The Governor rode up too late to avert the punishment. Dan had taken his whipping and was sitting on a footstool in the library, facing the Major and a couple of the Major's cronies. His face wore an expression in which there was more resentment than resignation; for, though he took blows doggedly, he bore the memory of them long after the smart had ceased—long, indeed, after light-handed justice, in the Major's person, had forgotten alike the sin and the expiation. For the Major's hand was not steady at the rod, and he had often regretted a weakness of heart which interfered with a physical interpretation of the wisdom of Solomon. “If you get your deserts, you'd get fifty lashes,” was his habitual reproof to his servants, though, as a matter of fact, he had never been known to order one. His anger was sometimes of the kind that appalls, but it usually vented itself in a heightened redness of face or a single thundering oath; and a woman's sob would melt his stoniest mood. It was only because his daughter had kept out of his sight that he had never forgiven her, people said; but there was, perhaps, something characteristic in the proof that he was most relentless where he had most loved.
As for Dan's chastisement, he had struck him twice across the shoulders, and when the boy had turned to him with the bitter smile which was Jane Lightfoot's own, the Major had choked in his wrath, and, a moment later, flung the whip aside. “I'll be damned,—I beg your pardon, sir,—I'll be ashamed of myself if I give you another lick,” he said. “You are a gentleman, and I shall trust you.”
He held out his hand, but he had not counted on the Montjoy blood. The boy looked at him and stubbornly shook his head. “I can't shake hands yet because I am hating you just now,” he answered. “Will you wait awhile, sir?” and the Major choked again, half in awe, half in amusement.
“You don't bear malice, I reckon?” he ventured cautiously.
“I am not sure,” replied the boy, “I rather think I do.”
Then he put on his coat, and they went out to meet Mr. Blake and Dr. Crump, two hale and jolly gentlemen who rode over every Thursday to spend the night.
As the visitors came panting up the steps, the Major stood in the doorway with outstretched hands.
“You are late, gentlemen, you are late,” was his weekly greeting, to which they as regularly responded, “We could never come too early for our pleasure, my dear Major; but there are professional duties, you know, professional duties.”
After this interchange of courtesies, they would enter the house and settle themselves, winter or summer, in their favourite chairs upon the hearth-rug, when it was the custom of Mrs. Lightfoot to send in a fluttering maid to ask if Mrs. Blake had done her the honour to accompany her husband. As Mrs. Blake was never known to leave her children and her pet poultry, this was merely a conventionalism by which the elder lady meant to imply a standing welcome for the younger.
On this evening, Mr. Blake—the rector of the largest church in Leicesterburg—straightened his fat legs and folded his hands as he did at the ending of his sermons, and the others sat before him with the strained and reverential faces which they put on like a veil in church and took off when the service was over. That it was not a prayer, but a pleasantry of which he was about to deliver himself, they quite understood; but he had a habit of speaking on week days in his Sunday tones, which gave, as it were, an official weight to his remarks. He was a fleshy wide-girthed gentleman, with a bald head, and a face as radiant as the full moon.
“I was just asking the doctor when I was to have the honour of making the little widow Mrs. Crump?” he threw out at last, with a laugh that shook him from head to foot. “It is not good for man to live alone, eh, Major?”
“That sentence is sufficient to prove the divine inspiration of the Scriptures,” returned the Major, warmly, while the doctor blushed and stammered, as he always did, at the rector's mild matrimonial jokes. It was twenty years since Mr. Blake began teasing Dr. Crump about his bachelorship, and to them both the subject was as fresh as in its beginning.
“I—I declare I haven't seen the lady for a week,” protested the doctor, “and then she sent for me.”
“Sent for you?” roared Mr. Blake. “Ah, doctor, doctor!”
“She sent for me because she had heart trouble,” returned the doctor, indignantly. The lady's name was never mentioned between them.
The rector laughed until the tears started.
