, Edmonia, about this thing—and some other things.”

He added the last clause after a pause, and in a tone which suggested that perhaps the “other things” were weightier in his mind than this one.

“Why can’t you?” the girl asked.

“Why, I can’t leave my sick people long enough for a visit to Branton. It will be many weeks yet before I shall feel free to leave this plantation.”

The girl thought a moment, and then said, with unusual deliberation:

“I can spare an hour now; surely you might give a like time. Why can’t we sit in Dorothy’s little porch and have our talk now? Dorothy has gone to the big tent, and is busy with the sick, and if you should be needed you will be here to respond to any call. I see how worried you are, and perhaps I may be able to help you with advice—or at the least with sympathy.”

Arthur gladly assented and the two repaired to the little shaded verandah which Dick had built out of brushwood and boughs across the front of Dorothy’s temporary dwelling.

“This thing troubles me greatly, Edmonia,” Arthur began, “and it depresses me as pretty nearly everything else does nowadays. It completely upsets my plans and defeats all my ambitions. It adds another to the ties of obligation that compel me to remain here and neglect my work.”

“Is it not possible, Arthur”—their friendship had passed the “cousining” stage and they used each other’s names now without prefix—“Is it not possible, Arthur, for you to find work enough here to occupy your life and employ your abilities worthily? There is no doubt that you have already saved many lives by the skill and energy with which you have met this fever outbreak, and your work will bear still better fruit. You have taught all of us how to save lives in such a case, how to deal with the epidemics that are common enough on plantations. You may be sure that nobody in this region will ever again let a dozen or twenty negroes perish in unwholesome quarters after they have seen how easily and surely you have met and conquered the fever. Dorothy tells me you have had only two deaths out of forty-two cases, and that no new cases are appearing. Surely your conscience should acquit you of neglecting your work, or burying your talents.”

“Oh, if there were such work for me to do all the time,” the young man answered, “I should feel easy on that score. But this is an extraordinary occasion. It will pass in a few weeks, and then—”

“Well, and then—what?”

“Why, then a life of idleness and ease, with no duties save such as any man of ordinary intelligence could do as well as I, or better—a life delightful enough in its graceful repose, but one which must condemn me to rust in all my faculties, to stand still or retrograde, to leave undone all that I have spent my youth and early manhood in fitting myself to do. Please understand me, Edmonia. I love Virginia, its people, and all its traditions of honor and manliness. But I am not fit for the life I must lead here. All the education, all the experience I have had have tended to unfit me for it in precisely that degree in which they have helped to equip me for something quite different. Then again the work I had marked out for myself in the world needs me far more than you can easily understand. There are not many men so circumstanced that they could do it in my stead. Other men as well or better equipped with scientific acquirements, and all that, are not free as I am—or was before this inheritance in Virginia came to blight my life. They have their livings to make and must work only in fields that promise a harvest of gain. I was free to go anywhere where I might be needed, and to minister to humanity in ways that make no money return. My annuities secured me quite all the money I needed for my support so that I need never take thought for the morrow. I have never yet received a fee for my ministry—for I regard my work as a ministry, for which I am set apart. Other men have families too, and owe a first duty to them, while I—well, I decided at the outset that I would never marry.”

Arthur did not end that sentence as he would have ended it a year or even half a year before. He was growing doubtful of himself. Presently he continued:

“I am free to work for humanity. My time is my own. I can spend it freely in making experiments and investigations that can hardly fail to benefit mankind. Few men who are equipped for such studies can spare time for them from the breadwinning. Then again when great epidemics occur anywhere, and multitudes need me, I am free to go and serve them. I have no family, no wife, no children, nobody dependent upon me, in short no obligations of any kind to restrain me from such service. Such at least was my situation before my Uncle Robert died. His death imposed upon me the duty of caring for all these black people. My first thought was of how I might most quickly free myself of this restraining obligation. Had the estate consisted only of houses and lands and other inanimate property I should have made short work of the business. I should have sold the whole of it for whatever men might be willing to give me for it; I should have devoted the proceeds to some humane purpose, and then, being free again I should have returned to my work. Unfortunately, however, in succeeding to my uncle’s estate I succeeded also to his obligations. I planned to fulfil them once for all by selling the plantation and using the proceeds in carrying the negroes to the west and establishing them upon farms of their own. I still cherish that purpose, but I am delayed in carrying it out by the fact that other obligations must first be discharged. There are debts—the hereditary curse of us Virginians—and I find that the value of the plantation, without the negroes, would not suffice to discharge them and leave enough to give the negroes the little farms that I must provide for them if I take the responsibility of setting them free. Still I see ways in which I think I can overcome that difficulty within two or three years, by selling crops that Virginians never think of selling and devoting their proceeds to the discharge of debts. But now comes this new and burdensome duty of caring for Dorothy’s estate. She is now sixteen years of age, so that this new burden must rest upon my shoulders for five full years to come.”

“I quite understand,” Edmonia slowly replied, “and in great part I sympathize with you. But not altogether. For one thing I do not share your belief in freedom for the negroes. I am sure they are unfit for it, and it would be scarcely less than cruelty to take them out of the happy life to which they were born, exile them to a strange land, and condemn them to a lifelong struggle with conditions to which they are wholly unused, with poverty for their certain lot and starvation perhaps for their fate. They are happy now. Why should you condemn them to unhappy lives? They are secure now in the fact that, sick or well, in age and decrepitude as well as in lusty health, they will be abundantly fed and clothed and well housed. Why should you condemn them to an incalculably harder lot?”

“So far as the negroes are concerned, you may be right. Yet I cannot help thinking that if I make them the owners of fertile little farms in that rapidly growing western country, without a dollar of debt, they will find it easy enough to put food into their mouths and clothes on their backs and keep a comfortable roof over their heads. However that is a large question and perhaps a difficult one. If it could have been kept out of politics Virginia at least would long ago have found means to free herself of the incubus. But it is not of the negroes chiefly that I am thinking. I am trying to set Arthur Brent free while taking care not to do them any unavoidable harm in the process. I want to return to my work, and I am sufficiently an egotist to believe that my freedom to do that is of some importance to the world.”

“Doubtless it is,” answered the young woman, hesitatingly, “but there are other ways of looking at it, Arthur. I have read somewhere that the secret of happiness is to reconcile oneself with one’s environment.”

“Yes, I know. That is an abominable thought, a paralyzing philosophy. In another form the privileged classes have written it into catechisms, teaching their less fortunate fellow beings that it is their duty to ‘be content in that state of existence to which it hath pleased God’ to call them. As a buttress to caste and class privilege and despotism of every kind, that doctrine is admirable, but otherwise it is the most damnable teaching imaginable. It is not the duty of men to rest content with things as they are. It is their duty to be always discontented, always striving to make conditions better. ‘Divine discontent’ is the very mainspring of human progress. The contented peoples are the backward peoples. The Italian lazzaroni are the most contented people in the world, and the most worthless, the most hopeless. No, no, no! No man who has brains should ever reconcile himself to his environment. He should continually struggle to get out of it and into a better. We have liberty simply because our oppressed ancestors refused to do as the prayer book told them they must. Men would never have learned to build houses or cook their food if they had been content to live in caves or bush shelters and eat the raw flesh of beasts. We owe every desirable thing we have—intellectual, moral and physical—to the fact that men are by nature discontented. Contentment is a blight.”

Edmonia thought for a while before answering. Then she said:

“I suppose you are right, Arthur. I never thought of the matter in that way. I have always been taught that discontent was wicked—a rebellion against the decrees of Providence.”

“You remember the old story of the miller who left to Providence the things he ought to have done for himself, and how he was reminded at last that ‘ungreased wheels will not go?’ ”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, in my view the most imperative decree of Providence is that we shall use the faculties it has bestowed upon us in an earnest and ceaseless endeavor to better conditions, for ourselves and for others.”

“But may it not sometimes be well to accept conditions as a guide—to let them determine in what direction we shall struggle?”

“Certainly, and that is precisely my case. When I consider the peculiar conditions that specially fit me to do my proper work in the world it is my duty, without doubt, to fight against every opposing influence. I feel that I must get rid of the conditions that are now restraining me, in order that I may fulfil the destiny marked out for me by those higher conditions.”

“Perhaps. But who knows? It may be that some higher work awaits you, here, some nobler use of your faculties, to which the apparently adverse conditions that now surround you, are leading, guiding, compelling you. It may be that in the end your unwilling detention here will open to you some opportunity of service to humanity, of which you do not now dream.”

