All this Arthur Brent contemplated with foreboding from the first. He anticipated Mr. Lincoln’s election from the beginning of the absurd campaign. And while he could not at all agree with those who were prepared to see in that event an occasion for secession and revolution, he foreboded those calamities as results likely in fact to follow. And even should a kindly fate avert them for a time, he saw clearly that the alignment of parties in the nation upon sectional issues must be productive of new and undreamed of irritations, full of threatening to the peace of the Republic.
No more than any of his neighbors could he forecast the events of the next few years. “But,” he wrote to Dorothy in the autumn “I see that the election of Mr. Lincoln is now a certainty; I foresee that it will lead to a determined movement in the South in favor of secession and the dissolution of the Federal Union. It ought to be possible, if that must come, to arrange it on a basis of peaceable agreement to disagree—the Southern States assuming all responsibility for slavery till they can rid themselves of it with safety to society, and the Northern people washing their hands once for all of an iniquity from which they have derived the major part of the profit. This they did, particularly during those years after 1808, in which the African slave trade was prohibited by law, but was carried on by New England ship masters and New England merchants with so great a profit that Justice Joseph Story of the United States supreme court, though himself a New Englander, was denounced by the New England press and even threatened with a violent ejection from the bench, because he sought to prevent and punish it, in obedience to the national statute.
“But I am wandering from my theme,” he continued. “I wanted to say that while I think there is no real occasion for a disruption of the Union, I gravely fear that it is coming. And while I think it should be possible to accomplish it peaceably I do not believe it will be done in that way. There are too many hot heads on both sides, for that. There is too much gunpowder lying around, and there will be too many sparks flying about. Listen, Dorothy! I foresee that Mr. Lincoln will be elected in November. I anticipate an almost immediate attempt on the part of the cotton states to dissolve the Union by secession. I shall do everything I can to help other sober minded Virginians to keep Virginia out of this movement, and if Virginia can be kept out of it, the other border states will accept her action as controlling, and they too will stay out of the revolutionary enterprise. In that case the states farther South will be amenable to reason, and if there is reason and discretion exercised at Washington and in the North, some means may possibly be found for adjusting the matter—Virginia and Kentucky perhaps acting successfully as mediators. But I tell you frankly, I do not expect success in the program to which I intend to devote all my labors and all I have of influence. I look to see Virginia drawn into the conflict. I look for war on a scale far more stupendous than any this country has ever seen.
“I can no more foresee what the result of such a war will be than you can—so far at least as military operations are concerned. But some of the results I think I do see very clearly. Virginia will be the battle-ground, and Virginia will be desolated as few lands have ever been in the history of the world. Another thing, Dorothy. If this war comes, as I fear it will, it will make an end of African slavery in this country. For if we of the South are beaten in the conflict of arms, the complete extinction of slavery will be decreed as a part of the penalty of war and the price of peace. If we are successful, we shall have set up a Canada at our very doors. The Ohio and the Potomac will become a border beyond which every escaping negro will be absolutely free, and across which every conceivable influence will be brought to bear upon the negroes to induce them to run away. Under such conditions the institution must become an intolerable as well as an unprofitable annoyance, and it will speedily disappear.
“Now I come to what I set out to say. Before election day this present fall I shall have paid off every dollar of the debts that rest upon Pocahontas and Wyanoke. You and I will be free, at least, from that source of embarrassment, and whatever the military or political, or legal or social results of the war may be, you and I will be owners of land that is subject to no claim of any kind against us. I have grievously compromised your dignity as well as my own in my efforts to bring this about, but you are not held responsible for my ‘Yankee doings,’ at Pocahontas, and as for me, I am not thin-skinned in such matters. I’d far rather be laughed at for paying debts in undignified ways than be dunned for debts that I cannot pay.”
This letter reached Dorothy in Paris, on her return through Switzerland, from an Italian journey, undertaken in the early summer before the danger of Roman fever should be threatening. Had such a letter come to her a few months earlier, her response to it would have been an utterly submissive assent to all that her guardian had done, with perhaps a wondering question or two as to why he should feel it necessary to ask her consent to anything he might be minded to do, or even to tell her what he had done. But Dorothy had grown steadily more reserved in her writing to him, as experience had slowly but surely awakened womanly consciousness in her soul. She was still as loyally devoted as ever to Arthur, but she shrank now as she had not been used to do, from too candid an expression of her devotion. The child had completely given place to the woman in her nature and the woman was far less ready than the child had been to reveal her feelings. A succession of suitors for her hand had taught Dorothy to think of herself as a woman bound to maintain a certain reserve in her intercourse with men. They had awakened in her a consciousness of the fact, of which she had scarcely even thought in the old, childish days, that Arthur Brent was a young man and Dorothy South a young woman, and that it would ill become Dorothy South to reveal herself too frankly to this young man. She did not quite know what there was in her mind to reveal or to withhold from revelation, but she instinctively felt the necessity strong upon her to guard herself against her own impulsive truthfulness. She had no more notion that she had dared give her woman’s love to Arthur unasked, than she had that he—who had never asked for it—desired her love. He remained to her in fact the enormously superior being that she had always held him to be, but she found herself blushing sometimes when she remembered the utter abandon with which she had been accustomed to lay bare her innermost thoughts and sentiments, her very soul, indeed, to his scrutiny.
She knew of no reason why she should now alter her attitude or her demeanor towards him, and she resolutely determined that she would not in the least change either, yet the letter she wrote to him on this occasion was altogether unlike that which she would have written a few months earlier upon a like occasion. She expressed her approval of all that he had done with respect to her estate, where in like case a few months earlier she would have asked him wonderingly what she had to do with things planned and accomplished by him. She expressed acquiescence as one might who has the right to approve or to criticise, where before she would have concerned herself only with rejoicings that her guardian had got things as he wanted them, in accordance with his unquestioned and unquestionable right to have everything as he wanted it to be in a world quite unworthy of him.
In brief, Dorothy’s letter depressed Arthur Brent almost unendurably. Because he missed something from it that long use had taught him to expect in all her utterances to him, he read into it much of coldness, alienation, indifference, which it did not contain. He sat up all night, torturing himself with doubts for which a frequent reperusal of the letter furnished him no shadow of justification; and when the gray morning came he ordered his horse, meaning to ride purposely nowhither. But when the horse was brought, a new and overpowering sense of Dorothy’s absence and perhaps her alienation, came over him. He remembered vividly every detail of that first morning’s ride he had had with her, and instinctively he copied her proceeding on that occasion. Drawing forth his handkerchief he rubbed the animal’s flanks and rumps with it to its soiling.
“I’ll not ride this morning, Ben,” he said. “I’ll go back to the house and write a letter to your Mis’ Dorothy and I’ll enclose that handkerchief for her inspection.”