Part 16

"No," the young woman answered; "I prefer that you should remain. I, at least, have nothing to conceal, and I do not seek, as you do, to get my father's ear in private. Besides, I have some things to say to you, and I prefer to say them in my father's presence. I am mistress of The Oaks. Hitherto, out of a respect which you have not justified, I have permitted you to exercise certain functions that belong to me. I shall do so no longer. I have given directions that hereafter I will make up the outgoing mail bag and open the incoming one."

"But, my dear child--"

"I am not a child, Aunt Betsy. You have made some grievous mistakes in forgetfulness of that fact. It shall not be forgotten again while I remain mistress of this plantation. What was it you were going to say, Aunt Betsy? I beg pardon for interrupting, but it seemed necessary."

"I was going to ask what the servants will think."

"I do not know what they will think, Aunt Betsy."

"On that point I must appeal to your father," "Aunt Betsy" replied.

"On that point it is _very dangerous for you to appeal_," answered the younger woman, still preserving an extraordinary calm that was at once astonishing and alarming to her aunt, but speaking with a degree of emphasis that suggested something behind the words.

"What do you mean? Explain yourself," said "Aunt Betsy," in that authoritative tone which she had all her life employed in addressing her niece.

"I will explain if you wish," Margaret answered; "but I'd rather spare you the explanation."

"I insist upon knowing what you mean," the elder woman unwisely replied.

"Very well, then; you shall hear. In addition to the wrong you have done me, wrecking my life and placing me in a grievously false position; in addition to the wrong you have done to another, you have been guilty of the crime of robbing the United States mails, Aunt Betsy, and as the minimum penalty of that crime is a long term in prison, I do not think it wise of you to suggest appeals in this case. It will be better, I think, to accept my decision as final."

The old lady rose in wrath, alarm, indignation and all the other emotions of an exciting sort, and demanded to know what her niece meant by such an accusation of infamy. At the same time Colonel Conway exclaimed:

"Oh, daughter, daughter, you do not mean what you say. Take it back! You are excited. You are beside yourself!"

"I am not in the least excited," the young woman answered. "I did not wish or intend to mention that aspect of the matter, but Aunt Betsy insisted upon it. I have no desire to emphasize it or to insist upon it, if only my authority as mistress at The Oaks is properly recognized. As your daughter, Father, I am entitled to that dignity which you yourself have been fond of insisting upon; and as your daughter I intend to exercise the authority and maintain the dignity of that position so long as you permit me to hold it. When you cease to permit that, I shall leave The Oaks and go to my own plantation of Tye, which my mother left me. You must remember that I am a grown woman of twenty-one, and that I am not a dependent upon anybody."

"Now, daughter," interrupted Colonel Conway with affection, "you are talking nonsense. You know that you are mistress of The Oaks, and--"

"That is quite all I am insisting upon. As mistress of The Oaks I do not intend to have my authority questioned or my affairs interfered with by anybody. I'm sorry I have this occasion to assert myself, but the circumstances are not of my making."

"But what do you mean, you--you--you ill-regulated girl,--in charging me with a crime?" almost shrieked the elder woman as she confronted her niece in an attitude that suggested a desire to shake her. "What do you mean? What do you mean?"

"You'd better let that phase of the affair drop, Aunt Betsy," answered the girl with a calm that additionally exasperated her aunt.

"No, I will not let it drop. You have uttered an accusation that I cannot and will not let pass. You must say what you meant by it."

"I will say it if you insist," answered Margaret, still preserving her exasperating calm.

"I do insist. I will not rest under such an accusation. Go on! Tell me what you meant."

"I will," said Margaret. "You remember that five years ago an attempt was made to open our mail bag in some political interest. Father appealed to the Government for its protection, and from that day to this it has gone back and forth under a United States mail lock. In tampering with its contents--in abstracting from it letters addressed to me, you--I don't like to put the matter into plain words. Let me say instead that you violated the law which renders the United States mail sacred. I'm sorry I have had to call your attention to such a matter, but you forced the necessity upon me."

