XX
A SPECIAL DELIVERY LETTER
W HEN Dorothy had disappeared, Arthur became conscious of a great loneliness, which he found it difficult to shake off. Presently he remembered that he had a letter to write, a letter which he had decided upon out there under the hickory trees. He had writing materials and a table in his own small quarters, but somehow he felt himself impelled to write this letter upon Dorothy’s own little lap desk and in Dorothy’s own little camp cottage.
“Positively, I am growing sentimental!” he said to himself as he walked toward Dorothy’s house. “I didn’t suspect such a possibility in myself. After all a man knows less about himself than about anybody else. I can detect tuberculosis in another, at a glance. I doubt if I should recognize it in myself. I can discover cardiac trouble by a mere look at the eyes of the man afflicted with it. I know instantly when I look at a man, what his temperament is, what tendencies he has, what probabilities, and even what possibilities inhere in his nature. But what do I know about Arthur Brent? I suppose that any of my comrades at Bellevue could have told me years ago the things I am just now finding out concerning myself. If any of them had predicted my present condition of mind a year ago, I should have laughed in derision of the stupid misconception of me. I thought I knew myself. What an idiot any man is to think that!”
Touching a match to the little camphene lamp on Dorothy’s table, he opened her desk and wrote.
“My Dear Edmonia:
“When you left me this afternoon, it was with a promise that on my next visit to Branton you would tell me of the things that limit Dorothy’s life. It was my purpose then to make an early opportunity for the hearing. I have changed my mind. I do not want to hear now, because when this knowledge comes to me, I must act upon it, in one way or another, and I must act promptly. Should it come to me now, I should not be free to act. I simply cannot, because I must not, leave my work here till it is done. I do not refer now to those plans of which we spoke today, but simply to the fever. I must not quit my post till that is at an end. I am a soldier in the midst of a campaign. I cannot quit my colors till the enemy is completely put to rout. This enemy – the fever – is an obstinate one, slow to give way. It will be many weeks, possibly several months, before I can entirely conquer it. Until then I must remain at my post, no matter what happens. Until then, therefore, I do not want to know anything that might place upon me the duty of withdrawing from present surroundings. I shall ride over to Branton now and then, as matters here grow better, and I hope, too, that you will continue your compassionate visits to our fever camp. But please, my dear Edmonia, do not tell me anything of this matter, until the last negro in the camp is well and I am free to take the next train for New York, and perhaps the next ship for Havre.
“You will understand me, I am sure. I do not want to play a halting, hesitating part in a matter of such consequence. I do not wish to be compelled to sit still when the time comes for me to act. So I must wait till I am free again from this present and most imperative service, before I permit myself to hear that which may make it my duty to go at once into exile.
“In the meantime I shall guard my conduct against every act, and lock my lips against every utterance that might do harm.
“I have formulated a plan of action, and of that I will tell you at the first opportunity, because I want your counsel respecting it. As soon as I am free, I shall act upon it, if you do not think it too late.
“I cannot tell you, my dear Edmonia, how great a comfort it is to me in my perplexity, that I have your sympathy and may rely upon your counsel in my time of need. I have just now begun to realize how little I know of myself, and your wise words, spoken today, have shown me clearly how very much you know of me. To you, therefore, I shall look, in this perplexity, for that guidance for which I have always, hitherto, relied, – in mistaken and conceited self-confidence, – upon my own judgment. Could there be anything more precious than such friendship and ready sympathy as that which you give to me? Whatever else may happen, now or hereafter, I shall always feel that in enriching my life with so loyal, so unselfish a friendship as that which you have given to me, my Virginian episode has been happy in its fruit.
“Poor Dorothy is almost broken down with work and loss of sleep. You will be glad to know that I have sent her to the house for a night of undisturbed rest. I had to use all my influence with her to make her go. And at the last she went, I think, merely because she felt that her going would relieve me of worry and apprehension. She is a real heroine, but she has so much of the martyr’s spirit in her that she needs restraint and control.”
