Dorothy South

For a time there was an encouraging prospect of the success of these Virginian efforts. Nobody, North or South, believed that the cotton states would long stand alone in their determination, if Virginia and the other border states that looked to her for guidance – Kentucky, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Maryland – should continue to hold aloof.

In the meantime Mr. Lincoln, after his inauguration, had a somewhat similar problem to deal with at the North. There was a party there clamorous for instant war with a declared purpose of abolishing slavery. The advocates of that policy pressed it upon the new president as urgently as the extreme secessionists at the South pressed secession upon Virginia. Mr. Lincoln saw clearly, as these his advisers did not, that their policy was utterly impracticable. From the very beginning he insisted upon confining his administration’s efforts rigidly to the task of preserving the Union with the traditional rights of all the states unimpaired. He saw clearly that there were men by hundreds of thousands at the North, who would heart and soul support the administration’s efforts to preserve the Union, even by war if that should be necessary, but who would antagonize by every means in their power a war for the extirpation of slavery at cost of Federal usurpation of control over any state in its domestic affairs.

Accordingly, Mr. Lincoln held to his purpose. He would make no attempt to interfere with slavery where it constitutionally existed, and he would make no direct effort to compel seceding states to return to the Union; but he would use whatever force he might find necessary to repossess the forts, arsenals, post-offices and custom houses which the seceding states had seized upon within their borders, and he would endeavor to enforce the Federal laws there.

But in order to accomplish this, military forces were necessary, and the government at Washington did not possess them. There was only the regular army, and it consisted of a mere handful of men, scattered from Eastport, Maine, to San Diego, California, from St. Augustine, Florida to Puget’s Sound, and charged with the task – for which its numbers were utterly inadequate – of keeping the Indians in order and proper subjection. It is doubtful that Mr. Lincoln could have concentrated a single full regiment of regulars at any point, even at risk of withdrawing from the Indian country the men absolutely necessary to prevent massacre there. He therefore called for volunteers with whom to conduct such military operations as he deemed necessary. He apportioned the call among the several states that had not yet seceded. He called upon Virginia for her quota.

That was the breaking point. Virginia had to choose. She must either furnish a large force of volunteers with which the Federal government might in effect coerce the seceding states into submission, or she must herself secede and cast in her lot with the cotton states. To the Virginian mind there was only one course possible. The Virginians believed firmly and without doubt or question in the right of any state to withdraw from the Union at will. They looked with unimagined horror upon every proposal that the Federal power should coerce a seceding state into submission. They regarded that as an iniquity, a crime, a proceeding unspeakably wrongful and subversive of liberty. They could have nothing to do with such an attempt without dishonor of the basest kind. Accordingly, almost before the ink was dry upon the call upon Virginia for volunteers with which to make war upon the seceding Southern States, the Virginia, pro-Union convention, adopted an ordinance of secession, and the Civil War was on.

The men who had, so long and so earnestly, and in face of such contumely, labored to keep Virginia in the Union and to use all that state’s commanding influence in behalf of peace, felt themselves obliged to yield to the inevitable, and to consent to a sectional war for which they saw no necessity and recognized no occasion. They had wasted their time in a futile endeavor to bring about a reconciliation where the conflict had been all the while hopelessly “irrepressible.” There was nothing for it now but war, and Virginia, deeply deprecating war, set herself at work in earnest to prepare for the conflict.

In accordance with his lifelong habit of mind, Arthur Brent in this emergency put aside all thoughts of self-interest, and looked about him to discover in what way he might render the highest service to his native land, of which he was capable. He was unanimously chosen by each of two companies of volunteers in his native county, to be their captain. In their rivalry with each other, they agreed to make him major in command of a battalion to be formed of those two companies and two others that were in process of organization.

