“How very shocking!” said Arthur, hiding his smile behind his hand.
“That’s really what made the trouble for poor Dorothy,” mused Aunt Polly. “If her father hadn’t gone gadding about – he even went to Europe you know – Dorothy never would have been born.”
“How fortunate that would have been! But tell me about it, Aunt Polly. You see I don’t quite understand in what way it would have been better for Dorothy not to have been born – unless we accept the pessimist philosophy, and consider all human life a curse.”
“Now you know, I don’t understand that sort of talk, Arthur,” answered Aunt Polly. “I never studied philosophy or chemistry, and I’m glad of it. But I know it would have been better for Dorothy if Dr. South had stayed at home like a reasonable man, and married – but there, I mustn’t talk of that. Dorothy is a dear girl, and I’m fitting her for her position in life as well as I can. If I could stop her from thinking, now, or – ”
“Pray don’t, Aunt Polly! Her thinking interests me more than anything I ever studied, – except perhaps the strange and even inexplicable therapeutic effect of champagne in yellow fever – ”
“There you go again, with your outlandish words, which you know I don’t understand or want to understand, though sometimes I remember them.”
“Tell me of an instance, Aunt Polly.”
“Why, you said to me the other night that Dorothy was a ‘psychological enigma’ to your mind, and that you very much wished you might know ‘the conditions of heredity and environment’ that had produced ‘so strange a phenomenon.’ There! I remember your words, though I haven’t the slightest notion what they mean. I went upstairs and wrote them down. Of course I couldn’t spell them except in my own way – and that would make you laugh I reckon if you could see it, which you never shall – but I haven’t a glimmering notion of what the words mean. Now I want to tell you about Dorothy.”
“Good! I am anxious to hear!”
“Oh, I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear. That would be gossip, and no Virginia woman ever gossips.”
That was true. The Virginians of that time, men and women alike, locked their lips and held their tongues in leash whenever the temptation came to them to discuss the personal affairs of their neighbors. They were bravely free and frank of speech when telling men to their faces what opinions they might hold concerning them; but they did that only when necessity, or honor, or the vindication of truth compelled. They never made the character or conduct or affairs of each other a subject of conversation. It was the very crux of honor to avoid that.
“Then tell me what you are minded to reveal, Aunt Polly,” responded Arthur. “I do not care to know anything else.”
“Well, Dorothy is in a peculiar position – not by her own fault. She must marry into a good family, and it has fallen to me to prepare her for her fate.”
“Surely, Aunt Polly,” interjected the young man with a shocked and distressed tone in his voice, “surely you are not teaching that child to think of marriage – yet?”
“No, no, no!” answered Aunt Polly. “I’m only trying to train her to submissiveness of mind, so that when the time comes for her to make the marriage that is already arranged for her, she will interpose no foolish objections. It’s a hard task. The girl has a wilful way of thinking for herself. I can’t cure her of it, do what I will.”
“Why should you try?” asked Arthur, almost with excitement in his tone. “Why should you try to spoil nature’s fine handiwork? That child’s intellectual attitude is the very best I ever saw in one so young, so simple and so childlike. For heaven’s sake, let her alone! Let her live her own life and think in her own honest, candid and fearless way, and she will develop into a womanhood as noble as any that the world has seen since Eve persuaded Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge and quit being a fool.”
“Arthur, you shock me!”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Polly, but I shall shock you far worse than that, if you persist in your effort to warp and pervert that child’s nature to fit it to some preconceived purpose of conventionality.”
“I don’t know just what you mean, Arthur,” responded the old lady, “but I know my duty, and I’m going to do it. The one thing necessary in Dorothy’s case, is to stop her from thinking, and train her to settle down, when the time comes, into the life of a Virginia matron. It is her only salvation.”
“Salvation from what?” asked Arthur, almost angrily.
“I can’t tell you,” the old lady answered. “But the girl will never settle into her proper place if she goes on thinking, as she does now. So I’m going to stop it.”
“And I,” the young man thought, though he did not say it, “am going to teach her to think more than ever. I’ll educate that child so long as I am condemned to lead this idle life. I’ll make it my business to see that her mind shall not be put into a corset, that her extraordinary truthfulness shall not be taught to tell lies by indirection, that she shall not be restrained of her natural and healthful development. It will be worth while to play the part of idle plantation owner for a year or two, to accomplish a task like that. I can never learn to feel any profound interest in the growing of tobacco, wheat and corn – but the cultivation of that child into what she should be is a nobler work than that of all the agriculturists of the south side put together. I’ll make it my task while I am kept here away from my life’s chosen work.”
That day Arthur Brent sent a letter to New York. In it he ordered his library and the contents of his laboratory sent to him at Wyanoke. He ordered also a good many books that were not already in his library. He sent for a carpenter on that same day, and set him at work in a hurry, constructing a building of his own designing upon a spot selected especially with reference to drainage, light and other requirements of a laboratory. He even sent to Richmond for a plumber to put in chemical sinks, drain pipes and other laboratory fittings.
VI
“NOW YOU MAY CALL ME DOROTHY”
A RTHUR BRENT had now come to understand, in some degree at least, who Dorothy South was. He remembered that the Pocahontas plantation which immediately adjoined Wyanoke on the east, was the property of a Dr. South, whom he had never seen. At the time of his own boyhood’s year at Wyanoke he had understood, in a vague way that Dr. South was absent somewhere on his travels. Somehow the people whom he had met at Wyanoke and elsewhere, had seemed to be sorry for Dr. South but they never said why. Apparently they held him in very high esteem, as Arthur remembered, and seemed deeply to regret the necessity – whatever it was – which detained him away, and to all intents and purposes made of Pocahontas a closed house. For while the owner of that plantation insisted that the doors of his mansion should always remain open to his friends, and that dinner should be served there at the accustomed hour of four o’clock every day during his absence, so that any friend who pleased might avail himself of a hospitality which had never failed, – there was no white person on the plantation except the overseer. Gentlemen passing that way near the dinner hour used sometimes to stop and occupy places at the table, an event which the negro major-domo always welcomed as a pleasing interruption in the loneliness of the house. The hospitality of Pocahontas had been notable for generations past, and the old servant recalled a time when the laughter of young men and maidens had made the great rooms of the mansion vocal with merriment. Arthur himself had once taken dinner there with his uncle, and had been curiously impressed with the rule of the master that dinner should be served, whether there were anybody there to partake of it or not. He recalled all these things now, and argued that Dr. South’s long absence could not have been caused by anything that discredited him among the neighbors. For had not those neighbors always regretted his absence, and expressed a wish for his return? Arthur remembered in what terms of respect and even of affection, everybody had spoken of the absent man. He remembered too that about the time of his own departure from Wyanoke, there had been a stir of pleased expectation, over the news that Dr. South was soon to return