Part 12

“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

_W_hen 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.”