He peremptorily declined. “I know nothing of the military art,” he wrote to the committee that had laid the proposal before him. “There are scores of men in the community better fit than I am for military command. Especially there is your fellow citizen, John Meaux, trained at West Point and eminently fit for a much higher command than any that you can offer him. Put him, I earnestly adjure you, into the line of promotion. Elect him to the highest military office within your gift, and let me serve as a private under him, in either of your companies, if no opportunity offers for me to render a larger service and a more valuable one than that. There is scarcely a man among you who couldn’t handle a military force more effectively than I could. Let your most capable men be your commanders, big and little. I believe firmly in the dictum ‘the tools to him who can use them.’ For myself I see a more fruitful opportunity of service than any that military command could bring to me. I have a certain skill which, I think, is going to be sorely needed in this war. It is my firm belief that the struggle upon which we are entering is destined to last through long years of suffering and sore want. We are mainly dependent upon importation not only for the most pressingly necessary of our medicines but for that absolute necessity of life, salt. If war shall shut us in, as it is extremely likely to do, we must find means which we do not now possess of producing these and other things for ourselves, including the materials for that prime requisite of war – gunpowder. It so happens that I have skill in such manufactures as these, and I purpose to turn it to account whenever the necessity shall come upon us. In the meantime, as a surgeon and, upon occasion, as a private soldier I may perhaps be able to do more for Virginia and for the South than I could ever hope to do by assuming those functions of military command for which I have neither natural fitness nor the fitness of training.”

All this was deemed very absurd at the time. The war, it was thought, could not last more than sixty days – an opinion which Mr. Secretary of State Seward, on the other side of the line, confidently shared, though his anticipations of the end of it were quite different from those entertained at the South. Why a young man of spirit, such as Arthur Brent was, should refuse to enter upon the brief but glorious struggle in the capacity of a major with the prospect of coming out of it a brigadier-general, his neighbors could not understand. Nor could any of them, with one exception, understand his anticipations of a long war, or his conviction that, end as it might, the war would make an early end of slavery, overturning the South’s industrial system and bringing sore poverty upon the people. The one exception was Robert Copeland, the thrifty young man who had lost caste by “making too many hogsheads of tobacco to the hand.” He shared Arthur’s views, and he acted upon them in ways that Arthur would have scorned to do. He sent all his negroes to Richmond to be sold by auction to the traders to the far South. He converted his plantation, with all its live stock and other appurtenances into money, and with the proceeds of these his sellings he hurried to New York and purchased diamonds. These he bestowed in a belt which he buckled about his person and wore throughout the war, upon the principle that whatever value there might or might not be in other things when the war should be over, diamonds always command their price throughout the civilized world. When after this was done he sought to enlist in one of the companies forming in his neighborhood, he was rejected by unanimous vote, because he had sold negroes, while the men of the company held rigidly to a social standard of conduct which he had flagrantly defied. He went to Richmond. He raised a company of ruffians, which included many “jailbirds” and the like. He made himself its captain, and went into the field as the leader of a “fighting battery.” He distinguished himself for daring, and came out of the war, four years later, a brigadier-general. As such he was excluded from the benefits of the early amnesty proclamation. But he cared little about that. He went to New York, sold his diamonds for fifty per cent more than their cost, and accepted high office in the army of the Khedive of Egypt. He thus continued active in that profession of arms in which he had found his best opportunity to exercise his peculiar gift of “getting out of men all there is in them” – which was the phrase chosen by himself to describe his own special capabilities.[3 - This story of Robert Copeland is historical fact, except for such disguises of name, etc. as are necessary under the circumstances. – Author.]

XXXIII

“AT PARIS IT WAS”

DURING all this year of wandering on the part of Dorothy Edmonia did her duty as a correspondent with conspicuous fidelity. To her letters far more than to Dorothy’s own, Arthur was indebted for exact information as to Dorothy’s doings and Dorothy’s surroundings and Dorothy’s self. For Dorothy’s reticence concerning herself grew upon her as the months went on. She wrote freely and with as much apparent candor and fulness as ever, but she managed never to reveal herself in the old familiar fashion. Not that there was anything of estrangement in her words or tone, for there was nothing of the kind. It was only that she manifested a certain shyness and reserve concerning her own thought and feeling when these became intimate, – a reserve like that which every woman instinctively practises concerning details of the toilet. A woman may frankly admit to a man that she finds comfort in the use of a little powder, but she does not want him to see the powder box and puff. She may mention her shoe-strings quite without hesitation, but if one of them comes unfastened, she will climb two flights of stairs rather than let him see her readjust it.

