Tom your own cousin.”
“Oh, they tell those lies HERE, do they? But do they say anything about how, when the same lies were told over in California, the lawyer they’ve got over there, called Colonel Starbottle,—a Southern man too,—got up and just wrote to Aunt Martha that she’d better quit that afore she got prosecuted? They didn’t tell you that, did they, Mister Chester Brooks?”
But here the unfortunate Brooks, after the fashion of all jealous lovers, deserted his allies for his fair enemy. “I don’t cotton to what THEY say, Sally, but you DO write to him, and I don’t see what you’ve got to write about—you and him. Jule Jeffcourt says that when you got religion at Louisville during the revival, you felt you had a call to write and save sinners, and you did that as your trial and probation, but that since you backslided and are worldly again, and go to parties, you just keep it up for foolin’ and flirtin’! SHE ain’t goin’ to weaken on the man that shot her brother, just because he’s got a gold mine and—a mustache!”
“She takes his MONEY all the same,” said Miss Sally.
“SHE don’t,—her mother does. SHE says if she was a man she’d have blood for blood!”
“My!” said Miss Sally, in affected consternation. “It’s a wonder she don’t apply to you to act for her.”
“If it was MY brother he killed, I’d challenge him quick enough,” said Chet, flushing through his thin pink skin and light hair.
“Marry her, then, and that’ll make you one of the family. I reckon Miss Hilda can bear it,” rejoined the young lady pertly.
“Look here, Miss Sally,” said the young fellow with a boyish despair that was not without a certain pathos in its implied inferiority, “I ain’t gifted like you—I ain’t on yo’ level no how; I can’t pass yo’ on the road, and so I reckon I must take yo’ dust as yo’ make it. But there is one thing, Miss Sally, I want to tell you. You know what’s going on in this country, you’ve heard your father say what the opinion of the best men is, and what’s likely to happen if the Yanks force that nigger worshiper, Lincoln, on the South. You know that we’re drawing the line closer every day, and spottin’ the men that ain’t sound. Take care, Miss Sally, you ain’t sellin’ us cheap to some Northern Abolitionist who’d like to set Marm Judy’s little niggers to something worse than eavesdropping down there, and mebbe teach ‘em to kindle a fire underneath yo’ own flo’.”
He had become quite dialectic in his appeal, as if youthfully reverting to some accent of the nursery, or as if he were exhorting her in some recognized shibboleth of a section. Miss Sally rose and shut down the piano. Then leaning over it on her elbows, her rounded little chin slightly elevated with languid impertinence, and one saucy foot kicked backwards beyond the hem of her white cotton frock, she said: “And let me tell you, Mister Chester Brooks, that it’s just such God-forsaken, infant phenomenons as you who want to run the whole country that make all this fuss, when you ain’t no more fit to be trusted with matches than Judy’s children. What do YOU know of Mr. Jo Corbin, when you don’t even know that he’s from Shelbyville, and as good a Suth’ner as you, and if he hasn’t got niggers it’s because they don’t use them in his parts? Yo’r for all the world like one o’ Mrs. Johnson’s fancy bantams that ain’t quit of the shell afore they square off at their own mother. My goodness! Sho! Sho-o-o!” And suiting the action to the word the young lady, still indolently, even in her simulation, swirled around, caught her skirts at the side with each hand, and lazily shaking them before her in the accepted feminine method of frightening chickens as she retreated backwards, dropped them suddenly in a profound curtsey and swept out of the parlor.
Nevertheless, as she entered the sitting-room she paused to listen, then, going to the window, peeped through the slits of the Venetian blind and saw her youthful admirer, more dejected in the consciousness of his wasted efforts and useless attire, mount his showy young horse, as aimlessly spirited as himself, and ride away. Miss Sally did not regret this; neither had she been entirely sincere in her defense of her mysterious correspondent. But, like many of her sex, she was trying to keep up by the active stimulus of opposition an interest that she had begun to think if left to itself might wane. She was conscious that her cousin Julia, although impertinent and illogical, was right in considering her first epistolary advances to Corbin as a youthful convert’s religious zeal. But now that her girlish enthusiasm was spent, and the revival itself had proved as fleeting an excitement as the old “Tournament of Love and Beauty,” which it had supplanted, she preferred to believe that she enjoyed the fascinating impropriety because it was the actual result of her religious freedom. Perhaps she had a vague idea that Corbin’s conversion would expiate her present preference for dress and dancing. She had certainly never flirted with him; they had never exchanged photographs; there was not a passage in his letters that might not have been perused by her parents,—which, I fear, was probably one reason why she had never shown her correspondence; and beyond the fact that this letter-writing gave her a certain importance in her own eyes and those of her companions, it might really be stopped. She even thought of writing at once to him that her parents objected to its further continuance, but remembering that his usual monthly letter was now nearly due, she concluded to wait until it came.
It is to be feared that Miss Sally had little help in the way of family advice, and that the moral administration of the Dows household was as prematurely developed and as precociously exhausted as the estate and mansion themselves. Captain Dows’ marriage with Josephine Jeffcourt, the daughter of a “poor white,” had been considered a mesalliance by his family, and his own sister, Miranda Dows, had abandoned her brother’s roof and refused to associate with the Jeffcourts, only returning to the house and an armed neutrality at the death of Mrs. Dows a few years later. She had taken charge of Miss Sally, sending her to school at Nashville until she was recalled by her father two years ago. It may be imagined that Miss Sally’s correspondence with Jeffcourt’s murderer had afforded her a mixed satisfaction; it was at first asserted that Miss Sally’s forgiveness was really prompted by “Miss Mirandy,” as a subtle sarcasm upon the family. When, however, that forgiveness seemed to become a source of revenue to the impoverished Jeffcourts, her Christian interference had declined.
For this reason, possibly, the young girl did not seek her aunt in the bedroom, the dining-room, or the business-room, where Miss Miranda frequently assisted Captain Dows in the fatuous and prejudiced mismanagement of the house and property, nor in any of the vacant guest-rooms, which, in their early wreck of latter-day mahogany and rosewood, seemed to have been unoccupied for ages, but went directly to her own room. This was in the “L,” a lately added wing that had escaped the gloomy architectural tyranny of the main building, and gave Miss Sally light, ventilation, the freshness and spice of new pine boards and clean paper, and a separate entrance and windows on a cool veranda all to herself. Intended as a concession to the young lady’s traveled taste, it was really a reversion to the finer simplicity of the pioneer.
New as the apartment appeared to be, it was old enough to contain the brief little records of her maidenhood: the childish samplers and pictures; the sporting epoch with its fox-heads, opossum and wild-cat skins, riding-whip, and the goshawk in a cage, which Miss Sally believed could be trained as a falcon; the religious interval of illustrated texts, “Rock of Ages,” cardboard crosses, and the certificate of her membership with “The Daughters of Sion” at the head of her little bed, down to the last decadence of frivolity shown in the be-ribboned guitar in the corner, and the dance cards, favors, and rosettes, military buttons, dried bouquets, and other love gages on the mantelpiece.
The young girl opened a drawer of her table and took out a small packet of letters tied up with a green ribbon. As she did so she heard the sound of hoofs in the rear courtyard. This was presently followed by a step on the veranda, and she opened the door to her father with the letters still in her hand. There was neither the least embarrassment nor self-consciousness in her manner.
Captain Dows, superficially remarkable
