A Man of Honor

"Well, I reckon you won't," said the Virginian; "I've been inviting you to the 'home of your fathers' ever since I was born, and this is the very first time I ever got you to own up to a scrap of leisure as big as your thumb nail. I've got you now with nothing to do and nowhere to go, and I mean to take you with me this very evening to Virginia. We'll leave on the eleven o'clock train to-night, get to Richmond to-morrow at two, and go up home next morning in time for snack."

"But, my dear Billy – "

"But, my dear Bob, I won't hear a word, and I won't take no for an answer. That's poz roz and the king's English. I'm managing this little job. You can give up your rooms to-day, sell out your plunder, and stop expenses. Then you needn't open your pocket-book again for so long that you'll forget how it looks inside. Put a few ninepences into your breeches pocket to throw at darkeys when they hold your horse, and the thing's done. And won't we wake up old Shirley? I tell you it's the delightfulest two hundred year old establishment you ever saw or didn't see. As the Irish attorney said of his ancestral home: 'there isn't a table in the house that hasn't had jigs danced upon it, and there's not a chair that you can't throw at a friend's head without the slightest fear of breaking it.' When we get there we'll have as much fun as a pack of hounds on a fresh trail."

"Upon my word, Billy," said the professor cousin, "your metaphors have the merits of freshness and originality, at the least, though now and then, as in the present instance, they are certainly not very complimentary. However, it just occurs to me that I have been wanting to go to Shirley 'ever since I was born,' if you will allow me to borrow one of your forcible phrases, and this really does seem to be a peculiarly good opportunity to do so. I am a good deal interested in dialects and provincialisms, so it would be worth my while to visit you, if for no other reason, because my stay at Shirley will give me an excellent opportunity to study some of your own expressions. 'Poz roz,' now, is entirely new to me, and I might make something out of it in a philological way."

"Upon my word" said Mr. Billy, "that's a polite speech. If you'll only say you'll go, though, I don't care the value of a herring's left fore foot what use you make of me. I'm yours to command and ready for any sport that suits you, unless you take a notion to throw rocks at me."

"Pray tell me, Billy, do Virginians ever throw rocks? I am interested in muscle, and should greatly like to see some one able to throw rocks. I have paid half a dollar many a time to see a man lift extraordinary weights, but the best of the showmen never dream of handling anything heavier than cannon-balls. It would be decidedly entertaining to see a man throwing rocks and things of that sort about, even if he were to use both hands in doing it."

"Nonsense," said Billy; "I'm not one of your students getting a dictionary lesson. Waiter!"

"What will you have, sir?" asked the waiter.

"Some hot biscuit, please."

"They a'n't no hot biscuits, sir."

"Well some hot rolls then, or hot bread of some sort. Cold bread for breakfast is an abomination."

"They a'n't no hot bread in the house, sir. We never keep none. Hot bread a'n't healthy, sir."

"You impertinent – "

"My dear Billy," said Mr. Bob, "pray keep your temper. 'Impertinent' is not the word you wish to use. The man can not well be impertinent. He is a trifle impudent, I admit, but we can afford to overlook the impudence of his remark for the sake of the philological interest it has. Waiter, you ought to know, inasmuch as you have been brought up in a land of free schools, that two negatives, in English, destroy each other, and are equivalent to an affirmative; but the matter in which I am most interested just now is your remark that hot bread is not healthy. Your statement is perfectly true, and it would have been equally true if you had omitted the qualifying adjective 'hot.' No bread can be 'healthy,' because health and disease are not attributes or conditions of inanimate things. You probably meant, however, that hot bread is not wholesome, a point on which my friend here, who eats hot bread every day of his life, would naturally take issue with you. Please bring us some buttered toast."

The waiter went away bewildered – questioning the sanity of Mr. Bob in all probability; a questioning in which Billy was half inclined to join him.

"What on earth do you mean, Bob, by talking in that way to a waiter who don't know the meaning of one word in five that you use?"

"Well, I meant for one thing to keep you from losing your temper and so spoiling your digestion. Human motives are complicated affairs, and hence I am by no means sure that I can further unravel my purpose in this case."

