GORDON KEITH’S PATRIMONY

Gordon Keith was the son of a gentleman.  And this fact, like the cat the honest miller left to his youngest son, was his only patrimony.  As in that case also, it stood to the possessor in the place of a good many other things.  It helped him over many rough places.  He carried it with him as a devoted Romanist wears a sacred scapulary next to the heart.

His father, General McDowell Keith of “Elphinstone,” was a gentleman of the old kind, a type so old-fashioned that it is hardly accepted these days as having existed.  He knew the Past and lived in it; the Present he did not understand, and the Future he did not know.  In his latter days, when his son was growing up, after war had swept like a vast inundation over the land, burying almost everything it had not borne away, General Keith still survived, unchanged, unmoved, unmarred, an antique memorial of the life of which he was a relic.  His one standard was that of a gentleman.

This idea was what the son inherited from the father along with some other old-fashioned things which he did not know the value of at first, but which he came to understand as he grew older.

When in after times, in the swift rush of life in a great city, amid other scenes and new manners, Gordon Keith looked back to the old life on the Keith plantation, it appeared to him as if he had lived then in another world.

Elphinstone was, indeed, a world to itself:  a long, rambling house, set on a hill, with white-pillared verandahs, closed on the side toward the evening sun by green Venetian blinds, and on the other side looking away through the lawn trees over wide fields, brown with fallow, or green with cattle-dotted pasture-land and waving grain, to the dark rim of woods beyond.  To the westward “the Ridge” made a straight, horizontal line, except on clear days, when the mountains still farther away showed a tenderer blue scalloped across the sky.

A stranger passing through the country prior to the war would have heard much of Elphinstone, the Keith plantation, but he would have seen from the main road (which, except in summer, was intolerably bad) only long stretches of rolling fields well tilled, and far beyond them a grove on a high hill, where the mansion rested in proud seclusion amid its immemorial oaks and elms, with what appeared to be a small hamlet lying about its feet.  Had he turned in at the big-gate and driven a mile or so, he would have found that Elphinstone was really a world to itself; almost as much cut off from the outer world as the home of the Keiths had been in the old country.  A number of little blacks would have opened the gates for him; several boys would have run to take his horse, and he would have found a legion of servants about the house.  He would have found that the hamlet was composed of extensive stables and barns, with shops and houses, within which mechanics were plying their trades with the ring of hammers, the clack of looms, and the hum of spinning-wheels-all for the plantation; whilst on a lower hill farther to the rear were the servants’ quarters laid out in streets, filled with children.