“Every one to his taste,” answered the lawyer, “but I confess I do not see what better a young man could do than sit down here at Wyanoke and, without any but pleasurable activities, enjoy all that life has to give. Your income will be large, and your credit quite beyond question. You can buy whatever you want, and you need never bother yourself with a business detail. No dun will ever beset your door. If any creditor of yours should happen to want his money, as none will, you can borrow enough to pay him without even going to Richmond to arrange the matter. I will attend to all such things for you, as I did for your late uncle.”
“Thank you very much,” Arthur answered in a tone which suggested that he did not thank him at all. “But I always tie my own shoe strings. I do not know whether I shall go on living here or not, whether I shall give up my work and my ambitions and settle down into a life of inglorious ease, or whether I shall be strong enough to put that temptation aside. I confess it is a temptation. Accustomed as I am to intensity of intellectual endeavor, I confess that the prospect of sitting down here in lavish plenty, and living a life unburdened by care and unvexed by any sense of exacting duty, has its allurements for me. I suppose, indeed, that any well ordered mind would find abundant satisfaction in such a life programme, and perhaps I shall presently find myself growing content with it. But if I do, I shall not consent to live in debt.”
“But everybody has his debts – everybody who has an estate. It is part of the property, as it were. Of course it would be uncomfortable to owe more than you could pay, but you are abundantly able to owe your debts, so you need not let them trouble you. All told they do not amount to the value of ten or a dozen field hands.”
“But I shall never sell my negroes.”
“Of course not. No gentleman in Virginia ever does that, unless a negro turns criminal and must be sent south, or unless nominal sales are made between the heirs of an estate, simply by way of distributing the property. Far be it from me to suggest such a thing. I meant only to show you how unnecessary it is for you to concern yourself about the trifling obligations on your estate – how small a ratio they bear to the value of the property.”
“I quite understand,” answered Arthur. “But at the same time these debts do trouble me and will go on troubling me till the last dollar of them is discharged. This is simply because they interfere with the plans I have formed – or at least am forming – for so ordering my affairs that I may go back to my work. Pray do not let us discuss the matter further. I will ask you, instead, to send me, at your earliest convenience, an exact schedule of the creditors of this estate, together with the amount – principal and interest – that is owing to each. I intend to make it my first business to discharge all these obligations. Till that is done, I am not my own master, and I have a decided prejudice in favor of being able to order my own life in my own way.”
Behind all this lay the fact that Arthur Brent was growing dissatisfied with himself and suspicious of himself. The beauty and calm of Wyanoke, the picturesque contentment of that refined Virginia life which was impressed anew upon his mind every time a neighboring planter rode over to take breakfast, dinner, or supper with him, or drove over in the afternoon with his wife and daughters to welcome the new master of the plantation – all this fascinated his mind and appealed strongly to the partially developed æsthetic side of his nature, and at times the strong, earnest manhood in him resented the fact almost with bitterness.
There was never anywhere in America a country life like that of Virginia in the period before the war. In that state, as nowhere else on this continent, the refinement, the culture, the education and the graceful social life of the time were found not in the towns, but in the country. There were few cities in the state and they were small. They existed chiefly for the purpose of transacting business for the more highly placed and more highly cultivated planters. The people of the cities, with exceptions that only emphasized the general truth, were inferior to the dwellers on the plantations, in point of education, culture and social position. It had always been so in Virginia. From the days of William Byrd of Westover to those of Washington, and Jefferson and Madison and John Marshall, and from their time to the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been the choice of all cultivated Virginians to live upon their plantations. Thence had always come the scholars, the statesmen, the great lawyers and the masterful political writers who had conferred untold lustre upon the state.
Washington’s career as military chieftain and statesman, had been one long sacrifice of his desire to lead the planter life at Mount Vernon. Jefferson’s heart was at Monticello while he penned the Declaration of Independence, and it was the proud boast of Madison that he like Jefferson, quitted public office poorer than he was when he undertook such service to his native land, and rejoiced in his return to the planter life of his choice at Montpélièr.
In brief, the entire history of the state and all its traditions, all its institutions, all its habits of thought tended to commend the country life to men of refined mind, and to make of the plantation owners and their families a distinctly recognized aristocracy, not only of social prestige but even more of education, refinement and intellectual leadership.
To Arthur Brent had come the opportunity to make himself at once and without effort, a conspicuous member of this blue blooded caste. His plantation had come to him, not by vulgar purchase, but by inheritance. It had been the home of his ancestors, the possession and seat of his family for more than two hundred years. And his family had been from the first one of distinction and high influence. One of his great, great, great grandfathers, had been a member of the Jamestown settlement and a soldier under John Smith. His great, great grandfather had shared the honor of royal proscription as an active participant in Bacon’s rebellion. His great grandfather had been the companion of young George Washington in his perilous expeditions to “the Ohio country,” and had fallen by Washington’s side in Braddock’s blundering campaign. His grandfather had been a drummer boy at Yorktown, had later become one of the great jurists of the state and had been a distinguished soldier in the war of 1812. His father, as we know, had strayed away to the west, as so many Virginians of his time did, but he had won honors there which made Virginia proud of him. And fortunately for Arthur Brent, that father’s removal to the west was not made until this his son had been born at the old family seat.
“For,” explained Aunt Polly to the young man, in her own confident way, “in spite of your travels, you are a native Virginian, Arthur, and when you have dropped into the ways of the country, people will overlook the fact that you have lived so much at the north, and even in Europe.”
“But why, Aunt Polly,” asked Arthur, “should that fact be deemed something to be ‘overlooked?’ Surely travel broadens one’s views and – ”
“Oh, yes, of course, in the case of people not born in Virginia. But a Virginian doesn’t need it, and it upsets his ideas. You see when a Virginian travels he forgets what is best. He actually grows like other people. You yourself show the ill effects of it in a hundred ways. Of course you haven’t quite lost your character as a Virginian, and you’ll gradually come back to it here at Wyanoke; but ‘evil communications corrupt good manners,’ and I can’t help seeing it in you – at least in your speech. You don’t pronounce your words correctly. You say ‘cart’ ‘carpet’ and ‘garden’ instead of ‘cyart’ ‘cyarpet’ and ‘gyarden.’ And you flatten your a’s dreadfully. You say ‘grass’ instead of ‘grawss’ and ‘basket’ instead of ‘bawsket’ and all that sort of thing. And you roll your r’s dreadfully. It gives me a chill whenever I hear you say ‘master’ instead of ‘mahstah.’ But you’ll soon get over that, and in the meantime, as you were born in Virginia and are the head of an old Virginia family, the gentlemen and ladies who are coming every day to welcome you, are very kind about it. They overlook it, as your misfortune, rather than your fault.”
“That is certainly very kind of them, Aunt Polly. I can’t imagine anything more generous in the mind than that. But – well, never mind.”
“What were you going to say, Arthur?”
“Oh, nothing of any consequence. I was only thinking that perhaps my Virginia neighbors do not lay