IF Aunt Polly had entertained any real desire to forbid the expedition planned for Dorothy, the prompt interference of Madison Peyton in that behalf would have dissipated it.
No sooner had Peyton learned of the contemplated journey than he bustled over to Wyanoke to see Aunt Polly regarding it.
It is not a comfortable thing to visit a man with whom one has recently quarrelled and to whom one has had to send a letter of apology. Even Peyton, thick-skinned and self-assured as he was, would probably have hesitated to make himself a guest at Wyanoke at this time but for the happy chance that Arthur was absent in Richmond for a few days.
Seizing upon the opportunity thus afforded, Peyton promptly visited Aunt Polly to enter a very earnest and insistent protest. He was genuinely alarmed. He realized Dorothy’s moral and intellectual superiority to his son. He was shrewd enough to foresee that travel and a year’s association with men and women of attractive culture and refined intellectual lives would, of necessity, increase this disparity and perhaps—nay, almost certainly—make Jefferson Peyton seem a distinctly unworthy and inferior person in Dorothy’s eyes. He realized that the arrangement made some years before between himself and Dr. South, was not binding upon Dorothy, except in so far as it might appeal to her conscience and to her loyalty to her father’s memory when the time should be ripe to reveal it to her. For as yet she knew nothing of the matter.
She had liked young Peyton when he and she were children together. His abounding good nature had made him an agreeable playmate. But as they had grown up, the sympathy between them had steadily decreased. The good nature which had made him agreeable as a playmate, had become a distinct weakness of character as he had matured. He lacked fixity of purpose, industry and even conscience—while Dorothy, born with these attributes, had strengthened them by every act and thought of her life.
The young man had courage enough to speak the truth fearlessly on all occasions that strongly called for truth and courage, but Dorothy had discovered that in minor matters he was untruthful. To her integrity of mind it was shocking that a young man should make false pretences, as he had done when they had talked of literature and the like. She could not understand a false pretence, and she had no toleration for the weakness that indulges in it.
Moreover in intellectual matters, Dorothy had completely outgrown her former playmate. The bright boy, whom Dorothy’s father had chosen as one destined to be a fit life companion for her, had remained a bright boy. And that which astonishes us as brilliancy in a child ceases to impress us as the child grows into manhood, if the promise of it is not fulfilled by growth. A bright boy, ten or twelve years old, is a very pleasant person to contemplate; but a youth who remains nothing more than a bright boy as he grows into manhood, is distinctly disappointing and depressing.
It is to be said to the credit of Madison Peyton that he had done all that he could—or rather all that he knew how—to promote the intellectual development of this his first born son. He had lavished money upon tutors for him, when he ought instead to have sent him to some school whose all dominating democracy would have compelled the boy to work for his standing and to realize the value of personal endeavor. In brief Madison Peyton had made that mistake which the much richer men of our day so often make. He had tried to provide for his son a royal road to learning, only to find that the pleasures of the roadside had won the wayfarer away from the objects of his journey.
Madison Peyton now realized all this. He understood how little profit his son had got out of the very expensive education provided for him, how completely he had failed to acquire intellectual tastes, and in a dimly subconscious way, he understood how ill equipped the young man was to win the love of such a girl as Dorothy, or to make her happy as his wife. And he realized also that if travel and culture and a larger thinking should weaken in Dorothy’s mind—as it easily might—that sense of obligation to fulfil her father’s desires, on which mainly he had relied for the carrying out of the program of marriage between these two, with Pocahontas plantation as an incidental advantage, the youth must win Dorothy by a worthiness of her love, or lose her for lack of it.
The worthiness in his son was obviously wanting. There remained only Dorothy’s overweening loyalty to her father’s memory and will as a reliance for the accomplishment of Madison Peyton’s desires. It was to prevent the weakening of that loyalty that he appealed to Aunt Polly to forbid the travel plan.