Dick returned to the camp before this letter was finished, and his master delivered it into his hands with an injunction to carry it to Branton in the early morning of the next day. He knew the habit of young women in Virginia, which was to receive and answer all letters carried by the hands of special messengers, before the nine o’clock breakfast hour. And there were far more of such letters interchanged than of those that came and went by the post. For the post, in those years, was not equipped with free delivery devices. Most of the plantations were nearer to each other than to the nearest postoffice, and there were young negroes in plenty to carry the multitudinous missives with which the highly cultured young women of the time and country maintained what was in effect a continuous conversation with each other. They wrote to each other upon every conceivable occasion, and often upon no occasion at all, but merely because the morning was fine and each wanted to call the other’s attention to the fact. If one read a novel that pleased her, she would send it with a note, – usually covering two sheets and heavily crossed, – to some friend whom she desired to share her enjoyment of it. Or if she had found a poem to her liking in Blackwood, or some other of the English magazines, for American periodicals circulated scarcely at all in Virginia in those days – except the Southern Literary Messenger, for which everybody subscribed as a matter of patriotic duty – she would rise “soon” in the morning, make half a dozen manuscript copies of it, and send them by the hands of little darkeys to her half dozen bosom friends, accompanying each with an astonishingly long “note.” I speak with authority here. I have seen Virginia girls in the act of doing this sort of thing, and I have read many hundreds of their literary criticisms. What a pity it is that they are lost to us! For some of them were mightily shrewd both in condemnation and in ecstatic approval, and all of them had the charm of perfect and fearless honesty in utterance, and all of them were founded upon an actual and attentive reading of the works criticised, as printed criticism usually is not.
XXI
HOW A HIGH BRED DAMSEL CONFRONTED FATE AND DUTY
Q UITE unconsciously Arthur Brent had prepared a very bad morning hour for the best friend he had ever known. His letter was full of dagger thrusts for the loving girl’s soul. Every line of it revealed his state of mind, and that state of mind was a very painful thing for the sensitive woman, who loved him so, to contemplate. The very intimacy of it was a painful reminder; the affection it revealed so frankly stung her to the quick. The missive told her, as no words so intended could have done, how far removed this man’s attitude toward her was from that of the lover. Had his words been angry they might not have indicated any impossibility of love – they might indeed have meant love itself in such a case, – love vexed or baffled, but still love. Had they been cold and indifferent, they might have been interpreted merely as the language of reserve, or as a studied concealment of passion. But their very warmth and candor of friendship would have set the seal of impossibility upon her hope that he might ever come to love her, if she had cherished any such hope, as she did not.
The letter told her by its tone more convincingly than any other form of words could have done, that this man held her in close affection as a friend, and that no thought of a dearer relationship than that could at any time come to him.
Edmonia Bannister was a strong woman, highly bred and much too proud to give way to the weakness of self-pity. She made no moan over her lost love as she laid it away to rest forever in the sepulchre of her heart. Nor did she in her soul repine or complain of fate.
“It is best for him as it is,” she told herself, as she had told herself before during that long, solitary drive in the carriage; “and I must rejoice in it, and not mourn.”
The sting of it did not lie in disappointment. She met that with calm mind as the soldier faces danger without flinching when it comes to him hand in hand with duty. The agony that tortured her was of very different origin. All her pride of person, all her pride of race and family, even her self-respect itself, was sorely stricken by the discovery that she had given her love unasked.
This truth she had not so much as suspected until that conversation in Dorothy’s little porch on the day before had revealed it to her. Then the revelation had so stunned her that she did not realize its full significance. And besides, her mind at that time was fully occupied with efforts so to bear herself as to conceal what she regarded as her shame. Now that she had passed a sleepless night in company with this hideous truth, and now that it came to her anew with its repulsive nakedness revealed in the gray of the morning, she appreciated and exaggerated its deformity, and the realization was more than she could bear.
She had been bred in that false school of ethics which holds a woman bound to remain a stock, a stone, a glacier of insensibility to love until the man shall graciously give her permission to love, by declaring his own love for her. She believed that false teaching implicitly. She was as deeply humiliated, as mercilessly self-reproachful now as if she had committed an immodesty. She told herself that her conduct in permitting herself, however unconsciously, to love this man who had never asked for her love, had “unsexed” her – a term not understanded of men, but one to which women attach a world of hideous meaning.