In somewhat that way Dorothy at this time wrote to Arthur. If she read a book or saw a picture that pleased her, she would write to him, telling him quite all her external thought concerning it; but if it inspired any emotion of a certain sort in her, she had nothing whatever to say concerning that. In one particular, too, she deliberately abstained from telling him even of her pursuits and ambitions. He was left to hear of that from Edmonia, who wrote:

“Apparently we are destined to remain here in Paris during the rest of our stay abroad. For Dorothy has a new craze which she will in no wise relinquish or abate. For that, you, sir, are responsible, for you planted the seed that are now producing this luxuriant growth of quite unfeminine character. You taught Dorothy the rudiments of chemistry and physics. You awakened in her a taste for such studies which has grown into an uncontrollable passion.

“She has become the special pupil of one of the greatest chemists in France, and she almost literally lives in his laboratory, at least during the daylight hours. She goes to operas about twice a week, and she takes violin lessons from a woman before breakfast; but during the rest of the time she does nothing but slop at a laboratory sink. Her master in this department is madly in love – not with her, though he calls her, in the only English phrase he speaks without accent, ‘the apple of his eye,’ – but with her enthusiasm in science. He describes it as a ‘grand passion’ and positively raves in ejaculatory French and badly broken English, over the extraordinary rapidity with which she learns, the astonishing grasp she has of principles, and the readiness with which she applies principles to practice. ‘Positively’ he exclaimed to me the other day, ‘she is no longer a student – she is a chemist, – almost a great chemist. If I had to select one to take absolute control of a laboratory for the nice production of the most difficult compounds, I would this day choose not any man in all France, but Mademoiselle by herself.’ Then he paid you a compliment. He added; ‘and she tells me she has studied under a master for only a few months! It is marvellous! It is incredible, except that we must believe Mademoiselle, who is the soul of honor and truth. Ah – that is what gives her her love of science – for science loves nothing but truth. But her first master must be a wonder, a born teacher, an enthusiast, a real master who inspires his pupil with a passion like his own.’

“I confirmed Dorothy’s statement that she had received only a few months’ tuition in a little plantation laboratory, but – at the risk of making you disagreeably conceited, I will tell you this – I fully confirmed the judgment he had formed of Dorothy’s master.

“ ‘Ah, you know him then?’ the enthusiastic Frenchman broke out; ‘and you will tell me his name, which Mademoiselle refused to speak in answer to my inquiry? And you will give me a letter which may excuse me for the deep presumption when I write to him? I must write to him. I must know a master who has no other such in all France. His name Mademoiselle Bannister, his name, I pray you.’

“Now comes the curious part of the story. I told Monsieur your name and address, and his eyes instantly lighted up. ‘Ah, that accounts for all!’ he exclaimed. ‘I know the Dr. Brent. He was my own pupil till I could teach him nothing that he did not know. Then he taught me all the original things he had learned for himself during his stay in my laboratory and before that. Then we ceased to be master and pupil. We were after that two masters working together and every day finding out much that the world can never be enough grateful for. He is truly a wonder, Mister the Doctor Brent! I no longer am surprised at Mademoiselle Sout’s accomplishments and her enthusiasm. But why did she not want to speak to me his name? Is it that she loves him and he loves her not – ah, no, that cannot be! He must love Mademoiselle Sout’ after he has taught her. Nothing else is possible. But is it then that he is dull to find out, and that he doubts the reaction of her love in return for his? Ah, no! He is too great a chemist for that. There must be some other explanation and I cannot find it out. But Mister the Doctor Brent is after all only an American. The Americans are what you call alert in everything but one. Mister the Doctor Brent would quickly discover the smallest error in a reaction and he would know the cause of it. But he did not note the affinity in Mademoiselle for himself. I am not a greater chemist than he is, and yet I see it instantly, when she does not want to speak to me his name! He is a man most fortunate, in that I am old and have Madame at home and three young sons in the École Polytechnique! Ah, how ardently I should have wooed Mademoiselle, the charming, if she had come to me as a pupil twenty five years ago!’