“Of course that is possible,” Arthur answered doubtfully, “but I see no such prospect. I see only danger in my present situation, danger of falling into the lassitude and inertia of contentment. I saw that danger from the first, especially when I first knew you. I felt myself in very serious danger of falling in love with you like the rest. In that case I might possibly have won you, as none of the rest had done. Then I should joyfully, and almost without a thought of other things, have settled into the contented life of a well to do planter, leaving all my duties undone.”

Edmonia flushed crimson as he so calmly said all this, but he, looking off into the nothingness of space, failed to see it, and a few seconds later she had recovered her self-control. Presently he added, still unheeding the possible effect of his words:

“You saved me from that danger. You put me under bonds not to fall in love with you, and you have helped me to keep the pact. That danger is past, but I begin to fear another, and my only safety would be to go back to my work if that were possible.”

For a long time Edmonia did not speak. Perhaps she did not trust herself to do so. Finally, in a low, soft voice, she asked:

“Would you mind telling me what it is you fear? We are sworn friends and comrades, you know.”

“It is Dorothy,” he answered. “From the first I have been fond of the child, but now, to my consternation, I find myself thinking of her no longer as a child. The woman in her is dawning rapidly, especially since she has been called upon to do a woman’s part in this crisis. She still retains her childlike simplicity of mind, her extraordinary candor, her trusting truthfulness. She will always retain those qualities. They lie at the roots of her character. But she has become a woman, nevertheless, a woman at sixteen. You must have observed that.”

“I have,” the young woman answered in a voice that she seemed to be managing with difficulty. “And with her womanhood her beauty has come also. You must have seen how beautiful she has become.”

“Oh, yes,” he answered; “no one possessed of a pair of eyes could fail to observe that. Now that we are talking so frankly and in the sympathy of close friendship, let me tell you all that I fear. I foresee that if I remain here, as apparently I must, I shall presently learn to love Dorothy madly. If that were all I might brave it. But in an intercourse so close and continual as ours must be, there is danger that her devoted, childlike affection for me, may presently ripen into something more serious. In that case I could not stifle her love as I might my own. I could not sacrifice her to my work as I am ready to sacrifice myself. I almost wish you had let me fall in love with you as the others did.”

Again Edmonia paused long before answering. When she spoke at last, it was to say:

“It is too late now, Arthur.”

“Oh, I know that. The status of things between you and me is too firmly fixed now—”

“I did not mean that,” she answered, “though that is a matter of course. I was thinking of the other case.”

“What?”

“Why, Dorothy. It is too late to prevent her from loving you. She has fully learned that lesson already though she does not know the fact. And it is too late for you also, though you, too, do not know it—or did not till I told you.”

It was now Arthur’s turn to pause and think before replying. Presently, in a voice that was unsteady in spite of himself, he asked:

“Why do you think these dreadful things, Edmonia?”

“I do not think them. I know. A woman’s instinct is never at fault in such a case—at least when she feels a deep affection for both the parties concerned. And there is nothing dreadful about it. On the contrary it offers the happiest possible solution of Dorothy’s misfortune, and it assures you of something far better worth your while to live for than the objects you have heretofore contemplated. I must go now. Of course you will say nothing of this to Dorothy for the present. That must wait for a year or two. In the meantime in all you do toward directing Dorothy’s education, you must remember that you are educating your future wife. Help me into my carriage, please. I will not wait for my maid. Dick can bring her over later, can’t he?”

“But tell me, please,” Arthur eagerly asked as the young woman seated herself alone in the carriage, “what is this ‘misfortune’ of Dorothy’s, this mystery that is so closely kept from me, while it darkly intervenes in everything done or suggested with regard to her.”

“I cannot—not now at least.” Then after a moment’s meditation she added:

“And yet you are entitled to know it—now. You are her guardian in a double sense. Whenever you can find time to come over to Branton, I’ll tell you. Good-bye!”

As the carriage was starting Edmonia caught sight of Dick and called him to her.

“Have you any kittens at Wyanoke, Dick?” she asked.

“Yes, Miss Mony, lots uv ’em.”

“Will you pick out a nice soft one, Dick, and bring it to me at Branton? Every old maid keeps a cat, you know, Dick, and so I want one.”

All that was chivalric in Dick’s soul responded.

“I’ll put a Voodoo[A] on anybody I ever heahs a callin’ you a ole maid, Miss Mony, but I’ll git you de cat.”

As she sank back among the cushions the girl relaxed the rein she had so tightly held upon herself, and the tears slipped softly and silently from her eyes. For the first time in her life this brave woman was sorry for herself.

XVIII
ALONE IN THE CARRIAGE

AFTER the blind and blundering fashion of a man, Arthur Brent was utterly unconscious of the blow he had dealt to this woman who had given him the only love of her life. For other men she had felt friendship, and to a few she had willingly given that affection which serves as a practical substitute for love in nine marriages out of ten, and which women themselves so often mistake for love. But to this woman love in its divinest form had come, the love that endureth all things and surpasseth all things, the love that knows no ceasing while life lasts, the love that makes itself a willing sacrifice. Until that day she had not herself known the state of her own soul. She had not understood how completely this man had become master of her life, how utterly she had given herself to him. And in the very moment that revealed the truth to her the man she loved had, with unmeant cruelty, opened her eyes also to that other truth that her love for him was futile and must ever remain hopeless.

She bade her driver go slowly, that she might think the matter out alone, and she thought it out. She was too proud a woman to pity herself for long. She knew and felt that Arthur had never dreamed of the change which had so unconsciously come upon her. She knew that had he so much as entertained a hope of her love a little while ago, he would have bent all the energies of his soul to the winning of her. She knew in brief that this man to whom she had unconsciously given the one love of her life, would have loved her in like manner, if she had permitted that. She knew too that it was now too late.

As the carriage slowly toiled along the sandy road, she meditated, sometimes even uttering her thought in low tones.

“There is no fault in him,” she reflected. “It is not that he is blind, but that I have hoodwinked him. In deceiving myself, I have deceived him.”

Then came the pleasanter thought:

“At any rate in ruining my own life, I have not ruined his, but glorified it. Had he loved and married me he would have been happy, but it would have been in a commonplace way. His ambitions would have died slowly but surely. That discontent, which he has taught me to understand as the mainspring of all that is highest and noblest in human endeavor, would have given place to a blighting contentment in such a life as that which he and I would have led together. It will be quite different when he marries Dorothy. She too has the ‘divine discontent’ that does things. She will be a help immeasurably more meet for him than I could ever have hoped to be. She will share his enthusiasms, and strengthen them. And it is his enthusiasm that makes him worthy of a woman’s love. It is that which takes him out of the commonplace. It is that which sets him apart from other men. It is that which makes him Arthur Brent.”

Then her thought reverted for a moment to her own pitiful case.

“What am I to do?” she asked herself. “What use can I make of my life that shall make it worthy of him? First of all I must be strong. He must never so much as suspect the truth, and of course nobody else must be permitted even to guess it. I must be a help to him, and not a hindrance. He must feel that my friendship, on which he places so high an estimate, is a friendship to be trusted and leant upon. I must more and more make myself his counsellor, a stimulating helpful influence in his life. His purposes are mainly right, and I must encourage him to seek their fulfilment. Such a man as he should not be wasted upon a woman like me, or led by such into a life of inglorious ease and inert content. After all perhaps I may help him as his friend, where, as his wife, my influence over his life and character would have been paralyzing. If I can help, him, my life will not be lost or ruined. It need not even be unhappy. If my love for him is such as he deserves, it will meet disappointment bravely. It will discipline itself to service. It will scorn the selfishness of idle bemoaning. The sacrifice that is burnt upon the altar is not in vain if the odors of it placate the gods. Better helpful sacrifice than idle lamentation.”

Then after a little her mind busied itself with thoughts less subjective and more practical.

“How shall I best help?” she asked herself. “First of all I must utterly crush selfishness in my heart. I must be a cheerful, gladsome influence and not a depressing one. From this hour there are no more tears for me, but only gladdening laughter. I must help toward that end which I see to be inevitable. I must do all that is possible to make it altogether good. I must help to prepare Dorothy to be the wife he needs. She has not been educated for so glorious a future. She has been carefully trained, on the contrary, for a humdrum life for which nature never intended her, the life of submissive wifehood to a man she could never love, a man whom she could not even respect when once her eyes were opened to better things in manhood. I must have her much with me. I must undo what has been done amiss in her education. I must help to fit her for a high ministry to the unselfish ambitions of the one man who is worthy of such a ministry. I must see to it that she is taught the very things that she has been jealously forbidden to learn. I must introduce her to that larger life from which she has been so watchfully secluded. So shall I make of my own life a thing worth while. So shall my love find a mission worthy of its object. So shall it be glorified.”