“Ah, you're a success with the ladies,” he exclaimed, as he drew out a neatly ironed handkerchief and shook it free from its folds, “and no wonder—no wonder! We'll be having an epidemic of heart trouble next.” Then, as he saw the doctor wince beneath his jest, his kindly heart reproached him, and he gravely turned to politics and the dignity of nations.
The two friends were faithful Democrats, though the rector always began his very forcible remarks with: “A minister knows nothing of politics, and I am but a minister of the Gospel. If you care, however, for the opinion of an outsider—”
As for the Major, he had other leanings which were a source of unending interest to them all. “I am a Whig, not from principle, but from prejudice, sir,” he declared. “The Whig is the gentleman's party. I never saw a Whig that didn't wear broadcloth.”
“And some Democrats,” politely protested the doctor, with a glance at his coat.
The Major bowed.
“And many Democrats, sir; but the Whig party, if I may say so, is the broadcloth party—the cloth stamps it; and besides this, sir, I think its 'parts are solid and will wear well.'”
Now when the Major began to quote Mr. Addison, even the rector was silent, save for an occasional prompting, as, “I was reading the Spectator until eleven last night, sir,” or “I have been trying to recall the lines in The Campaign before. 'Twas then great Marlborough's mighty soul was proved.”
This was the best of the day to Dan, and, as he turned on his footstool, he did not even glare at Champe, who, from the window seat, was regarding him with the triumphant eye with which the young behold the downfall of a brother. For a moment he had forgotten the whipping, but Champe had not; he was thinking of it in the window seat.
But the Major was standing on the hearth-rug, and the boy's gaze went to him. Tossing back his long white hair, and fixing his eagle glance on his friends, the old gentleman, with a free sweep of his arm, thundered his favourite lines:—
“So, when an angel by divine command With rising tempests shakes a guilty land (Such as of late o'er pale Britannia passed), Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”
He had got so far when the door opened and the Governor entered—a little hurriedly, for he was thinking of his supper.
“I am the bearer of an apology, my dear Major,” he said, when he had heartily shaken hands all round. “It seems that Betty—I assure you she is in great distress—set fire to your woodpile this afternoon, and that your grandson was punished for her mischief. My dear boy,” he laid his hand on Dan's shoulder and looked into his face with the winning smile which had made him the most popular man in his State, “my dear boy, you are young to be such a gentleman.”
A hot flush overspread Dan's face; he forgot the smart and the wounded pride—he forgot even Champe staring from the window seat. The Governor's voice was like salve to his hurt; the upright little man with the warm brown eyes seemed to lift him at once to the plane of his own chivalry.
“Oh, I couldn't tell on a girl, sir,” he answered, and then his smothered injury burst forth; “but she ought to be ashamed of herself,” he added bluntly.
“She is,” said the Governor with a smile; then he turned to the others. “Major, the boy is a Lightfoot!” he exclaimed.
“Ah, so I said, so I said!” cried the Major, clapping his hand on Dan's head in a racial benediction. “'I'd know you were a Lightfoot if I met you in the road' was what I said the first evening.”
“And a Virginian,” added Mr. Blake, folding his hands on his stomach and smiling upon the group. “My daughter in New York wrote to me last week for advice about the education of her son. 'Shall I send him to the school of learning at Cambridge, papa?' she asked; and I answered, 'Send him there, if you will, but, when he has finished with his books, by all means let him come to Virginia—the school for gentlemen.'”
“The school for gentlemen!” cried the doctor, delightedly. “It is a prouder title than the 'Mother of Presidents.'”
“And as honourably earned,” added the rector. “If you want polish, come to Virginia; if you want chivalry, come to Virginia. When I see these two things combined, I say to myself, 'The blood of the Mother of Presidents is here.'”
