At the instant I felt that I staked my whole future, and yet that it was no longer in my power to hesitate or to draw back. "The word is—you," I replied.
Her hand dropped from the mare's neck, where it had almost touched mine, and I watched her mouth grow tremulous until the red of it showed in a violent contrast to the clear pallor of her face. Then she turned her head away from me toward the sun, and thoughtful and in silence, we passed down Franklin Street to the old grey house.
When we had delivered the mare to the coloured groom waiting on the sidewalk, she turned to me for the first time since I had uttered my daring word.
"You must come in to breakfast with us," she said, with a friendly and careless smile, "Aunt Mitty will be disappointed if I return without what she calls 'a cavalier.'"
The doubt occurred to me if Miss Mitty would consider me entitled to so felicitous a phrase, but smothering it the next minute as best I could, I followed Sally, not without trepidation, up the short flight of steps, and into the wide hall, where the air was heavy with the perfume of fading roses. Great silver bowls of them drooped now, with blighted heads, amid the withered smilax, and the floor was strewn thickly with petals, as if a strong wind had blown down the staircase. From the dining room came a delicious aroma of coffee, and as we crossed the threshold, I saw that the two ladies, in their lace morning caps, were already seated at the round mahogany table. From behind the tall old silver service, the grave oval face of Miss Mitty cast on me, as I entered, a look in which a faint wonder was mingled with a pleasant hereditary habit of welcome. A cover was already laid for the chance comer, and as I took possession of it in response to her invitation, I felt again that terrible shyness—that burning physical embarrassment of the plain man in unfamiliar surroundings. So had I felt on the morning when I had stood in the kitchen, with my basket on my arm, and declined the plum cake for which my mouth watered. In the road with Sally I had appeared to share, as she had said, something of the dignity of the broomsedge and the open sky; here opposite to Miss Matoaca, with the rich mahogany table and the vase of chrysanthemums between us, I seemed ridiculously out of proportion to the surroundings amid which I sat, speechless and awkward. Was it possible that any woman could look beneath that mountain of shyness, and discern a self-confidence in large matters that would some day make a greater man than the General?
"Cream and sugar?" enquired Miss Mitty, in a tone from which I knew she had striven to banish the recognition that she addressed a social inferior. Her pleasant smile seemed etched about her mouth, over the expression of faint wonder which persisted beneath. I felt that her racial breeding, like Miss Matoaca's, was battling against her instinctive aversion, and at the same moment I knew that I ought to have declined the invitation Sally had given. A sense of outrage—of resentment—swelled hot and strong in my heart. What was this social barrier—this aristocratic standard that could accept the General and reject such men as I? If it had sprung back, strong and flexible as a steel wire, before the man, would it still present its irresistible strength against the power of money? In that instant I resolved that if wealth alone could triumph over it, wealth should become the weapon of my attack. Then my gaze met Sally's over the chrysanthemums, and the thought in my brain shrank back suddenly abashed.
"Dolly got a stone in her foot, poor dear," she remarked to her aunts, "and Ben Starr got it out. She limped all the way home."
At her playful use of my name, a glance flashed from Miss Mitty to Miss Matoaca and back again across the high silver service.
"Then we are very grateful to Mr. Starr," replied Miss Mitty in a prim voice. "Sister Matoaca and I were just agreeing that you ought not to be allowed to ride alone outside the city."
"Perhaps we can arrange with Ben to go walking along the same road," responded Sally provokingly, "and I shouldn't be in need of a groom."
For the first time I raised my eyes. "I'll walk anywhere except along the road-to-what-might-have-been," I said, and my voice was quite steady.
Her glance dropped to her plate. Then she looked across the vase of chrysanthemums into Miss Mitty's face.
"Ben and I used to play together, Aunt Mitty," she said, offering the information as if it were the most pleasant fact in the world, "when I lived on Church Hill."
A flush rose to Miss Mitty's cheeks, and passed the next instant, as if by a wave of sympathy, into Miss Matoaca's.
"I hoped, Sally, that you had forgotten that part of your life," observed the elder lady stiffly.
"How can I forget it, Aunt Mitty? I was very happy over there."
"And are you not happy here, dear?" asked Miss Matoaca, hurt by the words, and bending over, she smelt a spray of lilies-of-the-valley that had lain beside her plate.
"Of course I am, Aunt Matoaca, but one doesn't forget. I met Ben first when I was six years old. Mamma and I stopped at his house in a storm one night on our way over to grandmama's. We were soaking wet, and they were very kind and dried us and gave us hot things to drink, and his mother wrapped me up in a shawl and sent me here with mamma. I shall always remember how good they were, and how he broke off a red geranium from his mother's plant and gave it to me."
As she told her story, Miss Mitty watched her attentively, the expression of faint wonder in her eyes and her narrow eyebrows, and her pleasant, rather pained smile etched delicately about her fine, thin lips. Her long, oval face, suffused now by an unusual colour, rose above the quaint old coffee urn, on which the Fairfax crest, belonging to her mother's family, was engraved. If any passion could have been supposed to rock that flat, virgin bosom, I should have said that it was moved by a passion of wounded pride.
"Is your coffee right, Mr. Starr? Have you cream enough?" she enquired politely. "Selim, give Mr. Starr a partridge."
My coffee was right, and I declined the bird, which would have stuck in my throat. The united pride of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, I told myself, could not equal that possessed by a single obscure son of a stone-cutter.
"If you are as hungry as I am, you are famished," observed Sally, with a gallant effort to make a semblance of gayety sport on a frozen atmosphere. "Aunt Matoaca, have pity and give me a muffin."
Muffins were passed by Miss Matoaca; waffles were presented immediately by Selim.
"Do take a hot one," urged Miss Matoaca anxiously, "yours is quite cold."
I took a hot one, and after placing it on the small white and gold plate, swore desperately to myself that I would not eat a mouthful in that house until I could eat there as an equal. The faint wonder beneath the pained fixed smile on Miss Mitty's face stabbed me like a knife. All her anxious hospitality, all her offers of cream and partridges, could not for a single minute efface it. Turning my head I discerned the same expression, still fainter, still gentler, reflected on Miss Matoaca's lips—as if some subtle bond of sympathy between them were asking always, beneath the hereditary courtesy: "Can this be possible? Are we, whose mother was a Fairfax, whose father was a Bland, sitting at our own table with a man who is not a gentleman by birth?—who has even brought a market basket to our kitchen door? What has become of the established order if such a thing as this can happen to two unprotected Virginia ladies?"
And it was quite characteristic of their race, of their class, that the greater the wonder grew in their gentle minds, the more sedulously they plied me with coffee and partridges and preserves—that the more their souls abhorred me, the more lavish became their hands. Divided as they were by their principles, something stronger than a principle now held the sisters together, and this was a passionate belief in the integrity of their race.
Again Selim handed the waffles in a frozen silence, and again Sally made an unsuccessful attempt to produce an appearance of animation.
