Part 2

Advancing to the porch, Arthur rapped thrice with the stick that he carried. That was because he had passed the major part of his life elsewhere than in Virginia. If such had not been the case he would have interpreted the meaning of the broad open doors aright, and would have walked in without any knocking at all.

As it was, Johnny, the “head dining room servant,” as he was called in Virginia--the butler, as he would have been called elsewhere--heard the unaccustomed sound of knocking, and went to the door to discover what it might mean. To him Arthur handed a visiting card, and said simply: “Your Miss Polly.”

The comely and intelligent serving man was puzzled by the card. He had not the slightest notion of its use or purpose. In his bewilderment he decided that the only thing to be done with it was to take it to his “Miss Polly,” which, of course, was precisely what Arthur Brent desired him to do. There was probably not another visiting card in all that country side--for the Virginians of that time used few formalities, and very simple ones in their social intercourse. They went to visit their friends, not to “call” upon them. Pasteboard politeness was a factor wholly unknown in their lives.

Miss Polly happened to be at that moment in the garden directing old Michael,--the most obstinately obstructive and wilful of gardeners,--to do something to the peas that he was resolutely determined not to do, and to leave something undone to the tomatoes which he was bent upon doing. On receipt of the card, she left Michael to his own devices, and almost hurried to the house. “Almost hurried,” I say, for Miss Polly was much too stately and dignified a person to quicken a footstep upon any occasion.

She was “Miss Polly” to the negro servants. To everybody else she was “Cousin Polly,” or “Aunt Polly,” and she had been that from the period described by the old law writers as “the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” How old she was, nobody knew. She looked elderly in a comfortable, vigorous way. Gray hair was at that time mistakenly regarded as a reproach to women--a sign of advancing age which must be concealed at all costs. Therefore Aunt Polly’s white locks were kept closely shaven, and covered with a richly brown wig. For the rest, she was a plump person of large proportions, though not in the least corpulent. Her dignity was such as became her age and her lineage--which latter was of the very best. She knew her own value, and respected, without aggressively asserting it. She had never been married--unquestionably for reasons of her own--but her single state had brought with it no trace or tinge of bitterness, no suggestion of discontent. She was, and had always been, a woman in perfect health of mind and body, and the fact was apparent to all who came into her comfortable presence.

She had a small but sufficient income of her own, but, being an “unattached female”--as the phrase went at a time when people were too polite to name a woman an “old maid,”--she had lived since early womanhood at Wyanoke; and since the late bachelor owner of the estate, Arthur Brent’s uncle, had come into the inheritance, she had been mistress of the mansion, ruling there with an iron rod of perfect cleanliness and scrupulous neatness, according to housekeeping standards from which she would abate no jot or tittle upon any conceivable account. Fortunately for her servitors, there were about seven of them to every one that was reasonably necessary.

She was a woman of high intelligence and of a pronounced wit,--a wit that sometimes took humorous liberties with the proprieties, to the embarrassment of sensitive young people. She was well read and well informed, but she never did believe that the world was round, her argument being that if such were the case she would be standing on her head half the time. She also refused to believe in railroads. She was confident that “the Yankees” had built railroads through Virginia, with a far seeing purpose of overrunning and conquering that state and possessing themselves of its plantations. Finally, she regarded Virginia as the only state or country in the world in which a person of taste and discretion could consent to be born. Her attitude toward all dwellers beyond the borders of Virginia, closely resembled that of the Greeks toward those whom they self assertively classed as “the barbarians.” How far she really cherished these views, or how far it was merely her humor to assert them, nobody ever found out. To all this she added the sweetest temper and the most unselfish devotion to those about her, that it is possible to imagine. She was very distantly akin to Arthur, if indeed she was akin to him at all. But in his childhood he had learned to call her “Aunt Polly,” and during that year of his boyhood which he had spent at Wyanoke, he had known her by no other title. So when she came through the rear doors to meet him in the great hall which ran through the house from front to rear, he advanced eagerly and lovingly to greet her as “Aunt Polly.”

The first welcome over, Aunt Polly became deeply concerned over the fact that Arthur Brent had walked the five or six miles that lay between the Court House and Wyanoke.

“Why didn’t you get a horse, Arthur, or better still why didn’t you send me word that you were coming? I would have sent the carriage for you.”

“Which one, Aunt Polly?”

“Why, there’s only one, of course.”

“Why, I was credibly informed this morning that there were seventeen carriages here besides the barouche and the carryall.”

“Who could have told you such a thing as that? And then to think of anybody accusing Wyanoke of a ‘carryall!’”

“How do you mean, Aunt Polly?”

“Why, no _gentleman_ keeps a carryall. I believe Moses the storekeeper at the Court House has one, but then he has nine children and needs it. Besides he doesn’t count.”

“Why not, Aunt Polly? Isn’t he a man like the rest of us?”