XIX
DOROTHY’S MASTER

WHEN Edmonia drove away, leaving Arthur alone, he bade Dick bring his horse, and, mounting, he set off at a gallop toward the most distant part of the plantation. He was dazed by the revelation that Edmonia’s words had made to him as to the state of his own mind, and almost frightened by what she had declared with respect to Dorothy’s feeling. He wanted to be alone in order that he might think the matter out.

It seemed to him absurd that he should really be in love with the mere child whom he had never thought of as other than that. And yet—yes, he must admit that of late he had half unconsciously come to think of the womanhood of her oftener than of the childhood. He saw clearly, when he thought of it, that his fear that he might come to love the girl had been born of a subconsciousness that he had come to love her already.

It was a strange condition of mind in which he found himself. His strongest impulse was to run away and thus save the girl from himself and his love. But would that save her? She was not the kind of woman—he caught himself thinking of her now as a woman and not as a child—she was not the kind of woman to love lightly or to lay a love aside as one might do with a misfit garment. What if it should be true, as Edmonia had declared, that Dorothy had already given him her heart? What would happen to her in that case, should he go away and leave her? “But, psha!” he thought; “that cannot be true. The child does not know what love is. And yet, and yet. Why did she choose me to be her guardian, and why, when I expressed regret that she had done so, did she look at me so, out of those great, solemn, sad eyes of hers, and ask me, with so much intensity if I did not want to be her guardian? Was it not that she instinctively, and in obedience to her love, longed to place her life in my keeping? After all she is not a child. It is only habit that makes me think of her in that way—habit and her strangely childlike confidence in me. But is that confidence childlike, after all? Do not women feel in that way toward the men they love? Dorothy is fully grown and sixteen years of age. Many a woman is married at sixteen.”

Of his own condition of mind Arthur had now no doubt. The thought had come to him that should he go away she would forget him, and he had angrily rejected it as a lie. He knew she would never forget. The further thought had come to him that in such case she would marry some other man, and it stung him like a whip lash to think of that. In brief he knew now, though until a few hours ago he had not so much as suspected it, that he loved Dorothy as he had never dreamed of loving any woman while he lived. He remembered how thoughts of her had colored all his thinking for a month agone and had shaped every plan he had formed.

But what was he now to do? “My life—the life I have marked out for myself,” he reflected, “would not be a suitable one for her.” He had not fully formulated the thought before he knew it to be a falsehood. “She would be supremely happy in such a life. It would give zest and interest to her being. She would rejoice in its sacrifices and share mightily in its toil and its triumphs. She cares nothing for the life of humdrum ease and luxury that has been marked out for her to live. She would care intensely for a life of high endeavor. And yet I must save her from the sacrifice if I can. I must save her from myself and from my love if it be not indeed too late.”

His horse had long ago slowed down to a walk, and was pursuing a course of its own selection. It brought him now to the hickory plantation near the outer gate of the Wyanoke property. Awakening to consciousness of his whereabouts, Arthur drew rein.

“It was here that I first met Dorothy”—he liked now the sound of her name in his ears—“on that glorious June morning when the hickory leaves that now strew the ground were in the full vigor of their first maturity. How confidently she whistled to her hounds, and how promptly they obeyed her call! What a queen she seemed as she disciplined them, and with what stately grace she passed me by without recognition save that implied in a sweeping inclination of her person! That was a bare five months ago! It seems five years, or fifty! How much I have lived since then! And how large a part of my living Dorothy has been!”

Presently he turned and set off at a gallop on his return to the fever camp, his mien that of a strong man who has made up his mind. His plan of action was formed, and he was hastening to carry it out.

It was growing dark when he arrived at the camp, and Dorothy met him with her report as to the condition of the sick. She took his hand as he dismounted, and held it between her own, as was her custom, quite unconscious of the nature of her own impulses.

“I’m very tired, Cousin Arthur,” she said after her report was made. “The journey to Court and all the rest of it have wearied me; and I sat up with Sally last night. You’re glad she’s better, aren’t you?”

“I certainly am,” he replied. “I feared yesterday for her life, but your nursing has saved her, just as it has saved so many others. Sally has passed the crisis now, and has nothing to do but obey you and get well.”

He said this in a tone of perplexity and sadness, which Dorothy’s ears were quick to catch.

“You’re tired too, Cousin Arthur?” she half said, half asked.

“Oh, no. I’m never tired. I—”

“Then you are troubled. You are unhappy, and you must never be that. You never deserve it. Tell me what it is! I won’t have you troubled or unhappy.”

“I’m troubled about you, Dorothy. You’ve been over-straining your strength. There are dark shadows under your eyes, and your cheeks are wan and pale. You must rest and make up your lost sleep. Here, Dick! Go over to the great house and bring Chestnut for your Miss Dorothy, do you hear?”

“No, no, no!” Dorothy answered quickly. “Don’t go, Dick. I do not want the mare. No, Cousin Arthur, I’m not going to quit my post. I only want to sleep now for an hour or two,—just to rest a little. The sick people can’t spare me now.”

“But they must, Dorothy. I will not have you make yourself ill. You must go back to the great house tonight and get a good night’s rest. I’ll look after your sick people.”

Dorothy loosened her hold of his hand, and retreated a step, looking reproachfully at him as she said:

“Don’t you want me here, Cousin Arthur? Don’t you care?”

“I do care, Dorothy, dear! I care a great deal more than I can ever tell you. That is why I want you to go home for a rest tonight. I am seriously anxious about you. Let me explain to you. When one is well and strong and gets plenty of sleep, there is not much danger of infection. But when one is worn out with anxiety and loss of sleep as you are, the danger is very great. You are not afraid of taking the fever. I don’t believe you are afraid of anything, and I am proud of you for that. But I am afraid for you. Think how terrible it would be for me, Dorothy, if you should come down with this malady. Will you not go home for my sake, and for my sake get a good night’s sleep, so that you may come back fresh and well and cheery in the morning? You do not know, you can’t imagine how much I depend upon you for my own strength and courage. Several things trouble me just now, and I have a real need to see you bright and well and strong in the morning. Won’t you try to be so for my sake, Dorothy? Won’t you do as I bid you, just once?”

“Just once?” she responded, with a rising inflection. “Just always, you ought to say. As long as I live I’ll do whatever you tell me to do—at least when you tell me the truth as you are doing now. You see I always know when you are telling the truth. With other people it is different. Sometimes I can’t tell how much or how little they mean. But I know you so well! And besides you’re always clumsy at fibbing, even when you do it for a good purpose. That’s why I like you so much—or,” pausing,—“that’s one of the reasons. Has Dick gone for Chestnut?”

“Yes, Dick always obeys me.”

“Oh, but that’s quite different. You are Dick’s master you know—” Then she hesitated again, presently adding, “of course you are my master too—only in a different way. Oh, I see now; you’re my guardian. Of course I must obey my guardian, and I’ll show him a bright, fresh face in the morning. Here comes Dick with Chestnut. Good night—Master!”

From that hour Dorothy thought of Arthur always by that title of “master,” though in the presence of others she never so addressed him.

Arthur watched her ride away in the light of the rising November moon, Dick following closely as her groom. And as he saw her turn at the entrance to the woodlands to wave him a final adieu, he said out loud:

“I fear it is indeed too late!”

XX
A SPECIAL DELIVERY LETTER

WHEN Dorothy had disappeared, Arthur became conscious of a great loneliness, which he found it difficult to shake off. Presently he remembered that he had a letter to write, a letter which he had decided upon out there under the hickory trees. He had writing materials and a table in his own small quarters, but somehow he felt himself impelled to write this letter upon Dorothy’s own little lap desk and in Dorothy’s own little camp cottage.

“Positively, I am growing sentimental!” he said to himself as he walked toward Dorothy’s house. “I didn’t suspect such a possibility in myself. After all a man knows less about himself than about anybody else. I can detect tuberculosis in another, at a glance. I doubt if I should recognize it in myself. I can discover cardiac trouble by a mere look at the eyes of the man afflicted with it. I know instantly when I look at a man, what his temperament is, what tendencies he has, what probabilities, and even what possibilities inhere in his nature. But what do I know about Arthur Brent? I suppose that any of my comrades at Bellevue could have told me years ago the things I am just now finding out concerning myself. If any of them had predicted my present condition of mind a year ago, I should have laughed in derision of the stupid misconception of me. I thought I knew myself. What an idiot any man is to think that!”

Touching a match to the little camphene lamp on Dorothy’s table, he opened her desk and wrote.