“I am not well this morning,” she said to her maid as she passed up the stairs in retreat. “No, you need not attend me,” she added quickly upon seeing the devoted serving woman’s purpose; “stay here instead and make my apologies to my brother when he comes out of his room, for leaving him to breakfast alone.”
“Why, Miss Mony, is you done forgot? Mas’ Archer he ain’t here. You know he done stayed at de tavern at de Co’t House las’ night, an’ a mighty poor white folksey breakfas’ he’ll git too.”
“Oh, yes, I had forgotten. So much the better. But don’t accompany me. I want to be alone.”
The maid stared at her in blank amazement. When she had entered her chamber and carefully shut the door, the woman exclaimed:
“Well, I ’clar to gracious! I ain’t never seed nuffin like dat wid Miss Mony before!”
Then with that blind faith which her class at that time cherished in the virtues of morning coffee as a panacea, Dinah turned into the dining room, and with a look of withering scorn at the head dining room servant, demanded:
“Is you a idiot, Polydore? Couldn’t you see dat Miss Mony is seriously decomposed dis mawnin’? What you means by bein’ so stupid? What fer didn’t you give her a cup o’ coffee? An’ why don’t you stir yourself now an’ bring me de coffee urn, an’ de cream jug? Don’t stan’ dar starin’, nigga! Do you heah?”
Having “hopes” in the direction of this comely maid, Polydore was duly abashed by her rebuke while full of admiration for the queenly way in which she had administered it. He brought the urn and its adjuncts and admiringly contemplated the grace with which Dinah prepared a cup for her mistress.
“I ’clar, Dinah, you’se mos’ as fine as white ladies dey selves!” he ventured to say in softly placative tones. But Dinah had no notion of relaxing her dignity, so instead of acknowledging the compliment she rebuffed it, saying:
“Why don’t Mas’ Archer sen’ you to the cawnfiel’, anyhow? Dat’s all you’se fit for. Don’ you see I’se a waitin’ fer you to bring me a tray an’ a napkin, an’ a chaney plate with a slice o’ ham on it?”
Equipped at last, the maid, disregarding her mistress’s injunction, marched up the stairs and entered Edmonia’s room. The young woman gently thanked her, and then, after a moment’s thought, said:
“Dinah, I wish you would get some jellies and nice things ready this morning and take them over to your Miss Dorothy for her sick people. You can use the carriage, but go as soon as you can get away; and give my love to your Miss Dorothy, and tell her I am not feeling well this morning. But tell her, Dinah, that I’ll drive over this afternoon about two o’clock and she must be ready to go with me for a drive. Poor child, she needs some relaxation!”
Having thus secured immunity from Dinah’s kindly but at present unwelcome attentions, Edmonia Bannister proceeded, as she phrased it in her mind, to “take herself seriously in hand.”
After long thought she formulated a program for herself.
“My pride ought to have saved me from this humiliation,” she thought. “Having failed me in that, it must at least save me from the consequences of my misconduct. I’ll wear a cheerful face, whatever I may feel. I’ll cultivate whatever there is of jollity in me, and still better, whatever I possess of dignity. I’ll be social. I’ll entertain continually, as brother always wants me to do. I’ll have some of my girl friends with me every day and every night. I’ll busy myself with every duty I can find to do, and especially I shall devote myself to dear Dorothy. By the way, Arthur will expect a reply to his letter. I’ll begin my duty-doing with that.”
And so she wrote:
“You are by all odds the most ridiculous fellow, my dear Arthur, that I have yet encountered – the most preposterous, wrong headed, cantankerous (I hope that word is good English – and anyhow it is good Virginian, because it tells the truth) sort of human animal I ever yet knew. Do you challenge proof of my accusations? Think a bit and you’ll have it in abundance. Let me help you think by recounting your absurdities.