“Now, I’m not quite sure Arthur that your danger in that quarter is altogether past. Yes, I am. That was a sorry jest. But I sincerely hope that on our return you may be a trifle more alert than you have hitherto been in discovering ‘reactions.’ You don’t at all deserve that I should thus enlighten and counsel you. And it may very easily prove to be too late when we return. For, in spite of her absorption in chemistry, and the horribly stained condition of her fingers sometimes, I drag her to all sorts of entertainments, and at the Tuileries especially she is a favorite. The Empress is so gracious to ‘the charming American,’ as she calls her, that she even summons me to her side for the sake of Dorothy’s company. The entire ‘eligible list’ of the diplomatic corps has gone daft about her beauty, her naïveté and her wonderful accomplishments. The Duc de Morny has even ventured to call twice at our hotel, begging the privilege of ‘paying his respects to the charming young American.’ But the Duc de Morny is a beast – an accomplished, fascinating beast, if you please, but a beast, nevertheless, – and I have used my woman’s privilege of fibbing so far as to send him word, each time, that Mademoiselle was not at home.

“ ‘Why did the Duc de Morny want to call upon me?’ queried the simple, honest minded Dorothy, when she heard of the visits of this greatest potentate in France next to the Emperor. I could not explain, so I fibbed a bit further and told her it was only his extreme politeness and the French friendship for Americans.

“Young Jefferson Peyton, you know, has been following us from the beginning. Dorothy expresses surprise, now and then, that his route happens, so singularly to coincide with our own. I think he will explain all that to her presently. He has greatly improved by travel. He has learned that his name and family count for nothing outside Virginia, and that he is personally a man of far less consequence than he has been brought up to consider himself. Now that he has been cured of a conceit that was due rather to his provincial bringing up than to any innate tendency in that direction, now that he has seen enough of the world to acquire a new perspective in contemplating himself, he has become in truth a very pleasing young man. His father did well to act upon Aunt Polly’s advice and send him abroad for education and culture. He is going to propose to Dorothy at the very first opportunity. He has told me so himself, and as she has a distinct liking for the amiable and really very handsome young fellow, I cannot venture upon any confident prediction as to the consequences.”

That letter came as a Christmas gift to Arthur Brent. One week later, on the New Year’s day, came one from Dorothy which made amends by reason of its resumption of much of the old tone of candor and confidence which he had so sadly missed from her letters during many months past.

“I want to go home, Cousin Arthur,” she began. “I want to go home at once. I want my dear old mammy to put her arms around me as she used to do when I was a little child, and croon me to sleep, so that I may forget all that has happened to me. And, I want to talk with you again, Cousin Arthur, as freely as I used to do when you and I rode together through the woodlands or the corn at sunrise, when we didn’t mind a wetting from the dew, and when our horses and my dear dogs seemed to enjoy the glory of the morning as keenly as we did. It is in memory of those mornings that I send you back the soiled handkerchief you mailed to me. I want you, please, to give it to Ben, and tell him I make him a present of it, because it is no longer fit for you to use. You needn’t tell him anything more than that. He will understand. But I mustn’t leave you any longer to the mercy of such neglect on the part of servants to whom you are always so good. I must get home again before this terrible war breaks out. I have read all your letters about it a hundred times each, and I have tried to fit myself for my part in it. When you told me how great the need was likely to be for somebody qualified to make medicines, and salt, and saltpetre and soda and potash for gunpowder – no, you didn’t tell me of all that, you wrote to Edmonia about it, and that hurt my feelings because it seemed to put me out of your life and work – but when Edmonia told me what you had written about it, I set myself to work again at my chemistry, and I have worked so diligently at it that my master, Mons. X. declares that I am capable of taking complete charge of a laboratory and doing the most difficult and delicate of all the work needed. I believe I am. Anyhow, he has somehow found out, – though I certainly never told him of it – that you taught me at the beginning and he insists upon giving me a letter to you about my qualifications.

“You say you hope Virginia will not secede, and that perhaps, after all, there will be no war. But I see clearly that you have no great confidence in your own hopes. So I am in a great hurry to get home before trouble comes. After it comes it may be too late for me to get home at all.