By this time it was necessary to summon maids and get "Aunt Betsy" back to bed again,--genuinely ill this time.

It was not until she was made as comfortable as circumstances permitted, that Colonel Conway and his daughter returned to the library and resumed their conversation.

"Now, daughter," said the old soldier, "I am ready to do anything to right this wrong--anything, of course, that will not compromise your aunt."

"Father," responded the girl with a world of tenderness in her voice, "you ought not to have anything to do in the matter. It is Aunt Betsy who has wrought all the mischief. She has deceived you; she has deceived me; she has deceived Mr. Westover. It should be her duty, not yours, to undo the wrong she has done."

"But, my dear daughter, how can she? She is a woman."

"I know that, Father, and I know our Virginian view of such things. But it is all wrong. You men of Virginia have granted to us women a license that ought not to be. If one of us utters a slander, you hold yourselves responsible for it even unto death. If one of us lies--it isn't a ladylike term, I know, but it is what I mean--if one of us lies you hold yourselves bound to maintain the lie and answer for it, even at the pistol's point. You Virginia gentlemen insist upon only one point of honor for women. So long as we observe that, we may lie and cheat and slander at will and you sustain us in it. It is all wrong. If a woman does mischief, she should herself atone for it. In this case it is Aunt Betsy who has wrought the wrong and it is Aunt Betsy who should undo it."

"But how can she, dear?"

"By going to Mr. Westover, or writing to him, and saying frankly: 'I robbed the post bag of your letters to Margaret and her letters to you.' That is what a brave man would do. Why should not a brave woman do the same?"

"But, daughter, your aunt is a lady and excessively sensitive."

"She forgot to be a lady when she did this infamous thing, and her sensitiveness is mainly a pretence assumed to play upon your chivalry and to deceive you and others. If she were honest in mind, a real, genuine, conscientious sensitiveness would prompt her to make precisely the reparation I have suggested. As she is utterly dishonest and dishonorable instead, I quite understand that no force, moral or physical, could ever compel her to an act of reparation like that."

"My dear, you are very hard upon your poor old aunt."

"Not at all, Father. Truth is as much an obligation of women as of men. So is courage of the moral sort. But it is idle to expect that after generations in which you gentlemen of Virginia have excused us from all obligations except that of chastity. You have assumed our protection, and you have met that obligation bravely; but--well, I have thought much on that subject, and what I have thought is of no consequence. What are you going to do by way of righting the wrong Aunt Betsy has done, as you excuse her from the obligation of herself righting it?"

"I'll do anything you suggest--anything that will not compromise your aunt. You see I must protect her."

"I understand. The one who has wrought the wrong must be spared the consequences. The victims of it must bear them. I have nothing whatever to suggest, Father."

And with that she advanced, kissed him tenderly, said:

"Poor, dear old Dad!" and quietly left the room.

Then it was that Colonel Conway set himself to satisfy his daughter's conscience and his own by writing a letter to Boyd Westover. Then it was that, after repeated failures, he compromised with his conscience by writing to Dr. Carley Farnsworth instead.

Then it was that under Dr. Carley Farnsworth's instructions Millicent Danvers sent Colonel Conway and Margaret to bed.

"Aunt Betsy" was already sleeping the sleep of one who feels that she has adroitly escaped uncomfortable consequences.

XXXI

A SUNSET INTERVIEW

The days were growing short, and so when Jack Towns approached The Oaks that afternoon, the sun was setting and Millicent was watching it from a little hilltop just beyond the orchard and perhaps half a mile from the house.

