Dorothy South

“But he might need me in other ways,” answered the persistently reluctant Dorothy. “And besides he is teaching me chemistry and other scientific things that will make me useful in life. No, I can’t go away now.”

“But, you absurd child,” answered Edmonia, “there will be plenty of time to learn all that when you come back. You are ridiculously young yet. You won’t be seventeen till March, and you know a great deal more about science than Arthur did at your age. Besides this is his plan for you, not mine. He wants you to learn the things this trip will teach you, a great deal more than he wants you to learn chemistry and that sort of thing. He knows what you need in the way of education, and it is at his suggestion that I’m going to take you North and to Europe. He appreciates your abilities as you never will, and it is his earnest wish that you shall make this trip as a part of your education.”

“Very well,” answered Dorothy. “I’ll ask him if he wants me to go, and if he says yes, I’ll go. Of course it will be delightful to see great cities and the ocean and Pompeii and pictures and all the rest of it. But a woman mustn’t think of enjoyment alone. That’s the way women become bad. My father often told me so, and I don’t want to be bad.”

“You never will, Dorothy, dear. You couldn’t become bad if you wanted to. And as for Arthur, I assure you it was he who planned this journey for you and asked me to take you on it. Don’t you think he knows what is best for you?”

“Why, of course, he does! I never questioned that. But maybe he isn’t just thinking of what is best for me. Maybe he is only thinking of what would give me pleasure. Anyhow I’ll ask him and make sure. He won’t deceive me. And he couldn’t if he tried. I always know when he’s making believe and when I get angry with him for pretending he always quits it and tells me the truth.”

“Then you’ll go if Arthur tells you he really wants you to go, and really thinks it best for you to go?”

“Of course, I will! I’ll do anything and everything he wants me to do, now and always. He’s the best man in the world, and the greatest, Edmonia. Don’t you believe that? If you don’t I shall quit loving you.”

“Oh, you may safely go on loving me then,” answered Edmonia bowing her head very low to inspect something minute in the fancy work she had in her lap, and in that way hiding her flushed face for the moment. “I think all the good things about Arthur that you do, Dorothy. As I know what his answer to your questions will be, we’ll order the seamstresses to begin work tomorrow morning. I’ll have everything made at Branton, so you are to come over there soon in the morning.”

The catechising of Arthur yielded the results that Edmonia had anticipated.

“Yes, Dorothy,” he said, “I am really very anxious that you shall make this trip. It will give you more of enjoyment than you can possibly anticipate, but it will do something much better than that. It will repair certain defects in your education, which have been stupidly provided for by people who did not appreciate your wonderful gifts and your remarkable character. For Dorothy, dear, though you do not know it, you are a person of really exceptional gifts both of mind and character – gifts that ought to be cultivated, but which have been suppressed instead. You do not know it, and perhaps you won’t quite believe it, but you have capacities such as no other woman in this community can even pretend to possess. You are very greatly the superior of any woman you ever saw.”

“Oh, not of Edmonia!” the girl quickly replied.

“Yes – even of Edmonia,” he answered.

The girl’s face was hotly flushed. She did not know why, but such praise, so sincerely given, and coming from the man whom she regarded as “the best man in the world, and the greatest,” was gladsome to her soul. Her native modesty forbade her to believe it, quite, “but,” she argued with herself, “of course he knows better than I do, better than anybody else ever can. And, of course, I must do all I can to improve myself in order that I may satisfy his expectations of me. I’ll ask him all about that before I leave.”

And she did.

“Cousin Arthur,” she said one evening as they two sat with Aunt Polly before a crackling fire in “the chamber” – let the author suspend that sentence in mid air while he explains.

The chamber, in an old plantation house, was that room on the ground floor in which the master of the plantation, whether married or unmarried, slept. It was the family room always. Into it came those guests whose intimacy was sufficient to warrant intrusion upon the penetralia. The others were entertained in the drawing room. The word chamber was pronounced “chawmber,” just as the word “aunt” was properly pronounced “awnt.” The chamber had a bed in it and a bureau. In a closet big enough for a modern bedroom there was a dressing case with its fit appurtenances. In the chamber there was a lounge that tempted to afternoon siestas, and there were great oaken arm chairs whose skilful fashioning for comfort rendered cushions an impertinence. In the chamber was always the broadest and most cavernous of fire places and the most satisfactory of fires when the weather was such as to render artificial heating desirable. In the chamber was usually a carpet softly cushioned beneath, itself and its cushions being subject to a daily flagellation out-of-doors in the “soon” hours of morning in order that they might be relaid before the breakfast-time. All other rooms in the house were apt to be carpetless, their immaculate white ash floors undergoing a daily polishing with pine needles and rubbing brushes. The chamber alone was carpeted in most houses. Why this distinction the author does not undertake to say. He merely records a fact which was well-nigh universal in the great plantation houses.

So much for the chamber. Let us return to the sentence it interrupted.

“Cousin Arthur,” Dorothy said, “I wish you would mark out a course of study for me to pursue during this journey, so that I may get out of it all the good I can.”