“You were a young man, practically alone in the world, with no fortune except an annuity, which must cease at your death. You had no associates except scientific persons who never think of anything but trilobites and hydrocyanic acid and symptoms and all that sort of thing. Suddenly, and by reason of no virtuous activity of your own, you found yourself the owner of one of the finest estates in Virginia, and the head of one of its oldest and most honored houses. In brief you came into an inheritance for which any reasonable young man of your size and age would have been glad to mortgage his hopes of salvation and cut off the entail of all his desires. There, that’s badly quoted, I suppose, but it is from Shakespeare, I think, and I mean something by it – a thing not always true of a young woman’s phrases when she tries her hand at learned utterance.
“Never mind that. This favored child of Fortune, Arthur Brent, M. D., Ph. D., etc., bitterly complains of Fate for having poured such plenty into his lap, rescuing him from a life of toil and trouble and tuberculosis – for I’m perfectly satisfied you would have contracted that malady, whatever it is, if Fate hadn’t saved you from it by compelling you to come down here to Virginia.
“Don’t criticise if I get my tenses mixed up a little, so long as my moods are right. Very well, to drop what my governess used to call ‘the historical present,’ this absurd and preposterous young man straightway ‘kicked against the pricks’ – that’s not slang but a Biblical quotation, as you would very well know if you read your Bible half as diligently as you study your books on therapeutics. Better than that, it is truth that I’m telling you. You actually wanted to get rid of your heritage, to throw away just about the finest chance a young man ever had to make himself happy and comfortable and contented. You might even have indulged yourself in the pastime of making love to me, and getting your suit so sweetly rejected that you would ever afterwards have thought of the episode as an important part of your education. But you threw away even that opportunity.
“Now comes to you the greatest good fortune of all, and it positively frightens you so badly that you are planning to run away from it – if you can.
“Badinage aside, Arthur, – or should that word be ‘bandinage?’ You see I don’t know, and my dictionary is in another room, and anyhow the phrase sounds literary. Now to go on. Really, Arthur, you are a ridiculous person. You have had months of daily, hourly, intimate association with Dorothy. With your habits of observation, and still more your splendid gifts in that way, you cannot have failed to discover her superiority to young women generally. If you have failed, if you have been so blind as not to see, let me point out the fact to you. Did you ever know a better mind than hers? Was there ever a whiter soul? Has she not such a capacity of devotion and loyalty and love as you never saw in any other woman? Isn’t her courage admirable? Is not her truthfulness something that a man may trust his honor and his life to, knowing absolutely that his faith must always be secure?
“Fie upon you, Arthur. Why do you not see how lavishly Providence has dealt with you?
“But that is only one side of the matter, and by no means the better side of it. On that side lies happiness for you, and you have a strange dislike of happiness for yourself. You distrust it. You fear it. You put it aside as something unworthy of you, something that must impair your character and interrupt your work. Oh, foolish man! Has not your science taught you that it is the men of rich, full lives who do the greatest things in this world, and not the starvelings? Do you imagine for a moment that any monkish ascetic could have written Shakespeare’s plays or Beethoven’s music or fought Washington’s campaigns or rendered to the world the service that Thomas Jefferson gave?
“But there, I am wandering from my point again. Don’t you see that it is your duty to train Dorothy, to give to her mind a larger and better outlook than the narrow horizon of our Virginian life permits?
“Anyhow, you shall see it, and you shall see it now. For in spite of your unwillingness to hear, and in spite of your injunction that I shall not tell you now, I am going to tell you some things that you must know. Listen then.
“Certain circumstances which I may not tell you either now or hereafter, render Dorothy’s case a peculiar one. She was only a dozen years old, or so, when her father died, and he never dreamed of her moral and intellectual possibilities. He was oppressed with a great fear for her. He foresaw for her dangers so grave and so great that he ceaselessly planned to save her from them. To that end he decreed that she should learn nothing of music, or art or any other thing which he believed would prove a temptation to her. His one supreme desire was to save her from erratic ways of living, and so to hedge her life about that she should in due course marry into a good Virginia family and pass all her days in a round of commonplace duties and commonplace enjoyments. He had no conception of her character, her genius or her capacities for enjoyment or suffering. He fondly believed that she would be happy in the life he planned for her as the wife of young Jefferson Peyton, to whom, in a way, he betrothed her in her early childhood, when Jeff himself was a well ordered little lad, quite different from the arrogant, silly young donkey he has grown up to be, with dangerous inclinations toward dissoluteness and depravity.