“My Dear Edmonia:

“When you left me this afternoon, it was with a promise that on my next visit to Branton you would tell me of the things that limit Dorothy’s life. It was my purpose then to make an early opportunity for the hearing. I have changed my mind. I do not want to hear now, because when this knowledge comes to me, I must act upon it, in one way or another, and I must act promptly. Should it come to me now, I should not be free to act. I simply cannot, because I must not, leave my work here till it is done. I do not refer now to those plans of which we spoke today, but simply to the fever. I must not quit my post till that is at an end. I am a soldier in the midst of a campaign. I cannot quit my colors till the enemy is completely put to rout. This enemy—the fever—is an obstinate one, slow to give way. It will be many weeks, possibly several months, before I can entirely conquer it. Until then I must remain at my post, no matter what happens. Until then, therefore, I do not want to know anything that might place upon me the duty of withdrawing from present surroundings. I shall ride over to Branton now and then, as matters here grow better, and I hope, too, that you will continue your compassionate visits to our fever camp. But please, my dear Edmonia, do not tell me anything of this matter, until the last negro in the camp is well and I am free to take the next train for New York, and perhaps the next ship for Havre.

“You will understand me, I am sure. I do not want to play a halting, hesitating part in a matter of such consequence. I do not wish to be compelled to sit still when the time comes for me to act. So I must wait till I am free again from this present and most imperative service, before I permit myself to hear that which may make it my duty to go at once into exile.

“In the meantime I shall guard my conduct against every act, and lock my lips against every utterance that might do harm.

“I have formulated a plan of action, and of that I will tell you at the first opportunity, because I want your counsel respecting it. As soon as I am free, I shall act upon it, if you do not think it too late.

“I cannot tell you, my dear Edmonia, how great a comfort it is to me in my perplexity, that I have your sympathy and may rely upon your counsel in my time of need. I have just now begun to realize how little I know of myself, and your wise words, spoken today, have shown me clearly how very much you know of me. To you, therefore, I shall look, in this perplexity, for that guidance for which I have always, hitherto, relied,—in mistaken and conceited self-confidence,—upon my own judgment. Could there be anything more precious than such friendship and ready sympathy as that which you give to me? Whatever else may happen, now or hereafter, I shall always feel that in enriching my life with so loyal, so unselfish a friendship as that which you have given to me, my Virginian episode has been happy in its fruit.

“Poor Dorothy is almost broken down with work and loss of sleep. You will be glad to know that I have sent her to the house for a night of undisturbed rest. I had to use all my influence with her to make her go. And at the last she went, I think, merely because she felt that her going would relieve me of worry and apprehension. She is a real heroine, but she has so much of the martyr’s spirit in her that she needs restraint and control.”

Dick returned to the camp before this letter was finished, and his master delivered it into his hands with an injunction to carry it to Branton in the early morning of the next day. He knew the habit of young women in Virginia, which was to receive and answer all letters carried by the hands of special messengers, before the nine o’clock breakfast hour. And there were far more of such letters interchanged than of those that came and went by the post. For the post, in those years, was not equipped with free delivery devices. Most of the plantations were nearer to each other than to the nearest postoffice, and there were young negroes in plenty to carry the multitudinous missives with which the highly cultured young women of the time and country maintained what was in effect a continuous conversation with each other. They wrote to each other upon every conceivable occasion, and often upon no occasion at all, but merely because the morning was fine and each wanted to call the other’s attention to the fact. If one read a novel that pleased her, she would send it with a note,—usually covering two sheets and heavily crossed,—to some friend whom she desired to share her enjoyment of it. Or if she had found a poem to her liking in Blackwood, or some other of the English magazines, for American periodicals circulated scarcely at all in Virginia in those days—except the Southern Literary Messenger, for which everybody subscribed as a matter of patriotic duty—she would rise “soon” in the morning, make half a dozen manuscript copies of it, and send them by the hands of little darkeys to her half dozen bosom friends, accompanying each with an astonishingly long “note.” I speak with authority here. I have seen Virginia girls in the act of doing this sort of thing, and I have read many hundreds of their literary criticisms. What a pity it is that they are lost to us! For some of them were mightily shrewd both in condemnation and in ecstatic approval, and all of them had the charm of perfect and fearless honesty in utterance, and all of them were founded upon an actual and attentive reading of the works criticised, as printed criticism usually is not.

XXI
HOW A HIGH BRED DAMSEL CONFRONTED FATE AND DUTY

QUITE unconsciously Arthur Brent had prepared a very bad morning hour for the best friend he had ever known. His letter was full of dagger thrusts for the loving girl’s soul. Every line of it revealed his state of mind, and that state of mind was a very painful thing for the sensitive woman, who loved him so, to contemplate. The very intimacy of it was a painful reminder; the affection it revealed so frankly stung her to the quick. The missive told her, as no words so intended could have done, how far removed this man’s attitude toward her was from that of the lover. Had his words been angry they might not have indicated any impossibility of love—they might indeed have meant love itself in such a case,—love vexed or baffled, but still love. Had they been cold and indifferent, they might have been interpreted merely as the language of reserve, or as a studied concealment of passion. But their very warmth and candor of friendship would have set the seal of impossibility upon her hope that he might ever come to love her, if she had cherished any such hope, as she did not.

The letter told her by its tone more convincingly than any other form of words could have done, that this man held her in close affection as a friend, and that no thought of a dearer relationship than that could at any time come to him.

Edmonia Bannister was a strong woman, highly bred and much too proud to give way to the weakness of self-pity. She made no moan over her lost love as she laid it away to rest forever in the sepulchre of her heart. Nor did she in her soul repine or complain of fate.

“It is best for him as it is,” she told herself, as she had told herself before during that long, solitary drive in the carriage; “and I must rejoice in it, and not mourn.”

The sting of it did not lie in disappointment. She met that with calm mind as the soldier faces danger without flinching when it comes to him hand in hand with duty. The agony that tortured her was of very different origin. All her pride of person, all her pride of race and family, even her self-respect itself, was sorely stricken by the discovery that she had given her love unasked.

This truth she had not so much as suspected until that conversation in Dorothy’s little porch on the day before had revealed it to her. Then the revelation had so stunned her that she did not realize its full significance. And besides, her mind at that time was fully occupied with efforts so to bear herself as to conceal what she regarded as her shame. Now that she had passed a sleepless night in company with this hideous truth, and now that it came to her anew with its repulsive nakedness revealed in the gray of the morning, she appreciated and exaggerated its deformity, and the realization was more than she could bear.

She had been bred in that false school of ethics which holds a woman bound to remain a stock, a stone, a glacier of insensibility to love until the man shall graciously give her permission to love, by declaring his own love for her. She believed that false teaching implicitly. She was as deeply humiliated, as mercilessly self-reproachful now as if she had committed an immodesty. She told herself that her conduct in permitting herself, however unconsciously, to love this man who had never asked for her love, had “unsexed” her—a term not understanded of men, but one to which women attach a world of hideous meaning.

“I am not well this morning,” she said to her maid as she passed up the stairs in retreat. “No, you need not attend me,” she added quickly upon seeing the devoted serving woman’s purpose; “stay here instead and make my apologies to my brother when he comes out of his room, for leaving him to breakfast alone.”

“Why, Miss Mony, is you done forgot? Mas’ Archer he ain’t here. You know he done stayed at de tavern at de Co’t House las’ night, an’ a mighty poor white folksey breakfas’ he’ll git too.”

“Oh, yes, I had forgotten. So much the better. But don’t accompany me. I want to be alone.”

The maid stared at her in blank amazement. When she had entered her chamber and carefully shut the door, the woman exclaimed:

“Well, I ’clar to gracious! I ain’t never seed nuffin like dat wid Miss Mony before!”

Then with that blind faith which her class at that time cherished in the virtues of morning coffee as a panacea, Dinah turned into the dining room, and with a look of withering scorn at the head dining room servant, demanded:

“Is you a idiot, Polydore? Couldn’t you see dat Miss Mony is seriously decomposed dis mawnin’? What you means by bein’ so stupid? What fer didn’t you give her a cup o’ coffee? An’ why don’t you stir yourself now an’ bring me de coffee urn, an’ de cream jug? Don’t stan’ dar starin’, nigga! Do you heah?”

Having “hopes” in the direction of this comely maid, Polydore was duly abashed by her rebuke while full of admiration for the queenly way in which she had administered it. He brought the urn and its adjuncts and admiringly contemplated the grace with which Dinah prepared a cup for her mistress.

“I ’clar, Dinah, you’se mos’ as fine as white ladies dey selves!” he ventured to say in softly placative tones. But Dinah had no notion of relaxing her dignity, so instead of acknowledging the compliment she rebuffed it, saying:

“Why don’t Mas’ Archer sen’ you to the cawnfiel’, anyhow? Dat’s all you’se fit for. Don’ you see I’se a waitin’ fer you to bring me a tray an’ a napkin, an’ a chaney plate with a slice o’ ham on it?”

