CHAPTER XVII
IN WHICH MY FORTUNES RISE
The winter began with a heavy snow-storm and ended in a long April rain, and in all those swiftly moving months I had seen Sally barely a dozen times. Not only my pride, but Miss Mitty's rigid commands had kept me from her house, and the girl had promised that for the first six months she would not meet me except by chance.
"In the spring – oh, in the spring," she wrote, "I shall be free. My promise was given and I could not recall it, but I believe now that it was pride, not love, that made them exact it. Do you know, I sometimes think that they do not love me at all. They have both told me that they would rather see me dead than married, as they call it, beneath me. Beneath me, indeed! Ah, dearest, dearest, how can one lower one's self to a giant? When I think of all that you are, of all that you have made yourself, I feel so humble and proud. The truth is, Ben, I'm not suffering half so much from love as I am from indignation. If it keeps up, some day I'll burst out like Aunt Matoaca, for I've got it in me. And she of all people! Why, she goes about in her meek, sanctified manner distributing pamphlets on the emancipation of woman, and yet she actually told me the other day that, of course, she would prefer to have only 'ladies' permitted to vote. 'In that case, however,' she added, 'I should desire to restrict the franchise to gentlemen, also.' Did you ever in your whole life hear of anything so absurd, and she really meant it. She's a martyr, and filled with a holy zeal to get burned or racked. But it's awful, every bit of it. Oh, lift me up, Ben! Lift me up!" And in a postscript, "What does the General say to you? Aunt Mitty has told the General."
The General had said nothing to me, but when I drove him up from his office the next day, he invited me to dine with him, and talked incessantly through the three simple courses about the prospects of the National Oil Company.
"So you're sweeping the whole South?" he said.
"Yes, Sam has made a big thing of it. We've knocked out everybody else in the oil business in this part of the world."
"Mark my word, then, you've been cutting into the interest of the oil trust, and it will come along presently and try to knock you out. When it does, Ben, make it pay, make it pay."
"Oh, I'll make it pay," I answered. "The consolidated interests may sweep out the independent companies, but they can't overturn the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad."
"It's the road, of course, that has made such a success possible."
"Yes, it's the road – everything is the road, General."
"And to think that when I got control of it, it was bankrupt."
Rising from the table he took my arm, and limped painfully into his study, where he lit a cigar and sank back in his easy chair.
"Look here, Ben," he began suddenly, with a change of tone, "what's this trouble brewing between you and Miss Mitty Bland?"
"There's no trouble, sir, except that her niece has promised to marry me."
"Promised to marry you, eh? Sally Mickleborough? Are you sure it's Sally Mickleborough?"
"I'm hardly likely to be mistaken, General, about the identity of my future wife."
"No, I suppose you ain't," he admitted, "but, good Lord, Ben, how did you make her do it?"
"I didn't make her. She was good enough to do it of her own accord."
"So she did it of her own accord? Well, confound you, boy, how did it ever occur to you to ask her?"
"That's what I can't answer, General, I don't believe it ever occurred to me any more than it occurred to me to fall in love with her."
"You've fallen in love with Sally Mickleborough, Miss Matoaca's niece. She refused George, you know?"
I replied that I didn't know it, but I never supposed that she would engage herself to two men at the same time.
"And she's seriously engaged to you?" he demanded, still unconvinced. "Are you precious sure she isn't flirting? Girls will flirt, and I don't reckon you've had much experience of 'em. Why, even Miss Mitty was known to flirt in a prim, stiff-necked fashion in her time, and as for Sarah Bland, they say she promised to marry a whole regiment before the battle of Seven Pines. A little warning beforehand ain't going to do any harm, Ben."
"I'm much obliged to you, General, but I don't think in this case it's needed. Sally is staunch and true."
"Sally? Do you call her 'Sally'? It used to be the custom to address the lady you were engaged to as 'Miss Sally' up to the day of the marriage."
