Читать книгу Dorothy South - George Cary Eggleston - Страница 6

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ARTHUR BRENT had been born at Wyanoke, twenty seven years or so before the time of our story. His father, one of a pair of brothers, was a man imbued with the convictions of the Revolutionary period—the convictions that prompted the Virginians of that time to regard slavery as an inherited curse to be got rid of in the speediest possible way compatible with the public welfare. There were still many such Virginians at that time. They were men who knew the history of their state and respected the teachings of the fathers. They remembered how earnestly Thomas Jefferson had insisted upon writing into Virginia’s deed of cession of the North West Territory, a clause forever prohibiting slavery in all the fair “Ohio Country”—now constituting Indiana, Illinois and the other great states of the Middle West. They held in honor, as their fathers before them had done, the memory of Chancellor George Wythe, who had well-nigh impoverished himself in freeing the negroes he had inherited and giving them a little start in the world. They were the men to whom Henry Clay made confident appeal in that effort to secure the gradual extirpation of the system which was the first and was repeated as very nearly the last of his labors of statesmanship.

These men had no sympathy or tolerance for “abolitionist” movements. They desired and intended that slavery should cease, and many of them impoverished themselves in their efforts to be personally rid of it. But they resented as an impertinence every suggestion of interference with it on the part of the national government, or on the part of the dwellers in other states.

For these men accepted, as fully as the men of Massachusetts once did, the doctrine that every state was sovereign except in so far as it had delegated certain functions of sovereignty to the general government. They held it to be the absolute right of each state to regulate its domestic affairs in its own way, and they were ready to resent and resist all attempts at outside interference with their state’s institutions, precisely as they would have resisted and resented the interference of anybody with the ordering of their personal households.

Arthur Brent’s father, Brandon Brent, was a man of this type. Upon coming of age and soon afterwards marrying, he determined, as he formulated his thought, to “set himself free.” When Arthur was born he became more resolute than ever in this purpose, under the added stimulus of affection for his child. “The system” he said to his wife, “is hurtful to young white men, I do not intend that Arthur shall grow up in the midst of it.”

So he sold to his brother his half interest in the four or five thousand acres which constituted Wyanoke plantation, and with the proceeds removed those of the negroes who had fallen to his share to little farms which he had bought for them in Indiana.

This left him with a wife, a son, and a few hundred dollars with which to begin life anew. He went West and engaged in the practice of the law. He literally “grew up with the country.” He won sufficient distinction to represent his district in Congress for several successive terms, and to leave behind him when he died a sweetly savored name for all the higher virtues of honorable manhood.

He left to his son also, a fair patrimony, the fruit of his personal labors in his profession, and of the growth of the western country in which he lived.

At the age of fifteen, the boy had been sent to pass a delightful year at Wyanoke, while fitting himself for college under the care of the same tutor who had personally trained the father, and whose influence had been so good that the father invoked it for his son in his turn. The old schoolmaster had long since given up his school, but when Brandon Brent had written to him a letter, attributing to his influence and teaching all that was best in his own life’s success, and begging him to crown his useful life’s labors with a like service to this his boy, he had given up his ease and undertaken the task.

Arthur had finished his college course, and was just beginning, with extraordinary enthusiasm, his study of medicine when his father died, leaving him alone in the world; for the good mother had passed away while the boy was yet a mere child.

After his father’s death, Arthur found many business affairs to arrange. Attention to these seriously distracted him, greatly to his annoyance, for he had become an enthusiast for scientific acquirement, and grudged every moment of time that affairs occupied to the neglect of his studies. In this mood of irritation with business details, the young man decided to convert the whole of his inheritance into cash and to invest the proceeds in annuities. “I shall never marry,” he told himself. “I shall devote my whole life to science. I shall need only a moderate income to provide for my wants, but that income must come to me without the distraction of mind incident to the earning of it. I must be completely a free man—free to live my own life and pursue my own purposes.”

So he invested all that he had in American and English annuity companies, and when that business was completed, he found himself secure in an income, not by any means large but quite sufficient for all his needs, and assured to him for all the years that he might live. “I shall leave nothing behind me when I die,” he reflected, “but I shall have nobody to provide for, and so this is altogether best.”

Then he set himself to work in almost terrible earnest. He lived in the laboratories, the hospitals, the clinics and the libraries. When his degree as a physician was granted his knowledge of science, quite outside the ordinary range of medical study was deemed extraordinary by his professors. A place of honor in one of the great medical colleges was offered to him, but he declined it, and went to Germany and France instead. He had fairly well mastered the languages of those two countries, and he was minded now to go thither for instruction, under the great masters in biology and chemistry and physics.

Two years later—and four years before the beginning of this story, there came to Arthur Brent an opportunity of heroic service which he promptly embraced. There broke out, in Norfolk, in his native state, in the year 1855, such an epidemic of yellow fever as had rarely been known anywhere before, and it found a population peculiarly susceptible to the subtle poison of the scourge.