Jack came upon her there and was fascinated with the picture she presented. With her head bare and her hair in some disorder as a result of facing the west wind too fearlessly, she wore upon her shoulders a voluminous mass of fleecy knitted work known in those days as a "nubia," or, by those who preferred good English to very bad dog-Latin, a "cloud." As he approached from the east he saw her figure silhouetted against the glowing western sky, and the grace of it fascinated him. It was like a great picture--suggesting one of Turner's interpretations of Venice, with an absorbing human interest added to the glow and glory of it.

For to Jack Towns the girl who turned to greet him as he rode up was a very absorbing human interest indeed. The hour he had passed in converse with her on the day before, had left him with a glamor upon him which even his jaunty indifference to permanent impressions could not dismiss. He had been moved to make this special visit to The Oaks by an irresistible desire to see more of a young woman whose superiority of mind and character was strongly impressed upon him, and whose very peculiarities--mainly due to differences of environment and education--were strangely appealing to his imagination.

Upon approaching her there upon the little, sun illumined hilltop, he dismounted, and, with bridle rein over his arm, joined her in admiration of the glowing sunset.

After the first greetings were over she said:

"Do you know, Mr. Towns, I think that is where your chivalry comes from?" And as she said it, she waved her hand toward the horizon with its gold and purple, intermingled with pinks and blues and exquisite greens that the dyer's art has never matched.

"I mean," she added without waiting to be asked for an explanation, "that you Virginians are inspired with gentleness and chivalry by the quality of the climate in which you live, and that your sunsets give color to your imaginings of courage, optimism, and high endeavor."

"I doff my hat in acknowledgement of the double compliment," he said, "to our climate and to our manhood. But surely fine sunsets are not our exclusive possession. You must have such at the North?"

"Sometimes--not often. They are so rare indeed that we make note of them and recall them afterwards as pleasant memories."

"But isn't that because you live in a large city where the vapors of industry cloud the sky and shut out nature's displays?"

"I do not live in a large city, Mr. Towns, except for the two or three worst months of the year, and not always even then. I live on the 'blue hills of Milton.' My father has a country place there, and since he has grown old enough to relax a little in his business enterprises, we live there almost all the year round. So you see I know our climate quite irrespective of the factory chimneys and their fumes. The sunset is dying out. I don't like to see the death of beauty or grandeur or glory of any kind. Let's turn our faces toward the house."

As they turned Jack Towns in his own mind formulated his impressions in this wise:

"Here is a young woman who can think for herself and without any regard whatever for the conventions of thought; she is inspired with an appreciation of truth and beauty, which is only another way of saying that she is a poet in her soul--thank God she is not a poet in the magazines, for that would be dreadful. She has common sense, too, in an uncommon abundance. Jack Towns, you are falling in love in a way you never dreamed of before, and the fact doesn't alarm you in the least."

As his meditations kept him silent for a longer time than is usual when youth and beauty walk together in the gloaming, Millicent was the first to speak.

"I wish you could know our 'blue hills of Milton.' They have some attractions of their own."

"They certainly have," he answered. "I know them--at least in a small way."

"Why, how did that come about?" she asked in surprise. "I understood you to say you were never in Boston but once."

"'And that same is thrue for you,' as my Irish office attendant would say. I was never in Boston until a few weeks ago, when I went thither to arrange some financial affairs for a client of mine"--he did not mention Westover's name. "I had some negotiations with a banking firm there, and the head of the establishment was exceedingly courteous to me. He took me to his country place to spend the Sunday. By a curious coincidence, his surname is the same as yours--Danvers. He's the head of the banking house of Danvers, Appleton and Wentworth. I wonder if by any chance he's a relative of yours. At any rate he deserves to be. For a more courtly gentleman I have never met. He's the sort of educated, refined, polished, considerate person that only three States in this Union produce, so far as I have been able to observe."

"Which are the three States, please,--that is to say, if you are free to designate them?"

"Massachusetts, Virginia, and South Carolina. Mind, I don't say that such gentlemen are not found in other States. It is only that those of them whom I have personally met have happened to be sons of one or other of the three States mentioned."