I laughed and shook my head. "Oh, we move fast!"
"Yes, I'm an old man," he admitted sadly, "and I was brought up in a different civilisation. It's funny, my boy, how many customs were swept away with the institution of slavery."
"There'd have been little room for me in those days."
"Oh, you'd have got into some places quick enough, but you'd never have crossed the Blands' threshold when they lived down on James River. There isn't much of that nonsense left now, but Miss Mitty has got it and Theophilus has got it; and, when all's said, they, might have something considerably worse. Why, look at Miss Matoaca. When I first saw her you'd never have imagined there was an idea inside her head."
"I can understand that she must have been very pretty."
"Pretty? She was as beautiful as an angel. And to think of her distributing those damned woman's rights pamphlets! She left one on my desk," he added, sticking out his lower lip like a crying child, and wiping his bloodshot eyes on the hem of his silk handkerchief. "I tell you if she'd had a husband this would never have happened."
"We can't tell – it might have been worse, if she believes it."
"Believes what, sir?" gasped the great man, enraged. "Believes that outlandish Yankee twaddle about a woman wanting any rights except the right to a husband! Do you think she'd be running round loose in this crackbrained way if she had a home she could stay in and a husband she could slave over? I tell you there's not a woman alive that ain't happier with a bad husband than with none at all."
"That's a comfortable view, at any rate."
"View? It's not a view, it's a fact – and what business has a lady got with a view anyway? If Miss Matoaca hadn't got hold of those heathenish views, she'd be a happy wife and mother this very minute."
"Does it follow, General, that she would have been a happy one?" I asked a little unfairly.
"Of course it follows. Isn't every wife and mother happy? What more does she want unless she's a Yankee Abolitionist?"
"Who's a Yankee?" enquired young George, in his amiable voice from the hall. "I'm surprised to hear you calling names when the war is over, sir."
"I wasn't calling names, George. I was just saying that Miss Matoaca Bland was a Yankee. Did you ever hear of a Virginia lady who wasn't content to be what the Lord and the men intended her?"
"No, sir, I never did – but it seems to me that Miss Matoaca has managed to secure a greater share of your attention than the more amenable Virginia ladies."
"Well, isn't it a sad enough sight to see any lady going cracked?" retorted the General, hotly; "do you know, George, that Sally Mickleborough – he says he's sure it's Sally Mickleborough – has promised to marry Ben Starr?"
"Oh, it's Sally all right," responded George, "she has just told me."
He came over and held out his hand, smiling pleasantly, though there was a hurt look in his eyes.
"I congratulate you, Ben," he observed in his easy, good-natured way, "the best man comes in ahead."
His face wore the frown, not from temper, but from pain, that I had seen on it at the club when his favourite hunter had dropped dead, and he had tried to appear indifferent. He was a superb horseman, a typical man about town, a bit of a sport, also, as Dr. Theophilus said. I knew he loved Sally, just as I had known he loved his hunter, by a sympathetic reading of his character rather than by any expression of regret on his long, highly coloured, slightly wooden countenance, with its set mouth over which drooped a mustache so carefully trimmed that it looked almost as if it were glued on his upper lip.
"By the way, uncle, have you heard the last news?" he asked, "Barclay is buying all the A. P. & C. Stock he can lay hands on. It's selling at – "
"Hello! What's that? Barclay, did you say? I knew it was coming, and that he'd spring it. Here, Hatty, give me my cape, I'm going back to the office!"
"George, George, the doctor told you not to excite yourself," remonstrated Miss Hatty, appearing in the doorway with a glass of medicine in her hand.
"Excite myself? Pish! Tush!" retorted the General, "I ain't a bit more excited than you are yourself. Do you think if I hadn't had a cool head they'd have made me president of the South Midland? But I tell you Barclay's trying to get control of the A. P. & C., and I'll be blamed if he shall! Do you want him to snatch a railroad out of my very mouth, madam?"