“Dr. South and Mr. Madison Peyton planned this marriage, as something that was to be fulfilled in that future for which Dr. South was morbidly anxious to provide. Like many other people, Dr. South mistook himself for Divine Providence, and sought to order a life whose conditions he could not foresee. He wanted to save his daughter from a fate which he, perhaps, had reason to fear for her. On the other side of the arrangement Madison Peyton wanted his eldest son to become master of Pocahontas plantation, so that his own possessions might pass to his other sons and daughters. So these two bargained that Dorothy should become Jefferson Peyton’s wife when both should be grown up. Dr. South did not foresee what sort of man the boy was destined to become. Still less did he dream what a woman Dorothy would be. His only concern was that his daughter should marry into a family as good as his own.
“Now that Peyton sees what his son’s tendencies are he is more determined than ever to have that mistaken old bargain carried out. He is willing to sacrifice Dorothy in the hope of saving his son from the evil courses to which he is so strongly inclined.
“Are you going to let this horrible thing happen, Arthur Brent? You love Dorothy and she loves you. She does not yet suspect either fact, but you are fully aware of both. You alone can save her from a fate more unhappy than any that her father, in his foolishness, feared for her, and in doing so you can at the same time fulfil her father’s dearest wish, which was that she should marry into a Virginia family of high repute. Your family ranks as well in this commonwealth as any other – better than most. You are the head of it. You can save Dorothy from a life utterly unworthy of her, a life in which she must be supremely unhappy. You can give to her mind that opportunity of continuous growth which it needs. You can offer to her the means of culture and happiness, and of worthy intellectual exercise, which so rare and exceptional a nature must have for its full development.
“Are you going to do this, Arthur Brent, or are you not? Are you going to do the high duty that lies before you, or are you going to put it aside for some imagined duty which would be of less consequence even if it were real? Is it not better worth your while to save Dorothy than to save any number of life’s failures who dwell in New York’s tenements? Are not Dorothy South’s mind and soul and superb capacities of greater consequence than the lives of thousands of those whose squalor and unwholesome surroundings are after all the fruit of their own hereditary indolence and stupidity? Is not one such life as hers of greater worth in the world, than thousands or even millions of those for whose amelioration you had planned to moil and toil? You know, Arthur, that I have little sympathy with the thought that those who fail in life should be coddled into a comfort that they have not earned. I do not believe that you can rescue dulness of mind from the consequences of its own inertia. Nine tenths of the poverty that suffers is the direct consequence of laziness and drink. The other tenth is sufficiently cared for. I am a heretic on this subject, I suppose. I do not think that such a man as you are should devote his life to an attempt to uplift those who have sunk into squalor through lack of fitness for anything better. Your abilities may be much better employed in helping worthier lives. I never did see why we should send missionaries to the inferior races, when all our efforts might be so much more profitably employed for the betterment of worthier people. Why didn’t we let the red Indians perish as they deserve to do, and spend the money we have fruitlessly thrown away upon them, in providing better educational opportunities for a higher race?
“The moral of all this is that you have found your true mission in the rescue of Dorothy South from a fate she does not deserve. I’m going to help you in doing that, but I will not tell you my plans till you get through with your fever crusade and have time to listen attentively to my superior wisdom.
“In the meantime you are to humble yourself by reflecting upon your great need of such counsel as mine and your great good fortune in having a supply of it at hand.
“I hope your patients continue to do credit to your medical skill and to Dorothy’s excellent nursing. I have sent Dinah over this morning with some delicacies for the convalescent among them, and in the afternoon I shall go over to the camp myself and steal Dorothy from them and you, long enough to give her a good long drive.
“Always sincerely your Friend,“Edmonia Bannister.”