“You are right, sir, you are right!” cried the Major, shaking back his hair, as he did when he was about to begin the lines from The Campaign. “Nothing gives so fine a finish to a man as a few years spent with the influences that moulded Washington. Why, some foreigners are perfected by them, sir. When I met General Lafayette in Richmond upon his second visit, I remember being agreeably impressed with his dignity and ease, which, I have no doubt, sir, he acquired by his association, in early years, with the Virginia gentlemen.”
The Governor looked at them with a twinkle in his eye. He was aware of the humorous traits of his friends, but, in the peculiar sweetness of his temper, he loved them not the less because he laughed at them—perhaps the more. In the rector's fat body and the Major's lean one, he knew that there beat hearts as chivalrous as their words. He had seen the Major doff his hat to a beggar in the road, and the rector ride forty miles in a snowstorm to read a prayer at the burial of a slave. So he said with a pleasant laugh, “We are surely the best judges, my dear sirs,” and then, as Mrs. Lightfoot rustled in, they rose and fell back until she had taken her seat, and found her knitting.
“I am so sorry not to see Mrs. Blake,” she said to the rector. “I have a new recipe for yellow pickle which I must write out and send to her.” And, as the Governor rose to go, she stood up and begged him to stay to supper. “Mr. Lightfoot, can't you persuade him to sit down with us?” she asked.
“Where you have failed, Molly, it is useless for me to try,” gallantly responded the Major, picking up her ball of yarn.
“But I must bear your pardon to my little girl, I really must,” insisted the Governor. “By the way, Major,” he added, turning at the door, “what do you think of the scheme to let the Government buy the slaves and ship them back to Africa? I was talking to a Congressman about it last week.”
“Sell the servants to the Government!” cried the Major, hotly. “Nonsense! nonsense! Why, you are striking at the very foundation of our society! Without slavery, where is our aristocracy, sir?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the Governor lightly. “Well, we shall keep them a while longer, I expect. Good night, madam, good night, gentlemen,” and he went out to where his horse was standing.
The Major looked after him with a sigh. “When I hear a man talking about the abolition of slavery,” he remarked gloomily, “I always expect him to want to do away with marriage next—” he checked himself and coloured, as if an improper speech had slipped out in the presence of Mrs. Lightfoot. The old lady rose primly and, taking the rector's arm, led the way to supper.
Dan was not noticed at the table,—it was a part of his grandmother's social training to ignore children before visitors,—but when he went upstairs that night, the Major came to the boy's room and took him in his arms.
“I am proud of you, my child,” he said. “You are my grandson, every inch of you, and you shall have the finest riding horse in the stables on your birthday.”
“I'd rather have Big Abel, if you please, sir,” returned Dan. “I think Big Abel would like to belong to me, grandpa.”
“Bless my soul!” cried the Major. “Why, you shall have Big Abel and his whole family, if you like. I'll give you every darky on the place, if you want them—and the horses to boot,” for the old gentleman was as unwise in his generosity as in his wrath.
“Big Abel will do, thank you,” responded the boy; “and I'd like to shake hands now, grandpa,” he added gravely; but before the Major left that night he had won not only the child's hand, but his heart. It was the beginning of the great love between them.
For from that day Dan was as the light of his grandfather's eyes. As the boy strode manfully across the farm, his head thrown back, his hands clasped behind him, the old man followed, in wondering pride, on his footsteps. To see him stand amid the swinging cradles in the wheat field, ordering the slaves and arguing with the overseer, was sufficient delight unto the Major's day. “Nonsense, Molly,” he would reply half angrily to his wife's remonstrances. “The child can't be spoiled. I tell you he's too fine a boy. I couldn't spoil him if I tried,” and once out of his grandmother's sight, Dan's arrogance was laughed at, and his recklessness was worshipped. “Ah, you will make a man, you will make a man!” the Major had exclaimed when he found him swearing at the overseer, “but you mustn't curse, you really mustn't, you know. Why, your grandmother won't let me do it.”
“But I told him to leave that haystack for me to slide on,” complained the boy, “and he said he wouldn't, and began to pull it down. I wish you'd send him away, grandpa.”