Arthur picked up a dry sponge and dropped it into a basin of water.

“Look, Dorothy,” he said. “That is the only course I shall mark out for you.”

“It is very dull of me, I suppose,” said the girl, “but I really don’t understand.”

“Why, I didn’t tell the sponge what to absorb, and yet as you see it has drunk up all the water it can hold. It is just so with you and your journey. You need no instruction as to what you shall learn by travel or by mingling in the social life of great cities. You are like that sponge. You will absorb all that you need of instruction, when once you are cast into the water of life. You have very superior gifts of observation. There is no fear that you will fail to get all that is best out of travel and society. It is only the stupid people who need be told what they should see and what they should think about it, and the stupid people would much better stay at home.”

XXVI

AUNT POLLY’S ADVICE

IF Aunt Polly had entertained any real desire to forbid the expedition planned for Dorothy, the prompt interference of Madison Peyton in that behalf would have dissipated it.

No sooner had Peyton learned of the contemplated journey than he bustled over to Wyanoke to see Aunt Polly regarding it.

It is not a comfortable thing to visit a man with whom one has recently quarrelled and to whom one has had to send a letter of apology. Even Peyton, thick-skinned and self-assured as he was, would probably have hesitated to make himself a guest at Wyanoke at this time but for the happy chance that Arthur was absent in Richmond for a few days.

Seizing upon the opportunity thus afforded, Peyton promptly visited Aunt Polly to enter a very earnest and insistent protest. He was genuinely alarmed. He realized Dorothy’s moral and intellectual superiority to his son. He was shrewd enough to foresee that travel and a year’s association with men and women of attractive culture and refined intellectual lives would, of necessity, increase this disparity and perhaps – nay, almost certainly – make Jefferson Peyton seem a distinctly unworthy and inferior person in Dorothy’s eyes. He realized that the arrangement made some years before between himself and Dr. South, was not binding upon Dorothy, except in so far as it might appeal to her conscience and to her loyalty to her father’s memory when the time should be ripe to reveal it to her. For as yet she knew nothing of the matter.

She had liked young Peyton when he and she were children together. His abounding good nature had made him an agreeable playmate. But as they had grown up, the sympathy between them had steadily decreased. The good nature which had made him agreeable as a playmate, had become a distinct weakness of character as he had matured. He lacked fixity of purpose, industry and even conscience – while Dorothy, born with these attributes, had strengthened them by every act and thought of her life.

The young man had courage enough to speak the truth fearlessly on all occasions that strongly called for truth and courage, but Dorothy had discovered that in minor matters he was untruthful. To her integrity of mind it was shocking that a young man should make false pretences, as he had done when they had talked of literature and the like. She could not understand a false pretence, and she had no toleration for the weakness that indulges in it.

Moreover in intellectual matters, Dorothy had completely outgrown her former playmate. The bright boy, whom Dorothy’s father had chosen as one destined to be a fit life companion for her, had remained a bright boy. And that which astonishes us as brilliancy in a child ceases to impress us as the child grows into manhood, if the promise of it is not fulfilled by growth. A bright boy, ten or twelve years old, is a very pleasant person to contemplate; but a youth who remains nothing more than a bright boy as he grows into manhood, is distinctly disappointing and depressing.

It is to be said to the credit of Madison Peyton that he had done all that he could – or rather all that he knew how – to promote the intellectual development of this his first born son. He had lavished money upon tutors for him, when he ought instead to have sent him to some school whose all dominating democracy would have compelled the boy to work for his standing and to realize the value of personal endeavor. In brief Madison Peyton had made that mistake which the much richer men of our day so often make. He had tried to provide for his son a royal road to learning, only to find that the pleasures of the roadside had won the wayfarer away from the objects of his journey.

Madison Peyton now realized all this. He understood how little profit his son had got out of the very expensive education provided for him, how completely he had failed to acquire intellectual tastes, and in a dimly subconscious way, he understood how ill equipped the young man was to win the love of such a girl as Dorothy, or to make her happy as his wife. And he realized also that if travel and culture and a larger thinking should weaken in Dorothy’s mind – as it easily might – that sense of obligation to fulfil her father’s desires, on which mainly he had relied for the carrying out of the program of marriage between these two, with Pocahontas plantation as an incidental advantage, the youth must win Dorothy by a worthiness of her love, or lose her for lack of it.

The worthiness in his son was obviously wanting. There remained only Dorothy’s overweening loyalty to her father’s memory and will as a reliance for the accomplishment of Madison Peyton’s desires. It was to prevent the weakening of that loyalty that he appealed to Aunt Polly to forbid the travel plan.

Aunt Polly from the first refused. “Dorothy is a wonderful girl,” she said, “and she has wonderful gifts. I shall certainly not stand in the way of their development.”

“But let me remind you, Cousin Polly,” answered Peyton, “that Dorothy’s life is marked out for her. Don’t you think it would be a distinct injustice to her to unfit her as this trip cannot fail to do, for the life that she must lead? Will not that tend to render her unhappy?”