"I suppose there is a reason for that," answered Millicent.

"What is it?" he inquired in answer.

"They are the three oldest commonwealths," she answered, "and the three most conservative. You have a saying here in Virginia--a true saying, I think--that 'it takes three generations to make a gentleman.' The three States you have named have lived their own lives for a good many more than three generations, and so they have had time to make gentlemen. Still--"

She did not continue her sentence, till Towns urged her to do so. Then she said:

"I was going to say that about the most perfect gentleman I ever met was Jake Greenfield, a Vermonter, without education beyond what he called the 'rujimenteries,' whom I met in the Rocky Mountains."

"Tell me about him," implored Jack, saying nothing of his own acquaintance with Jake, who had been his companion and shrewd adviser during his stay in the Rocky Mountains in Boyd Westover's interest. "Tell me about him."

"I will," she answered. "I am always pleased to celebrate his virtues. Jake is ignorant, unfamiliar with the ways of society, and wholly unformed as to his manners, but he is instinctively a gentleman. He habitually eats with his knife--a dirk-like thing that he carries in his belt. He has no hesitation about sitting at table and picking his teeth with a fork. It never occurs to him to apologize for lighting his pipe at table or quitting the company before the others have done. None of the conventions of civilized life have dawned upon his intelligence as matters worthy of attention. When I knew him, if a single pie sat before him he would carefully count noses and divide it equally; but if the table were well dotted with pies he would seize upon the one nearest him and devour it from his hand without enlisting the services of knife or fork in aid of the process.

"I met him in the Rocky Mountains where my father had some mining interests, and I was a good deal distressed and disgusted by his lack of manners until I came to know the real man who lived under so rough an exterior."

"How did that come about? Tell me, please," said Jack Towns as he handed his companion up the two or three steps that led to the porch.

"It was a rather thrilling experience," she answered, "at least in its beginning. I was only a girl then of eighteen or nineteen. I had gone to the Rockies with my father for the sake of 'roughing it,' as they say out there, and enjoying the out-of-door life. I was in the habit of riding alone, anywhere I pleased, for the region was a wilderness and nobody lived in it except a few surface miners. One day I rode away till I came to a little stream, a few inches deep, which was crossed by a ford. The road to and from the stream had been cut by nature or by man, through bluff banks, twenty feet high. I crossed the stream, scarcely wetting the fetlocks of my horse. I rode up through the cut on the other side to the high ground above, and thence on through a delightfully wild region, until presently it began to rain in that sudden and torrential way that belongs to the Rocky Mountains. I turned my horse about and trotted him somewhat hurriedly toward the ford I had crossed. When I got there I found the trickling little brook swollen to a mountain torrent, but I did not recognize the change as a matter of consequence. I saw that the water had risen, but to me that meant only that where I had had to make my horse wade fetlock deep before, I must make him wade knee deep now. I pushed him into the stream and almost instantly he was swept from his footing. The depth required swimming, and the onrush of the waters was so great that swimming across the stream was impossible. The horse made a gallant struggle to reach the other side within the roadway space, but he was swept away down stream. I was afloat on his back, imprisoned as it were between two perpendicular bluffs that offered no point of possible landing or rescue.

"Just as I fully realized my situation Jake Greenfield, mounted upon a strong horse, appeared on the bank above.

"'Hold on for your life!' he cried to me, 'an' I'll be with you in half a minute.' With that he turned his horse's head and rode away for thirty or forty paces. Then, suddenly turning about, he rode straight toward the bluff, digging spurs into his horse's flanks at every step, and lashing his rumps with a black snake whip by way of making sure that he should not refuse the leap. A moment later there was a splash and a struggle in the water. Jake Greenfield's horse had leaped into the stream from the bluff twenty feet or more above, with Jake Greenfield on his back, and the two had sunk beneath the flood within a few feet of me as I clung to my horse.

