“Had you my uncle’s power of attorney to bind him to a year’s arrangement?”
“Of course not. He was ill and I merely did a neighbor’s part.”
“Then suppose Williams should sue you instead of me? You see it is you who are liable for non-fulfilment of that contract. You bargained with this man to serve you for a year as overseer on my plantation, and I have declined to accept the arrangement. If he has a right of action against anybody, it is against you. However, I don’t think he will sue you, for I have paid him his wages for the full year. Fortunately I happened to have money enough in bank for that. There is the voluntary—let’s go into church.”
Arthur Brent entered the place of service, one or two of the gentlemen following him.
He had made an enemy of Madison Peyton—an enemy who would never admit his enmity but would never lose an opportunity to indulge it.
VIII
A DINNER AT BRANTON
IT fell to Arthur Brent’s share to dine on that Sunday at Branton, the seat of the most princely hospitality in all that part of Virginia. The matter was not at all one of his own arranging, although it was altogether agreeable to him. The master of Branton—a young man scarcely older than himself, who lived there with his only sister, Edmonia Bannister, had been the first of all the neighbors to visit Arthur, dining with him and passing the night at Wyanoke. He had been most kindly and cordial in his welcome and Arthur had been strongly drawn to him as a man of character, intelligence and very winning manners. No sooner had Arthur dismounted at church on that first Sunday, than young Archer Bannister had come to shake his hand and say—“I want to preëmpt you, Doctor Brent. All your neighbors will clamor for your company for the dinner and the night, but I have done my best to establish the priority of my claim. Besides my good sister wants you—and as a confidence between you and me, I will tell you that when my sister wants anything she is extremely apt to get it. I’m something of a laggard at dressing myself for church, but this morning she began upon me early, sending three servants to help me put on my clothes, and laying her particular commands upon me to be the first man to arrive at Shrub Hill, lest some other get before me with an invitation to dinner. So you are to be my guest, please, and I’ll send one of my people over to Wyanoke for anything you want. By the way I’ve cleared out a wardrobe for you at Branton, and a dressing case. You’ll need to send over a supply of linen, coats, boots, underwear, and the like and leave it in your room there, so that you shall be quite at home to come and go at your will, with the certainty of always finding ready for you whatever you need in the way of costume.”
Arthur Brent’s one extravagance was in the matter of clothes. He always dressed himself simply, but he was always dressed well, and especially it was his pleasure to change his garments as often as the weather or the circumstances might suggest the desirability of a change. Accordingly he had brought fat trunks to Wyanoke, but by the time that three others of his new neighbors had informed him, quite casually and as a matter of course, that they had prepared rooms for him and expected him to send to those rooms a supply of clothing sufficient for any need, he was pleased to remember that he had left careful measurements with his tailor, his shirt maker, his fabricator of footwear, and his “gents’ furnisher” in New York. And he had also acquired a new and broader conception than ever before, of the comprehensive heartiness of Virginia hospitality.
“You see,” said young Bannister, later in the day, “Branton is to be one of your homes. As a young man you will be riding about a good deal, and you mustn’t be compelled to ride all the way to Wyanoke every time you want to change your coat or substitute low quarter shoes for your riding boots. If you’ll ask little Miss Dorothy to show you my room at Wyanoke you’ll find that I have everything there that any gentleman could possibly need with which to dress himself properly for any occasion, from a fish fry to a funeral, from a fox hunt to a wedding. You are to do the same at Branton. You don’t do things in that way in a city, of course, but here it is necessary, because of the distance between plantations. A man doesn’t want all his belongings in one place when that place may be ten or a dozen miles away when he wants them.”
Arthur found Branton to be substantially a reproduction of Wyanoke, except that the great gambrel-roofed house had many wings and extensions, and several one storied, two roomed “offices” built about the grounds for the accommodation of any overflow of guests that might happen there. The house had been built about the time at which the Wyanoke mansion had come into being. It was of wood, but by no means of such structure as we now expect in a wooden house. The frame was made of great hewn timbers of forest pine, twelve inches square as to floor beams and rafter plates, and with ten inch timbers in lieu of studding. The vast chimneys were supported, not upon arches nicely calculated to sustain their superincumbent weight with a factor of safety, but upon a solid mass of cellar masonry that would have sustained the biggest of Egyptian monoliths. The builders of the old colonial time may not have known the precise strength of materials or the niceties of calculation by which the supporting capacity of an arch is determined, but they knew—and they acted upon the knowledge—that twelve inch, heart pine timbers set on end will sustain any weight that a dwelling is called upon to bear, and that a chimney built upon a solid mass of masonry, twenty feet in diameter, is not likely to fall down for lack of underpinning.