“A man? Yes, but like the rest of us--no. He isn’t a gentleman.”

“Does he misbehave very grossly?”

“Oh, no. He is an excellent man I believe, and his children are as pretty as angels; but, Arthur, he _keeps a store_.”

Aunt Polly laid a stress upon the final phrase as if that settled the matter beyond even the possibility of further discussion.

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” asked the young man with a smile. “In Virginia no man keeps a carryall unless he is sufficiently depraved to keep a store also. But I wonder why Dick told me we had a carryall at Wyanoke besides the seventeen carriages.”

“Oh, you saw Dick, then? Why didn’t you take his horse and make him get you a saddle somewhere? By the way, Dick had an adventure this morning. Out by the Garland gate he was waylaid by a man dressed all in white ‘jes’ like a ghos’,’ Dick says, with a sword and two pistols. The fellow tried to take the mail bag away from him, but Dick, who is quick-witted, struck him suddenly, made his horse jump the gate, and galloped away.”

“Aunt Polly,” said the young man with a quizzical look on his face, “would you mind sending for Dick to come to me? I very much want to hear his story at first hands, for now that I am to be master of Wyanoke, I don’t intend to tolerate footpads and mail robbers in the neighborhood. Please send for Dick. I want to talk with him.”

Aunt Polly sent, but Dick was nowhere to be found for a time. When at last he was discovered in a fodder loft, and dragged unwillingly into his new master’s presence, the look of consternation on his face was so pitiable that Arthur Brent decided not to torture him quite so severely as he had intended.

“Dick,” he said, “I want you to get me some cherries, will you?”

“‘Cou’se I will, Mahstah,” answered the boy, eagerly and turning to escape.

“Wait a minute, Dick. I want you to bring me the cherries on a china plate, and give me one of the gold forks to eat them with. Then go to the carriage-house and have all seventeen of my carriages brought up here for me to look at. Tell the hostlers to send me one or two hundred of the horses, too. There! Go and do as I tell you.”

“What on earth do you mean, Arthur?” asked Aunt Polly, who never had quite understood the whimsical ways of the young man. “I tell you there is only one carriage--”

“Never mind, Aunt Polly. Dick understands me. He and I had an interview out there by the Garland gate this morning. Mail robbers will not trouble him again, I fancy, now that his ‘Yankee Master’ is ‘in position,’ as he puts it. But please, Aunt Polly, send some one with a wagon to the Court House after my trunks.”

III

DR. ARTHUR BRENT

_A_rthur Brent had been born at Wyanoke, twenty seven years or so before the time of our story. His father, one of a pair of brothers, was a man imbued with the convictions of the Revolutionary period--the convictions that prompted the Virginians of that time to regard slavery as an inherited curse to be got rid of in the speediest possible way compatible with the public welfare. There were still many such Virginians at that time. They were men who knew the history of their state and respected the teachings of the fathers. They remembered how earnestly Thomas Jefferson had insisted upon writing into Virginia’s deed of cession of the North West Territory, a clause forever prohibiting slavery in all the fair “Ohio Country”--now constituting Indiana, Illinois and the other great states of the Middle West. They held in honor, as their fathers before them had done, the memory of Chancellor George Wythe, who had well-nigh impoverished himself in freeing the negroes he had inherited and giving them a little start in the world. They were the men to whom Henry Clay made confident appeal in that effort to secure the gradual extirpation of the system which was the first and was repeated as very nearly the last of his labors of statesmanship.

These men had no sympathy or tolerance for “abolitionist” movements. They desired and intended that slavery should cease, and many of them impoverished themselves in their efforts to be personally rid of it. But they resented as an impertinence every suggestion of interference with it on the part of the national government, or on the part of the dwellers in other states.

For these men accepted, as fully as the men of Massachusetts once did, the doctrine that every state was sovereign except in so far as it had delegated certain functions of sovereignty to the general government. They held it to be the absolute right of each state to regulate its domestic affairs in its own way, and they were ready to resent and resist all attempts at outside interference with their state’s institutions, precisely as they would have resisted and resented the interference of anybody with the ordering of their personal households.

Arthur Brent’s father, Brandon Brent, was a man of this type. Upon coming of age and soon afterwards marrying, he determined, as he formulated his thought, to “set himself free.” When Arthur was born he became more resolute than ever in this purpose, under the added stimulus of affection for his child. “The system” he said to his wife, “is hurtful to young white men, I do not intend that Arthur shall grow up in the midst of it.”

So he sold to his brother his half interest in the four or five thousand acres which constituted Wyanoke plantation, and with the proceeds removed those of the negroes who had fallen to his share to little farms which he had bought for them in Indiana.