"Are you going to market, Aunt Matoaca?" she asked, "and will you remember to buy seed for my canary?"
The flush in Miss Matoaca's cheek this time, I could not explain.
"Sister Mitty will go," she replied, in confusion, "I—I have another engagement."
"She alludes to a meeting of one of her boards," observed Miss Mitty, and turning to me she added, with what I felt to be an unfair thrust at the shrinking bosom of Miss Matoaca, "My sister is a great reader, Mr. Starr, and she has drawn many of her opinions out of books instead of from life."
I looked up, my eyes met Miss Matoaca's, and I remembered her love story.
"We all do that, I suppose," I answered. "Even when we get them from life, haven't most of them had their beginning in books?"
"I am not a great reader myself," remarked Miss Mitty, a trifle primly. "My father used to say that when a lady had read a chapter of her Bible in the morning, and consulted her cook-book, she had done as much literary work as was good for her. Too intimate an acquaintance with books, he always said, was apt to unsettle the views, and the best judgment a woman can have, I am sure, is the opinion of the gentlemen of her family."
"That may be true," I admitted, and my self-possession returned to me, until a certain masculine assurance sounded in my voice, "but I'm quite sure I shouldn't like anybody else's opinion to decide mine."
"You are a man," rejoined Miss Mitty, and I felt that she had not been able to bring her truthful lips to utter the word "gentleman." "It is natural that you should have independent ideas, but, as far as I am concerned, I am perfectly content to think as my grandmother and my great-grandmother have thought before me. Indeed, it seems to me almost disrespectful to differ from them."
"And it was dear great-grandmama," laughed Sally, "who when the doctor once enquired if her tooth ached, turned to great-grandpapa and asked, 'Does it ache, Bolivar?'"
She had tossed her riding hat aside, and a single loosened wave of her hair had fallen low on her forehead above her arched black eyebrows. Beneath it her eyes, very wide and bright, held a puzzled yet resolute look, as if they were fixed upon an obstacle which frightened her, and which she was determined to overcome.
"You are speaking of my grandmama, Sally," observed Miss Mitty, and I could see that the levity of the girl had wounded her.
"I'm sorry, dear Aunt Mitty, she was my great-grandmama, too, but that doesn't keep me from thinking her a very silly person."
"A silly person? Your own great-grandmama, Sally!" Her mind, long and narrow, like her face, had never diverged, I felt, from the straight line of descent.
"My sister and I unfortunately do not agree in our principles, Mr. Starr," said Miss Matoaca, breaking her strained silence suddenly in a high voice, and with an energy that left tremors in her thin, delicate figure. "Indeed, I believe that I hold views which are opposed generally by Virginia ladies—but I feel it to be a point of honour that I should let them be known." She paused breathlessly, having delivered herself of the heresy that worked in her bosom, and a moment later she sat trembling from head to foot with her eyes on her plate. Poor little gallant lady, I thought, did she remember the time when at the call of that same word "honour," she had thrown away, not only her peace, but her happiness?
"Whatever your opinions may be, Miss Matoaca, I respect your honest and loyal support of them," I said.
The embarrassment that had overwhelmed me five minutes before had vanished utterly. At the first chance to declare myself—to contend, not merely with a manner, but with a situation, I felt the full strength of my manhood. The General himself could not have uttered his piquant pleasantries in a blither tone than I did my impulsive defence of the right of private judgment. Miss Mitty raised her eyes to mine, and Miss Matoaca did likewise. Over me their looks clashed, and I saw at once that it was the relentless warfare between individual temperament and racial instinct. In spite of the obscurity of my birth, I knew that in Miss Matoaca, at that instant, I had won a friend.
"Surely Aunt Matoaca is right to express what she thinks," said Sally, loyally following my lead.
"No woman of our family has ever thought such things, Sally, or has ever felt called upon to express her views in the presence of men."
"Well, I suppose, some woman has got to begin some day, and it may as well be Aunt Matoaca."
"There is no reason why any woman should begin. Your great-grandmama did not."
"But my great-grandmama couldn't tell when her tooth ached, and you can, I've heard you do it. It was very disrespectful of you, dear Auntie."
"If you cannot be serious, Sally, I refuse to discuss the subject."
"But how can anybody be serious, Aunt Mitty, about a person who didn't know when her own tooth ached?"
"Dear sister," remarked Miss Matoaca, in a voice of gentle obstinacy, "I do not wish to be the cause of a disagreement between Sally and yourself. Any question that was not one of principle I should gladly give up. I know you are not much of a reader, but if you would only glance at an article in the lastFortnightly Reviewon the Emancipation of Women—"
"I should have thought, sister Matoaca, that Dr. Peterson's last sermon in St. Paul's on the feminine sphere would have been a far safer guide for you. His text, Mr. Starr," she added, turning to me, "was, 'She looketh well to the ways of her household.'"
"At least you can't accuse Aunt Matoaca of neglecting the ways of her household," said Sally, merrily, "even the General rises up after dinner and praises her mince pies. Do you like mince pies, Ben?"
I replied that I was sure that I should like Miss Matoaca's, for I had heard them lauded by General Bolingbroke; at which the poor lady blushed until her cheeks looked like withered rose leaves. She was one of those unhappy women, I had learned during breakfast, who suffered from a greater mental activity than was usually allotted to the females of their generation. Behind that long and narrow face, with its pencilled eyebrows, its fine, straight nose, and restlessly shining eyes, what battles of conviction against tradition must have waged. Was the final triumph of intellect due, in reality, to the accident of an unhappy love? Had the General's frailties driven this shy little lady, with her devotion to law and order, and her excellent mince pies, into a martyr for the rights of sex?
"I am told that Mrs. Clay prides herself upon her pies," she remarked. "I have never eaten them, but Dr. Theophilus tells me that he prefers mine because I use less suet."
"I am sure nobody's could compare with yours, sister Matoaca," observed Miss Mitty in an affable tone, "and I happen to know that Mrs. Clay resorts to Mrs. Camberwell's cook-book.Weprefer Mrs. Randolph's," she added, turning to me.
"Well, we'll ask Ben to dinner some day, and he may judge," said Sally.
Instantly I felt that her words were a challenge, and the shining mahogany table, with its delicate lace mats, its silver and its chrysanthemums, became a battle-field for opposing spirits. I saw Miss Mitty stiffen and the corners of her mouth grow rigid under her pleasant, fixed smile.
"Will you have some marmalade, Mr. Starr?" she asked, and I knew that with the phrase, she had flung down her gauntlet on the table. Her very politeness veiled a purpose, not of iron, but finely tempered and resistless as a blade. Had she said to me: "Sir, you are an upstart, and I, sitting quietly at the same table with you, and inviting you to eat of the same dish of marmalade, am a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes,"—her words would have stabbed me less deeply than did the pathetic "Can this be possible?" of her smiling features.
