XXIV TO GIVE DOROTHY A CHANCE

IT was nearly the Christmas time when Arthur finally broke up the fever camp. He decided that the outbreak was at an end and the need of a hospital service no longer pressing. The half dozen patients who remained at the camp were now so far advanced on the road to recovery that he felt it safe to remove them to the new quarters at the Silver Spring.

He had sent Dorothy home a week before, saying:

“Now, Dorothy, dear, we have conquered the enemy—you and I—and a glorious conquest it has been. We have had forty-seven cases of the disease, some of them very severe, and there have been only two deaths. Even they were scarcely attributable to the fever, as both the victims were old and decrepit, having little vitality with which to resist the malady. It is a record that ought to teach the doctors and planters of Virginia something as to the way in which to deal with such outbreaks. I shall prepare a little account of it for their benefit and publish it in a medical journal. But I never can tell you how greatly I thank you for your help.”

“Please don’t talk in that way,” Dorothy hastily rejoined. “Other people may thank me for things whenever they please, but you never must.”

“But why not, Dorothy?”

“Why, because—well, because you are the Master. I won’t have you thanking me just like other people. It humiliates me. It is like telling me you didn’t expect me to do my duty. No, that isn’t just what I mean. It is like telling me that you think of Dorothy just as you do of other people, or something of that kind. I can’t make out just what I mean, but I will not let you thank me.”

“I think I understand,” he answered. “But at any rate you’ll permit me to tell you, that in my honest judgment as a physician, there would have been many more deaths than there have been, if I had not had you to help me. Your own tireless nursing, and the extraordinary way in which you have made all the negro nurses carry out my orders to the letter, have saved many lives without any possibility of doubt.”

“Then I have really helped?”

“Yes, Dorothy. I cannot make you know how much you have helped—how great an assistance, how great a comfort you have been to me in all this trying time.”

“I am very glad—very glad.”

That was all the answer she could make for tears. It was quite enough.

“Now I’m going to send you home, Dorothy, to get some badly needed rest and sleep, and to bring the color back to your cheeks. I am going home myself too. I need only ride over here twice a day to see that the getting well goes on satisfactorily, and in a week’s time I shall break up the camp entirely, and send the convalescents to their quarters. It will be safe to do so then. In the meantime I want you to think of Christmas. We must make it a red letter day at Wyanoke, to celebrate our victory. We’ll have a ‘dining day,’ as a dinner party is queerly called here in Virginia, with a dance in the evening. I’ll have some musicians up from Richmond. You are to send out the invitations at once, please, and we’ll make this the very gladdest of Christmases.”

“May I take my Mammy home with me?” the girl broke in. “She has been so good to me, you know.”

“Yes, Dorothy, and I wish you would keep her there ‘for all the time,’ as you sometimes say. There’s a comfortable house by the garden you know, and we’ll give her that for her home as long as she lives. You shall pick out one or two of the nicest of the negro girls to wait on her and keep house for her, and make her old age comfortable.”

Dorothy ejaculated a little laugh.

“Mammy would drive them all out of the house in ten seconds,” she said, “and call them ‘dishfaced devils’ and more different kinds of other ugly names than you ever heard of. Old as she is, she’s very strong, and she’ll never let anybody wait on her. She calls the present generation of servants ‘a lot o’ no ’count niggas, dat ain’t fit fer nothin’ but to be plaguesome.’ But you are very good to let me give her the house. Thank you, Cousin Arthur.”

“Oh, Dorothy,” answered Arthur, “I thought you always ‘played fair’ as the children say.”

“Why, what have I done?” the girl asked almost with distress in her tone.

“Why, you thanked me, after forbidding me to thank you for an immeasurably greater service.”

“Oh, but that’s different,” she replied. “You are the Master. I am only a woman.”

“Dorothy,” said Arthur seriously, “don’t you know I think there is nothing in the world better or nobler than a woman?”

“That’s because you are a man and don’t know,” she answered out of a wisdom so superior that it would not argue the point.

During the next week Arthur found time in which to prepare and send off for publication a helpful article on “The Plantation Treatment of Typhoid Epidemics.” He also found time in which to ride over to Branton and hold a prolonged conference with Edmonia Bannister. Before a hickory wood fire in the great drawing room they went over all considerations bearing upon Arthur’s affairs and plans and possibilities.

“This is the visitation you long ago threatened me with,” said Edmonia. “You said you would come when the stress of the fever should be over, and you told me you had some plan in your mind. Tell me what it was.”

“Oh, your past tense is correct there; that was before you wrote to me about Dorothy. Your letter put an end to that scheme at once.”

“Did it? I’m very glad.”

“But why? You don’t know what it was that I had in mind.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps I have a shrewd idea as to the general features of your plan. At any rate I’m perfectly sure that it was unworthy of you.”