Equipped at last, the maid, disregarding her mistress’s injunction, marched up the stairs and entered Edmonia’s room. The young woman gently thanked her, and then, after a moment’s thought, said:

“Dinah, I wish you would get some jellies and nice things ready this morning and take them over to your Miss Dorothy for her sick people. You can use the carriage, but go as soon as you can get away; and give my love to your Miss Dorothy, and tell her I am not feeling well this morning. But tell her, Dinah, that I’ll drive over this afternoon about two o’clock and she must be ready to go with me for a drive. Poor child, she needs some relaxation!”

Having thus secured immunity from Dinah’s kindly but at present unwelcome attentions, Edmonia Bannister proceeded, as she phrased it in her mind, to “take herself seriously in hand.”

After long thought she formulated a program for herself.

“My pride ought to have saved me from this humiliation,” she thought. “Having failed me in that, it must at least save me from the consequences of my misconduct. I’ll wear a cheerful face, whatever I may feel. I’ll cultivate whatever there is of jollity in me, and still better, whatever I possess of dignity. I’ll be social. I’ll entertain continually, as brother always wants me to do. I’ll have some of my girl friends with me every day and every night. I’ll busy myself with every duty I can find to do, and especially I shall devote myself to dear Dorothy. By the way, Arthur will expect a reply to his letter. I’ll begin my duty-doing with that.”

And so she wrote:

“You are by all odds the most ridiculous fellow, my dear Arthur, that I have yet encountered—the most preposterous, wrong headed, cantankerous (I hope that word is good English—and anyhow it is good Virginian, because it tells the truth) sort of human animal I ever yet knew. Do you challenge proof of my accusations? Think a bit and you’ll have it in abundance. Let me help you think by recounting your absurdities.

“You were a young man, practically alone in the world, with no fortune except an annuity, which must cease at your death. You had no associates except scientific persons who never think of anything but trilobites and hydrocyanic acid and symptoms and all that sort of thing. Suddenly, and by reason of no virtuous activity of your own, you found yourself the owner of one of the finest estates in Virginia, and the head of one of its oldest and most honored houses. In brief you came into an inheritance for which any reasonable young man of your size and age would have been glad to mortgage his hopes of salvation and cut off the entail of all his desires. There, that’s badly quoted, I suppose, but it is from Shakespeare, I think, and I mean something by it—a thing not always true of a young woman’s phrases when she tries her hand at learned utterance.

“Never mind that. This favored child of Fortune, Arthur Brent, M. D., Ph. D., etc., bitterly complains of Fate for having poured such plenty into his lap, rescuing him from a life of toil and trouble and tuberculosis—for I’m perfectly satisfied you would have contracted that malady, whatever it is, if Fate hadn’t saved you from it by compelling you to come down here to Virginia.

“Don’t criticise if I get my tenses mixed up a little, so long as my moods are right. Very well, to drop what my governess used to call ‘the historical present,’ this absurd and preposterous young man straightway ‘kicked against the pricks’—that’s not slang but a Biblical quotation, as you would very well know if you read your Bible half as diligently as you study your books on therapeutics. Better than that, it is truth that I’m telling you. You actually wanted to get rid of your heritage, to throw away just about the finest chance a young man ever had to make himself happy and comfortable and contented. You might even have indulged yourself in the pastime of making love to me, and getting your suit so sweetly rejected that you would ever afterwards have thought of the episode as an important part of your education. But you threw away even that opportunity.

“Now comes to you the greatest good fortune of all, and it positively frightens you so badly that you are planning to run away from it—if you can.

“Badinage aside, Arthur,—or should that word be ‘bandinage?’ You see I don’t know, and my dictionary is in another room, and anyhow the phrase sounds literary. Now to go on. Really, Arthur, you are a ridiculous person. You have had months of daily, hourly, intimate association with Dorothy. With your habits of observation, and still more your splendid gifts in that way, you cannot have failed to discover her superiority to young women generally. If you have failed, if you have been so blind as not to see, let me point out the fact to you. Did you ever know a better mind than hers? Was there ever a whiter soul? Has she not such a capacity of devotion and loyalty and love as you never saw in any other woman? Isn’t her courage admirable? Is not her truthfulness something that a man may trust his honor and his life to, knowing absolutely that his faith must always be secure?

“Fie upon you, Arthur. Why do you not see how lavishly Providence has dealt with you?

“But that is only one side of the matter, and by no means the better side of it. On that side lies happiness for you, and you have a strange dislike of happiness for yourself. You distrust it. You fear it. You put it aside as something unworthy of you, something that must impair your character and interrupt your work. Oh, foolish man! Has not your science taught you that it is the men of rich, full lives who do the greatest things in this world, and not the starvelings? Do you imagine for a moment that any monkish ascetic could have written Shakespeare’s plays or Beethoven’s music or fought Washington’s campaigns or rendered to the world the service that Thomas Jefferson gave?

“But there, I am wandering from my point again. Don’t you see that it is your duty to train Dorothy, to give to her mind a larger and better outlook than the narrow horizon of our Virginian life permits?

“Anyhow, you shall see it, and you shall see it now. For in spite of your unwillingness to hear, and in spite of your injunction that I shall not tell you now, I am going to tell you some things that you must know. Listen then.

“Certain circumstances which I may not tell you either now or hereafter, render Dorothy’s case a peculiar one. She was only a dozen years old, or so, when her father died, and he never dreamed of her moral and intellectual possibilities. He was oppressed with a great fear for her. He foresaw for her dangers so grave and so great that he ceaselessly planned to save her from them. To that end he decreed that she should learn nothing of music, or art or any other thing which he believed would prove a temptation to her. His one supreme desire was to save her from erratic ways of living, and so to hedge her life about that she should in due course marry into a good Virginia family and pass all her days in a round of commonplace duties and commonplace enjoyments. He had no conception of her character, her genius or her capacities for enjoyment or suffering. He fondly believed that she would be happy in the life he planned for her as the wife of young Jefferson Peyton, to whom, in a way, he betrothed her in her early childhood, when Jeff himself was a well ordered little lad, quite different from the arrogant, silly young donkey he has grown up to be, with dangerous inclinations toward dissoluteness and depravity.

“Dr. South and Mr. Madison Peyton planned this marriage, as something that was to be fulfilled in that future for which Dr. South was morbidly anxious to provide. Like many other people, Dr. South mistook himself for Divine Providence, and sought to order a life whose conditions he could not foresee. He wanted to save his daughter from a fate which he, perhaps, had reason to fear for her. On the other side of the arrangement Madison Peyton wanted his eldest son to become master of Pocahontas plantation, so that his own possessions might pass to his other sons and daughters. So these two bargained that Dorothy should become Jefferson Peyton’s wife when both should be grown up. Dr. South did not foresee what sort of man the boy was destined to become. Still less did he dream what a woman Dorothy would be. His only concern was that his daughter should marry into a family as good as his own.

“Now that Peyton sees what his son’s tendencies are he is more determined than ever to have that mistaken old bargain carried out. He is willing to sacrifice Dorothy in the hope of saving his son from the evil courses to which he is so strongly inclined.

“Are you going to let this horrible thing happen, Arthur Brent? You love Dorothy and she loves you. She does not yet suspect either fact, but you are fully aware of both. You alone can save her from a fate more unhappy than any that her father, in his foolishness, feared for her, and in doing so you can at the same time fulfil her father’s dearest wish, which was that she should marry into a Virginia family of high repute. Your family ranks as well in this commonwealth as any other—better than most. You are the head of it. You can save Dorothy from a life utterly unworthy of her, a life in which she must be supremely unhappy. You can give to her mind that opportunity of continuous growth which it needs. You can offer to her the means of culture and happiness, and of worthy intellectual exercise, which so rare and exceptional a nature must have for its full development.

