Part 5

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.

VI

COLLEGE DAYS

“My dear grandpa,” wrote Dan during his first weeks at college, “I think I am going to like it pretty well here after I get used to the professors. The professors are a great nuisance. They seem to forget that a fellow of seventeen isn't a baby any longer.

“The Arcades are very nice, and the maples on the lawn remind me of those at Uplands, only they aren't nearly so fine. My room is rather small, but Big Abel keeps everything put away, so I manage to get along. Champe sleeps next to me, and we are always shouting through the wall for Big Abel. I tell you, he has to step lively now.

“The night after we came, we went to supper at Professor Ball's. There was a Miss Ball there who had a pair of big eyes, but girls are so silly. Champe talked to her all the evening and walked out to the graveyard with her the next afternoon. I don't see why he wants to spend so much of his time with young ladies. It's because they think him good-looking, I reckon.

“We are the only men who have horses here, so I am glad you made me bring Prince Rupert, after all. When I ride him into town, everybody turns to look at him, and Batt Horsford, the stableman, says his trot is as clean as a razor. At first I wished I'd brought my hunter instead, they made such a fuss over Champe's, and I tell you he's a regular timber-topper.

“A week ago I rode to the grave of Mr. Jefferson, as I promised you, but I couldn't carry the wreath for grandma because it would have looked silly--Champe said so. However, I made Big Abel get down and pull a few flowers on the way.

“You know, I had always thought that only gentlemen came to the University, but whom do you think I met the first evening?--why, the son of old Rainy-day Jones. What do you think of that? He actually had the impudence to pass himself off as one of the real Joneses, and he was going with all the men. Of course, I refused to shake hands with him--so did Champe--and, when he wanted to fight me, I said I fought only gentlemen. I wish you could have seen his face. He looked as old Rainy-day did when he hit the free negro Levi, and I knocked him down.

“By the way, I wish you would please send me my half-year's pocket money in a lump, if you can conveniently do so. There is a man here who is working his way through Law, and his mother has just lost all her money, so, unless some one helps him, he'll have to go out and work before he takes his degree. I've promised to lend him my half-year's allowance--I said 'lend' because it might hurt his feelings; but, of course, I don't want him to pay it back. He's a great fellow, but I can't tell you his name--I shouldn't like it in his place, you know.

“The worst thing about college life is having to go to classes. If it wasn't for that I should be all right, and, anyway, I am solid on my Greek and Latin--but I can't get on with the higher mathematics. Mr. Bennett couldn't drive them into my head as he did into Champe's.

“I hope grandma has entirely recovered from her lumbago. Tell her Mrs. Ball says she was cured by using red pepper plasters.

“Do you know, by the way, that I left my half-dozen best waistcoats--the embroidered ones--in the bottom drawer of my bureau, at least Big Abel swears that's where he put them. I should be very much obliged if grandma would have them fixed up and sent to me--I can't do without them. A great many gentlemen here are wearing coloured cravats, and Charlie Morson's brother, who came up from Richmond for a week, has a pair of side whiskers. He says they are fashionable down there, but I don't like them.

“With affectionate greeting to grandma and yourself,

“Your dutiful grandson,

“DANDRIDGE MONTJOY.”

“P.S. I am using my full name now--it will look better if I am ever President. I wonder if Mr. Jefferson was ever called plain Tom.

“DAN.”

“N.B. Give my love to the little girls at Uplands.

“D.”

The Major read the letter aloud to his wife while she sat knitting by the fireside, with Mitty holding the ball of yarn on a footstool at her feet.

“What do you think of that, Molly?” he asked when he had finished, his voice quivering with excitement.

“Red pepper plasters!” returned the old lady, contemptuously. “As if I hadn't been making them for Cupid for the last twenty years. Red pepper plasters, indeed! Why, they're no better than mustard ones. I reckon I've made enough of them to know.”

“I don't mean that, Molly,” explained the Major, a little crestfallen. “I was speaking of the letter. That's a fine letter, now, isn't it?”

“It might be worse,” admitted Mrs. Lightfoot, coolly; “but for my part, I don't care to have my grandson upon terms of equality with any of that rascal Jones's blood. Why, the man whips his servants.”

“But he isn't upon any terms, my dear. He refused to shake hands with him, didn't you hear that? Perhaps I'd better read the letter again.”

“That is all very well, Mr. Lightfoot,” said his wife, clicking her needles, “but it can't prevent his being in classes with him, all the same. And I am sure, if I had known the University was so little select, I should have insisted upon sending him to Oxford, where his great-grandfather went before him.”

“Good gracious, Molly! You don't wish the lad was across the ocean, do you?”

“It matters very little where he is so long as he is a gentleman,” returned the old lady, so sharply that Mitty began to unwind the worsted rapidly.

“Nonsense, Molly,” protested the Major, irritably, for he could not stand opposition upon his own hearth-rug. “The boy couldn't be hurt by sitting in the same class with the devil himself--nor could Champe, for that matter. They are too good Lightfoots.”

“I am not uneasy about Champe,” rejoined his wife. “Champe has never been humoured as Dan has been, I'm glad to say.”

The Major started up as red as a beet.

“Do you mean that I humour him, madam?” he demanded in a terrible voice.

“Do pray, Mr. Lightfoot, you will frighten Mitty to death,” said his wife, reprovingly, “and it is really very dangerous for you to excite yourself so--you remember the doctor cautioned you against it.” And, by the time the Major was thoroughly depressed, she skilfully brought out her point. “Of course you spoil the child to death. You know it as well as I do.”

The Major, with the fear of apoplexy in his mind, had no answer on his tongue, though a few minutes later he showed his displeasure by ordering his horse and riding to Uplands to talk things over with the Governor.