“So I should just compel Edmonia to take the first ship for New York, if we had any money. But we haven’t any, because I have spent all my own and borrowed and spent all of hers. We must wait now until you and Archer Bannister can send us new letters of credit or whatever it is that you call the papers on which the banking people here are so ready to give us all the money we want. Now I must ’fess up about the expenses. They have not been incurred for new gowns or for any other feminine frivolities. I’ve spent all my own money and all of Edmonia’s for chemicals and chemical apparatus, which I foresee that you and I will need in order to make medicines and salt and soda and saltpetre for our soldiers and people. I’ve ordered all these things sent by a ship that is going to Nassau, in the Bahama Islands, and the captain of the ship promises me that whether there is a blockade or not, he will get them through to you somehow or other. By the way the foolish fellow, who is a French naval officer, detailed for the merchant service, wanted me to marry him – isn’t it absurd? – and I told him we’d keep that question open till the chemicals and apparatus should be safe in your hands, and till he could come to you in the uniform of a Virginia officer, and ask you as my guardian, for permission to pay his addresses. Was it wrong, Cousin Arthur, thus to play with a fellow who never really loved anybody, but who simply wanted Pocahontas plantation? You see I’ve become very bad, and very knowing, since I’ve been without control, as I told you I would. But, anyhow, that Frenchman will get the things to you in safety.

“But all this nonsense isn’t what I wanted to write to you. I want to go home and I will go home, even if I have to accept Jefferson Peyton’s offer to furnish the money necessary. We simply mustn’t be shut out of Virginia when the war comes, and nobody can tell when it will come now. But of course I shall not let Jeff furnish the money. That was only a strong way of putting it. For Jeff has insulted me, I think. I’m not quite certain, but I think that is what it amounts to. You will know, and I’m going to tell you all about it, just as I used to tell you all about everything, before – well before all this sort of thing. Jeff has been travelling about ever since we began our journey, and he has really been very nice to us, and very useful sometimes. But a few days ago he proposed marriage to me. I was disposed to be very kindly in my treatment of him, because I rather like the poor fellow. But when I told him I didn’t in the least think of marrying him or anybody else, he lost his temper, and had the assurance to say that the time would come when I would be very grateful to him for being willing to offer me such a road out of my difficulties. He didn’t explain, for I instantly rang for a servant to show him out of the hotel parlor, and myself retired by another door. But, I think I know what he meant, because I have found out all about myself and my mother, all the things that people have been so laboriously endeavoring to keep me from finding out. And among other things I have found out that I must marry Jeff Peyton or nobody. So I will marry nobody, so long as I live. I’ll be like Aunt Polly, just good and useful in the world.

“I’ll write you all about this by the next steamer, if I can make up my mind to do it – that is to say if I find that in spite of all, I may go on thinking of you as my best friend on earth, and telling you everything that troubles me just as I used to tell dear old mammy, when the bees stung me or the daisies wilted before I could make them into a pretty chain. I have a great longing to tell you things in the old, frank, unreserved way, and to feel the comfort of your strong support in doing what it is right for me to do. Somehow, all this distance has seemed to make it difficult to do that. But now that my fate in life is settled and my career fully marked out as a woman whose only ambition is to be as useful as possible, I may talk to you, mayn’t I, in the old, unreserved way, in full assurance that you won’t let me make any mistakes?

“That is what I want. So I have this moment decided that I will not wait for you to send me a new letter of credit, but will find somebody here to lend me enough money to go home on. In the meantime I’m going to begin being the old, frank, truthful Dorothy, by writing you, by the next steamer, all that I have learned about myself.”

XXXIV

DOROTHY’S DISCOVERY

DOROTHY’S next letter came at the beginning of the spring. There were mail steamers at that time only once a fortnight and the passage occupied a fortnight more – or perhaps a longer time as the sea and the west wind might determine.

“I hope this letter will reach you before I do, Cousin Arthur,” Dorothy began. “But I’m not quite sure of that, for we hope to sail by the Asia on her next trip and she is a much faster ship they say than the one that is to carry this. The money things arranged themselves easily and without effort. For when I asked Mr. Livingston, – Mildred’s husband, you know – to go with me to the bankers to see if they wouldn’t lend me a few hundred dollars, he laughed and said:

‘You needn’t bother, you little spendthrift. I provided for all that before we started. I knew you women would spend all your money, so I gave myself a heavy credit with my bankers here, and of course you can have all the money you want.’ I didn’t like it for him to think we’d spent our money foolishly, but I couldn’t explain, so I just thanked him and said, with all the dignity I could command: ‘I’ll give you a letter of credit on my guardian Dr. Brent.’ I suppose I got the terms wrong, for he laughed in his careless way – he always laughs at things as if nothing in the world mattered. He even laughed at his own seasickness on the ship. Anyhow, he told me I needn’t give him any kind of papers – that you would settle the bill when the time came, and that I could have all the money I needed. So at first we thought we should get off by the ship that is to carry this letter. But something got the matter with Mildred’s teeth, so we had to wait over for the Asia. Why do things get the matter with people’s teeth? Nothing ever got the matter with mine, and I never heard of anything getting the matter with yours or Edmonia’s. Mr. Livingston says that’s because we eat corn bread. How I wish I had some at this moment!

“But that isn’t what I want to write to you about. I have much more serious things to tell you – things that alter my whole life, and make it sadder than I ever expected it to be.

“I have seen my mother, and she has told me the whole terrible story. She wouldn’t have told me now or ever, but that she thought she was going to die under a surgical operation.

“You remember I wrote to you about Madame Le Sud, whom I met on shipboard and learned to love so much. I’m glad I learned to love her, because she is my mother. She calls herself Madame Le Sud, because that is only the French way of calling herself Mrs. South, you know.

“The way of it was this: When we parted at Liverpool I told her what our trip was to be. She was coming direct to Paris, and I made her promise to let me visit her here if she did not leave before our arrival, as she thought she probably would. When we got here I rather hoped to hear from her, for somehow, though I did not dream of the relationship between us, I had formed a very tender attachment to her, and I longed to see her again.

“As the weeks passed and I heard nothing, I made up my mind that she had gone back to New York before we reached Paris, and I was not undeceived until a few weeks ago, when she sent me a sad little note, telling me she was ill and asking me to call upon her in her apartments in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs.

“I went at once and found her in very pitiful condition. Her apartments were mere garrets, ill furnished and utterly uncomfortable, and she herself was manifestly suffering. When I asked her why she had not sent for me before, she answered: ‘It was better not, child. You were in your proper place. You were happy. You were receiving social recognition of the highest kind and it was good for you because you are fit for it and deserve it. I have sent for you now only because I have something that I must give to you before I die. For I’m going to die almost immediately.’ She wouldn’t let me interrupt her. ‘I’m going to have a surgical operation tomorrow, and I do not expect to get over it.’

“I found out presently that she was going to a charity hospital for her treatment, and that it was because she is so poor; for by reason of her sickness, she has lost her employment, which was that of a dresser for an opera company. Think of it, Cousin Arthur! My mother, – though I didn’t know then that she was my mother – a dresser to those opera people! I’m glad she didn’t tell me she was my mother until after I had told her she should not go to a charity hospital, to be operated on before a class of gaping students and treated very much as if she were a subject in a dissecting room. I took all that in my own hands. I went down to the concierge and secured a comfortable apartment for my mother on the entresol, with a nice French maid to look after her. Then I sent for the best surgeon I could hear of to treat her, and he promised me to get her quite well again in a few weeks, which he has done. It was after I had moved her down to the new apartments and sent the maid out for a little dinner – for my mother hadn’t anything to eat or any money – it was after all that that she told me her story.

“First she gave me a magnificent ring, a beautiful fire opal set round with diamonds. Think of it! She with that in her possession and belonging to her, which would have sold for enough to keep her in luxury for months, yet shivering there without a fire and without food, and waiting for the morrow, to go to a charity hospital like a pauper, while I have the best rooms in the best hotel in Paris! And she my mother, all the while!

“When she put the ring on my finger, saying, ‘It fits you as it once fitted me – but you are worthy of it as I never was,’ I cried a little and begged her to tell me what it all meant. Then she broke down and, clasping me in her arms, told me that she was my own mother. I won’t tell you all the details of our weeping time, for they are too sacred even for you to hear. Let me simply copy here, as accurately as I can, my mother’s account of herself.