By this time he had got into his cape and slouch hat, turning at the last moment to swallow Miss Hatty's dose of medicine with a wry mouth. Then with one arm in George's and one in mine, he descended the steps and limped as far as the car line on Main Street.
On that same afternoon I walked out to meet Sally on her ride in one of the country roads to what was called "the Pump House," and when she had dismounted, we strolled together along the little path under the scarlet buds of young maples. At the end of the path there was a rude bench placed beside the stream, which broke from the dam above with a sound that was like laughing water. The grass was powdered with small spring flowers, and overhead a sycamore drooped its silvery branches to the sparkling waves. Spring was in the air, in the scarlet buds of maples, in the song of birds, in the warm wind that played on Sally's flushed cheek and lifted a loosened curl on her forehead. And spring was in my heart, too, as I sat there beside her, on the old bench, with her hand in mine.
"You will marry me in November, Sally?"
"On the nineteenth of November, as I promised. Aunt Mitty and Aunt Matoaca have forbidden me to mention your name to them, so I shall walk with you to church some morning – to old Saint John's, I think, Ben."
"Then may God punish me if I ever fail you," I answered.
Her look softened. "You will never fail me."
"You will trust me now and in all the future?"
"Now and in all the future."
As we strolled back a little later to her horse that was tethered to a maple on the roadside, I told her of the success of the National Oil Company and of the possibility that I might some day be a rich man.
"As things go in the South, sweetheart, I'm a rich man now for my years."
"I am glad for your sake, Ben, but I have never expected to have wealth, you know."
"All the same I want you to have it, I want to give it to you."
"Then I'll begin to love it for your sake – if it means that to you?"
"It means nothing else. But what do you think it will mean to your aunts next November?"
She shook her head, while I untethered Dolly, the sorrel mare.
"They haven't a particle of worldliness, either of them, and I don't believe it will make any great difference if we have millions. Of course if you were, for instance, the president of the South Midland they would not have refused to receive you, but they would have objected quite as strongly to your marrying into the family. What you are yourself might concern them if they were inviting you to dinner, but when it is a question of connecting yourself with their blood, it is what your father was that affects them. I really believe," she finished half angrily, half humorously, "that Aunt Mitty – not Aunt Matoaca – would honestly rather I'd marry a well-born drunkard or libertine than you, whom she calls 'quite an extraordinary-looking young man.'"
"Then if they can neither be cajoled nor bought, I see no hope for them," I replied, laughing, as she sprang from my hand into her saddle.
The red flame of the maple was in her face as she looked back at me. "Everything will come right, Ben, if we only love enough," she said.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE PRINCIPLES OF MISS MATOACA
When I walked down to the office now, I began to be pointed out as "the General's wonderful boy." Invitations to start companies, or to directorships of innumerable boards, were showered upon me, and adventurous promoters of vain schemes sought desperately to shelter themselves behind my growing credit. Then, in the following October, the consolidated oil interests bought out my business at my own price, and I awoke one glorious morning to the knowledge that my fortune was made.
"If you're going to swell, Ben, now's the time," said the General, "and out you go."
But my training had been in a hard school, and by the end of the month he had ceased to enquire in the mornings "if my hat still fitted my head."
"You'll have your ups and downs, Ben, like the rest of us," he said, "but the main thing is, let your fortunes see-saw as they may, always keep your eyes on a level. By the way, I saw Sally Mickleborough last night, and when I asked her why she fell in love with you, she replied it was because she saw you pushing a wheel up a hill. Now there's a woman with a reason – you'd better look sharp, or she'll begin talking politics presently like her Aunt Matoaca. What do you think I found on my desk this morning? A pamphlet, addressed in her handwriting, about the presidential election." Then his tone softened. "So Sally's going to marry you in spite of her aunts? Well, she's a good girl, a brave girl, and I'm proud of her."
