Facing the fact that he was in no way immune, the young physician abandoned the work he had returned from Paris to New York to do, and went at once to the post of danger as a volunteer for medical service. Those whose memories stretch back to that terrible year of 1855, remember the terms in which Virginia and all the country echoed the praises of Dr. Arthur Brent, the plaudits that everywhere greeted his heroic devotion. The newspapers day by day were filled with despatches telling with what tireless devotion this mere boy – he was scarcely more than twenty three years of age – was toiling night and day at his self appointed task, and how beneficent his work was proving to be. The same newspapers told with scorching scorn of physicians and clergymen – a very few of either profession, but still a few – who had quitted their posts in panic fear and run away from the danger. Day by day the readers of the newspapers eagerly scanned the despatches, anxious chiefly to learn that the young hero had not fallen a victim to his own compassionate enthusiasm for the relief of the stricken.
Dr. Arthur Brent knew nothing of all this at the time. His days and nights were too fully occupied with his perilous work for him even to glance at a newspaper. He was himself stricken at last, but not until the last, not until that grand old Virginian, Henry A. Wise had converted his Accomac plantation into a relief camp and, arming his negroes for its defence against a panic stricken public, had robbed the scourge of its terrors by drawing from the city all those whose presence there could afford opportunity for its spread.
Dr. Arthur Brent was among the very last of those attacked by the scourge, and it was to give that young hero a meagre chance for life that Henry A. Wise went in person to Norfolk and brought the physician away to his own plantation home, in armed and resolute defiance alike of quarantine restrictions and of the protests of an angry and frightened mob.
Such in brief had been the life story of Arthur Brent. On his recovery from a terribly severe attack of the fever, he had gone again to Europe, not this time for scientific study, but for the purpose of restoring his shattered constitution through rest upon a Swiss mountain side. After a year of upbuilding idleness, he had returned to New York with his health completely restored.
There he had taken an inexpensive apartment, and resumed his work of scientific investigation upon lines which he had thought out during his long sojourn in Switzerland.
Three years later there came to him news that his uncle at Wyanoke was dead, and that the family estate had become his own as the only next of kin. It pleased Arthur’s sense of humor to think of a failure of “kin” in Virginia, where, as he well remembered, pretty nearly everybody he had met in boyhood had been his cousin.
But the news that he was sole heir to the family estate was not altogether agreeable to the young man. “It will involve me in affairs again,” he said to himself, “and that is what I meant should never happen to me. There is a debt on the estate, of course. I never heard of a Virginia estate without that adornment. Then there are the negroes, whose welfare is in my charge. Heaven knows I do not want them or their value. But obviously they and the debt saddle me with a duty which I cannot escape. I suppose I must go to Wyanoke. It is very provoking, just as I have made all my arrangements to study the problem of sewer gas poisoning with a reasonable hope of solving it this summer!”
He thought long and earnestly before deciding what course to pursue. On the one hand he felt that his highest duty in life was to science as a servant of humanity. He realized, as few men do, how great a beneficence the discovery of a scientific fact may be to all mankind. “And there are so few men,” he said to himself, “who are free as I am to pursue investigations untrammeled by other things – the care of a family, the ordering of a household, the education of children, the earning of a living! If I could have this summer free, I believe I could find out how to deal with sewer gas, and that would save thousands of lives and immeasurable suffering! And there are my other investigations that are not less pressing in their importance. Why should I have to give up my work, for which I have the equipment of a thorough training, a sufficient income, youth, high health, and last but not least, enthusiasm?”
He did not add, as a less modest man might, that he had earned a reputation which commanded not only the attention but the willing assistance of his scientific brethren in his work, that all laboratories were open to him, that all men of science were ready to respond to his requests for the assistance of their personal observation and experience, that the columns of all scientific journals were freely his to use in setting forth his conclusions and the facts upon which they rested.
“I wish I could put the whole thing into the hands of an agent, and bid him sell out the estate, pay off the debts and send me the remainder of the proceeds, with which to endow a chair of research in some scientific school! But that would mean selling the negroes, and I’ll never do that. I wish I could set them all free and rid myself of responsibility for them. But I cannot do that unless I can get enough money out of the estate to buy little farms for them as my father did with his negroes. I mustn’t condemn them to starvation and call it freedom. I wish I knew what the debt is, and how much the land will bring. Then I could plan what to do. But as I do not know anything of the kind, I simply must go to Wyanoke and study the problem as it is. It will take all summer and perhaps longer. But there is nothing else for it.”
That is how it came about that Dr. Arthur Brent sat in the great hallway at Wyanoke, talking with Aunt Polly, when Dorothy South returned, accompanied by her hounds.
IV
DR. BRENT IS PUZZLED
D OROTHY came up to the front gate at a light gallop. Disdaining the assistance of the horse block, she nimbly sprang from the saddle to the ground and called to her mare “Stand, Chestnut!”
Then she gathered up the excessively long riding skirt which the Amazons of that time always wore on horseback, and walked up the pathway to the door, leaving the horse to await the coming of a stable boy. Arthur could not help observing and admiring the fact that she walked with marked dignity and grace even in a riding skirt – a thing so exceedingly difficult to do that not one woman in a score could accomplish it even with conscious effort. Yet this mere girl did it, manifestly without either effort or consciousness. As an accomplished anatomist Dr. Brent knew why. “That girl has grown up,” he said to himself, “in as perfect a freedom as those locust trees out there, enjoy. She is as straight as the straightest of them, and she has perfect use of all her muscles. I wonder who she is, and why she gives orders here at Wyanoke quite as if she belonged to the place, or the place belonged to her.”
This last thought was suggested by the fact that just before mounting the two steps that led to the porch, Dorothy had whistled through her fingers and said to the negro man who answered her call: – “Take the hounds to the kennels, and fasten them in. Turn the setters out.”
But the young man had little time for wondering. The girl came into the hall, and, as Aunt Polly had gone to order a little “snack,” she introduced herself.
“You are Dr. Brent, I think? Yes? well, I’m Dorothy South. Let me bid you welcome as the new master of Wyanoke.”
With that she shook hands in a fashion that was quite child-like, and tripped away up the stairs.
Arthur Brent found himself greatly interested in the girl. She was hardly a woman, and yet she was scarcely to be classed as a child. In her manner as well as in her appearance she seemed a sort of compromise between the two. She was certainly not pretty, yet Arthur’s quick scrutiny informed him that in a year or two she was going to be beautiful. It only needed a little further ripening of her womanhood to work that change. But as one cannot very well fall in love with a woman who is yet to be, Arthur Brent felt no suggestion of other sentiment than one of pleased admiration for the girl, mingled with respect for her queenly premature dignity. He observed, however, that her hair was nut brown and of luxuriant growth, her complexion, fair and clear in spite of a pronounced tan, and her eyes large, deep blue and finely overarched by their dark brows.
Before he had time to think further concerning her,