“Are you going to do this, Arthur Brent, or are you not? Are you going to do the high duty that lies before you, or are you going to put it aside for some imagined duty which would be of less consequence even if it were real? Is it not better worth your while to save Dorothy than to save any number of life’s failures who dwell in New York’s tenements? Are not Dorothy South’s mind and soul and superb capacities of greater consequence than the lives of thousands of those whose squalor and unwholesome surroundings are after all the fruit of their own hereditary indolence and stupidity? Is not one such life as hers of greater worth in the world, than thousands or even millions of those for whose amelioration you had planned to moil and toil? You know, Arthur, that I have little sympathy with the thought that those who fail in life should be coddled into a comfort that they have not earned. I do not believe that you can rescue dulness of mind from the consequences of its own inertia. Nine tenths of the poverty that suffers is the direct consequence of laziness and drink. The other tenth is sufficiently cared for. I am a heretic on this subject, I suppose. I do not think that such a man as you are should devote his life to an attempt to uplift those who have sunk into squalor through lack of fitness for anything better. Your abilities may be much better employed in helping worthier lives. I never did see why we should send missionaries to the inferior races, when all our efforts might be so much more profitably employed for the betterment of worthier people. Why didn’t we let the red Indians perish as they deserve to do, and spend the money we have fruitlessly thrown away upon them, in providing better educational opportunities for a higher race?

“The moral of all this is that you have found your true mission in the rescue of Dorothy South from a fate she does not deserve. I’m going to help you in doing that, but I will not tell you my plans till you get through with your fever crusade and have time to listen attentively to my superior wisdom.

“In the meantime you are to humble yourself by reflecting upon your great need of such counsel as mine and your great good fortune in having a supply of it at hand.

“I hope your patients continue to do credit to your medical skill and to Dorothy’s excellent nursing. I have sent Dinah over this morning with some delicacies for the convalescent among them, and in the afternoon I shall go over to the camp myself and steal Dorothy from them and you, long enough to give her a good long drive.

“Always sincerely your Friend,
“Edmonia Bannister.”

XXII
THE INSTITUTION OF THE DUELLO

WHEN Arthur Brent had read Edmonia’s letter, he mounted Gimlet and rode away with no purpose except to think. The letter had revealed some things to him of which he had not before had even a suspicion. He understood now why Madison Peyton had been so anxious to become Dorothy’s guardian and so angry over his disappointment in that matter. For on the preceding evening Archer Bannister had ridden over from the Court House to tell him of Peyton’s offensive words and to deliver the letter of apology into his hands.

“I don’t see how you can challenge him after that” said Archer, with some uncertainty in his tone.

“Why should I wish to do so?” Arthur asked in surprise. “I have something very much more important to think about just now than Madison Peyton’s opinion of me. You yourself tell me that when he was saying all these things about me, he only got himself laughed at for his pains. Nobody thought the worse of me for anything that he said, and certainly nobody would think the better of me for challenging him to a duel and perhaps shooting him or getting shot. Of course I could not challenge him now, as he has made a written withdrawal of his words and given me an apology which I am at liberty to tack up on the court house door if I choose, as I certainly do not. But I should not have challenged him in any case.”

“I suppose you are right,” answered Archer; “indeed I know you are. But it requires a good deal of moral courage—more than I suspect myself of possessing—to fly in the face of Virginia opinion in that way.”

“But what is Virginia opinion on the subject of duelling, Archer? I confess I can’t find out.”

“How do you mean?” asked the other.

“Why, it seems to me that opinion here on that subject is exceedingly inconsistent and contradictory. Dorothy once said, when she was a child,”—there was a world of significance in the past tense of that phrase—“that if a man in Virginia fights a duel for good cause, everybody condemns him for being so wicked and breaking the laws in that fashion; but if he doesn’t fight when good occasion arises, everybody calls him a coward and blames him more than in the other case. So I do not know what Virginia opinion is. And even the laws do not enlighten me. Many years ago the Legislature adopted a statute making duelling a crime, but I have never heard of anybody being punished for that crime. On the contrary the statute seems to have been carefully framed to prevent the punishment of anybody for duelling. It makes a principal in the crime of everybody who in any capacity participates in a duel, whether as fighter or second, or surgeon or mere looker on. In other words it makes a principal of every possible witness, and then excuses all of them from testifying to the fact of a duel on the ground that to testify to that fact would incriminate themselves. I saw a very interesting farce of that sort played in a Richmond court a month or so ago. Are you interested to hear about it?”

“Yes, tell me!”

“Well, Mr. P.”—Arthur named a man who has since become a famous judge—“had had something to do with a duel. As I understand it he was neither principal nor second, but at any rate he saw the duel fought. The principals, or one of them, had been brought before the judge for trial, and Mr. P. was called as a witness. When a question was put to him by the judge himself, Mr. P. replied: ‘I am not a lawyer. I ask the privilege of consulting counsel before answering that question.’ To this the judge responded: ‘To save time Mr. P., I will myself be your counsel. As such I advise you to decline to answer the question. Now, as the judge of this court, and not in my capacity as your counsel, I again put the question to you and require you, under penalty of the law to answer it.’ Mr. P. answered: ‘Under advice of counsel, your Honor, I decline to answer the question.’ The judge responded: ‘Mr. Sheriff, take Mr. P. into custody. I commit him for contempt of court.’ Then resuming his attitude as counsel, the judge said: ‘Mr. P., as your counsel I advise you to ask for a writ of Habeas Corpus.’

“ ‘I ask for a writ of Habeas Corpus, your Honor,’ answered P.

“ ‘The court is required to grant the writ,’ said the judge solemnly, ‘and it is granted. Prepare it for signature, Mr. Clerk, and serve it on the sheriff.’

“The clerical work occupied but a brief time. When it was done the sheriff addressing the court said: ‘May it please your Honor, in obedience to the writ of Habeas Corpus this day served upon me, I produce here the body of R. A. P., and I pray my discharge from further obligation in the premises.’

“Then the judge addressed the prisoner, saying: ‘Mr. P. you are arraigned before this court, charged with contempt and disobedience of the court’s commands. What have you to say in answer to the charge?’ Then instantly he added: ‘In my capacity as your counsel, Mr. P., I advise you to plead that the charge of contempt which is brought against you, rests solely upon your refusal to answer a question the answer to which might tend to subject you to a criminal accusation.’

“ ‘I do so make my answer, your Honor,’ said Mr. P.

“ ‘The law in this case,’ said the judge, ‘is perfectly clear. No citizen can be compelled to testify against himself. Mr. P., you are discharged under the writ. There being no other testimony to the fact that the prisoners at the bar have committed the crime charged against them, the court orders their discharge. Mr. Clerk, call the next case on the calendar.’[B] Now wasn’t all that a roaring farce, with the judge duplicating parts after the ‘Protean’ manner of the low comedians?”

“It certainly was,” answered young Bannister. “But what are we to do?”

“Why, make up your minds—or our minds I should say, for I am a Virginian now with the best of you—whether we will or will not permit duelling, and make and enforce the laws accordingly. If duelling is right let us recognize it and put an end to our hypocritical paltering with it. I’m not sure that in the present condition of society and opinion that would not be the best course to pursue. But if we are not ready for that, if we are to go on legislating against the practice, for heaven’s sake let us make laws that can be enforced, and let us enforce them. The little incident I have related is significant in its way, but it doesn’t suggest the half or the quarter or the one-hundredth part of the absurdity of our dealing with this question.”

“Tell me about the rest of it,” responded Archer, “and then I shall have some questions to ask you.”

“Well, as to the rest of it, you have only to look at the facts. Years ago the Virginia Legislature went through the solemn process of enacting that no person should be eligible to a seat in either house of our law making body, who had been in any way concerned in a duel, either as principal or second, since a date fixed by the statute. If that meant anything it meant that in the opinion of the Legislature of Virginia no duellist ought to be permitted to become a lawgiver. It was a statute prescribing for those who have committed the crime of duelling precisely the same penalty of disfranchisement that the law applies to those who have committed other felonies. But there was this difference. The laws forbidding other felonies, left open an opportunity to prove them and to convict men of committing them, while the law against duelling carefully made it impossible to convict anybody of its violation. To cover that point, the Legislature enacted that every man elected to either house of that body, should solemnly make oath that he had not been in any wise engaged in duelling since the date named in the statute. Again the lawgivers were not in earnest, for every year since that time men who have been concerned in duelling within the prohibited period have been elected to the Legislature; and every year the Legislature’s first act has been to bring forward the date of the prohibition and admit to seats in the law making body all the men elected to it who have deliberately defied and broken the law. It deals in no such fashion with men disfranchised for the commission of any other crime. Is not all this in effect an annual declaration by the Legislature that its laws in condemnation of duelling do not mean what they say? Is it not a case in which a law is enacted to satisfy one phase of public sentiment and deliberately nullified by legislative act in obedience to public sentiment of an opposite character?”

“It certainly seems so. And yet I do not see what is to be done. You said just now that perhaps it would be best to legalize duelling. Would not that be legalizing crime?”