When I went home to supper, I was to have a different opinion from Dr. Theophilus.
"I saw Sally Mickleborough to-day, Ben, when I called on Miss Matoaca, – [that poor lady gets flightier every day, she left a pamphlet here this morning about the presidential election] – and the girl told me in the few minutes I saw her in the hall, that she meant to marry you next month."
"She will do me that great honour, doctor."
"Well, I regret it, Ben; I can't conceal from you that I regret it. You're a good boy, and I'm proud of you, but I don't like to see young folks putting themselves in opposition to the judgment of their elders. I'm an orthodox believer in the claims of blood, you know."
"And is there nothing to be said for the claims of love?"
"The claims of moonshine, Ben," observed Mrs. Clay in her sharp voice, looking up from a pair of yarn socks she was knitting for the doctor; "you know I'm fond of you, but when you begin to talk of the claims of love driving a girl to break with her family, I feel like boxing your ears."
"You see, Tina is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love isn't moonshine, but that however solid a thing it may be, it isn't, after all, as solid as one's duty to one's family."
"Of course I can't argue with you, doctor. I know little of the unit you call 'the family'; but I should think the first duty of the family would be to consider the happiness of the individual."
"And do you think, Ben, that you are the only person who is considering Sally's happiness?"
"I know that I am considering it; for the rest I can't speak."
"I firmly believe," broke in Mrs. Clay, "that Sally's behaviour has helped to drive Matoaca Bland clean out of her wits. She's actually sent me one of her leaflets, – what do you think of that, Theophilus? – to me, the most refined and retiring woman on earth."
"What I'd say, Tina, is that you aren't half as refined and retiring as Miss Matoaca," chuckled the doctor.
"That is merely the way she dresses," rejoined Mrs. Clay stiffly; "it is her poke bonnet and black silk mantle that deceives you. As for me, I can call no woman truly refined who does not naturally avoid the society of men."
"Well, Tina, I had a notion that all of you were pretty fond of it, when it comes to that."
"Not of the society of men, Theophilus, but of the select attentions of gentlemen."
"I'm not taking up for Miss Matoaca," pursued the good man; "I can't conscientiously do that, and I'm more concerned at this minute about the marriage of Ben and Sally. You may smile at me as superstitious, if you please, but I never yet saw a marriage turn out happily that was made in defiance of family feeling."
As I could make no reply to this, except to put forward a second time what Mrs. Clay had tartly called "the claims of moonshine," I bade the doctor goodnight, and going upstairs to my room, sat down beside the small square window, which gave on the garden, with its miniature box borders and its single clipped yew-tree, over which a young moon was rising. "A mixture of a fighter and a dreamer," the old man had once called me, and it seemed to me now that something apart from the mere business of living and the alert man of affairs, brooded in me over the young moon and the yew-tree.
A letter from Sally had reached me a few hours before, and taking it from my pocket, I turned to the lamp and read it for the sixth time with a throbbing heart.
"You ask me if I am happy, dearest," she wrote, "and I answer that I am happy, with a still, deep happiness, over which a hundred troubles and cares ripple like shadows on a lake. But oh! poor Aunt Mitty, with her silent hurt pride in her face, and poor Aunt Matoaca, with the strained, unnatural brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks so like rose leaves that have crumpled. Oh, Ben, I believe Aunt Matoaca is living over again her own romance, and it breaks my heart. Last night I went into her room, and found her with her old yellowed wedding veil and orange blossoms laid out on the bed. She tried to pretend that she was straightening her cedar chests, but she looked so little and pitiable – if you could only have seen her! I wonder what she would be now if the General had been a man like you? How grateful I am, how profoundly thankful with my whole heart that I am marrying a man that I can trust!"