“Why do you think that, Edmonia? Surely I have not—”

“Oh, yes you have—if you mean that you haven’t deserved to be thought ill of. You have wanted to run away from your duty and your happiness, and it was that sort of thing you had in mind. Otherwise you wouldn’t have needed to plan at all. Besides, you said you didn’t want to have this conversation with me, or to hear about Dorothy till you should be ‘free to act.’ You meant by that ‘free to run away.’ That is why I wrote you about Dorothy.”

“Listen, Edmonia!” said the young man pleadingly. “Don’t think of me as a coward or a shirk! Don’t imagine that I have been altogether selfish even in my thoughts! I did plan to run away, as you call it. But it was not to escape duty—for I didn’t know, then, that I had a duty to do. Or rather I thought that my duty called upon me to ‘run away.’ Will you let me tell you just what I felt and thought, and what the plan was that I had in mind?”

“Surely, Arthur. I did not really think you selfish, and certainly I did not think you cowardly. If I had, I should have taken pains to save Dorothy from you. But tell me the whole story.”

“I will. When we began our conversation in Dorothy’s little porch, I was just beginning to be afraid that I might learn to love her. She had so suddenly matured, somehow. Her womanhood seemed to have come upon her as the sunrise does in the tropics without any premonitory twilight. It was the coming of serious duty upon her, I suppose that wrought the change. At any rate, with the outbreak of the fever, she seemed to take on a new character. Without losing her childlike trustfulness and simplicity, she suddenly became a woman, strong to do and to endure. And her beauty came too, so that I caught myself thinking of her when I ought to have been thinking of something else.”

“Oh, yes,” Edmonia broke in. “I know all that and sympathize with it. You remember I found it all out before you did.”

“Yes, I was coming to that. Perhaps I wandered from my story a bit—”

“You did, of course. But under the circumstances I forgive you. Go on.”

“Well, when you told me it was too late for me to save myself from loving Dorothy, I knew you were right, though I had not suspected it before. I hoped, however, that it might not be too late to save Dorothy from myself. I did not want to lure her to a life that was sure to bring much of trial and hard work and sympathetic suffering to her.”

“But why not? Isn’t such a life, with the man she loves, very greatly the happiest one she could lead? Have you studied her character to so little purpose as to imagine—”

“No, no, no!” he broke in. “I saw all that when I thought the matter out, after you left the camp that day. But at first I didn’t see it, and I didn’t want Dorothy sacrificed—especially to me.”

“No woman is sacrificed when she is permitted to share the work, the purposes, the aspirations of the man she loves. How men do misjudge women and misunderstand them! It is not ease, or wealth, or luxury that makes a woman happy—for many a woman is wretched with all these—it is love, and love never does its work so perfectly in a woman’s soul as when it demands sacrifice at her hands.”

Edmonia said this oracularly, as she sat staring into the fire. Arthur wondered where she had learned this truth, seeing that love had never come to her either to offer its rewards or to demand sacrifice at her hands. She caught his look and was instantly on her guard lest his shrewd gift of observation should penetrate her secret.

“You wonder how I know all this, Arthur,” she quickly added. “I see the question in your face. For answer I need only remind you that I am a woman, and a woman’s intuitions sometimes serve her as well as experience might. Go on, and tell me what it was you planned before I wrote you concerning Dorothy’s case. What was the particular excuse you invented at that time for running away?”

“It is of no consequence now, but I don’t mind telling you. I conceived the notion of freeing myself from the obligations that tie me here in Virginia by giving Wyanoke and all that pertains to it to Dorothy.”

“I almost wish you had proposed that to Dorothy. I should have been an interested witness of the scorn and anger which she would have visited upon your poor foolish head. It would have taken you five years to undo that mistake. But those five years would have been years of suffering to Dorothy; so on the whole I’m glad you didn’t make the suggestion. What spasm of returning reason restrained you from that crowning folly?”

“Your letter, of course. When you told me that those who had assumed the rôle of Special Providence to Dorothy had planned to marry her to that young Jackanapes—”

“Don’t call him contemptuous names, Arthur. He doesn’t need them as a label, and it only ruffles your temper. Go on with what you were saying.”

“Well, of course, you see how the case stood. Even if I had not cared for Dorothy in any but a friendly way, I should have felt it to be the very highest duty of my life to save her from this hideous thing. I decided instantly that whatever else might happen I would save Dorothy from this fate. So I have worked out a new plan, and I want you to help me carry it out.”

“Go on. You know you may count upon me.”