“ ‘I was born,’ she said, ‘the daughter of a Virginian of good family – as good as any. My father lived as many Virginians do, far beyond his means. Perhaps he did wrong things – I do not know, and after all it is no matter. At any rate when he died people seemed to care very little for us – my mother and me – when everything we had was sold and we went out into the world to hunt for bread. I was seventeen then, I had what they call a genius for music. We went to New York and lived wretchedly there for a time. But I earned something with my violin and my ’cello, and now and then by singing, for I had a voice that was deemed good. We lived in that wretched, ill-mannered, loose-moraled, dissolute and financially reckless set which calls itself Bohemia, and excuses itself from all social and moral obligation on the ground that its members are persons of genius, though in fact most of them are anything else. My mother never liked these people. She simply tolerated them, and she did that only because she had no choice. She did her best to shield me against harm to my soul in contact with them, but she could not prevent the contact itself. Our bread and butter and the roof over our heads depended upon that. Finally there came into our set a manager who was looking out for opportunities. He heard me play, and he heard me sing. He proposed that I should go to Europe for instruction at his expense, and that he should bring me out as a genius in the autumn. I went, and I received some brief instruction of great value to me – not that it made me a better musician but that it taught me how to captivate an audience with such gifts as I had. Well the manager brought me out, and I succeeded even beyond his expectations. I don’t think it was my musical ability altogether, though that was thought to be remarkable, I believe. I was beautiful then, as you are now, Dorothy; I had all the charm of a willowy grace, which, added to my beauty, made men and women go mad over me. I made money in abundance for my manager, and that was all that he cared for. I made money for myself too, and my mother and I were eagerly sought after by the leaders of fashion. We ceased to know the old Bohemia and came to be members of a new and perhaps not a better set – except in its conformity to those rules of life which are supposed to hedge respectability about, without really improving its morals. For I tell you child I saw more of real wickedness in my contact with those who call themselves the socially elect than I ever dreamed of among my old-time Bohemian associates. The only advantage these dissolutes had over the others was, that having bank accounts they drew checks for their debts where the others shirked and shuffled to escape from theirs.

“ ‘I was glad, therefore, when your father came into my life. He was a man of a higher type than any that I had known since early childhood – a man of integrity, of honor, of high purposes. His courtesy was exquisite, and it was sincere. It is often said of a man that he would not tell a lie to save his life. Your father went further than that, my child. He would not tell a lie even to please a woman, and with such a man as he was, pleasing a woman was a stronger temptation than saving his life. He was in New York taking a supplementary medical course – what they now call a post graduate course, – in order, as he said, that he might the better fulfil his life-saving mission as a physician. He fell madly in love with me, and I – God help me! I loved him as well as one of my shallow nature and irregular bringing up could love any man. After a little I married him. I went with him for a brief trip abroad, and after that I went to be mistress of Pocahontas. I looked forward longingly to the beautiful life of refinement there, as he so often pictured it to me. I was tired of the whirl and excitement. I was weary of the footlights and of having to take my applause and my approval over the heads of the orchestra. I thought I should be perfectly happy, playing grand lady in an old, historic Virginia house. I was only nineteen years old then, – I am well under forty still – and for a time I did enjoy the new life amazingly. But after a little it wearied me. It seemed to me too narrow, too conventional, too uninteresting. When I had company and poured my whole soul into a violin obligato, – rendering the great music in a way which had often brought down the house and called for repeated encores while delighted audiences threatened to bury me under flowers – when I did that sort of thing at Pocahontas, the guests would say coldly how well I played and all the other parrot like things that people say when they mean to be polite but have no real appreciation of music. Little by little I grew utterly weary of the life. The very things in it that had at first delighted and rested me, became like thorns in my flesh. As the rescued children of Israel longed for the flesh pots of Egypt, so at last I came to long again for the delights of the old life on the stage, with its excitements, its ever changing pleasures, its triumphs and even its failures and disappointments. Yet it was not so much a longing for that old life which oppressed me, as an intolerable impatience to get out of the new one from which I had expected so much of happiness. It seemed to me a tread-mill life of self-indulgence. I was surrounded by every luxury that a well-ordered woman could desire. But I was not a well-ordered woman, and the very luxury of my surroundings, the very exemption they gave me from all care, all responsibility, all endeavor, seemed to drive me almost insane with impatience. I had nothing to do. I was surrounded by skilled servants who provokingly anticipated every wish I could form. If I wanted even to rinse my fingers after eating a peach, I was not permitted to do it in any ordinary way. There was always a maid standing ready with a bowl and napkin for my use. My bed was prepared for me before I went to it, and the maid waited to put out the candle after I had gone to rest. Your father worshipped me, and surrounded me with attentions on his own part and on that of others, which were intolerable in the perfection of their service. I knew that I was not worthy of his worship and I often told him so, to no effect. He only worshipped me the more. The only time I ever saw him angry was once soon after you were born. I loved you as I had never dreamed of loving anybody or anything before in my life – even better ten thousand times than I had ever loved music itself. I wanted to do something for you with my own hands. I wanted to feel that I was your mother and you altogether my own child.