“Happiness is not a matter of circumstance, Madison. It is a matter of character. But that isn’t what I meant to say. You want me to keep Dorothy here in order that she may not grow, or develop, or whatever else you choose to call it. You want to keep her as ignorant as you can, simply because you know she is already the superior of the young man whom you and Dr. South, in your ignorant assumption of the attributes of Divine Providence, have selected to be her husband. You are afraid that she will outgrow him. Isn’t that what you mean, Madison?”

“Well, yes, in a way. You put it very baldly, but – ”

“But that’s the truth, isn’t it? That’s what you’re afraid of?”

“Well, the fact is I don’t believe in educating girls above their station in life.”

“How can anything be above Dorothy’s station, Madison? She is the daughter and sole heir of one of the oldest and best families in Virginia. I have never heard of anything higher than that.”

“Oh, certainly. But that isn’t what I mean. You see Dorothy has been permitted to read a lot of books that young women don’t usually read, and study a lot of subjects that young women don’t usually study. She has got her head full of notions, and this trip will make the matter worse. I think women should look up to their husbands and not down upon them, and how can Dorothy – ”

“How would it do, Madison, for the young men to make an effort on their own account, to improve their minds and build up their characters so that their wives might look up to them without an effort? There are some men to whom the most highly cultivated women can look up in real respect, and it is quite natural that the best of the young women should choose these for their husbands. Many young men refuse to make themselves worthy in that way, or fail in such efforts as they may make to accomplish it. If I understand you properly, you would forbid the girls to cultivate what is best in them lest they grow superior to their coming husbands.”

“That’s it, Cousin Polly. The happy women are those who feel the superiority of their husbands and find pleasure in bowing to it.”

“I thought that was your idea. It is simply abominable. It makes no more of a woman than of a heifer or a filly. It regards her as nothing more or better than a convenience. I’ll have nothing to do with such a doctrine. Dorothy South is a girl of unusual character, and unusual mind, so far as I can judge. She has naturally done all she could to cultivate what is best in herself, and, so far as I can control the matter she shall go on doing so, as every woman and every man ought to do. When she has made the best she can of herself, she may perhaps meet some man worthy of her, some man fit to be her companion in life. If she does, she’ll probably marry him. If she meets none such she can remain single. That isn’t at all the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is a hideous thing to marry a girl to her inferior. You have yourself suggested that such a marriage can only mean wretchedness to both. And your plan of avoiding such marriages is to keep the girls inferior by denying them the privilege of self-cultivation. I tell you it is an abominable plan. It’s Turkish, and the only right way to carry it out is to shut women up in harems and forbid them to learn how to read. For if a woman or a man of brains learns that much, the rest cannot be prevented. So you may make up your mind that Dorothy is going to make this trip. I’ve already consented to it, and the more I think about it, the more I am in favor of it. My only fear is that she may fall off the earth when she gets to the other side, and I reckon that will not happen, for both Arthur and Edmonia assure me they didn’t fall off when they were over there.”

Peyton saw the necessity of making some stronger appeal to Aunt Polly, than any he had yet put forward. So he addressed himself to her conscience and her exalted sense of honor.

“Doubtless you are right, Cousin Polly,” he said placatively, “at least as to the general principle. But, as you clearly understand, this is a peculiar case. You see Dorothy must marry Jefferson in any event. Don’t you think it would be very unfair and even cruel to her, to let her unfit herself for happiness in the only marriage she is permitted to make? Will it not be cruel to let her get her head full of notions, and perhaps even accept some man’s attentions, and then find yourself in honor bound to show her the letter you hold from Dr. South, instructing her to carry out his will? You know she will obey her dead father and marry Jefferson. Isn’t it clearly your duty to shield and guard her against influences that cannot fail to unfit her for happiness in the marriage she must make?”

“I am sole judge of that matter, Madison. I am the guardian of Dorothy’s person during her nonage – four years longer. By the terms of Dr. South’s will she must not marry until she is twenty-one, except with my consent. With my consent she may marry at any time. As to the letter you speak of, you have never had the privilege of reading it, and I do not intend to show it to you. It is less peremptory, perhaps than you think. It does not command Dorothy to marry your son. It only recommends such a marriage to her as a safe and prudent one, securing to her the advantages of marriage into as good a family as her own. But there are other families than yours as good as her own, and I may see fit not to show Dorothy her father’s letter at all. I am not bound to let her read it, by any clause in his will, or by any promise to him, or even by any injunction from him. I am left sole judge as to that. If I had not been so left free to use my own discretion I should never have accepted the responsibility of the girl’s guardianship.”

“You astonish me!” exclaimed Peyton. “I had supposed this matter settled beyond recall. I had trusted Dr. South’s honor – ”

“Stop, Madison!” interposed Aunt Polly. “If you say one word in question of Dr. South’s honor and integrity, I will burn that letter now, and never, so long as I live mention its existence.”