“Well, I want you to take Dorothy away from here. I want you to show her a larger world than she has ever dreamed of. I want you to take her to Washington, Baltimore and New York and introduce her to the best society there is there. Then I want you to take her to Europe for a year. She must see pictures and sculpture, and the noblest examples of architecture there are in the world. That side of her nature which has been so wickedly cramped and crippled and dwarfed, must be cultivated and developed. She must hear the greatest music there is, and see the greatest plays and the greatest players. Fortunately she is fluent in her French and she readily understands Italian. Her capacity for enjoyment is matchless. It is that of a full-souled woman who has been starved on this side of her nature. You once bade me remember that in anything I did toward educating her I was educating my future wife. I don’t know whether it will prove to be so or not. But in any case this thing must be done. She must know all these higher joys of life while yet she is young enough to enjoy them to the full, and she must have the education they will bring to her. She will be seventeen in March—only three months hence. She is at the age of greatest susceptibility to impressions.”

“Your thought mightily pleases me, Arthur,” said Edmonia. “But I warn you there is serious danger in it.”

“Danger for Dorothy?”

“No. But danger for you.”

“That need not matter. You mean that—”

“I mean just that. In all this Dorothy will rapidly change—at least in her points of view. Her conceptions of life will undergo something like a revolution. At the end of it all she may not care for any such life as you can offer her, especially as she will meet many brilliant men under circumstances calculated to make the most of their attractions. She may transfer her love for you, which is at present a thing quite unconsciously felt, to some one who shall ask for it. For I suppose you will say nothing to her now that might make her conscious of her state of mind and put her under bonds to you?”

“Quite certainly, no! My tongue shall be dumb and even my actions and looks shall be kept in leash till she is gone. Can’t you understand, Edmonia—”

“I understand better than you think, and I honor you for your courage and your unselfishness. You want this thing done in order that Dorothy may have the fullest possible chance in life and in love—in order that if there be in this world a higher happiness for her than any that you can offer, she may have it?”

“That is precisely my thought, Edmonia. You have expressed it far better than I could have done. I don’t want to take an unfair advantage of Dorothy, as I suppose I easily might. I don’t want her to accept my love and agree to share my life, in ignorance of what better men and better things there may be for her elsewhere. If I am ever to make her my own, it must be after she knows enough to choose intelligently. Should she choose some other life than that which I can offer, some other love than mine, she must never know the blight that her choice cannot fail to inflict upon me. As for myself, I have my crucibles and my work, and I should be better content, knowing that she was happy in some life of her own choosing, than knowing that I had made her mine by taking unfair advantage of her inexperience.”

“Arthur Brent,” said Edmonia, rising, not to dismiss him, but for the sake of giving emphasis to her utterance, “you are—well, let me say it all in a single phrase—you are worthy of Dorothy South. You are such a man as women of the higher sort dream of, but rarely meet. It is not quite convenient for me to undertake this mission for you just now, but convenience must courtesy to my will. I’ll arrange the matter with Dorothy at once and we’ll be off in a fortnight or less. Fortunately no dressmaking need detain us, for we must have our first important gowns made in Richmond and Baltimore, a larger supply in New York, and then Paris will take care of its own. I’ll have some trouble with Aunt Polly, of course; she regards travel very much as she does manslaughter, but you may safely leave her to me.”

“But, Edmonia, you said this thing would subject you to some inconvenience?”

“So it will. But that’s a trifle. I had half promised to spend July at the White Sulphur, but that can wait for another July. Now you are to tell me goodby a few minutes hence and ride away. For I must write a note to Dorothy—no, on second thoughts I’ll drive over and see her and Aunt Polly, and you are to remain here and dine with brother. Dorothy and I are going to talk about clothes, and we shan’t want any men folk around. I’ll dine at Wyanoke, and by tomorrow we’ll have half a dozen seamstresses at work making things enough to last us to Baltimore.”

“But tell me, Edmonia,” said Arthur, beginning to think of practical things, “can you and Dorothy travel alone?”

“We could, if it were necessary. You know I’ve been abroad twice and I know ‘the tricks and the manners’ of Europe. But it will not be necessary. I enjoy the advantage of having been educated at Le Febvre’s School, in Richmond. That sort of thing has its compensations. Among them is the fact that it is apt to locate one’s friendships variously as to place. I have a schoolmate in New York—a schoolmate of five or six years ago, and a very dear friend—Mildred Livingston. She is married and rich and restless. She likes nothing so much as travel and I happen to know that she is just now planning a trip to Europe. I’ll write to her today and we’ll go together. As her husband, Nicholas Van Rensselaer Livingston, hasn’t anything else to do he’ll go along just to look after the baggage and swear in English, which they don’t understand, at the Continental porters and their kind. He’s really very good at that sort of thing.”

“It is well for a man to be good at something.”

“Yes, isn’t it? I’ve often said so to Mildred. Besides he worships the ground—or the carpets, rather,—that she walks on. For he never lets her put her foot on the ground if he can help it. He’s a dear fellow—in his way—and Mildred is really fond of him—especially when he’s looking after the tickets and the baggage. Now you must let me run away. You are to stay here and dine with brother, you know.”