“ ‘So, just as old mammy was preparing to give you your bath, I pretended to be faint and sent her below stairs to bring me a cup of coffee. When she had gone I seized you and in ecstatic triumph, set to work to make your little baby toilet with my own hands. Just as I began, your father came stalking up the stairs and entered the nursery. For mammy had told him I was faint, and he had hurried to my relief. When he found me bathing you he rang violently for all the servants within call and as they came one after another upon the scene he challenged each to know why their mistress was thus left to do servile offices for herself. But for my pleading I think he would have taken the whole company of them out to the barn and chastised them with his own hand, though I had never known him to strike a servant.

“ ‘I know now that I ought to have explained the matter to him. I ought to have told him how the mother love in me longed to do something for you. I know he would have understood even in his rage over what he regarded as neglect of me, and he would have sympathized with my feeling. But I was enraged at the baffling of my purpose, and I hastily put on a riding habit, mounted my horse, which, your father, seeing my purpose, promptly ordered brought to the block, and rode away, unattended except by a negro groom. For when your father offered his escort I declined it, begging him to let me ride alone.

“ ‘It was not long after that that I sat hour after hour by your cradle, composing a lullaby which should be altogether your own, and as worthy of you as I could make it. When the words and the music were complete and satisfying to my soul, I began singing the little song to you, and your father, whose love of music was intense, seemed entranced with it. He would beg me often to sing it, and to play the violin accompaniment I had composed to go with it. I would never do so except over your cradle. Understand me, child, if you can understand one of so wayward a temper as mine. I had put all my soul into that lullaby. Every word in it, every note of the music, was an expression of my mother love – the best there was in me. I was jealous of it for you. I would not allow even your father to hear a note of that outpouring of my love for my child, except as a listener while I sang and played for you alone. So your cradle with you in it must always be brought before I would let your father hear.

“ ‘One day, when you were six or eight months old, we had a houseful of guests, as we often did at Pocahontas. They stayed over night of course, and in the evening when I asked their indulgence while I should go and sing you to sleep, your father madly pleaded that I should sing and play the lullaby in the drawing room in order that the guests might hear what he assured them was his supreme favorite among all musical compositions. I suppose I was in a more than usually complaisant mood. At any rate, I allowed myself to

be persuaded against my will, and mammy brought you in, in your cradle. I remember that you had a little pink sack over your night gown – a thing I had surreptitiously knitted for you without anybody’s knowledge, and without even the touch of a servant’s hand.

“ ‘You were crowing with glee at the lights and the great, flaring fire. Everybody in the room wanted to caress you, but I peremptorily ordered them off, and took you for a time into my own arms. At last, when the lights were turned down at my command, and the firelight hidden behind a screen, I took the violin – a rare old instrument for which your father had paid a king’s ransom – and began to play. After the prelude had been twice played, I began to sing. Never in my life had I been so overwhelmingly conscious of you – so completely unconscious of everybody else in the world. I played and sang only to my child. All other human beings were nonexistent. I played with a perfection of which I had never for a moment thought myself capable. I sang with a tenderness which I could never have commanded had I been conscious for the time of any other existence than your own. In that music my soul laid itself bare to yours and prayed for your love. I told you in every tone all that a mother love means – all that an intensely emotional woman is capable of feeling; I gave free rein to all there was in me of passion, and made all of it your own. I was in an ecstasy. I was entranced. My soul was transfigured and all was wrought into the music.