“Send Harris away!” whistled the Major. “Why, where could I get another, Dan? He has been with me for twenty years.”
“Hi, young Marster, who gwine min' de han's?” cried Big Abel, from behind.
“Do you like him, Big Abel?” asked the child, for the opinion of Big Abel was the only one for which he ever showed respect. “It's because he's not free, grandpa,” he had once explained at the Major's jealous questioning. “I wouldn't hurt his feelings because he's not free, you know, and he couldn't answer back,” and the Major had said nothing more.
Now “Do you like him, Big Abel?” he inquired; and to the negro's “He's done use me moughty well, suh,” he said gravely, “Then he shall stay, grandpa—and I'm sorry I cursed you, Harris,” he added before he left the field. He would always own that he was wrong, if he could once be made to see it, which rarely happened.
“The boy's kind heart will save him, or he is lost,” said the Governor, sadly, as Dan tore by on his little pony, his black hair blown from his face, his gray eyes shining.
“He has a kind heart, I know,” returned Mrs. Ambler, gently; “the servants and the animals adore him—but—but do you think it well for Betty to be thrown so much with him? He is very wild, and they deny him nothing. I wish she went with Champe instead—but what do you think?”
“I don't know, I don't know,” answered the Governor, uneasily. “He told the doctor to mind his own business, yesterday—and that is not unlike Betty, herself, I am sorry to say—but this morning I saw him give his month's pocket money to that poor free negro, Levi. I can't say, I really do not know,” his eyes followed Betty as she flew out to climb behind Dan on the pony's back. “I wish it were Champe, myself,” he added doubtfully.
For Betty—independent Betty—had become Dan's slave. Ever since the afternoon of the burning woodpile, she had bent her stubborn little knees to him in hero-worship. She followed closer than a shadow on his footsteps; no tortures could wring his secrets from her lips. Once, when he hid himself in the mountains for a day and night and played Indian, she kept silence, though she knew his hiding-place, and a search party was out with lanterns until dawn.
“I didn't tell,” she said triumphantly, when he came down again.
“No, you didn't tell,” he frankly acknowledged.
“So I can keep a secret,” she declared at last.
“Oh, yes, you can keep a secret—for a girl,” he returned, and added, “I tell you what, I like you better than anybody about here, except grandpa and Big Abel.”
She shone upon him, her eyes narrowing; then her face darkened. “Not better than Big Abel?” she questioned plaintively.
“Why, I have to like Big Abel best,” he replied, “because he belongs to me, you know—you ought to love the thing that belongs to you.”
“But I might belong to you,” suggested Betty. She smiled again, and, smiling or grave, she always looked as if she were standing in a patch of sunshine, her hair made such a brightness about her.
“Oh, you couldn't, you're white,” said Dan; “and, besides, I reckon Big Abel and the pony are as much as I can manage. It's a dreadful weight, having people belong to you.”
Then he loaded his gun, and Betty ran away with her fingers in her ears, because she couldn't bear to have things killed.
A month later Dan and Champe settled down to study. The new tutor came—a serious young man from the North, who wore spectacles, and read the Bible to the slaves on the half-holidays. He was kindly and conscientious, and, though the boys found him unduly weighed down by responsibility for the souls of his fellows, they soon loved him in a light-hearted fashion. In a society where even the rector harvested alike the true grain and the tares, and left the Almighty to do His own winnowing, Mr. Bennett's free-handed fight with the flesh and the devil was looked upon with smiling tolerance, as if he were charging a windmill with a wooden sword.
On Saturdays he would ride over to Uplands, and discuss his schemes for the uplifting of the negroes with the Governor and Mrs. Ambler; and once he even went so far as to knock at Rainy-day Jones's door and hand him a pamphlet entitled “The Duties of the Slaveholder.” Old Rainy-day, who was the biggest bully in the county, set the dogs on him, and lit his pipe with the pamphlet; but the Major, when he heard the story, laughed, and called the young man “a second David.”