“Not at all. Duelling is simply private, personal war. It is a crime only by circumstance and statute. Under certain conditions such war is as legitimate as any other, and the right to wage it rests upon precisely the same ethical grounds as those upon which we justify public, national war. In a state of society in which the law does not afford protection to the individual and redress of wrongs inflicted upon him, I conceive that he has an indisputable right to wage war in his own defence, just as a nation has. But we live in a state of society quite different from that. If Madison Peyton or any other man had inflicted hurt of any kind upon me, I could go into court with the certainty of securing redress. I have no right, therefore, to make personal war upon him by way of securing the redress which the courts stand ready to give me peaceably. So I say we should forbid duelling by laws that can be enforced, and public sentiment should imperatively require their enforcement. Till we are ready to do that, we should legalize duelling and quit pretending.”

“After all, now that I think of it,” said young Bannister, “most of the duels of late years in Virginia have had their origin in cowardice, pure and simple. They have been born of some mere personal affront, and the principals on either side have fought not to redress wrongs but merely because they were afraid of being called cowards. You at least can never be under any necessity of proving that you are not a coward. The people of Virginia have not forgotten your work at Norfolk. But I’m glad Peyton apologized. For even an open quarrel between you and him, and especially one concerning Dorothy, would have been peculiarly embarrassing and it would have given rise to scandal of an unusual sort.”

“But why, Archer? Why should a quarrel between him and me be more productive of scandal than one between any other pair of men? I do not understand.”

“And I cannot explain,” answered the other. “I can only tell you the fact. I must go now. I have a long ride to a bad bed at the Court House, with tedious jury duty to do tomorrow. So, good night.”

XXIII
DOROTHY’S REBELLION

THE conversation reported in the last preceding chapter of this record, occurred on the evening before Edmonia Bannister’s letter was written. The letter, therefore, when Arthur received it at noon of the next day, supplemented and in some measure explained what Archer had said with respect to the peculiar inconvenience of a quarrel between Dr. Brent and Madison Peyton.

Yet it left him in greater bewilderment than ever concerning Dorothy’s case. That is why he mounted Gimlet and rode away to think.

He understood now why Madison Peyton so eagerly desired to become Dorothy’s guardian. That would have been merely to take charge of his own son’s future estate. But why should any such fate have been decreed for Dorothy under a pretence of concern for her welfare? What but wretchedness and cruel wrong could result from a marriage so ill assorted? Why should a girl of Dorothy’s superior kind have been expected to marry a young man for whom she could never feel anything but contempt? Why should her rare and glorious womanhood have been bartered away for any sort of gain? Why had her father sought to dispose of her as he might of a favorite riding horse or a cherished picture?

All these questions crowded upon Arthur’s mind, and he could find no answer to any of them. They made him the angrier on that account, and presently he muttered:

“At any rate this hideous wrong shall not be consummated. Whether I succeed in setting myself free, or fail in that purpose, I will prevent this thing. Whether I marry Dorothy myself or not, she shall never be married by any species of moral compulsion to this unworthy young puppy.”

Perhaps Doctor Brent’s disposition to call young Peyton by offensive names, was a symptom of his own condition of mind. But just at this point in his meditations a thought occurred which almost staggered him.

“What if Dr. South has left somewhere a written injunction to Dorothy to carry out his purpose? Would she not play the part of martyr to duty? Would she not, in misdirected loyalty, obey her dead father’s command, at whatever cost to herself?”

Arthur knew with how much of positive worship Dorothy regarded the memory of her father. He remembered how loyally she had accepted that father’s commands forbidding her to learn music or even to listen to it in any worthy form. He remembered with what unquestioning faith the girl had accepted his strange dictum about every woman’s need of a master, and how blindly she believed his teaching that every woman must be bad if she is left free. Would she not crown her loyalty to that dead father’s memory by making this final self-sacrifice, when she should learn of his command, as of course she must? In view of the extreme care and minute attention to detail with which Dr. South had arranged to hold his daughter’s fate in mortmain, there could be little doubt that he had somehow planned to have her informed of this his supreme desire, at some time selected by himself.

At this moment Arthur met the Branton carriage, bearing Edmonia and Dorothy.

“You are playing truant, Arthur,” called Edmonia. “You must go back to your sick people at once, for I’ve kidnapped your head nurse and I don’t mean to return her to you till six. She is to dine with me at Branton. So ride back to your duty at once, before Dick shall be seized with an inspiration to give somebody a dose of strychnine as a substitute for sweet spirits of nitre.”

“Oh, no, Edmonia,” broke in Dorothy, “we must drive back to the camp at once. Cousin Arthur needs his ride. You don’t know. I tell you he’s breaking down. Yes you are, Cousin Arthur, so you needn’t shake your head. That isn’t quite truthful in you. You work night and day, and lately you’ve had a dreadfully worn and tired look in your eyes. I’ve noticed it and all last night, when you had sent me away to sleep, I lay awake thinking about it.”

Edmonia smiled at this. Perhaps she recognized it as a symptom—in Dorothy. She only said in reply:

“Don’t worry about Arthur. I am worried only about you, and I’m going to take you to Branton. Am I not, Arthur?”

“I sincerely hope so,” he replied. “And there is not the slightest reason why you shouldn’t keep her for the night if you will. She is really not needed at the hospital till tomorrow. I’m honest and truthful when I say that, Dorothy. Dick and I can take care of everything till tomorrow, and I’ll see to it that Dick’s inspirations are restricted to poetry. So take her, Edmonia, and keep her till tomorrow. And don’t let her talk too much.”

“Oh, I’m going to take her. She is impolite enough not to want to go but she is much too young to have a will of her own—yet. As for Dick, he’s already in the throes. He is constructing a new ‘song ballad’ on the sorrowful fate of the turkey. It begins:

‘Tukkey in de bacca lot,
A pickin’ off de hoppa’s,’

but it goes no further as yet because Dick can’t find any rhyme for ‘hopper’ except ‘copper’ and ‘proper’ and ‘stopper,’ which I suggested, and they don’t serve his turn. He came to me to ask if ‘gobblers’ would not do, but I discouraged that extreme of poetic license.”

“Edmonia,” said Dorothy as soon as the carriage had renewed its journey, “did you really think it impolite in me not to want to go with you?”

“No, you silly girl.”

“I’m glad of that. You see I think there is nothing so unkind as impoliteness. But really I think it is wrong for me to go. Why didn’t you take Cousin Arthur instead? You don’t know how badly he needs rest.”

Edmonia made no direct reply to this. Instead, she said presently:

“Arthur is one of the best men I know. Don’t you think so, Dorothy?”

“Oh, he’s altogether the best. I can’t think of anybody to compare him with—not even Washington. He’s a hero you know. I often read over again all the newspapers that told about what he did in Norfolk, and of course he’s just like that now. He never thinks of himself, but always of others. There never was any man like him in all the world. That’s why I can’t bear to think of going to Branton and leaving him alone when if I were at my post, he might get some of the sleep that he needs so much. Edmonia, I’m not going to Branton! Positively I can’t and I won’t. So if you don’t tell the driver to turn back, I’ll open the carriage door and jump out and walk back.”

Curiously enough Edmonia made no further resistance. Perhaps she had already accomplished the object she had had in view. At any rate she bade the driver turn about, and upon her arrival at the camp she offered Arthur no further explanation than he might infer from her telling him:

“I’ve brought back the kidnapped nurse. I couldn’t win her away from you even for a few hours. See that you reward her devotion with all possible good treatment.”

“You are too funny for anything, Edmonia,” said Dorothy as she stepped from the carriage. “As if Cousin Arthur could treat me in any but the best of ways!”

“Oh, I’m not so sure on that point. He’ll bear watching anyhow. He’s ‘essenteric’ as Dick said the other day in a brave but hopeless struggle with the word ‘eccentric.’ But I must go now or I shall be late for dinner, and I’m expecting some friends who care more than Dorothy does for my hospitality.”

“Oh, please, Edmonia—”

“Don’t mind me, child. I was only jesting. You are altogether good and sweet and lovable.”

She looked at Arthur significantly as she emphasized that last word.

The young man thereupon took Dorothy’s hands in his, looked her in the eyes, and said:

“Edmonia is right, dear. You are altogether good and sweet and lovable. But you ought to have taken some rest and recreation.”

“How could I, when I knew you needed me?”

XXIV
TO GIVE DOROTHY A CHANCE

IT was nearly the Christmas time when Arthur finally broke up the fever camp. He decided that the outbreak was at an end and the need of a hospital service no longer pressing. The half dozen patients who remained at the camp were now so far advanced on the road to recovery that he felt it safe to remove them to the new quarters at the Silver Spring.