A canary, swinging in a gilt cage between the curtains at the window, broke suddenly into a jubilant fluting; and rising from the table, we stood for a minute, as if petrified, with our eyes on the bird, and on the box of blossoming sweet alyssum upon the sill. A little later, when I left with the plea that the General expected me at nine o'clock, the two elder ladies gave me their small, transparent hands, while their polite farewell sounded as final as if it had been uttered on the edge of an open grave. Only Sally, smiling up at me, with that puzzled yet determined look still in her eyes, said gayly, "When you go walking at sunrise, Ben, choose the road-to-what-might-have-been!"
Her words rang in my ears while I went along the crooked pavement under the burnished sycamore. As I met the General at the corner I was still hearing them, and they prompted the speech that burst impulsively from my lips.
"General, I've got to get rich quickly, and I'm finding a way."
"You'd better make sure first that your royal road doesn't end in a ditch."
"I was talking to a man from West Virginia yesterday about buying out the National Oil Company, and I dreamed of it all night. He wants me to go in with him, and start a refining plant. If I can get special privileges and rebates from the railroads to give us advantages, we may make a big business of it."
"You may and you mayn't. Who's your man?"
"Sam Brackett. Bob's brother, you know."
"A mighty good fellow, and shrewd, too. But I'd think it over carefully, if I were you."
I did think it over, and the result of my thoughts was, as I told the General a fortnight later, the purchase of a refining plant near Clarksburg, and the beginning of a lively war with the competitors in the business.
"We're going to sweep the South, General, with the help of the railroad," I said.
The great man, with his gouty foot in a felt slipper, sat gazing meditatively over the words of a telegram, which had come on his private wire.
"Midland stock is selling at 160," he said. "It's a big railroad, my boy, and I've made it."
Even to-day, with the living presence of Sally still in my eyes, I was filled again with the old unappeasable desire for the great railroad. The woman and the road were distinct and yet blended in my thoughts.
At dinner-time, when the General hobbled to his buggy on my arm, I made again the remark I had blurted out so inopportunely.
"General, I've been to West Virginia and started the plant, and we're going to give Hail Columbia to our competitors."
He looked at me attentively, and a sly twinkle appeared in his little watery grey eyes, which were sunk deep in the bluish and swollen sockets.
"Do you feel yourself getting big, Ben?" he enquired, with a chuckle.
I shook my head. "Not yet, but it's a fair risk and a good chance to make a big business."
"Well, you're right, I suppose, and if you ain't you'll find out before long. What's luck, after all, but the thing that enables a man to see a long way ahead?"
He settled himself under his fur rug, flicked the reins over the old grey horse, and we drove slowly up Main Street behind a street car.
"I don't know about luck, General, but I'm going to win out if hard pushing can do it."
"It can do 'most anything if you only push hard, enough. But you talk as if you were in love, Ben, I've said the same thing a hundred times in my day, I reckon."
I blushed furiously, and then turning my face from him, stared at a group of children upon the sidewalk.
"Whom could I marry, General?" I asked. "You know well enough that a woman in your class wouldn't marry a man in mine—unless—"
"Unless she were over head and heels in love with him," he chuckled.
"Unless he were a great man," I corrected.
"You mean a rich man, Ben? So your oil business is merely a little love attention, after all."
"No, money has very little to do with it, and the woman I want to marry wouldn't marry me for money. But it's the mettle that counts, and in this age, given the position I've started from, how can a man prove his mettle except by success?—and success does mean money. The president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad is obliged to be a rich man, isn't he?"
"So you're still after my job, eh? Is that why you've let me bully and badger you for the last six years?"
"It was at the bottom of it," I answered honestly, for the gay old bird liked downright speaking, and I knew it. "I'd rather have been your confidential secretary for six years than general manager of traffic. I was learning what I wanted to know."
"And what was that?"
"The way you did things. The way you handled men and bought and sold stocks."
"You like the road, too, eh?"
"I like the road as long as it can be of use to me."
"And when it ceases to be you'll throw it over?"
"Yes, if it ever ceases to be I'll throw it over—honestly," I answered.
"Now that's the thing," he said, "remember always that in handling men honesty is a big asset. I've always been honest, my boy, and it's helped me when I needed it. Why, when I came in and got control of the road in that slump after the war, I was able to reorganise it principally because of the reputation for honesty I had earned. It was a long time before it began to pay dividends, but nobody grumbled. They knew I was doing my best—and that I was doing it fair and square, and to-day we control nearly twenty thousand miles of road."
"Yes, honesty I've learned in your office, sir."
"Well, it's good training,—it's mighty good training, if I do say it myself. You could have got with a darn bloater like Dick Horseley, and he'd have worked your ruin. Now you never saw me lose my head, did you, eh, Ben?"
I replied that I had not—not even when his private wire had ticked off news of the last panic.
"Well, I never did," he said reflectively, "except with women. Take my advice, Ben, and find a good sensible wife, even if she's in your own class, and marry and settle down. It steadies a man, somehow. I'd be a long ways happier to-day," he added, a little wistfully, "if I'd taken a wife when I was young."
I thought of Miss Matoaca, with her bright brown eyes, her withered roseleaf cheeks, and her sacrifice in the cause of honour.
"Whatever you are don't be an old bachelor," he pursued after a pause, "it may be pleasant in the beginning, but I'll be blamed if it pays in the end. Find a good sensible woman who hasn't any opinions of her own, and you will be happy. But as you value your peace, don't go and fall in love with a woman who has any heathenish ideas in her head. When a woman once gets that maggot in her brain, she stops believing in gentleness and self-sacrifice, and by George, she ceases to be a woman. Every man knows there's got to be a lot of sacrifice in marriage, and he likes to feel that he's marrying a woman who is fully capable of making it. A strong-minded woman can't—she's gone and unsexed herself—and instead of taking pleasure in giving up, she begins to talk everlastingly about her 'honour.' Pshaw! the next thing she'll expect to be treated as punctiliously as if she were a business partner!"
The old wound still ached sometimes, it was easy to see; and because of his age and his growing infirmities, he found it harder to keep back the querulous complaints that rose to his lips.
"Now, there's that George of mine," he resumed, still fretting, "he's probably gone and set his eyes on Sally Mickleborough, and it's as plain as daylight that she's got a plenty of that outlandish spirit of her aunt's. I don't mean she's got her notions—I ain't saying any harm of the girl—she's handsome enough in spite of Hatty's nonsense about her mouth—and I call it downright scandalous of Edmund Bland to leave every last penny of his money away from her. But, mark my words, and I tell George so every single day I live, if she marries George he's going to have trouble as sure as shot. She's just the kind to expect him to make sacrifices, and by Jove, no man wants to be expected to make sacrifices in his own home!"
Sacrifices! My blood sang in my ears. If she would only marry me I'd promise to make a sacrifice for her every blessed minute that I lived.
"And do you think she likes George, General?" I asked timidly.
"Oh, I don't suppose she knows her own mind," he retorted. "I never in my life, sir, knew but one woman who did."
