Dorothy South. Eggleston George Cary

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СКАЧАТЬ He used to say that the authority of the master of a plantation was too great to be delegated to any person who didn’t care for the black people and didn’t feel his responsibility.”

      “But how did the fellow come to be here then? Who employed him?”

      “Mr. Peyton did – Mr. Madison Peyton. When your uncle was ill, Mr. Peyton looked after things for him, and he kept it up after Uncle Robert died. He hired this overseer. He said he was too busy on his own plantation to take care of things here in person.”

      “Uncle Robert was quite right,” said Arthur meditatively. “And now that I am charged with the responsibility for these black people, I will not delegate my power to any overseer, least of all to one whom you have found out to be a cruel coward. Where do you suppose we could find him now?”

      “Down in the tobacco new grounds,” the girl answered. “I was going there to-day to set my dogs on him, but I remembered that you were master now.”

      “What was the special occasion for your anger this time?” Arthur asked in a certain quiet, seemingly half indifferent tone which Dorothy found inscrutable.

      “He whipped poor old Michael, the gardener last night,” answered the girl with a glint as of fire in her eyes. “He had no right to do that. Michael isn’t a field hand, and he isn’t under the overseer’s control.”

      “Do you mean the shambling old man I saw in the garden yesterday? Surely he didn’t whip that poor decrepit old man!”

      “Yes, he did. I told you he was a cruel coward.”

      “Let’s ride to the tobacco new grounds at once,” said Arthur quite as he might have suggested the most indifferent thing. But Dorothy observed that on the way to the new grounds Arthur Brent spoke no word. Twice she addressed him, but he made no response.

      Arrived at the new grounds Arthur called the overseer to him and without preface asked him:

      “Did you strike old Michael with your whip last night?”

      “Yes, and there wan’t a lick amiss unless I made a lick at him and missed him.”

      The man laughed at his own clumsy witticism, but the humor of it seemed not to impress the new master of the plantation. For reply he said:

      “Go to your house at once and pack up your belongings. Come to me after I have had my breakfast, and we’ll have a settlement. You are to leave my plantation to-day and never set foot upon it again. Come, Miss Dorothy, let’s continue our ride!”

      With that the two wheeled about, the girl saying:

      “Let’s run our horses for a stretch.” Instantly she set off at breakneck speed across the fields and over two stiff fences before regaining the main plantation road. There she drew rein and turning full upon her companion she said:

      “Now you may call me Dorothy.”

      VII

      SHRUB HILL CHURCH

      T HE following day was Sunday, and to Arthur’s satisfaction it was one of the two Sundays in the month, on which services were held at Shrub Hill Church. For Arthur remembered the little old church there in the woods, with the ancient cemetery, in which all the Brents who had lived before him were buried, and in which rested also all the past generations of all the other good families of the region round about.

      Shrub Hill Church represented one of the most attractive of Virginia traditions. Early in his career as statesman, Thomas Jefferson had rendered Virginia a most notable service. He had secured the complete separation of church from state, the dissolution of that unholy alliance between religion and government, with which despotism and class privilege have always buttressed the fabric of oppression. But church and family remained, and in the course of generations that relation had assumed characteristics of a most wholesome, ameliorating and liberalizing character.

      Thus at Shrub Hill all the people of character and repute in the region round about, found themselves at home. They were in large degree Baptists and Presbyterians in their personal church relations, but all of them deemed themselves members of Shrub Hill – the Episcopal church which had survived from that earlier time when to be a gentleman carried with it the presumption of adherence to the established religion. All of them attended service there. All contributed to the cost of keeping the edifice and the graveyard grounds in repair. All of them shared in the payment of the old rector’s salary and he in his turn preached scrupulously innocuous sermons to them – sermons ten minutes in length which might have been repeated with entire propriety and acceptance in any Baptist or Presbyterian pulpit.

      When the Easter elections came, all the gentlemen of the neighborhood felt themselves entitled to vote for the wardens and vestrymen already in office, or for the acceptable person selected by common consent to take the place of any warden or vestryman who might have been laid to rest beneath the sod of the Shrub Hill churchyard during the year. And the wardens and vestrymen were Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians or gentlemen professing no faith, quite indifferently.

      These people were hot debaters of politics and religion – especially religion. When the question of immersion or pedo-baptism was up, each was ready and eager to maintain the creed of his own church with all the arguments that had been formulated for that purpose generations before and worn smooth to the tongue by oft-repeated use. But this fervor made no difference whatever in the loyalty of their allegiance to their old family church at Shrub Hill. There they found common ground of tradition and affection. There they were all alike in right of inheritance. There all of them expected to be buried by the side of their forefathers.

      It has been said already that services were held at Shrub Hill on two Sundays of the month. As the old rector lived within a few minutes’ walk of the church, and had no other duty than its ministry, there might have been services there every Sunday in the year, except that such a practice would have interfered with the desire of those who constituted its congregation to attend their own particular Baptist or Presbyterian churches, which held services on the other Sundays. It was no part of the spirit or mission of the family church thus to interfere with the religious preferences of its members, and so, from time immemorial, there had been services at Shrub Hill only upon two Sundays of the month.

      Everybody attended those services – every gentleman and every gentlewoman at least. That is to say, all went to the church and the women with a few of the older men went in. The rest of the gentlemen gathered in groups under the trees outside – for the church stood in the midst of an unbroken woodland – and chatted in low tones while the service was in progress. Thus they fulfilled their gentlemanly obligations of church going, without the fatigue of personal participation in the services.

      The gentlemen rode to church on horseback. The ladies, old and young alike, went thither in their family carriages. Many of these, especially the younger ones, were accustomed to go everywhere else in the saddle, but to church, propriety and tradition required them to go decorously in the great lumbering vehicles of family state.

      The gentlemen arrived first and took their places at the church door to greet the gentlewomen and give them a hand in alighting from the high-hung carriages.

      As soon as the service was over the social clearing-house held its session. It was not known by that name, but that in fact was what it amounted to. Every young woman present invited every other young woman present to go home with her to dinner and to stay for a few days or for a week. There was a babel of insistent tongues out of which nothing less sagacious than feminine intelligence could have extracted a resultant understanding. But after a few minutes all was as orderly as the domestic arrangements СКАЧАТЬ