Mr. Bennett looked at him seriously through his glasses, and then his eyes wandered to the small slave, Mitty, whose chief end in life was the finding of Mrs. Lightfoot's spectacles. He was an earnest young man, but he could not keep his eyes away from Mitty when she was in the room; and at the old lady's, “Mitty, my girl, find me my glasses,” he felt like jumping from his seat and calling upon her to halt. It seemed a survival of the dark ages that one immortal soul should spend her life hunting for the spectacles of another. To Mr. Bennett, a soul was a soul in any colour; to the Major the sons of Ham were under a curse which the Lord would lighten in His own good time.
But before many months, the young man had won the affection of the boys and the respect of their grandfather, whose candid lack of logic was overpowered by the reasons which Mr. Bennett carried at every finger tip. He not only believed things, he knew why he believed them; and to the Major, with whom feelings were convictions, this was more remarkable than the courage with which he had handed his tract to old Rainy-day Jones.
As for Mr. Bennett, he found the Major a riddle that he could not read; but the Governor's first smile had melted his reserve, and he declared Mrs. Ambler to be “a Madonna by Perugino.”
Mrs. Ambler had never heard of Perugino, and the word “Madonna” suggested to her vague Romanist snares, but her heart went out to the stranger when she found that he was in mourning for his mother. She was not a clever woman in a worldly sense, yet her sympathy, from the hourly appeals to it, had grown as fine as intellect. She was hopelessly ignorant of ancient history and the Italian Renaissance; but she had a genius for the affections, and where a greater mind would have blundered over a wound, her soft hand went by intuition to the spot. It was very pleasant to sit in a rosewood chair in her parlour, to hear her gray silk rustle as she crossed her feet, and to watch her long white fingers interlace.
So she talked to the young man of his mother, and he showed her the daguerrotype of the girl he loved; and at last she confided to him her anxieties for Betty's manners and the Governor's health, and her timid wonder that the Bible “countenanced” slavery. She was rare and elegant like a piece of fine point lace; her hands had known no harder work than the delicate hemstitching, and her mind had never wandered over the nearer hills.
As time went on, Betty was given over to the care of her governess, and she was allowed to run wild no more in the meadows. Virginia, a pretty prim little girl, already carried her prayer book in her hands when she drove to church, and wore Swiss muslin frocks in the evenings; but Betty when she was made to hem tablecloths on sunny mornings, would weep until her needle rusted.
On cloudy days she would sometimes have her ambitions to be ladylike, and once, when she had gone to a party in town and seen Virginia dancing while she sat against the wall, she had come home to throw herself upon the floor.
“It's not that I care for boys, mamma,” she wailed, “for I despise them; but they oughtn't to have let me sit against the wall. And none of them asked me to dance—not even Dan.”
“Why, you are nothing but a child, Betty,” said Mrs. Ambler, in dismay. “What on earth does it matter to you whether the boys notice you or not?”
“It doesn't,” sobbed Betty; “but you wouldn't like to sit against the wall, mamma.”
“You can make them suffer for it six years hence, daughter,” suggested the Governor, revengefully.
“But suppose they don't have anything to do with me then,” cried Betty, and wept afresh.
In the end, it was Uncle Bill who brought her to her feet, and, in doing so, he proved himself to be the philosopher that he was.
“I tell you what, Betty,” he exclaimed, “if you get up and stop crying, I'll give you fifty cents. I reckon fifty cents will make up for any boy, eh?”
Betty lay still and looked up from the floor.
“I—I reckon a dol-lar m-i-g-h-t,” she gasped, and caught a sob before it burst out.
“Well, you get up and I'll give you a dollar. There ain't many boys worth a dollar, I can tell you.”
Betty got up and held out one hand as she wiped her eyes with the other.
“I shall never speak to a boy again,” she declared, as she took the money.
That was when she was thirteen, and a year later Dan went away to college.
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