In my innocence, rather ignorance, I unwittingly allowed my town acquaintances to believe me to be a chap of means. When I discovered their false estimate I did not have the courage to disillusion them. My true spending-pace was struck on my eighteenth birthday, and inside the year I had wasted my King William County patrimony.
Just what process of reasoning I followed during that foolish year I have never been able to determine. I must have believed it to be imperative that I live up to the expectations of my new friends. As a complement to this idiotic obsession there must have been a grotesque belief that somehow, by accident or miracle, I would be kept in funds indefinitely. I do recall my amazement at the abrupt ending of my dreams. I woke up one morning to discover I had no money, no assets. There were no odds and ends, even, of wreckage which I could salvage for one more week of the old life.
Among my first friends had been Ericus Dale and his daughter, Patricia. To her intimates she was known as Patsy. As was to be expected when an awkward boy meets a dainty and wonderful maid, I fell in love completely out of sight. At nineteen I observed that the girl, eighteen, was becoming a toast among men much older and very, very much more sophisticated than I.
She was often spoken of as the belle of Charles City County, and I spent much time vainly wishing she was less attractive. Her father, engaged in the Indian-trade, and often away from home for several months at a time, had seemed to be very kindly disposed to me.
I instinctively hurried to the Dales to impart the astounding fact that I was bankrupt. One usually speaks of financial reverses as “crashing about” one’s head. My wind-up did not even possess that poor dignity; for there was not enough left even to rattle, let alone crash.
The youth who rode so desperately to the Dale home that wonderful day tragically to proclaim his plight, followed by fervid vows to go away and make a new fortune, has long since won my sympathy. I have always resented Ericus Dale’s attitude toward that youth on learning he was a pauper. It is bad enough to confess to a girl that one has not enough to marry on; but it is hell to be compelled to add that one has not enough to woo on.
How it wrung my heart to tell her I was an impostor, that I was going to the back-country and begin life all over. Poor young devil! How many like me have solemnly declared their intentions to begin all over, whereas, in fact, they never had begun at all.
And why does youth in such juvenile cataclysms feel forced to seek new fields in making the fresh start? Shame for having failed, I suppose. An unwillingness to toe the scratch under the handicap of having his neighbors know it is his second trial.
But so much had happened since that epochal day back in Williamsburg that it seemed our parting had been fully a million years ago. It made me smile to remember how mature Patsy had been when I meekly ran her errands and gladly wore her yoke in the old days.
Three years of surveying, scouting and despatch-bearing through the trackless wilderness had aged me. I prided myself I was an old man in worldly wisdom. Patsy Dale had only added three years to her young life. I could even feel much at ease in meeting Ericus Dale. And yet there had been no day during my absence that I did not think of her, still idealizing her, and finding her fragrant memory an anodyne when suffering in the wilderness.