CHAPTER II.
It is impossible for anything in this tame, latter-day age to be compared with the marvels of fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. The worn-out, tired race declines to be awed, or delighted, or startled any more. “Old Wonder is dead.� People have lost the sense of admiration. It is the price paid for civilisation.
But it was not always so. Fifty years ago the romantic, the interesting, even the mysterious, still existed. Luxury was rare, and life was so hard and poor to most people on this continent that imagination had to be called in to make it even tolerable. Superlatives had not gone out of fashion, and therefore it is quite just to apply the words grand, magnificent, superb, to Deerchase. True, if that deadly enemy of superlatives, comparison, be levelled against it, there is no doubt the irreverent modern would smile; for what the fresh, wonder-loving people in 1820 thought ineffably splendid, the jaded, sated people of 19— would think cheap, tawdry, not worth speaking of, after all. So that the pictures in the main hall at Deerchase would be pronounced mediocre, the park rather ambitious than imposing, the stables and the establishment generally insignificant compared with those of the merchant princes of to-day. But the owner of Deerchase had this immense advantage over the rich people of to-day—not the whole possessions of all of them could command half the awe, delight, and distinction that Deerchase did in its time. And if the power of places to awe and delight be gone, what shall be said of the lost power of individuals? But in 1820 hero worship survived with many other beautiful and imaginative things that the world has outgrown; and Richard Skelton, Esquire, was an object of envy and admiration to the whole county, and to half the State of Virginia besides.
For Richard Skelton, Esquire, was certainly born with a golden, not a silver, spoon in his mouth. In his childhood his dark beauty and a certain proud, disdainful air, natural to him, made him look like a little prince. In those days Byron was the poet; and the boy, with his great fortune, his beauty, his orphanhood, his precocious wit and melancholy, was called a young Lara. As he grew older, there were indications in him of strange mental powers, and a cool and determined will that was perfectly unbreakable. He brooded his youth away (in these degenerate days it would be said he loafed) sadly and darkly in the library at Deerchase. Old Tom Shapleigh, his guardian, who feared neither man nor devil, and who was himself a person of no mean powers, always felt, when his ward’s dark, inscrutable eyes were fixed upon him, a ridiculous and awkward inferiority—the more ridiculous and awkward because old Tom really had accomplished a good deal in life, while Richard Skelton could not possibly have accomplished anything at the very early age when he was perfectly commanding, not to say patronising, to his guardian. Old Tom did not take charge of the great Skelton property and the strange Skelton boy for pure love. The profits of managing such a property were considerable, and he was the very best manager of land and negroes in all the region about. But the Skelton boy, from the time he was out of round jackets, always assumed an air toward his guardian as if the guardian were merely his agent. This gave old Tom much saturnine amusement, for he was one of those men whose sense of humour was so sharp that he could smile over his own discomfiture at the hands of a haughty stripling, and could even laugh grimly at the burden of a silly wife, which he had taken upon himself.
