Something like a growl came from the doctor as he struck open the screen-door. “‘Limb!’ I’ll bet ten dollars she’s an angel in a cedar-tree at a church fair compared with some better-born young ones I know of who are only fit to live when they’ve got the scarlet-fever and who ought to be in the reformatory long ago. And as for Shirley Dandridge, it’s my opinion she and her mother and a few others like her have got about the only drops of the milk of human kindness in this whole abandoned community!”
“Dreadful man!” said Mrs. Gifford, sotto voce, as the door banged viciously. “To think of his being born a Southall! Sometimes I can’t believe it!”
Mrs. Mason shook her head and smiled. “Ah, but that isn’t the real Doctor Southall,” she said. “That’s only his shell.”
“I’ve heard that he has another side,” responded the other with guarded grimness, “but if he has, I wish he’d manage to show it sometimes.”
Mrs. Mason took off her glasses and wiped them carefully. “I saw it when my husband died,” she said softly. “That was before you came. They were old friends, you know. He was sick almost a year, and the doctor used to carry him out here on the porch every day in his arms, like a child. And then, when the typhus came that summer among the negroes, he quarantined himself with them—the only white man there—and treated and nursed them and buried the dead with his own hands, till it was stamped out. That’s the real Doctor Southall.”
The rockers vibrated in silence for a moment. Then Mrs. Gifford said: “I never knew before that he had anything to do with that duel. Was he one of Valiant’s seconds?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Mason; “and the major was the other. I was a little girl when it happened. I can barely remember it, but it made a big sensation.”
“And over a love-affair!” exclaimed Mrs. Gifford in the tone of one to whom romance was daily bread.
“I suppose it was.”
“Why, my dear! Of course it was. That’s always been the story. What on earth have men to fight duels about except us women? They only pretend it’s cards or horses. Trust me, there’s always a pair of silk stockings at the bottom of it! Girls are so thoughtless—though you and I were just as bad, I suppose, if we only remembered!—and they don’t realize that it’s sometimes a serious thing to trifle with a man. That is, of course, if he’s of a certain type. I think our Virginian girls flirt outrageously. They quit only at the church door (though I will say they generally stop then) and they take a man’s ring without any idea whatever of the sacredness of an engagement. You remember Ilsa Eustis who married the man from Petersburg? She was engaged to two men at once, and used to wear whichever ring belonged to the one who was coming to see her. One day they came together. She was in the yard when they stopped at the horse-block. Well, she tied her handkerchief round her hand and said she’d burned herself pulling candy. (No, neither one of them was the man from Petersburg.) When she was married, one of them wrote her and asked for his ring. It had seven diamonds set in the shape of a cross. I’m telling you this in confidence, just as it was told to me. She didn’t write a reply—she only sent him a telegram: ‘Simply to thy cross I cling.’ She wears the stones yet in a bracelet.”