"Return we to our muttons, then," said Billy; "I'll finish the business that brought me here, which is only to be present at the taking of a short deposition, by two or three o'clock. While I'm at it you can get your traps together, send your trunk to the depot, and get back here to dinner by four. Then we must get through the rest of the time the best way we can, and at eleven we'll be off. I'm crazy to see you with Phil once."

"Phil, who is he?"

"Oh! Phil is a character – a colored one. I want to see how his 'dialect' will affect you. I'm half afraid you'll go crazy, though, under it."

"Tell me – "

"No, I won't describe Phil, because I can't, and no more can anybody else. Phil must be seen to be appreciated. But come, I'm off for the notary's, and you must get you gone too, for you mustn't be late at dinner – that's poz."

With this the two young men separated, the Virginian lawyer to attend to the taking of some depositions, and his cousin to surrender his lodgings, pack his trunk, and make such other arrangements as were necessary for his journey.

This opportunity to visit the old homestead where his father had passed his boyhood was peculiarly welcome to Mr. Robert just now. There had always been to him a sort of glamour about the names Virginia and Shirley. His father's stories about his own childhood had made a deep impression on the mind of the boy, and to him Shirley was a palace and Virginia a fairy land. Whenever, in childhood, he was allowed to call a calf or a pig his own, he straightway bestowed upon it one or the other of the charmed names, and fancied that the animal grew stronger and more beautiful as a consequence. He had always intended to go to Shirley, but had never done so; just as you and I, reader, have always meant to do several scores of things that we have never done, though we can hardly say why. Just now, however, Mr. Billy's plan for his cousin was more than ever agreeable to Mr. Robert for various present and unusual reasons. He knew next to nobody in or about Philadelphia outside the precincts of the collegiate institute, and to hunt up acquaintances inside that institution was naturally enough not exactly to his taste. He had several months of time to dispose of in some way, and until Billy suggested the visit to Virginia, the best he had been able to do in the way of devising a time-killer was to plan a solitary wandering among the mountainous districts of Pennsylvania. Ordinarily he would have enjoyed such a journey very much, but just now he knew that Mr. Robert Pagebrook could hardly find a less agreeable companion than Mr. Robert Pagebrook himself. That little affair with Miss Nellie Currier kept coming up in his memory, and if the reader be a man it is altogether probable that he knows precisely how the memory of that story affected our young gentleman. He wanted company, and he wanted change, and he wanted out-door exercise, and where could he find all these quite so abundant as at an old Virginian country house? His love for Miss Nellie, he was sure, was a very genuine one; but he was equally sure that it was hopeless. Indeed, now that he knew the selfish insincerity of the damsel he did not even wish that his suit had prospered. This, at any rate, is what he thought, as you did, my dear sir, when you first learned what the word "Another" means when printed with a big A; and, thinking this, he felt that the first thing to be done in the matter was to forget Miss Nellie and his love for her as speedily as possible. How far he succeeded in doing this we shall probably see in the sequel. At present we have to do with the attempt only. New scenes and new people, Mr. Pagebrook thought, would greatly aid him in his purpose, and so the trip to Virginia seemed peculiarly fitting. It thus comes about that the scene of this young man's story suddenly shifts from Philadelphia to a Virginian country house, in spite of all I can do to preserve the dramatic unity of place. Ah! if I were making this story now, I could confine it to a single room, compress its action into a single day, and do other dramatic and highly proper things; but as Mr. Robert Pagebrook and his friends were not stage people, and, moreover, as they were not aware that their goings and comings would ever weave themselves into the woof of a story at all, they utterly failed to regulate their actions in accordance with critical rules, and went roving about over the country quite in a natural way and without the slightest regard for my convenience.

CHAPTER IV.

Mr. Pagebrook learns something about the Customs of the Country

When our two young men reached the station at which they were to leave the cars, they found awaiting them there the lumbering old carriage which had been a part of the Shirley establishment ever since Mr. Billy could remember. This vehicle was known to everybody in the neighborhood as the Shirley carriage, not because it was older or clumsier or uglier than its fellows, for indeed it was not, but merely because every carriage in a Virginian neighborhood is known to everybody quite as well as its owner is. To Mr. Robert Pagebrook, however, the vehicle presented itself as an antique and a curiosity. Its body was suspended by leathern straps which came out of some high semicircular springs at the back, and it was thus raised so far above the axles that one could enter it only by mounting quite a stairway of steps, which unfolded themselves from its interior. Swinging thus by its leathern straps, the great heavy carriage body really seemed to have no support at all, and Mr. Robert found it necessary to exercise all the faith there was in him in order to believe that to get inside of the vehicle was not a sure and speedy way of securing two or three broken bones. He got in, however, at his cousin's invitation, and soon discovered that although the motion of the suspended carriage body closely resembled that of a fore and aft schooner in a gale, it was by no means unpleasant, as the worst that the roughest road could do was to make the vibratory motion a trifle more decided than usual in its nature. A jolt was simply impossible.