This left him with a wife, a son, and a few hundred dollars with which to begin life anew. He went West and engaged in the practice of the law. He literally “grew up with the country.” He won sufficient distinction to represent his district in Congress for several successive terms, and to leave behind him when he died a sweetly savored name for all the higher virtues of honorable manhood.

He left to his son also, a fair patrimony, the fruit of his personal labors in his profession, and of the growth of the western country in which he lived.

At the age of fifteen, the boy had been sent to pass a delightful year at Wyanoke, while fitting himself for college under the care of the same tutor who had personally trained the father, and whose influence had been so good that the father invoked it for his son in his turn. The old schoolmaster had long since given up his school, but when Brandon Brent had written to him a letter, attributing to his influence and teaching all that was best in his own life’s success, and begging him to crown his useful life’s labors with a like service to this his boy, he had given up his ease and undertaken the task.

Arthur had finished his college course, and was just beginning, with extraordinary enthusiasm, his study of medicine when his father died, leaving him alone in the world; for the good mother had passed away while the boy was yet a mere child.

After his father’s death, Arthur found many business affairs to arrange. Attention to these seriously distracted him, greatly to his annoyance, for he had become an enthusiast for scientific acquirement, and grudged every moment of time that affairs occupied to the neglect of his studies. In this mood of irritation with business details, the young man decided to convert the whole of his inheritance into cash and to invest the proceeds in annuities. “I shall never marry,” he told himself. “I shall devote my whole life to science. I shall need only a moderate income to provide for my wants, but that income must come to me without the distraction of mind incident to the earning of it. I must be completely a free man--free to live my own life and pursue my own purposes.”

So he invested all that he had in American and English annuity companies, and when that business was completed, he found himself secure in an income, not by any means large but quite sufficient for all his needs, and assured to him for all the years that he might live. “I shall leave nothing behind me when I die,” he reflected, “but I shall have nobody to provide for, and so this is altogether best.”

Then he set himself to work in almost terrible earnest. He lived in the laboratories, the hospitals, the clinics and the libraries. When his degree as a physician was granted his knowledge of science, quite outside the ordinary range of medical study was deemed extraordinary by his professors. A place of honor in one of the great medical colleges was offered to him, but he declined it, and went to Germany and France instead. He had fairly well mastered the languages of those two countries, and he was minded now to go thither for instruction, under the great masters in biology and chemistry and physics.

Two years later--and four years before the beginning of this story, there came to Arthur Brent an opportunity of heroic service which he promptly embraced. There broke out, in Norfolk, in his native state, in the year 1855, such an epidemic of yellow fever as had rarely been known anywhere before, and it found a population peculiarly susceptible to the subtle poison of the scourge.

Facing the fact that he was in no way immune, the young physician abandoned the work he had returned from Paris to New York to do, and went at once to the post of danger as a volunteer for medical service. Those whose memories stretch back to that terrible year of 1855, remember the terms in which Virginia and all the country echoed the praises of Dr. Arthur Brent, the plaudits that everywhere greeted his heroic devotion. The newspapers day by day were filled with despatches telling with what tireless devotion this mere boy--he was scarcely more than twenty three years of age--was toiling night and day at his self appointed task, and how beneficent his work was proving to be. The same newspapers told with scorching scorn of physicians and clergymen--a very few of either profession, but still a few--who had quitted their posts in panic fear and run away from the danger. Day by day the readers of the newspapers eagerly scanned the despatches, anxious chiefly to learn that the young hero had not fallen a victim to his own compassionate enthusiasm for the relief of the stricken.

Dr. Arthur Brent knew nothing of all this at the time. His days and nights were too fully occupied with his perilous work for him even to glance at a newspaper. He was himself stricken at last, but not until the last, not until that grand old Virginian, Henry A. Wise had converted his Accomac plantation into a relief camp and, arming his negroes for its defence against a panic stricken public, had robbed the scourge of its terrors by drawing from the city all those whose presence there could afford opportunity for its spread.

Dr. Arthur Brent was among the very last of those attacked by the scourge, and it was to give that young hero a meagre chance for life that Henry A. Wise went in person to Norfolk and brought the physician away to his own plantation home, in armed and resolute defiance alike of quarantine restrictions and of the protests of an angry and frightened mob.

Such in brief had been the life story of Arthur Brent. On his recovery from a terribly severe attack of the fever, he had gone again to Europe, not this time for scientific study, but for the purpose of restoring his shattered constitution through rest upon a Swiss mountain side. After a year of upbuilding idleness, he had returned to New York with his health completely restored.

There he had taken an inexpensive apartment, and resumed his work of scientific investigation upon lines which he had thought out during his long sojourn in Switzerland.

Three years later there came to him news that his uncle at Wyanoke was dead, and that the family estate had become his own as the only next of kin. It pleased Arthur’s sense of humor to think of a failure of “kin” in Virginia, where, as he well remembered, pretty nearly everybody he had met in boyhood had been his cousin.

