These marked changes in public opinion, imperceptible as they had been at first, were gradually paving the way, it may be said, for the dawn of that new order of things which only the wiser and more farsighted men—men like Richard Horn—were able to discern. While many of the old regime were willing to admit that the patriarchal life, with the negro as the worker and the master as the spender, had seen its best days, but few of them, at the period of these chronicles, realized that the genius of Morse, Hoe, and McCormick, and a dozen others, whose inventions were just beginning to be criticised, and often condemned, were really the chief factors in the making of a new and greater democracy: that the cog, the drill, the grate-bar, and the flying shuttle would ere long supplant the hoe and the scythe; and that when the full flood of this new era was reached their old-time standards of family pride, reckless hospitality, and even their old-fashioned courtesy would well-nigh be swept into space. The storm raised over this and the preceding duel had they but known it, was but a notch in the tide-gauge of this flood.
“I understand, St. George, that you could have stopped that disgraceful affair the other night if you had raised your hand,” Judge Pancoast had blurted out in an angry tone at the club the week following. “I did raise it, judge,” replied St. George, calmly drawing off his gloves.
“They don't say so—they say you stood by and encouraged it.”
“Quite true,” he answered in his dryest voice. “When I raised my hand it was to drop my handkerchief. They fired as it fell.”
“And a barbarous and altogether foolish piece of business, Temple. There is no justification for that sort of thing, and if Rutter wasn't a feudal king up in his own county there would be trouble over it. It's God's mercy the poor fellow wasn't killed. Fine beginning, isn't it, for a happy married life?”
“Better not have any wife at all, judge, than wed a woman whose good name you are afraid to defend with your life. There are some of us who can stand anything but that, and Harry is built along the same lines. A fine, noble, young fellow—did just right and has my entire confidence and my love. Think it over, judge,” and he strolled into the card-room, picked up the morning paper, and buried his face in its columns, his teeth set, his face aflame with suppressed disgust at the kind of blood running in the judge's veins.
The colonel's treatment of his son also came in for heated discussion. Mrs. Cheston was particularly outspoken. Such quixotic action on the ground of safeguarding the rights of a young drunkard like Willits, who didn't know when he had had enough, might very well do for a self-appointed autocrat like Rutter, she maintained, but some equally respectable people would have him know that they disagreed with him.
“Just like Talbot Rutter,” she exclaimed in her outspoken, decided way—“no sense of proportion. High-tempered, obstinate as a mule, and a hundred years—yes, five hundred years behind his time. And he—could have stopped it all too if he had listened to me. Did you ever hear anything so stupid as his turning Harry—the sweetest boy who ever lived—out of doors, and in a pouring rain, for doing what he would have done himself! Oh, this is too ridiculous—too farcical. Why, you can't conceive of the absurdity of it all—nobody can! Gilbert was there and told me every word of it. You would have thought he was a grand duke or a pasha punishing a slave—and the funniest thing about it is that he believes he is a pasha. Oh—I have no patience with such contemptible family pride, and that's what is at the bottom of it.”
Some of the back county aristocrats, on the other hand—men who lived by themselves, who took their cue from Alexander Hamilton, Lee, and Webb, and believed in the code as the only means of arbitrating a difficulty of any kind between gentlemen—stoutly defended the Lord of Moorlands.
“Rutter did perfectly right to chuck the young whelp out of doors. Outrageous, sir—never is done—nothing less than murder. Ought to be prosecuted for challenging a man under his own roof—and at night too. No toss-up for position, no seconds except a parcel of boys. Vulgar, sir—infernally vulgar, sir. I haven't the honor of Colonel Rutter's acquaintance—but if I had I'd tell him so—served the brat right—damn him!”