Fifteen Days: An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal

by Mary Lowell Putnam

"We will make it up to you. I will tell you how we will make it up to you. Come to us,—come to Massachusetts: I will give you there a week of my time for every day we have taken from you here. Come to us in June: that is the month in which New England is most itself. Come and renew old associations."

"You will never see me again, if you wait to see me there."

"What now? You used to like it."

"I am not so sure that I used to like it, when I think back upon it. At any rate, if you want to see me, you must see me in my own place. I am not myself anywhere else. Equality, Borrow, equality is a very good thing for people who have never known anything better: may be a very good thing for people who can work themselves up out of it. But for a man who has grown up in the enjoyment of those privileges inappreciable by the vulgar, but which by the noble of every age have been regarded as the most real and the most valuable,—for such a man to sit, one at a long table, feeling himself nobody, and knowing all the time he has a right to be somebody! You can talk very easily about equality. You have never suffered from it. You have your learning and—— Well, you know how to talk. I have no learning, and I can't talk, except to particular friends. A man cannot ticket himself with his claims to estimation. Even Paris has too much equality for me. Flora liked it; she had her beauty and her toilet. But I! how I longed to be back here among my own simple, humble people! As soon as she was married, I made off home. In my own place, among my own people, I am, I might almost say, like a god, if I were not afraid of shocking you. And is not their fate in my hands? My frown is their night, my smile is their sunshine. The very ratification of their prayers to a Higher Power is intrusted to my discretion. Homage, Borrow, homage is the sweetest draught ever brought to mortal lips!"

"The homage of equals I suppose may be," said Dr. Borrow, modestly.

"You do not understand. How should you? Our modes of thinking and feeling are not to be comprehended by one brought up in a society so differently constituted. We avow ourselves an aristocracy."

"You do well: something of the inherent meaning of a word will always make itself felt. Aristocracy! It is vain to try to dispossess it of its own. The world will not be disenchanted of the beautiful word. Cover yourselves with its prestige. It will stand you in good stead with outsiders. But, between ourselves, Westlake, how is it behind the scenes? Can you look each other in the face and pronounce it? Or have you really persuaded yourselves down here that you are governed by your best men?"

"We do not use the word so pedantically down here. By an aristocracy we mean a community of gentlemen."

"And, pronouncing it so emphatically, you of course use the word gentleman in the sense it had when it had a sense. You bear in mind what the gentleman was pledged to, when to be called one was still a distinction. 'To eschew sloth,' 'to detest all pride and haughtiness,'—these were among his obligations: doubtless they are of those most strictly observed in your community. He was required 'to be true and just in word and dealing'; 'to be of an open and liberal mind.' You find these conditions fulfilled in Rasey, your leading man."