We drove on for a minute in silence, and from the red and watery look in the General's eyes, I inferred that, in spite of his broken engagement and his bitter judgment, Miss Matoaca had managed to retain her place in his memory. As I looked at him, sitting there like a wounded eagle, huddled under his fur rug, a feeling of thanksgiving that was almost one of rapture swelled in my heart. If I had a plain name, I had also a clean life to offer the woman I loved. When I remembered the strong, pure line of her features, her broad, intelligent brow, her clear, unswerving gaze, I told myself that whatever the world had to say, she, at least, would consider the difference a fair one. At the great moment she would choose me, I knew, for myself alone; choose in a democracy the man who, God helping him, would stand always for the best in the democratic spirit—for courage and truth and strength and a clean honour toward men and women.
"Who was that pretty girl, Ben," the General enquired presently, "I saw you walking with last Sunday? A sweetheart?"
"No, sir. My sister."
"A lady? She looked it."
"She has been taught like one."
"What'll you do with her? Marry her off?"
"I haven't thought—but she won't look at any of the men she knows."
"Oh, well, if the National Oil wins, you may give her a fortune. There are plenty of young chaps who would jump at her. Bless my soul, she's more to my taste than Sally Mickleborough. It's the women who are such fools about birth, you know, men don't care a rap. Why, if I'd loved a woman, she might have been born in the poorhouse for all the thought I'd have given it. A pretty face or a small foot goes a long sight farther with a man than the tallest grandfather that ever lived." For a moment he was silent, and then he spoke softly, unconscious that he uttered his thought aloud. "No, Matoaca's birth, whatever it might have been, couldn't have come between us—it was her damned principles."
He looked tired and old, now that his armour of business had dropped from him, as he sat there, with the fur rug drawn over his chest, and his loose lower lip hanging slightly away from his shrunken gums. A sudden pity, the first I had ever dared feel for the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, shot through my heart. The gay old bird, I told myself, was shedding his plumage at last.
"Well, as long as I can't rest on my birth, I might as well stand up on something," I said.
"Women think a lot of it," he resumed, as if he had not noticed my flippant interjection; "and I reckon it about fits the size of their minds. Why, to hear Miss Mitty Bland talk you would think good birth was the only virtue she admitted to the first rank. I was telling her about you," he added with a chuckle, "and you've got sense enough to see the humour of what she said."
"I hope I have, General."
"Well, I began it by boasting about your looks, Ben, if you don't mind. 'That wonderful boy of ours is the finest-looking fellow in the South to-day, Miss Mitty,' I burst out, 'and he stands six feet two in his stockings.' 'Ah, General,' she replied sadly, 'what are six feet two inches without a grandfather?'"
He threw back his head with a roar, appearing a trifle chagrined the next instant by my faint-hearted pretence of mirth.
"Doesn't it tickle you, Ben?" he enquired, checking his laughter.
"I'm afraid it makes me rather angry, General," I answered.
"Oh, well, I didn't think you'd take it seriously. It's just a joke, you know. Go ahead and make your fortune, and they'll receive you quick enough."
"But they have received me. They asked me to their party."
"That was Sally, my boy—it was her party, and she fought the ladies for you. That girl's a born fighter, and I reckon she gets it from Harry Mickleborough—for the only blessed thing he could do was to fight. He was a mighty poor man, was Harry, but a God Almighty soldier—and he sent more Yankees to glory than any single man in the whole South. The girl gets it from him, and she hasn't any of her aunts' aristocratic nonsense in her either. She told Miss Mitty, on the spot, and I can see her eyes shine now, that she liked you and she meant to know you."
"That she meant to know me," I repeated, with a singing heart.
"The ladies were put out, I could see, but they ain't a match for that scamp Harry, and he's in her. There never lived the general that could command him, and he'd have been shot for insubordination in '63 if he hadn't been as good as a whole company to the army. 'I'll fight for the South and welcome,' he used to say, 'but, by God, sir, I'll fight as I damn please.' 'Twas the same way about the church, too. Old Dr. Peterson got after him once about standing, instead of kneeling, during prayers, and 'I'll pray as I damn please, sir!' responded Harry. Oh, he was a sad scamp!"
"So his daughter fought for me?" I said. "How did it end?"
"It will end all right when you are president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, and have shipped me to Kingdom Come. They won't shut their doors in your face, then."
"But she stood up for me?" I asked, and my voice trembled.
"She? Do you mean Miss Matoaca? Well, she granted your good looks and your virtues, but she regretted that they couldn't ask you to their house."
"And Miss Mitty?"
"Oh, Miss Mitty assured me that six feet two were as an inch in her sight, without a grandfather."
"But her niece—Miss Mickleborough?" I had worked delicately up to my point.
"The girl fought for you—but then she's obliged to fight for something?—it's Harry in her. That's why, as I said to George at breakfast, I don't want him to marry her. She's a good girl, and I like her, but who in the deuce wants to marry a fighting wife? Look at that fellow mauling his horse, Ben. It makes me sick to see 'em do it, but it's no business of mine, I reckon."
"It is of mine, General," I replied, for the sight of an ill-treated animal had made my blood boil since childhood. Before he could answer, I had jumped over the moving wheel, and had reached the miserable, sore-backed horse struggling under a load of coal and a big stick.
"Come off and put your shoulder to the wheel, you drunken brute," I said, as my rage rose in my throat.
"I'll be damned if I will," replied the fellow, and he was about to begin belabouring again, when I seized him by the collar and swung him clear to the street.
"I'll be damned if you don't," I retorted.
I was a strong man, and when my passions were roused, the thought of my own strength slipped from consciousness.
"You'll break his bones, Ben," said the General, leaning out of his buggy, but his eyes shone as they might have shone at the sight of his first battle.
"I hope I shall," I responded grimly, and going over to the wagon I put my shoulder to the wheel, and began the ascent of the steep hill. Somebody on the pavement came to my help on the other side, and we went up slowly, with a half-drunken driver reeling at our sides and the General following, in his buggy, a short way behind.
"I thought you were a diffident fellow, Ben," remarked the great man, as I took my seat again by his side; "but I don't believe there's another man in Richmond that would make such a spectacle of himself."
"I forget myself when I'm worked up," I answered, "and I forget that anybody is looking."
"Well, somebody was," he replied slyly. "You didn't see Miss Matoaca Bland pass you in a carriage as you were pushing that wheel?"
"No, I didn't see anybody."
"She saw you—and so did Sally Mickleborough. Why, I'd have given something pretty in my day to make a girl's eyes blaze like that."
A week later I swallowed my pride, with an effort, and called at the old grey house at the hour of sunset. Selim, stepping softly, conducted me into the dimly lighted drawing-room, where a cedar log burned, with a delicious fragrance, on a pair of high brass andirons. The red glow, half light, half shadow, flickered over the quaint tapestried furniture, the white-painted woodwork, and the portraits of departed Blands and Fairfaxes that smiled gravely down, with averted eyes. In a massive gilt frame over a rosewood spinet there was a picture of Miss Mitty and Miss Mataoca, painted in fancy dress, with clasped hands, under a garland of roses. My gaze was upon it, when the sound of a door opening quickly somewhere in the rear came to my ears; and the next instant I heard Miss Mitty's prim tones saying distinctly:—
"Tell Mr. Starr, Selim, that the ladies are not receiving."