"After a few moments both came to the surface, and the snortings of the horse indicated that his breathing capacity was impaired. By way of sparing him Jake slipped off the saddle and took hold of a stirrup strap as a towing line. But his poor horse's powers were exhausted and he could sustain himself no longer. He gave up the struggle and sank beneath the flood, a martyr to the duty he owed to his master--man. Pardon me, I'm making a long story of this, but the details interest me so."

"They interest me, too," quickly responded her companion. "You cannot narrate them in too minute detail to please me. I could listen all night to the story. Go on, please."

"Well, Jake continued to swim until presently he caught my horse's tail and used it as a means of keeping up with me. Then he said:

"'Turn him to the right! Keep close in shore. There's a little break in the bluffs just ahead, and may be we can make it! More to the right! Closer in shore! There! There's the break. Make him catch bottom there if you can,' You see, Mr. Towns, every word spoken at that time was burned into my memory, and I recall every detail as vividly as if the thing had happened yesterday, or even to-day.

"I succeeded in 'beaching' my horse at that little break in the bank. It was literally like beaching him, for no sooner had he taken three or four steps through shoaling water toward the land, than he lay down, utterly exhausted."

Here the girl stopped in her narrative, as if it had been done. Jack Towns had no mind thus to lose the climax.

"You haven't told me yet in what way Jake proved himself a gentleman."

"That is true," she answered, "and it was that that I set out to tell you. Somehow heroism always appeals to me, and in telling you of Jake's heroism I forgot the other end of the story. I was soaked through, of course, and chilled to the bone. So Jake took me by the arm--he wanted to take me on his back but I wouldn't let him--and hurried me to one of his cabins. You see, as caretaker of the mining lands, he had several cabins, scattered about over them. He told me there was a motherly old squaw there who would look after me, but when we got there the squaw, after the manner of her race, had wandered away somewhere and was not likely to return. Jake built a big fire in the cabin chimney, and then went outside, telling me to 'shuck off them soakin' clothes' and wrap myself up in the quilts that covered the sole orderly bed in the place. As I did so I bethought me of the conventionalities, and when Jake came back to cook my supper and dry my clothes, I protested that I could not consent to stay there alone, and without even a squaw to sustain my dignity. I simply must go to my father, I said, and when he objected that the mountain torrent lay between and was by this time twenty-fold fiercer in its fury than when I had dared it before, I declared that it made no difference; that at all hazards I must make my way to my father's quarters that night. By way of making the matter impersonal and in that way sparing his feelings, I dwelt upon the anxiety my father must feel for me. I think Jake understood my real objection to the situation. Indeed I know he did, for by way of reply he said:

"'Ef you only could rest quiet here an' not worrit overmuch, I've been a-plannin' to go up the mountain to where the stream don't 'mount to nothin', an' cross it an' go down an' tell Mr. Danvers as how you is safe an' sound nevertheless of your bein' tired out an' chilly an' all that. Ef you kin spare me, I'd like to do that.'

"Not at all realizing the fact that that torrent had its beginning twenty miles away and in mountains so precipitous that no man could scale them, I gave eager consent to his proposal, and after preparing such supper as he could for me, the devoted fellow--no, the chivalric gentleman, I mean--set forth in the torrential rain. I learned afterwards that he toiled up the stream for six miles, plunged into it and the darkness, breasted his way across it as it swept him down its resistless current, and with difficulty effected a landing on the opposite side four miles below his starting point. Thence he trudged through the darkness and the rain to my father's quarters, where rescue parties were forming to hunt for me. That's the story. Don't you agree with me that Jake's a gentleman in the true sense of the word?"

"All that is what I should have expected of Jake," answered the young man. "You see I've just returned from that region, and during my stay there I was closely associated with him."

The girl uttered a little exclamation of astonishment; then, with that perfect self-possession which Jack Towns had found to be the most fascinating thing about her, she added: