“Wasn’t it curious? And especially when you reflect how many distinguished people she knows! But she brought me a sheet of very fine paper that afternoon, and said: ‘I don’t want you to write now. I don’t want you to write till our voyage is nearly over. Then I want you to write the truth as to your feeling for me. No matter what it is, I want it to be the truth, so that I may keep it always.’ I took the sheet and wrote on it, ‘I wish you were my mother.’ That was the truth. I do wish every hour that this woman were my mother. But she refused to read what I had written, saying: ‘I will keep it, child, unread until the end of the voyage. Then I’ll give it back to you if you wish, and you shall write again whatever you are prompted to write, be it this or something quite different.’
“Curiously enough, her name is in effect the same as my own, translated into French. She is Madame Le Sud. That means Mrs. South, of course, and when I called her attention to the fact, she said: ‘perhaps that may suggest an additional bond of affection between us.’ ”
Several days passed before Dorothy resumed her writing.
“I haven’t added a line to my letter for two or three days past. That’s because I have been so busy learning to know and love Madame Le Sud. She is the very sweetest and most charming woman I ever saw in my life. She is a trifle less than forty – just old enough I tell her, to be my mother if it had happened in that way. Then she asked me about my real mother and I couldn’t tell her anything. I couldn’t even tell when she died, or what her name had been or anything about her. Isn’t it a strange thing, Cousin Arthur, that nobody has ever told me anything about my mother? It makes me ashamed when I think of it, and still more ashamed when I remember that I never asked anything about her, except once. That time I asked my father some question and he answered only by quickly rising and going out to mount his horse and ride away all alone. That is the way he always did when things distressed him, and as I didn’t want to distress him I never asked him anything more about my mother. But why haven’t I been told about her? Was she bad? And is that why everybody has been so anxious about me, fearing that I might be bad? Even if that were so they ought to have told me about my mother, especially after I began to grow up and know how to stand things bravely. May be when I was too little to understand it was better to keep silent. But when I grew older there was no excuse for not telling me the truth. I don’t think there ever is any excuse for that. The truth is the only thing in the world that a sane person ought to love. I’m only seventeen years old, but I’m old enough to have found out that much, and I don’t think I shall ever quite forgive those who have shut out from me the truth about my mother. You, Cousin Arthur, haven’t had any hand in that. I never asked you, but I know. If you had known about my mother you’d have told me. You could not have helped it. The only limitation to your ability that I ever discovered is your utter inability to tell lies. If you tried to do that you’d make such a wretched failure of the attempt that the truth would come out in spite of you. So, of course, you are as ignorant as I am about my mother.
“But I wanted to tell you about Madame Le Sud. To me she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet most people would call her hideously ugly. Indeed, I’ve heard people on the ship call her that way, for they’re beginning at last to come out on deck and try to get well. She has a terribly disfiguring scar. It begins in her hair and extends down over her left eye which it has put out, and down her cheek by the side of her nose, almost, but not quite to her upper lip. The scar is very ugly, of course, but the woman is altogether beautiful. She impresses me as wonderfully fine and fragile – delicate in the same way that a piece of old Sèvres china is. She plays the violin divinely. She wouldn’t play for me at first, and she has since confessed that she feared to make me afraid to play for her. ‘For I am a professional musician,’ she said, ‘or rather I was, till I got this disfiguring scar. After that how could I present myself to an audience?’ Then she told me how she got the scar. She was celebrating something or other with a company of friends. They drank champagne too freely, and one of them, taking from Madame Le Sud’s mantelpiece a perfume bottle, playfully emptied its contents on her head. It was a perfume bottle, but it held nitric acid which somebody had been using medicinally. In an instant the mischief was done and Madame Le Sud’s career as a famous musician was ended forever.
“When she got well she was very poor, having spent all her money during her illness. A manager came to her and wanted her to go on as ‘the veiled violinist,’ he pretending that she was some woman of distinguished family and high social position whose love of music tempted her to exercise her skill upon the stage, but whose social position forbade her to show her face or reveal her name. He offered her large sums if she would do this, but she refused to make herself a party to such a deception. She secured employment, as she puts it, in a much humbler capacity which enables her to turn her artistic taste to account in earning a living, and it is in connection with this employment that she is now on her way to Paris. She did not tell me what her employment is, and of course I did not ask her. But now that I have learned something of her misfortunes, and have seen how bravely she bears them, I love her better than ever.
“Diana has come upon deck at last, ‘dressed and in her right mind.’ She is very proud of having been ‘seasick jes’ like white folks.’ She so far asserts her authority as to order Edmonia – who is quite herself again – and me to array ourselves in some special gowns of her personal selection for the captain’s dinner today. It is to be a notable affair and Madame Le Sud is to play a violin solo. They asked me to play also, but I refused, till Madame Le Sud asked me to give ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ with her to play second violin. Think of it! This wonderful musical artist volunteering to ‘play second fiddle’ to a novice like me! But she insists upon liking my rendering of the dear old melody and she has taken the trouble to compose a special second part, which, she generously says, ‘will bring out the beauty’ of my performance.
“We expect to make land during tonight, and by day after tomorrow, I’ll mail this letter at Liverpool.”
XXXI
THE VIEWS AND MOODS OF ARTHUR BRENT
W HEN Dorothy had gone Arthur Brent felt a double necessity for diligence in the ordering of plantation affairs. He realized for the first time what he had done in thus sending Dorothy away. For the first time he began to understand his own condition of mind and the extent to which this woman had become a necessity to his life. Quite naturally, too, her absence and the loss of his daily association with her served to depress him, as nothing else had ever done before. The sensation of needing some one was wholly novel to him, and by no means agreeable. “What if I should never have her with me again – never as my Dorothy?” he reflected. “That may very easily happen. In fact I sent her away in order that it might happen, if it would. Her affection for me is still quite that of a child for one much older than herself. Edmonia does not so regard it, but perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps her conviction that Dorothy the woman loves me even more than Dorothy the child ever did, and that her love will survive acquaintance with other and more attractive men, and other and more attractive ways of life, is born only of her eager desire to have that come about. A year’s absence will not make Dorothy forget me or even love me less than she does now. But how much does she love me now, in very truth? May it not happen that when she returns a year hence she will have given her woman’s heart to some other, bringing back to me only the old, child love unchanged? I must be prepared for that at all events. I must school myself to think of it as a probability without the distress of mind it gives me now. And I must be ready, when it happens, to go away from here at once and take up again my life of strenuous endeavor and absorbing study. I mustn’t let this thing ruin me as it might some weakling in character.”
In order that he might be ready thus to leave Virginia when the time should come, rejoicing instead of grieving over Dorothy’s good fortune in finding some fitter life than his to share, Arthur knew that he must this year discharge the last dollar of debt that rested upon the Wyanoke estate. He must be a free man on Dorothy’s return – free to reënter the world of scientific work, free to make and keep himself master of his own mind, as he had always been until this strange thing had come over his life.
He thus set himself two tasks, one of which he might perhaps fulfil by hard work and discreet management. The other promised to be greatly more difficult. He made a very bad beginning at it by sitting up late at night to read and ponder Dorothy’s letters, to question them as to the future, to study every indication of character or impulse, or temporary mood of mind they might give.
With the debt-paying problem he got on much better. He had now a whole year’s accumulated income from his annuity, and he devoted all of it at once to the lightening of this burden. He studied markets as if they had been problems in physics, and guided himself in his planting by the results of these studies. He had sold apples and bacon and sweet potatoes the year before, as we know, with results that encouraged him to go further in the direction of “Yankee farming.” This year he planted large areas in watermelons and other large areas in other edible things that the people of the cities want, but which no south side Virginia planter had ever thought of growing for sale.
He was laughed at while doing all this, and envied when the results of it appeared.
He deliberately implicated Dorothy in these his misdeeds, also, doing on her plantation precisely as he did on his own, so that when late in the autumn he gave account of his stewardship he was able to inform the court, to its astonishment and to that of the entire community, that he had discharged every dollar of debt that had rested upon his ward’s estate. The judge applauded such management of a trust estate, and Arthur Brent’s neighbors wondered. Some of them saw in his success ground of approval of “Yankee farming”; all of them conceived a new respect for the ability of a man who had thus, in so brief a time, freed two old estates from the hereditary debts that had been accumulating for slow generations.
Arthur had been additionally spurred and stimulated to the accomplishment of this end, by the forebodings of evil in connection with national politics which had gravely haunted him throughout the year.
In May the Republican party had nominated Mr. Lincoln, and about the same time the Democrats made his election a practical certainty. There was clearly a heavy majority of the people opposed to his election, but the division of that opposition into three hostile camps with three rival candidates, rendered Republican success a foregone conclusion. By some at least of the politicians the division was deliberately intended to produce that result, while the great mass of the people opposed to Mr. Lincoln and seriously fearing the consequences of his election, deeply deplored the condition thus brought about.
The Republican party at that time existed only at the North. For the first time in history the election threatened the country with the choice of a president by an exclusively sectional vote, and in opposition to the will of the majority of the people. On the popular vote, in fact, Mr. Lincoln was in a minority of nearly a million, and every electoral vote cast for him came from the northern states. In most of the southern states indeed there was no canvass made for him, no electoral nominations presented in his behalf.
Added to this was the fact that the one point on which his party was agreed, the one bond of opinion that held it together for political action, the one impulse held in common by all its adherents, was hostility to slavery, which the men of the South construed to mean hostility – intense and implacable – to the states in which that institution existed and even to the people of those states.
The “platform” on which Mr. Lincoln was nominated, did indeed protest, as he had himself done in many public utterances, that this was a misinterpretation of attitude and purpose; that the party disclaimed all intent to interfere with slavery in the slave states; that it held firmly to the right of each state to regulate that matter for itself, and repudiated the assumption of any power on the part of the Federal government to control the action of the several states or in any wise to legislate for them on this subject.
But these pledges were taken at the South to mean no more than a desire to secure united action in an election. The party proclaimed its purpose, while letting slavery alone in the states, to forbid its extension to the new territories. This alone was deemed a program of injustice by that very active group of Southern men who, repudiating the teachings of Jefferson, and Wythe and Henry Clay, had come to believe in African slavery as a thing right in itself, a necessity of the South, a labor system to be upheld and defended and extended, upon its own merits. These men contended that the new territories were the common and equal possession of all the people; that any attempt by Federal authority to deny to the states thereafter to be formed out of those territories, the right to determine for themselves whether they would permit or forbid slavery, was a wrong to the South which had contributed of its blood and treasure even more largely than the North had done to their acquisition. They further contended that any such legislation would of necessity involve an assumption of Federal authority to control states in advance of their formation, – an assumption which might easily be construed to authorize a like Federal control of states already existing, including those that had helped to create the Union.
All this Arthur Brent contemplated with foreboding from the first. He anticipated Mr. Lincoln’s election from the beginning of the absurd campaign. And while he could not at all agree with those who were prepared to see in that event an occasion for secession and revolution, he foreboded those calamities as results likely in fact to follow. And even should a kindly fate avert them for a time, he saw clearly that the alignment of parties in the nation upon sectional issues must be productive of new and undreamed of irritations, full of threatening to the peace of the Republic.
No more than any of his neighbors could he forecast the events of the next few years. “But,” he wrote to Dorothy in the autumn “I see that the election of Mr. Lincoln is now a certainty; I foresee that it will lead to a determined movement in the South in favor of secession and the dissolution of the Federal Union. It ought to be possible, if that must come, to arrange it on a basis of peaceable agreement to disagree – the Southern States assuming all responsibility for slavery till they can rid themselves of it with safety to society, and the Northern people washing their hands once for all of an iniquity from which they have derived the major part of the profit. This they did, particularly during those years after 1808, in which the African slave trade was prohibited by law, but was carried on by New England ship masters and New England merchants with so great a profit that Justice Joseph Story of the United States supreme court, though himself a New Englander, was denounced by the New England press and even threatened with a violent ejection from the bench, because he sought to prevent and punish it, in obedience to the national statute.
“But I am wandering from my theme,” he continued. “I wanted to say that while I think there is no real occasion for a disruption of the Union, I gravely fear that it is coming. And while I think it should be possible to accomplish it peaceably I do not believe it will be done in that way. There are too many hot heads on both sides, for that. There is too much gunpowder lying around, and there will be too many sparks flying about. Listen, Dorothy! I foresee that Mr. Lincoln will be elected in November. I anticipate an almost immediate attempt on the part of the cotton states to dissolve the Union by secession. I shall do everything I can to help other sober minded Virginians to keep Virginia out of this movement, and if Virginia can be kept out of it, the other border states will accept her action as controlling, and they too will stay out of the revolutionary enterprise. In that case the states farther South will be amenable to reason, and if there is reason and discretion exercised at Washington and in the North, some means may possibly be found for adjusting the matter – Virginia and Kentucky perhaps acting successfully as mediators. But I tell you frankly, I do not expect success in the program to which I intend to devote all my labors and all I have of influence. I look to see Virginia drawn into the conflict. I look for war on a scale far more stupendous than any this country has ever seen.