There was a moment's silence, followed by a voice that brought my delighted heart with a bound into my throat.
"Aunt Mitty, Iwillsee him."
"Sally, how can you receive a man who was not born a gentleman?"
"Aunt Mitty, if you don't let me see him here, I'll—I'll meet him in the street."
The door shut sharply, there was a sound of rapid steps, and the voices ceased. Harry Mickleborough, in his daughter, I judged, had gained the victory; for an instant afterwards I heard her cross the hall, with a defiant and energetic rustle of skirts. When she entered the room, and held out her hand, I saw that she was dressed in her walking gown. There were soft brown furs about her throat, and on her head she wore a small fur hat, with a bunch of violets at one side, under a thin white veil.
"I was just going to walk," she said, breathing a little quickly, while her eyes, very wide and bright, held that puzzled and resolute look I remembered; "will you come with me?"
She turned at once to the door, as if eager to leave the house, and while I followed her through the hall, and down the short flight of steps to the pavement, I was conscious of a sharp presentiment that I should never again cross that threshold.
I spoke no word of love in that brisk walk up Franklin Street, and when I remembered this a month afterwards, it seemed to me that I had let the opportunity of a lifetime slip by. Since that afternoon I had not seen Sally again—some fierce instinct held me back from entering the doors that would have closed against me—and as the days passed, crowded with work and cheered by the immediate success of the National Oil Company, I felt that Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca, and even Sally, whom I loved, had faded out of the actual world into a vague cloud-like horizon. To women it is given, I suppose, to merge the ideal into everyday life, but with men it is different. I saw Sally still every minute that I lived, but I saw her as a star, set high above the common business world in which I had my place—above the strain and stress of the General's office, above the rise and fall of the stock market, above the brisk triumphant war with competitors for the National Oil Company, above even the hope of the future presidency of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. Between my love and its fulfilment, stretched, I knew, hard years of struggle, but bred in me, bone and structure, the instinct of democracy was still strong enough to support me in the hour of defeat. Never once—not even when I sat, condescendingly plied with coffee and partridges, face to face with the wonder expressed in Miss Mitty's eyes, had I admitted to myself that I was obliged to remain in the class from which I had sprung. Courage I had never lost for an instant; the present might embarrass me, but the future, I felt always, I held securely grasped in my own hands. The birthright of a Republic was mine as well as the General's, and I knew that among a free people it was the mettle of the man that would count in the struggle. In the fight between democratic ideals and Old World institutions I had no fear, even to-day, of what the future would bring. The right of a man to make his own standing was all that I asked.
And yet the long waiting! As I walked one Sunday afternoon over to Church Hill, after a visit to Jessy (who was living now with a friend of the doctor's), I asked myself again and again if Sally had read my heart that last afternoon and had seen in it the reason of my fierce reserve. Jessy had been affectionate and very pretty—she was a cold, small, blond woman, with a perfect face and the manner of an indifferent child—but she had been unable to wean me from the thought which returned to take royal possession as soon as the high pressure of my working day was relaxed. It controlled me utterly from the moment I put the question of the stock market aside; and it was driving me now, like the ghost of an unhappy lover, back for a passionate hour in the enchanted garden.
The house was half closed when I reached it, though the open shutters to the upper windows led me to believe that some of the rooms, at least, were tenanted. When I entered the gate and passed the stuccoed wing to the rear piazza, I saw that the terraces were blotted and ruined as if an invading army had tramped over them. The magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of a few lonely trees, had already fallen; the latticed arbours were slowly rotting away; and several hardy rose-bushes, blooming bravely in the overgrown squares, were the only survivals of the summer splendour that I remembered. Turning out of the path, I plucked one of these gallant roses, and found it pale and sickly, with a November blight at the heart. Only the great elms still arched their bared branches unchanged against a red sunset; and now as then the small yellow leaves fluttered slowly down, like wounded butterflies, to the narrow walks.
I had left the upper terrace and had descended the sunken green steps, when the dry rustle of leaves in the path fell on my ears, and turning a fallen summer house, I saw Sally approaching me through the broken maze of the box. A colour flamed in her face, and pausing in the leaf-strewn path, she looked up at me with shining and happy eyes.
"It has been so long since I saw you," she said, with her hand outstretched.
I took her hand, and turning we moved down the walk while I still held it in mine. Out of the blur of her figure, which swam in a mist, I saw only her shining and happy eyes.
"It has been a thousand years," I answered, "but I knew that they would pass."
"That they would pass?" she repeated.
"That they must pass. I have worked for that end every minute since I saw you. I have loved you, as you surely know," I blurted out, "every instant of my life, but I knew that I could offer you nothing until I could offer you something worthy of your acceptance."
Reaching out her hand, which she had withdrawn from mine, she caught several drifting elm leaves in her open palm.
"And what," she asked slowly, "do you consider to be worthy of my acceptance?"
"A name," I answered, "that you would be proud to bear. Not only the love of a man's soul and body, but the soul and body themselves after they have been tried and tested. Wealth, I know, would not count with you, and I believe, birth would not, even though you are a Bland—but I must have wealth, I must have honour, so that at least you will not appear to stoop. I must give you all that it lies in my power to achieve, or I must give you nothing."
"Wealth! honour!" she said, with a little laugh, "O Ben Starr! Ben Starr!"
"So that, at least, you will not appear to stoop," I repeated.
"I stoop to you?" she responded, and again she laughed.
"You know that I love you?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied, and lifted her eyes to mine, "I know that you love me."
"Beyond love I have nothing at the moment."
A light wind swept the leaves from her hand, and blew the ends of her white veil against my breast.
"And suppose," she demanded in a clear voice, "that love was all that I wanted?"
Her lashes did not tremble; but in her eyes, in her parted red lips, and in her whole swift and expectant figure, there was something noble and free, as if she were swept forward by the radiant purpose which shone in her look.
"Not my love—not yet—my darling," I said.
At the word her blush came.
"You say you have only yourself to give," she went on with an effort. "Is it possible that in the future—in any future—you could have more than yourself?"
"Not more love, Sally, not more love."
"Then more of what?"
"Of things that other men and women count worth the having!"
The sparkle returned to her eyes, and I watched the old childish archness play in her face.
"Do I understand that you are proposing to other men and women or to me, sir?" she enquired, above her muff, in the prim tone of Miss Mitty.
"To neither the one nor the other," I answered stubbornly, though I longed to kiss the mockery away from her curving lips. "When the time comes I shall return to you."