Facing the fact that he was in no way immune, the young physician abandoned the work he had returned from Paris to New York to do, and went at once to the post of danger as a volunteer for medical service. Those whose memories stretch back to that terrible year of 1855, remember the terms in which Virginia and all the country echoed the praises of Dr. Arthur Brent, the plaudits that everywhere greeted his heroic devotion. The newspapers day by day were filled with despatches telling with what tireless devotion this mere boy—he was scarcely more than twenty three years of age—was toiling night and day at his self appointed task, and how beneficent his work was proving to be. The same newspapers told with scorching scorn of physicians and clergymen—a very few of either profession, but still a few—who had quitted their posts in panic fear and run away from the danger. Day by day the readers of the newspapers eagerly scanned the despatches, anxious chiefly to learn that the young hero had not fallen a victim to his own compassionate enthusiasm for the relief of the stricken.

Dr. Arthur Brent knew nothing of all this at the time. His days and nights were too fully occupied with his perilous work for him even to glance at a newspaper. He was himself stricken at last, but not until the last, not until that grand old Virginian, Henry A. Wise had converted his Accomac plantation into a relief camp and, arming his negroes for its defence against a panic stricken public, had robbed the scourge of its terrors by drawing from the city all those whose presence there could afford opportunity for its spread.

Dr. Arthur Brent was among the very last of those attacked by the scourge, and it was to give that young hero a meagre chance for life that Henry A. Wise went in person to Norfolk and brought the physician away to his own plantation home, in armed and resolute defiance alike of quarantine restrictions and of the protests of an angry and frightened mob.

Such in brief had been the life story of Arthur Brent. On his recovery from a terribly severe attack of the fever, he had gone again to Europe, not this time for scientific study, but for the purpose of restoring his shattered constitution through rest upon a Swiss mountain side. After a year of upbuilding idleness, he had returned to New York with his health completely restored.

There he had taken an inexpensive apartment, and resumed his work of scientific investigation upon lines which he had thought out during his long sojourn in Switzerland.

Three years later there came to him news that his uncle at Wyanoke was dead, and that the family estate had become his own as the only next of kin. It pleased Arthur’s sense of humor to think of a failure of “kin” in Virginia, where, as he well remembered, pretty nearly everybody he had met in boyhood had been his cousin.

But the news that he was sole heir to the family estate was not altogether agreeable to the young man. “It will involve me in affairs again,” he said to himself, “and that is what I meant should never happen to me. There is a debt on the estate, of course. I never heard of a Virginia estate without that adornment. Then there are the negroes, whose welfare is in my charge. Heaven knows I do not want them or their value. But obviously they and the debt saddle me with a duty which I cannot escape. I suppose I must go to Wyanoke. It is very provoking, just as I have made all my arrangements to study the problem of sewer gas poisoning with a reasonable hope of solving it this summer!”

He thought long and earnestly before deciding what course to pursue. On the one hand he felt that his highest duty in life was to science as a servant of humanity. He realized, as few men do, how great a beneficence the discovery of a scientific fact may be to all mankind. “And there are so few men,” he said to himself, “who are free as I am to pursue investigations untrammeled by other things—the care of a family, the ordering of a household, the education of children, the earning of a living! If I could have this summer free, I believe I could find out how to deal with sewer gas, and that would save thousands of lives and immeasurable suffering! And there are my other investigations that are not less pressing in their importance. Why should I have to give up my work, for which I have the equipment of a thorough training, a sufficient income, youth, high health, and last but not least, enthusiasm?”

He did not add, as a less modest man might, that he had earned a reputation which commanded not only the attention but the willing assistance of his scientific brethren in his work, that all laboratories were open to him, that all men of science were ready to respond to his requests for the assistance of their personal observation and experience, that the columns of all scientific journals were freely his to use in setting forth his conclusions and the facts upon which they rested.

“I wish I could put the whole thing into the hands of an agent, and bid him sell out the estate, pay off the debts and send me the remainder of the proceeds, with which to endow a chair of research in some scientific school! But that would mean selling the negroes, and I’ll never do that. I wish I could set them all free and rid myself of responsibility for them. But I cannot do that unless I can get enough money out of the estate to buy little farms for them as my father did with his negroes. I mustn’t condemn them to starvation and call it freedom. I wish I knew what the debt is, and how much the land will bring. Then I could plan what to do. But as I do not know anything of the kind, I simply must go to Wyanoke and study the problem as it is. It will take all summer and perhaps longer. But there is nothing else for it.”

That is how it came about that Dr. Arthur Brent sat in the great hallway at Wyanoke, talking with Aunt Polly, when Dorothy South returned, accompanied by her hounds.