But the news that he was sole heir to the family estate was not altogether agreeable to the young man. “It will involve me in affairs again,” he said to himself, “and that is what I meant should never happen to me. There is a debt on the estate, of course. I never heard of a Virginia estate without that adornment. Then there are the negroes, whose welfare is in my charge. Heaven knows I do not want them or their value. But obviously they and the debt saddle me with a duty which I cannot escape. I suppose I must go to Wyanoke. It is very provoking, just as I have made all my arrangements to study the problem of sewer gas poisoning with a reasonable hope of solving it this summer!”

He thought long and earnestly before deciding what course to pursue. On the one hand he felt that his highest duty in life was to science as a servant of humanity. He realized, as few men do, how great a beneficence the discovery of a scientific fact may be to all mankind. “And there are so few men,” he said to himself, “who are free as I am to pursue investigations untrammeled by other things--the care of a family, the ordering of a household, the education of children, the earning of a living! If I could have this summer free, I believe I could find out how to deal with sewer gas, and that would save thousands of lives and immeasurable suffering! And there are my other investigations that are not less pressing in their importance. Why should I have to give up my work, for which I have the equipment of a thorough training, a sufficient income, youth, high health, and last but not least, enthusiasm?”

He did not add, as a less modest man might, that he had earned a reputation which commanded not only the attention but the willing assistance of his scientific brethren in his work, that all laboratories were open to him, that all men of science were ready to respond to his requests for the assistance of their personal observation and experience, that the columns of all scientific journals were freely his to use in setting forth his conclusions and the facts upon which they rested.

“I wish I could put the whole thing into the hands of an agent, and bid him sell out the estate, pay off the debts and send me the remainder of the proceeds, with which to endow a chair of research in some scientific school! But that would mean selling the negroes, and I’ll never do that. I wish I could set them all free and rid myself of responsibility for them. But I cannot do that unless I can get enough money out of the estate to buy little farms for them as my father did with his negroes. I mustn’t condemn them to starvation and call it freedom. I wish I knew what the debt is, and how much the land will bring. Then I could plan what to do. But as I do not know anything of the kind, I simply must go to Wyanoke and study the problem as it is. It will take all summer and perhaps longer. But there is nothing else for it.”

That is how it came about that Dr. Arthur Brent sat in the great hallway at Wyanoke, talking with Aunt Polly, when Dorothy South returned, accompanied by her hounds.

IV

DR. BRENT IS PUZZLED

_D_orothy came up to the front gate at a light gallop. Disdaining the assistance of the horse block, she nimbly sprang from the saddle to the ground and called to her mare “Stand, Chestnut!”

Then she gathered up the excessively long riding skirt which the Amazons of that time always wore on horseback, and walked up the pathway to the door, leaving the horse to await the coming of a stable boy. Arthur could not help observing and admiring the fact that she walked with marked dignity and grace even in a riding skirt--a thing so exceedingly difficult to do that not one woman in a score could accomplish it even with conscious effort. Yet this mere girl did it, manifestly without either effort or consciousness. As an accomplished anatomist Dr. Brent knew why. “That girl has grown up,” he said to himself, “in as perfect a freedom as those locust trees out there, enjoy. She is as straight as the straightest of them, and she has perfect use of all her muscles. I wonder who she is, and why she gives orders here at Wyanoke quite as if she belonged to the place, or the place belonged to her.”

This last thought was suggested by the fact that just before mounting the two steps that led to the porch, Dorothy had whistled through her fingers and said to the negro man who answered her call:--“Take the hounds to the kennels, and fasten them in. Turn the setters out.”

But the young man had little time for wondering. The girl came into the hall, and, as Aunt Polly had gone to order a little “snack,” she introduced herself.

“You are Dr. Brent, I think? Yes? well, I’m Dorothy South. Let me bid you welcome as the new master of Wyanoke.”

With that she shook hands in a fashion that was quite child-like, and tripped away up the stairs.

Arthur Brent found himself greatly interested in the girl. She was hardly a woman, and yet she was scarcely to be classed as a child. In her manner as well as in her appearance she seemed a sort of compromise between the two. She was certainly not pretty, yet Arthur’s quick scrutiny informed him that in a year or two she was going to be beautiful. It only needed a little further ripening of her womanhood to work that change. But as one cannot very well fall in love with a woman who is yet to be, Arthur Brent felt no suggestion of other sentiment than one of pleased admiration for the girl, mingled with respect for her queenly premature dignity. He observed, however, that her hair was nut brown and of luxuriant growth, her complexion, fair and clear in spite of a pronounced tan, and her eyes large, deep blue and finely overarched by their dark brows.

Before he had time to think further concerning her, Aunt Polly returned and asked him to “snack.”

“Dorothy will be down presently,” she said. “She’s quick at changing her costume.”