"And you are doing this for the sake of other people, not for me," she said. "I suppose, indeed, that it's Aunt Mitty and Aunt Matoaca you are putting before me. They would be flattered, I am sure, if they could only know of it—but they can't. As a matter of fact, they also put something before me, so I don't appear to come first with anybody. Aunt Mitty prefers her pride and Aunt Matoaca prefers her principles, and you prefer both—"
"I am only twenty-six," I returned. "In five years—in ten at most—I shall be far in the race—"
"And quite out of breath with the running," she observed, "by the time you turn and come back for me."
"I don't dare ask you to wait for me."
"As a matter of fact," she responded serenely, "I don't think I shall. I could never endure waiting."
Her calmness was like a dash of cold water into my face.
"Don't laugh at me whatever you do," I implored.
"I'm not laughing—it's far too serious," she retorted. "That scheme of yours," she flashed out suddenly, "is worthy of the great brain of the General."
"Now I'll stand anything but that!" I replied, and turned squarely on her; "Sally, do you love me?"
"Love a man who puts both his pride and his principles before me?"
"If you don't love me—and, of course you can't—why do you torment me?"
"It isn't torment, it's education. When next you start to propose to the lady of your choice, don't begin by telling her you are lovesick for the good opinion of her maiden aunts."
"Sally, Sally!" I cried joyfully. My hand went out to hers, and then as she turned away—my arm was about her, and the little fur hat with the bunch of violets was on my breast.
"O, Ben Starr, were you born blind?" she said with a sob.
"Sally, am I mad or do you love me?" I asked, and the next instant, bending over as she looked up, I kissed her parted lips.
For a minute she was silent, as if my kiss had drawn her strength through her tremulous red mouth. Her body quivered and seemed to melt in my arms—and then with a happy laugh, she yielded herself to my embrace.
"A little of both, Ben," she answered, "you are mad, I suppose, and so am I—and I love you."
"But how could you? When did you begin?"
"I could because I would, and there was no beginning. I was born that way."
"You meant you have cared for me, as I have for you—always?"
"Not always, perhaps—but—well, it started in the churchyard, I think, when I gave you Samuel. Then when I met you again it might have been just the way you look—for oh, Ben, did you ever discover that you are splendid to look at?"
"A magnificent animal," I retorted.
She blushed, recognising the phrase. "To tell the truth, though, it wasn't the way you look," she went on impulsively, "it was, I think,—I am quite sure,—the time you pushed that wheel up the hill. I adored you, Ben, at that moment. If you'd asked me to marry you on the spot I'd have responded, 'Yes, thank you, sir,' as one of my great-grandmothers did at the altar."
"And to think I didn't even know you were there. I'd forgotten it, but I remember now the General told me I made a spectacle of myself."
"Well, I always liked a spectacle, it's in my blood. I like a man, too, who does things as if he didn't care whether anybody was looking at him or not—and that's you, Ben."
"It's not my business to shatter your ideals," I answered, and the next minute, "O Sally, how is it to end?"
"That depends, doesn't it," she asked, "whether you want to marry me or my maiden aunts?"
"Do you mean that you will marry me?"
"I mean, Ben, that if you aren't so obliging as to marry me, I'll pine away and die a lovelorn death."
"Be serious, Sally."
"Could anything on earth be more serious than a lovelorn death?"
I would have caught her back to my breast, but eluding my arms, she stood poised like the fleeting-spirit of gaiety in the little path.
"Will you promise to marry me, Ben Starr?" she asked.
"I'll promise anything on earth," I answered.
"Not to talk any more about my stooping to a giant?"
"I won't talk about it, darling, I'll let you do it."
"And if you're poor you'll let me be poor too? And if you're rich you'll give me a share of the money?"
"Both—all."
"And you'll make a sacrifice for me—as the General said George wouldn't—whenever I happen particularly to want one?"
"A million of them—anything, everything."
She came a step nearer, and raised her smiling lips to mine.
"Anything—everything, Ben, together," she said.
Presently we walked back slowly, hand in hand, through the maze of box.
"Will you tell your aunts, or shall I, Sally?" I asked.
"We'll go to them together."
"Now, at this instant?"
"Now—at this instant," she agreed, "but I thought you were so patient?"
"Patient? I'm as patient as an engine on the Great South Midland."
"A minute ago you were prepared to wait ten years."
"Oh, ten years!" I echoed, as I followed her out of the enchanted garden.
At the corner the surrey was standing, and the face of old Shadrach, the negro driver, stared back at me, transfixed with amazement.
"Whar you gwine now, Miss Sally?" he demanded defiantly of his young mistress, as I took my place under the fur rug beside her.
"Home, Uncle Shadrach," she replied.
"Ain't I gwine drap de gent'man some whar on de way up?"
"No, Uncle Shadrach, home,"—and for home we started merrily with a flick of the whip over the backs of the greys.
Sitting beside her for the first time in my life, I was conscious, as we drove through the familiar streets, only of an acute physical delight in her presence. As she turned toward me, her breath fanned my cheek, the touch of her arm on mine was a rapture, and when the edge of her white veil was blown into my face, I felt my blood rush to meet it. Never before had I been so confident, so strong, so assured of the future. Not the future alone, but the whole universe seemed to lie in the closed palm of my hand. I knew that I was plain, that I was rough beside the velvet softness of the woman who had promised to share my life; but this plainness, this roughness, no longer troubled me since she had found in it something of the power that had drawn her to me. My awkwardness had dropped from me in the revelation of my strength which she had brought. The odour of burning leaves floated up from the street, and I saw again her red shoes dancing over the sunken graves in the churchyard. Oh, those red shoes had danced into my life and would stay there forever!
We crossed the threshold, which I had thought never to pass again, and entered the drawing-room, where a cedar log burned on the andirons. At either end of the low brass fender, Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca sat very erect, like two delicate silhouettes, the red light of the flames shining through their fine, almost transparent profiles. Beyond them, over the rosewood spinet, I saw their portrait, painted in fancy dress, with clasped hands under a garland of roses.
As we entered the room, they rose slightly from their chairs, and turned toward us with an expression of mild surprise on their faces. It was impossible, I knew, for their delicately moulded features to express any impulse more strongly.
"Dear aunties," began Sally, in a voice that was a caress, "I've brought Ben back with me because I met him in the garden on Church Hill—and—and—and he told me that he loved me."
"He told you that he loved you?" repeated Miss Mitty in a high voice, while Miss Matoaca sat speechless, with her unnaturally bright eyes on her niece's face.
Kneeling on the rug at their feet, Sally looked from one to the other with an appealing and tender glance.
"You brought him back because he told you that he loved you?" said Miss Mitty again, as if her closed mind had refused to admit the words she had uttered.
"Well, only partly because of that, Aunt Mitty," replied Sally bravely, "the rest was because—because I told him that I loved him."
For a moment there was a tense and unnatural silence in the midst of which I heard the sharp crackling of the fire and smelt the faint sweet smell of the burning cedar. The two aunts looked at each other over the kneeling girl, and it seemed to me that the long, narrow faces had grown suddenly pinched and old.