He had sent Dorothy home a week before, saying:

“Now, Dorothy, dear, we have conquered the enemy—you and I—and a glorious conquest it has been. We have had forty-seven cases of the disease, some of them very severe, and there have been only two deaths. Even they were scarcely attributable to the fever, as both the victims were old and decrepit, having little vitality with which to resist the malady. It is a record that ought to teach the doctors and planters of Virginia something as to the way in which to deal with such outbreaks. I shall prepare a little account of it for their benefit and publish it in a medical journal. But I never can tell you how greatly I thank you for your help.”

“Please don’t talk in that way,” Dorothy hastily rejoined. “Other people may thank me for things whenever they please, but you never must.”

“But why not, Dorothy?”

“Why, because—well, because you are the Master. I won’t have you thanking me just like other people. It humiliates me. It is like telling me you didn’t expect me to do my duty. No, that isn’t just what I mean. It is like telling me that you think of Dorothy just as you do of other people, or something of that kind. I can’t make out just what I mean, but I will not let you thank me.”

“I think I understand,” he answered. “But at any rate you’ll permit me to tell you, that in my honest judgment as a physician, there would have been many more deaths than there have been, if I had not had you to help me. Your own tireless nursing, and the extraordinary way in which you have made all the negro nurses carry out my orders to the letter, have saved many lives without any possibility of doubt.”

“Then I have really helped?”

“Yes, Dorothy. I cannot make you know how much you have helped—how great an assistance, how great a comfort you have been to me in all this trying time.”

“I am very glad—very glad.”

That was all the answer she could make for tears. It was quite enough.

“Now I’m going to send you home, Dorothy, to get some badly needed rest and sleep, and to bring the color back to your cheeks. I am going home myself too. I need only ride over here twice a day to see that the getting well goes on satisfactorily, and in a week’s time I shall break up the camp entirely, and send the convalescents to their quarters. It will be safe to do so then. In the meantime I want you to think of Christmas. We must make it a red letter day at Wyanoke, to celebrate our victory. We’ll have a ‘dining day,’ as a dinner party is queerly called here in Virginia, with a dance in the evening. I’ll have some musicians up from Richmond. You are to send out the invitations at once, please, and we’ll make this the very gladdest of Christmases.”

“May I take my Mammy home with me?” the girl broke in. “She has been so good to me, you know.”

“Yes, Dorothy, and I wish you would keep her there ‘for all the time,’ as you sometimes say. There’s a comfortable house by the garden you know, and we’ll give her that for her home as long as she lives. You shall pick out one or two of the nicest of the negro girls to wait on her and keep house for her, and make her old age comfortable.”

Dorothy ejaculated a little laugh.

“Mammy would drive them all out of the house in ten seconds,” she said, “and call them ‘dishfaced devils’ and more different kinds of other ugly names than you ever heard of. Old as she is, she’s very strong, and she’ll never let anybody wait on her. She calls the present generation of servants ‘a lot o’ no ’count niggas, dat ain’t fit fer nothin’ but to be plaguesome.’ But you are very good to let me give her the house. Thank you, Cousin Arthur.”

“Oh, Dorothy,” answered Arthur, “I thought you always ‘played fair’ as the children say.”

“Why, what have I done?” the girl asked almost with distress in her tone.

“Why, you thanked me, after forbidding me to thank you for an immeasurably greater service.”

“Oh, but that’s different,” she replied. “You are the Master. I am only a woman.”

“Dorothy,” said Arthur seriously, “don’t you know I think there is nothing in the world better or nobler than a woman?”

“That’s because you are a man and don’t know,” she answered out of a wisdom so superior that it would not argue the point.

During the next week Arthur found time in which to prepare and send off for publication a helpful article on “The Plantation Treatment of Typhoid Epidemics.” He also found time in which to ride over to Branton and hold a prolonged conference with Edmonia Bannister. Before a hickory wood fire in the great drawing room they went over all considerations bearing upon Arthur’s affairs and plans and possibilities.

“This is the visitation you long ago threatened me with,” said Edmonia. “You said you would come when the stress of the fever should be over, and you told me you had some plan in your mind. Tell me what it was.”

“Oh, your past tense is correct there; that was before you wrote to me about Dorothy. Your letter put an end to that scheme at once.”

“Did it? I’m very glad.”

“But why? You don’t know what it was that I had in mind.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps I have a shrewd idea as to the general features of your plan. At any rate I’m perfectly sure that it was unworthy of you.”

“Why do you think that, Edmonia? Surely I have not—”

“Oh, yes you have—if you mean that you haven’t deserved to be thought ill of. You have wanted to run away from your duty and your happiness, and it was that sort of thing you had in mind. Otherwise you wouldn’t have needed to plan at all. Besides, you said you didn’t want to have this conversation with me, or to hear about Dorothy till you should be ‘free to act.’ You meant by that ‘free to run away.’ That is why I wrote you about Dorothy.”

“Listen, Edmonia!” said the young man pleadingly. “Don’t think of me as a coward or a shirk! Don’t imagine that I have been altogether selfish even in my thoughts! I did plan to run away, as you call it. But it was not to escape duty—for I didn’t know, then, that I had a duty to do. Or rather I thought that my duty called upon me to ‘run away.’ Will you let me tell you just what I felt and thought, and what the plan was that I had in mind?”

“Surely, Arthur. I did not really think you selfish, and certainly I did not think you cowardly. If I had, I should have taken pains to save Dorothy from you. But tell me the whole story.”

“I will. When we began our conversation in Dorothy’s little porch, I was just beginning to be afraid that I might learn to love her. She had so suddenly matured, somehow. Her womanhood seemed to have come upon her as the sunrise does in the tropics without any premonitory twilight. It was the coming of serious duty upon her, I suppose that wrought the change. At any rate, with the outbreak of the fever, she seemed to take on a new character. Without losing her childlike trustfulness and simplicity, she suddenly became a woman, strong to do and to endure. And her beauty came too, so that I caught myself thinking of her when I ought to have been thinking of something else.”

“Oh, yes,” Edmonia broke in. “I know all that and sympathize with it. You remember I found it all out before you did.”

“Yes, I was coming to that. Perhaps I wandered from my story a bit—”

“You did, of course. But under the circumstances I forgive you. Go on.”

“Well, when you told me it was too late for me to save myself from loving Dorothy, I knew you were right, though I had not suspected it before. I hoped, however, that it might not be too late to save Dorothy from myself. I did not want to lure her to a life that was sure to bring much of trial and hard work and sympathetic suffering to her.”

“But why not? Isn’t such a life, with the man she loves, very greatly the happiest one she could lead? Have you studied her character to so little purpose as to imagine—”

“No, no, no!” he broke in. “I saw all that when I thought the matter out, after you left the camp that day. But at first I didn’t see it, and I didn’t want Dorothy sacrificed—especially to me.”

“No woman is sacrificed when she is permitted to share the work, the purposes, the aspirations of the man she loves. How men do misjudge women and misunderstand them! It is not ease, or wealth, or luxury that makes a woman happy—for many a woman is wretched with all these—it is love, and love never does its work so perfectly in a woman’s soul as when it demands sacrifice at her hands.”

Edmonia said this oracularly, as she sat staring into the fire. Arthur wondered where she had learned this truth, seeing that love had never come to her either to offer its rewards or to demand sacrifice at her hands. She caught his look and was instantly on her guard lest his shrewd gift of observation should penetrate her secret.

“You wonder how I know all this, Arthur,” she quickly added. “I see the question in your face. For answer I need only remind you that I am a woman, and a woman’s intuitions sometimes serve her as well as experience might. Go on, and tell me what it was you planned before I wrote you concerning Dorothy’s case. What was the particular excuse you invented at that time for running away?”

“It is of no consequence now, but I don’t mind telling you. I conceived the notion of freeing myself from the obligations that tie me here in Virginia by giving Wyanoke and all that pertains to it to Dorothy.”

“I almost wish you had proposed that to Dorothy. I should have been an interested witness of the scorn and anger which she would have visited upon your poor foolish head. It would have taken you five years to undo that mistake. But those five years would have been years of suffering to Dorothy; so on the whole I’m glad you didn’t make the suggestion. What spasm of returning reason restrained you from that crowning folly?”

“Your letter, of course. When you told me that those who had assumed the rôle of Special Providence to Dorothy had planned to marry her to that young Jackanapes—”

“Don’t call him contemptuous names, Arthur. He doesn’t need them as a label, and it only ruffles your temper. Go on with what you were saying.”

“Well, of course, you see how the case stood. Even if I had not cared for Dorothy in any but a friendly way, I should have felt it to be the very highest duty of my life to save her from this hideous thing. I decided instantly that whatever else might happen I would save Dorothy from this fate. So I have worked out a new plan, and I want you to help me carry it out.”

“Go on. You know you may count upon me.”