“I can no more foresee what the result of such a war will be than you can – so far at least as military operations are concerned. But some of the results I think I do see very clearly. Virginia will be the battle-ground, and Virginia will be desolated as few lands have ever been in the history of the world. Another thing, Dorothy. If this war comes, as I fear it will, it will make an end of African slavery in this country. For if we of the South are beaten in the conflict of arms, the complete extinction of slavery will be decreed as a part of the penalty of war and the price of peace. If we are successful, we shall have set up a Canada at our very doors. The Ohio and the Potomac will become a border beyond which every escaping negro will be absolutely free, and across which every conceivable influence will be brought to bear upon the negroes to induce them to run away. Under such conditions the institution must become an intolerable as well as an unprofitable annoyance, and it will speedily disappear.
“Now I come to what I set out to say. Before election day this present fall I shall have paid off every dollar of the debts that rest upon Pocahontas and Wyanoke. You and I will be free, at least, from that source of embarrassment, and whatever the military or political, or legal or social results of the war may be, you and I will be owners of land that is subject to no claim of any kind against us. I have grievously compromised your dignity as well as my own in my efforts to bring this about, but you are not held responsible for my ‘Yankee doings,’ at Pocahontas, and as for me, I am not thin-skinned in such matters. I’d far rather be laughed at for paying debts in undignified ways than be dunned for debts that I cannot pay.”
This letter reached Dorothy in Paris, on her return through Switzerland, from an Italian journey, undertaken in the early summer before the danger of Roman fever should be threatening. Had such a letter come to her a few months earlier, her response to it would have been an utterly submissive assent to all that her guardian had done, with perhaps a wondering question or two as to why he should feel it necessary to ask her consent to anything he might be minded to do, or even to tell her what he had done. But Dorothy had grown steadily more reserved in her writing to him, as experience had slowly but surely awakened womanly consciousness in her soul. She was still as loyally devoted as ever to Arthur, but she shrank now as she had not been used to do, from too candid an expression of her devotion. The child had completely given place to the woman in her nature and the woman was far less ready than the child had been to reveal her feelings. A succession of suitors for her hand had taught Dorothy to think of herself as a woman bound to maintain a certain reserve in her intercourse with men. They had awakened in her a consciousness of the fact, of which she had scarcely even thought in the old, childish days, that Arthur Brent was a young man and Dorothy South a young woman, and that it would ill become Dorothy South to reveal herself too frankly to this young man. She did not quite know what there was in her mind to reveal or to withhold from revelation, but she instinctively felt the necessity strong upon her to guard herself against her own impulsive truthfulness. She had no more notion that she had dared give her woman’s love to Arthur unasked, than she had that he – who had never asked for it – desired her love. He remained to her in fact the enormously superior being that she had always held him to be, but she found herself blushing sometimes when she remembered the utter abandon with which she had been accustomed to lay bare her innermost thoughts and sentiments, her very soul, indeed, to his scrutiny.
She knew of no reason why she should now alter her attitude or her demeanor towards him, and she resolutely determined that she would not in the least change either, yet the letter she wrote to him on this occasion was altogether unlike that which she would have written a few months earlier upon a like occasion. She expressed her approval of all that he had done with respect to her estate, where in like case a few months earlier she would have asked him wonderingly what she had to do with things planned and accomplished by him. She expressed acquiescence as one might who has the right to approve or to criticise, where before she would have concerned herself only with rejoicings that her guardian had got things as he wanted them, in accordance with his unquestioned and unquestionable right to have everything as he wanted it to be in a world quite unworthy of him.
In brief, Dorothy’s letter depressed Arthur Brent almost unendurably. Because he missed something from it that long use had taught him to expect in all her utterances to him, he read into it much of coldness, alienation, indifference, which it did not contain. He sat up all night, torturing himself with doubts for which a frequent reperusal of the letter furnished him no shadow of justification; and when the gray morning came he ordered his horse, meaning to ride purposely nowhither. But when the horse was brought, a new and overpowering sense of Dorothy’s absence and perhaps her alienation, came over him. He remembered vividly every detail of that first morning’s ride he had had with her, and instinctively he copied her proceeding on that occasion. Drawing forth his handkerchief he rubbed the animal’s flanks and rumps with it to its soiling.
“I’ll not ride this morning, Ben,” he said. “I’ll go back to the house and write a letter to your Mis’ Dorothy and I’ll enclose that handkerchief for her inspection.”