For those who like life with a good strong flavour to it, Skelton and old Tom Shapleigh, and the people around them, were not devoid of interest. They belonged to a sturdy, well-fed, hard riding, hard drinking, landed aristocracy that was as much rooted to the land as the great oaks that towered in the virgin woods. All landowners are more or less bound to the soil; but these people were peculiarly so, because they had no outside world. There was no great city on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, and their journeys were merely a slight enlargement of their orbit. Their idea of seeing the world was a trip in the family coach to the Springs, where they met exactly the same people, bearing the same names, that they had left at home. This fixity and monotony produced in them an intensity of provincialism, a strength of prejudice, hardly to be conceived of now. They were only a few generations removed from an English ancestry, which in this new land prayed daily, “God bless England, our sweet native country!� Feudalism, in the form of a mild and patriarchal slave system, was still strong with them when it had gone to decay in Europe. The brighter sun had warmed their blood somewhat; they were more fiery and more wary than their forefathers. They were arrogant, yet simple-minded, and loved power more than money. They also loved learning, after their fashion, and kept the roster full at William and Mary College. But their learning was used to perpetuate their political power. By means of putting all their men of parts into politics, they managed to wage successfully an unequal fight for power during many generations. The same kind of equality existed among them as among the Spanish grandees, who call each other by their nicknames as freely as peasants, but are careful to give an outsider all his titles and dignities. There was a vast deal of tinsel in their cloth of gold; their luxuries were shabbily pieced out, and they were not quite as grand as they fancied themselves. But, after all, there is something imposing in a system which gives a man his own land, his house built of his own timber, his bricks made of his own red clay, his servants clothed and shod by his own workmen, his own blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, shoemakers—in short, a little kingdom of which he is the sovereign. Naturally it makes him arrogant, but it also makes him independent; and where each man stands upon punctilio everybody is likely to be polite. So they had few quarrels, but such as they had were deadly. The hair-splitting, the subtleties of the fin du siècle were unknown, undreamed of, by them. Everything was simple and direct—love, hate, fear, remorse, and joy. God and the devil were close to every man. Their lives were fixed, and had the continuity of an epic, instead of the fragmentary, disjointed lives that the people of to-day are living. And as they were necessarily obliged to spend all their mortal days together, they knew each other and each other’s generations like a book, and this effectually estopped pretension of all sorts. It was a picturesque, gay, pleasure-loving life, its Arcadian simplicity sometimes interrupted by tragedies, but it only lasted until the railroad and the telegraph brought all the world within speaking distance.
The rivers, broad and shallow and salt, that made in from the ocean bays, were the spots wisely chosen for the homesteads. The plantations extended back into a slightly rolling country, but every “p’int,� as the negroes called it, was the site for a house. At Deerchase, from the long stone porch covered with climbing tea roses, which faced the shining river, half a dozen rambling brick houses on their respective “p’ints� could be seen. The farthest off was only a mile up the river as the crow flies, but the indentations of the stream made it more, and when one undertook to go by land, the multitude of gates to be opened between different properties and the various windings and turnings to get there at all made it seem a dozen miles at least. This last place was Newington, where Mr. and Mrs. Jack Blair lived, and which Bulstrode so freely predicted would be in the market soon on account of a grudge owed the Blairs by the Great Panjandrum—Richard Skelton, Esquire. The next place to Deerchase was Belfield, where old Tom Shapleigh and that wonderful woman, Mrs. Shapleigh, lived with their daughter Sylvia, who had inherited more than her father’s brains and less than her mother’s beauty. Only a shallow creek, running into a marsh, divided Deerchase and Belfield, and it was not twenty minutes’ walk from one house to the other. This nearness had been very convenient to old Tom in managing the Skelton property, but it had not conduced to any intimacy between guardian and ward. Richard Skelton was not much above Mr. Shapleigh’s shoulder when he took to asking to be excused when his guardian called. Old Tom resented this impertinence as an impetuous, full-blooded, middle-aged gentleman might be expected to. He stormed up and down the Deerchase hall, nearly frightened Bob Skinny, the black butler, into fits, blazed away at the tutor, who would go and plead with the boy through the keyhole of a locked door.
“My dear Richard, come out and see your guardian; Mr. Shapleigh particularly wants to see you.�
“And I particularly don’t want to see Mr. Shapleigh; so go away and leave me,� young Skelton would answer in his smooth, soft voice.
As there was nothing for old Tom to do unless he kicked the door down, he would go home fuming, and have to content himself with writing very fierce and ungrammatical letters, of which the spelling was reckless, but the meaning plain, to his ward, which were never answered. Then old Tom would begin to laugh—it was so comical—and the next time he met the boy there would be that same haughty reserve on Skelton’s part, at which his guardian did not know whether to be most angry or amused. He was philosophic under it, though, and would say:
“Look at the tutors I’ve got for him, begad! and every man-jack of them has been under the hack of that determined little beggar from the start. And when a man, woman, or child can get the upper hand of one who lives in daily, hourly contact, why, you might just as well let ’em go their own gait. Damme, I can’t do anything with the arrogant little upstart!