"That I can trust!" Her words rang in my ears, and I heard them again, clear and strong, the next morning, when I met Miss Matoaca as I was on my way to my office. She was coming slowly up Franklin Street, her arms filled with packages, and when she recognised me, with a shy, startled movement to turn aside, a number of leaflets fluttered from her grasp to the pavement between us. When I stooped and gathered them up, her face, under the old-fashioned poke bonnet, was brought close to my eyes, and I saw that she looked wan and pinched, and that her bright brown eyes were shining as if from fever.
"Mr. Starr," she said, straightening her thin little figure as I handed her the leaflets, "I've wanted for some time to speak a word to you on the subject of my niece – Miss Mickleborough."
"Yes, Miss Matoaca."
"My sister Mitty thought it better that I should refrain from doing so, and upon such matters she has excellent judgment. It is my habit, indeed, to yield to her opinion in everything except a question of conscience."
"Yes?" for again she had paused. "It is very kind of you," I added.
"I do not mean it for kindness, Mr. Starr. My niece is very dear to me; and since poor Sarah's unfortunate experience, we have felt more – strongly, if possible, about unequal marriages. I know that you are a most remarkable young man, but I do not feel that you are in any way suited to make the happiness of our niece – Miss Mickleborough – "
"I am sorry, Miss Matoaca, but Miss Mickleborough thinks differently."
"Young people are rarely the best judges in such matters, Mr. Starr."
"But do you think their elders can judge for them?"
"If they have had experience – yes."
"Ah, Miss Matoaca, does our own experience ever teach us to understand the experience of others?"
"The Blands have never needed to be taught," she returned with pride, "that the claims of the family are not to be sacrificed to – to a sentiment. Except in the case of poor Sarah there has never been a mésalliance in our history. We have always put one thing above the consideration of our blood, and that is – a principle. If it were a question of conscience, however painful it might be to me, I should uphold my niece in her opposition to my sister Mitty. I myself have opposed her for a matter of principle."
"I am aware of it, Miss Matoaca."
Her withered cheeks were tinged with a delicate rose, and I could almost see the working of her long, narrow mind behind her long, narrow face.
"I should like to leave a few of these leaflets with you, Mr. Starr," she said.
A minute afterwards, when she had moved on with her meek, slow walk, I was left standing on the pavement with her suffrage pamphlets fluttering in my hand. Stuffing them hurriedly into my pocket, I went on to the office, utterly oblivious of the existence of any principle on earth except the one underlying the immediate expansion of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
A fortnight later I heard that Miss Matoaca had begun writing letters to the "Richmond Herald"; and I remembered, with an easy masculine complacency, the pamphlets I had thrown into the waste basket beside the General's desk. The presidential election, with its usual upheaval of the business world, had arrived; and that timid little Miss Matoaca should have intruded herself into the affairs of the nation did not occur to me as possible, until the General informed me, while we watched a Democratic procession one afternoon, that Miss Mitty had come to him the day before in tears over the impropriety of her sister's conduct.
"She begged me to remonstrate with Miss Matoaca," he pursued, "and by George, I promised her that I would. There's one thing, Ben, I've never been able to stand, and that's the sight of a woman in tears. Of course when you've made 'em cry yourself, it is different; but to have a lady coming to you weeping over somebody else – and a lady like Miss Mitty – well, I honestly believe if she'd requested me to give her my skin, I'd have tried to get out of it just to oblige her."
"Did you go to Miss Matoaca?" I asked, for the picture of the General lecturing his old love on the subject of the proprieties had caught my attention even in the midst of a large Democratic procession that was marching along the street. While he rambled on in his breaking voice, which had begun to grow weak and old, I gazed over his head at the political banners with their familiar, jesting inscriptions.
"I declare, Ben, I'd rather have swallowed a dose of medicine," he went on; "you see I used to know Miss Matoaca very well forty years ago – I reckon you've heard of it. We were engaged to be married, and it was broken off because of some woman's rights nonsense she'd got in her head."
"Well, it's hard to imagine your interview of yesterday."