"I—I don't think we understood quite what you said, Sally dear," said Miss Matoaca, in a hesitating voice; and I felt sorry for her as she spoke—sorry for them both because the edifice of their beliefs and traditions, reared so patiently through the centuries by dead Fairfaxes and Blands, had crumbled about their ears.
"What she means, Miss Matoaca," I said gently, coming forward into the firelight, "is that I have asked her to marry me."
"To marry you—you—Ben Starr?" exclaimed Miss Mitty abruptly, rising from her chair, and then falling nervelessly back. "There is some mistake—not that I doubt," she added courteously, the generations of breeding overcoming her raw impulse of horror, "not that I doubt for a minute that you are an estimable and deserving character—General Bolingbroke tells me so and I trust his word. But Sally marry you! Why, your father—I beg your pardon for reminding you of it—your father was not even an educated man."
"No," I replied, "my father was not an educated man, but I am."
"That speaks very well for you, sir, I am sure—but how—how could my niece marry a man who—I apologise again for alluding to your origin—whose father was a stone-cutter—I have heard?"
"Yes, he was a stone-cutter, and I am sorry to say wasn't even a good one."
"I don't know that good or bad makes a difference, except, of course, as it affected his earning a livelihood. But the fact remains that he was a common workman and that no member of our family on either side has ever been even remotely connected with trade. Surely, you yourself, Mr. Starr, must be aware that my niece and you are not in the same walk of life. Do you not realise the impossibility of—of the connection you speak of?"
"I realised it so much," I answered, "that until I met her this afternoon I had determined to wait five—perhaps ten years before asking her to become my wife."
"Ten years? But what can ten years have to do with it? Families are not made in ten years, Mr. Starr, and how could that length of time alter the fact that your father was a person of no education and that you yourself are a self-made man?"
"I am not ashamed to offer her the man after he is made," I replied. "What I did not think worthy of her was the man in the making."
"But it is the man in the making that I want," said Sally, rising to her feet, and taking my hand in hers. "O Aunt Matoaca, I love him!"
The little lady to whom she appealed bent slowly forward in the firelight, her face, which had grown old and wan, looking up at us, as we stood there, hand in hand, on the rug.
"I am distressed for you, Sally," she said, "but when it becomes a question of honour, love must be sacrificed."
"Honour!" cried Sally, and there was a passionate anger in her voice, "but Idohonour him." My hand was in hers, and she stooped and kissed it before turning to Miss Matoaca, who had drawn herself up, thin and straight as a blade, in her chair.
"You are right," I said, "to tell me that I am unworthy of your niece—for I am. I am plain and rough beside her, but, at least, I am honest. What I offer her is a man's heart, and a man's hand that has dealt cleanly and fairly with both men and women."
Until the words were uttered my pride had blinded me to my cruelty. Then I saw two bright red spots appear in Miss Matoaca's thin cheeks, and I asked myself in anger if the General or George Bolingbroke would have been guilty of so deep a thrust? Did she dream that I knew her story? And were those pathetic red spots the outward sign of a stab in her gentle bosom?
"There are many different kinds of merit, Mr. Starr," she returned, with a wistful dignity. "I do not undervalue that of character, but I do not think that even a good character can atone for the absence of family inheritance—of the qualities which come from refined birth and breeding. We have had the misfortune in our family of one experience of an ill-assorted and tragic marriage," she added.
"We must never forget poor Sarah's misery and ours, Sister Matoaca," remarked Miss Mitty, from the opposite side of the hearth; "and yet Harry Mickleborough's father was a most respectable man, and the teacher of Greek in a college."
All the pity went out of me, and I felt only a blind sense of irritation at the artificial values, the feminine lack of grasp, the ignorance of the true proportions of life. I grew suddenly hard, and something of this hardness passed into my voice when I spoke.
"I stand or fall by own worth and by that alone," I returned, "and your niece, if she marries me, will stand or fall as I do. I ask no favours, no allowances, even from her."
Withdrawing her hand from mine, Sally took a single step forward, and stood with her eyes on the faces that showed so starved and wan in the firelight.
"Don't you see—oh, can't you see," she asked, "that it is because of these very things that I love him? How can I separate his past from what he is to-day? How can I say that I would have this or that different—his birth, his childhood, his struggle—when all these have helped to make him the man I love? Who else have I ever known that could compare with him for a minute? You wanted me to marry George Bolingbroke, but what has he ever done to prove what he was worth?"
"Sally, Sally," said Miss Mitty, sternly, "he had no need to prove it. It was proved centuries before his birth. The Bolingbrokes proved themselves to their king before this was a country—"
"Well, I'm not his king," rejoined Sally, scornfully, "so it wasn't proved to me. I ask something more."
"More, Sally?"
"Yes, more, Aunt Mitty, a thousand times and ten thousand times. What do I care for a dead arm that fought for a dead king? Both are dust to-day, and I am alive. No, no, give me, not honour and loyalty that have been dead five hundred years, but truth and courage that I can turn to to-day,—not chivalric phrases that are mere empty sound, but honesty and a strong arm that I can lean on."
Miss Matoaca's head had dropped as if from weariness over her thin breast, which palpitated under the piece of old lace, like the breast of a wounded bird. Then, as the girl stopped and caught her breath sharply from sheer stress of feeling, the little lady looked up again and straightened herself with a gesture of pride.
"Do not make the mistake, Sally," she said, "of thinking that a humble birth means necessarily greater honesty than a high one. Generations of refinement are the best material for character-building, and you might as easily find the qualities you esteem in a gentleman of your own social position."
"I might, Aunt Matoaca; but, as a matter of fact, have I? Until you have seen a man fight can you know him? Is family tradition, after all, as good a school as the hard world? A life like Ben's does not always make a man good, I know, but it has made him so. If this were not true—if any one could prove to me that he had been false or cruel to any living creature—man, woman, or animal—I'd give him up to-day and not break my heart—"
It was true, I knew it as she spoke, and I could have knelt to her.
"You are blind, Sally, blind and rash as your mother before you," returned Miss Mitty.
"No, Aunt Mitty, it is you who are blind—who see by the old values that the world has long since outgrown—who think you can assign a place to a man and say to him, 'You belong there and cannot come out of it.' But, oh, Aunt Matoaca, surely you, who have sacrificed so much for what you believe to be right,—who have placed principle before any claims of blood, surely you will uphold me—"
"My child, my child," replied the poor lady, with a sob, "I placed principle first, but never emotion—never emotion."
"Poor Sarah was the only one of us who gave up everything for the sake of an emotion," added Miss Mitty, "and what did it bring her except misery?"
Our cause was lost—we saw it at the same instant—and again Sally gave me her hand and stood side by side with me in the firelight.
"I am sorry, dear aunts," she said gently, and turning to me, she added slowly and clearly, "I will marry you a year from to-day, if you will wait, Ben."
"I will wait for you, whether you marry me or not, forever," I answered; and bowing silently, I turned and left the room, while Sally went down again on her knees.