As soon as he got his sea legs on sufficiently to keep himself tolerably steady on his seat, Mr. Rob began to look at the country or, more properly, to study the road-side, there being little else visible, so thickly grew the trees and underbrush on each side.

"How far must we drive before reaching Shirley?" he asked after awhile, as the carriage stopped for the opening of a gate.

"About four miles now," said his cousin. "It's five miles, or nearly that, from the Court House."

"The court house? Where is that?"

"O the village where we left the train! That's the Court House."

"Ah! you Virginians call a village a court house, do you?"

"Certainly, when it's the county-seat and a'n't much else. Now and then court houses put on airs and call themselves names, but they don't often make much of it. There's Powhatan Court House now, I believe it tried to get itself called 'Scottsville,' or something of that sort, but nobody knows it as anything but Powhatan Court House. Our county-seat has always been modest, and if it has any name I never heard of it."

"That's one interesting custom of the country, at any rate. Pray tell me, is it another of your customs to dispense wholly with public roads? I ask for information merely, and the question is suggested by the fact that we seem to have driven away from the Court House by the private road which we are still following."

"Why, this isn't a private road. It's one of the principal public roads of the county."

"How about these gates then?" asked Robert as the negro boy who rode behind the carriage jumped down to open another.

"Well, what about them?"

"Why, I never saw a gate across a public thoroughfare before. Do you really permit such things in Virginia?"

"O yes! certainly. It saves a great deal of fencing, and the Court never refuses permission to put up a gate in any reasonable place, only the owner is bound to make it easy to open on horseback – or, as you would put it, 'by a person riding on horseback.' You see I'm growing circumspect in my choice of words since I've been with you. May be you'll reform us all, and make us talk tolerably good English before you go back. If you do, I'll give you some 'testimonials' to your worth as a professor."

"But about those gates, Billy. I am all the more interested in them now that I know them as another 'custom of the country.' How do their owners keep them shut? Don't people leave them open pretty often?"

"Never; a Virginian is always 'on honor' so far as his neighbors are concerned, and the man who would leave a neighbor's gate open might as well take to stealing at once for all the difference it would make in his social standing."

It was not only the gates, but the general appearance of the road as well, that astonished young Pagebrook: a public road, consisting of a single carriage track, with a grass plat on each side, fringed with thick undergrowth and overhung by the branches of great trees, was to him a novelty, and a very pleasant novelty too, in which he was greatly interested.

"Who lives there?" asked Robert, as a large house came into view.

"That's The Oaks, Cousin Edwin's place."

"And who is your Cousin Edwin?"

"My Cousin Edwin? He's yours too, I reckon. Cousin Edwin Pagebrook. He is our second cousin or, as the old ladies put it, first cousin once removed."

"Pray tell me what a first cousin once removed is, will you not, Billy? I am wholly ignorant on the subject of cousinhood in its higher branches, and as I understand that a good deal of stress is laid upon relationships of this sort in Virginia, I should like to inform myself in advance if possible."

"I really don't know whether I can or not. Any of the old ladies will lay it all out to you, illustrating it with their keys arranged like a genealogical tree. I don't know much about it, but I reckon I can make you understand this much, as I have Cousin Edwin's case to go by. It's a 'case in point' as we lawyers say. Let's see. Cousin Edwin's grandfather was our great grandfather; then his father was our grandfather's brother, and that makes him first cousin to my mother and your father. Now I would call mother's first cousin my second cousin, but the old ladies, who pay a good deal of attention to these matters, say not. They say that my mother's or my father's first cousin is my first cousin once removed, and his children are my second cousins, and they prove it all, too, with their keys."

"Well then," asked Robert, "if that is so, what is the exact relationship between Cousin Edwin's children and my father or your mother?"