"There wasn't any interview. I went to her and put it as mildly as I could. 'Miss Matoaca,' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear you've gone cracked.'"
"And how did she take it?"
"'Do you mean my heart or my head, General?' she asked – she had always plenty of spirit, had Matoaca, for all her soft looks. 'It's your head,' I answered. 'Lord knows I'm not casting any reflections on the rest of you.' 'Then it has fared better than my heart, General,' she replied, 'for that was broken.' She looked kind of wild, Ben, as she said it. I don't know what she was talking about, I declare on my honour I don't!"
A cheer went up from the procession, and an expression of eager curiosity came into his face.
"Can you read that inscription, Ben? My eyes ain't so good as they used to be."
"It's some campaign joke. So your lecture wasn't quite a success?"
"It would have been if she'd listened to reason."
"But she did not, I presume?"
"She never listened to it in her life. If she had, she wouldn't be a poor miserable old maid at this moment. What's that coming they're making such a noise about? My God, Ben, if it ain't Matoaca herself!"
It was Matoaca, and the breathless horror in the General's voice passed into my own mind as I looked. There she was, in her poke bonnet and her black silk mantle, walking primly at the straggling end of the procession, among a crowd of hooting small boys and gaping negroes. Her eyes, very wide and bright, like the eyes of one who is mentally deranged, were fixed straight ahead, over the lines of men marching in front of her, on the blue sky above the church steeples. Under her poke bonnet I saw her meekly parted hair and her faded cheeks, flushed now with a hectic colour. In one neatly gloved hand her silk skirt was held primly; in the other she carried a little white silk flag, on which the staring gold letters were lost in the rippling folds. With her eyes on the sky and her feet in the dust, she marched, a prim, ladylike figure, an inspired spinster, oblivious alike of the hooting small boys and the half-compassionate, half-scoffing gazers upon the pavement.
"She's crazy, Ben," said the General, and his voice broke with a sob.
For a minute, as dazed as he, I stared blankly at the little figure with the white flag. Then bewilderment gave place before the call to action, and it seemed to me that I saw Sally there in Miss Matoaca, as I had seen her in the rising moon over the clipped yew, and in the whirlpool of the stock market. Leaving my place at the General's side, I descended the steps at a bound, and made my way through the jostling, noisy crowd to the little lady in its midst.
"Miss Matoaca!" I said.
For the first time her eyes left the sky, and as she looked down, the consciousness of her situation entered into her strained bright eyes. Her composure was lost in a birdlike, palpitating movement of terror.
"I – I am going as far as the Square, Mr. Starr," she replied, as if she were repeating by rote a phrase in a strange tongue.
At my approach the ridicule, somewhat subdued by the sense of her helplessness, broke suddenly loose. Bending over I offered her my arm, my head still uncovered. As the hand holding the white flag drooped from exhaustion, I took it, with the banner, into my own.
"Then I'll go with you, Miss Matoaca," I responded.
We started on, took a few measured paces in the line of march, and then her strength failing her, she sank back, with a pathetic moan of weariness, into my arms. Lifting her like a child I carried her out of the street and up the steps into the General's office. Turning at a touch as I entered the room, I saw that Sally was at my side.
"I've sent for Dr. Theophilus," she said. "There, put her on the lounge."
Kneeling on the floor she began bathing Miss Matoaca's forehead with water which somebody had brought. The General, his eyes very red and bloodshot and his lower lip fallen into a senile droop, was trying vainly to fan her with his pocket-handkerchief.
"We have always feared this would happen," said Sally, very quiet and pale.
"She was talking to me yesterday about her heart," returned the General, "and I didn't know what she meant."
He bent over, fanning her more violently with his silk handkerchief, and on the lounge beneath, Miss Matoaca lay, very prim and maidenly, with her skirt folded modestly about her ankles.
Dr. Theophilus, coming in with the messenger, bent over her for a long minute.
"I always thought her sense of honour would kill her," he said at last as he looked up.