Once outside, I drew a long breath of air, sharp with the scent of the sycamore, and stood gazing up at the clear sunset beyond the silvery boughs. It was good to be out of those mouldering traditions, that atmosphere of an all-enveloping past; good, too, to be out of the tapestried room, away from the grave, fixed smiles of the dead Blands and Fairfaxes and the close, sweet smell of the burning cedar. There I dared not step with my full weight, lest I should ruthlessly tread on a sentiment, or bring down a moth-eaten tradition upon my head. I was for the hard, bright world, and the future; there in that cedar-scented room, sat the two ladies, forever guarding the faded furniture and the crumbling past. The pathetic contradiction of Miss Matoaca returned to me, and I laughed aloud. Miss Matoaca, who worked for the emancipation of women, while she herself was the slave of an ancestry of men who oppressed women, and women who loved oppression! Miss Matoaca, whose mind, long and narrow like her face, could grasp but a single idea and reject the sequence to which it inevitably led! I wondered if she meant to emancipate "ladies" merely, or if her principles could possibly overleap her birthright of caste? Was she a gallant martyr to the inequalities of sex, who still clung, trembling, to the inequalities of society? She would go to the stake, I felt sure, for the cause of womanhood, but she would go supported by the serene conviction that she was "a lady." The pathos of it, and the mockery, checked the laugh in my throat. To how many of us, after all, was it given to discern, not only immediate effects, but universal relations as well? To the General? To myself? What did we see except the possible opportunity, the room for the ego, the adjustment to selfish ends? Yet our school was the world. Should we, then, expect that little lady, with her bright eyes and her withered roseleaf cheeks, to look farther than the scented firelight in which she sat? I felt a tenderness for her, as I felt a tenderness for all among whom Sally moved. The house in which she lived, the threshold she had crossed, the servants who surrounded her, were all bathed for me in the rosy light of her lamps. Common day did not shine there. I was but twenty-seven, and my eyes could still find romance in the rustle of her skirt and in the curl of her eyelash.
In the little office, where the curtains were drawn and the green-shaded lamp already lit, I found Dr. Theophilus sitting over his evening mint julep, the solitary dissipation in which I had ever seen him indulge. His strong, ruddy face, with its hooked nose and illuminating smile, was still the face of a middle-aged man, though he had passed, a year ago, his seventieth birthday. At his feet, Waif, a stray dog, rescued in memory of Robin, the pointer, was curled up on a rug.
"Well, my boy," he said cheerily, "you've had a good day, I hope?"
"A good day, doctor, I've been in heaven," I answered.
His smile shone out, clear and bright, as it did at a patient's bedside. "I've been there, too, Ben," he responded, "forty years ago."
"Then why didn't you stay, sir?"
"Because it isn't given to any man to stay longer than a few minutes. Ah, my boy, you are the mixture of a fighter and a dreamer."
"But suppose," I blushed, for I was a reserved man, though few people were reserved with Dr. Theophilus, "suppose that your heaven is a woman?"
"Has it ever been anything else to a man since Adam?" he asked. "Every man's heaven, and most men's hell, is a woman, my boy. Why, look at old George Bolingbroke now! He's no longer young, and he's certainly no longer handsome, yet I've seen him, in his day, stand up straight and tall in church at Miss Matoaca Bland's side, and look perfectly happy because he could sing from the same hymn-book. Then a week later, when she'd thrown him over, I saw him jump up at a supper, and drink champagne out of the slipper of some variety actress."
"Yet she was right, I suppose, to throw him over?"
"Oh, she was right, I'm not questioning that she was right," he responded hastily; "but it isn't always the woman who is right, Ben," he added, "that makes a man's heaven."
"The poor little lady had no slipperful of champagne to fall back on," I suggested.
"It's a pity she hadn't—for it's as true as the Gospel, that George Bolingbroke drove her into all this nonsense about the equality of sexes. Equality, indeed! A man doesn't want to make love to an equal, but to an angel! Bless my soul, I don't know to save my life, what to think of Miss Matoaca, except that she's crazy. That's the kindest thing I can say for her. She's gone now and got into correspondence with some bloodthirsty, fire-eating woman's rights advocates up North, and she's actually taken to distributing their indecent pamphlets. She had the face to leave one on my desk this morning. I'd just taken it in the tongs before you came in and put it into the fire. There are the ashes of it," he added sardonically, waving his silver goblet in the direction of some grey shreds of paper in the fireplace.
"All the same, doctor, she may be crazy, but I respect her."
"Respect her? Respect Miss Matoaca Bland? Of course you respect her, sir. Even George Bolingbroke, bitter as he is, respects her from his boots up. She's the embodiment of honour, and if there's a man alive who doesn't respect the embodiment of honour, be it male or female, he ought—he ought to be taken out and horsewhipped, sir! Her own sister, poor Miss Mitty, has the greatest veneration for her, though she can't help lying awake at night and wondering where those crazy principles will lead her next. If they lead her to a quagmire, she'll lift her skirts and step in, Ben, there's no doubt of that—and what Miss Mitty fears now is that, since she's got hold of these abolition sheets, they'll lead her to the public platform—"
"You mean she'd get up and speak in public? She couldn't to save her head."
"You'd better not conclude that Miss Matoaca can't do anything until you've seen her try it," replied the doctor indignantly. "I suppose you'd think she couldn't bombard a political meeting, with not a woman to help her. Yet last winter she went down to the Legislature, in her black silk dress and poke bonnet, and tried to get her obnoxious measures brought before a committee."
"Was she laughed at?" I demanded angrily.
"Good Lord, no. They are gentlemen, even if they are politicians, and they know a lady even if she's cracked."
"And is she entirely alone? Has she no supporter?"
"As far as I know, my boy, Matoaca Bland is the only blessed thing in the state that cares a continental whether women are emancipated or not."
He lifted the silver goblet to his lips, and drank long and deeply, while the rustle of Mrs. Clay's skirts was heard at his office door. After a sharp rap, she entered in her bustling way, and presented me with a second julep, deliciously frosted and fragrant. She was a small, very alert old lady, wearing a bottle-green alpaca, made so slender in the waist that it caused her to resemble one of her own famous pickled cucumbers.
"Theophilus," she began in a crisp, high voice, "I hope you have sent in those bills, as you promised me?"
"Good Lord, Tina," responded the doctor, with a burst of irritation, "isn't it bad enough to be sick without being made to pay for it?"
"You promised me, Theophilus."
"I promised you I'd send bills to the folks I'd cured, but, when I came to think of it, how was I to know, Tina, that I'd cured any?"
"At least you dosed them?"
"Yes, I dosed them," he admitted; "but taking medicine isn't a pleasure that I'd like to pay for."
Turning away, she rustled indignantly through the door, and Dr. Theophilus, as he returned to the rim of his silver goblet, gave me a sly wink over his sprigs of mint.
"Yes, Ben, it isn't always the woman who is right that makes a man's heaven," he said.