WEDDING RING
381
to select a subject for his dissertation for his Ph.D., his professor sug–
gested that he edit the journal and letters of Cass Mastern, and write
a biographical essay, a social study based on those and other ma–
terials. So Jack Burden began his first journey into the past.
It
seemed easy at first.
It
was easy to reconstruct the life of the
log cabin in the red hills. There were the first letters back from Gil–
bert, after he had begun his rise (Jack Burden managed to get pos–
session of the other Gilbert Mastern papers of the period before the
Civil War). There was the known pattern of that life, gradually al–
tered toward comfort as Gilbert's affluence was felt at that distance.
Then,
in
one season, the mother and father died, and Gilbert returned
to burst, no doubt, upon Cass and Lavinia as an unbelievable vision,
a splendid imposter in black broadcloth, varnished boots, white linen,
heavy gold ring. He put Lavinia in a school in Atlanta, bought her
trunks of dresses, and kissed her goodbye. ("Could you not have taken
me with vou, dear Brother Gilbert? I would have been ever so dutiful
and affectionate a sister," so she wrote to him, in the copy-book hand,
in brown ink, in a language not her own, a language of school-room
propriety. "May I not come to you now? Is there no little task which
1-"
But Gilbert had other plans. When the time came for her to
appear in
his
house she would be ready.) But he took Cass with him,
a hobbledehoy now wearing black and mounted on a blooded mare.
At the end of three years Cass was not a hobbledehoy. He had
spent three years of monastic rigor at
Valhalla,
Gilbert's house, under
the tuition of a Mr. Lawson and of Gilbert himself. From Gilbert he
learned the routine of plantation management. From Mr. Lawson,
a tubercular and vague young man from Princeton, New Jersey, he
learned some geometry, some Latin, and a great deal of Presbyterian
theology. He liked the books, and once Gilbert (so the journal said)
stood in the doorway and watched him bent over the table and then
said, "At least you may be good for
that."
But he was good for more than that. When Gilbert gave him a
small plantation, he managed it for two years with such astuteness
(and such luck, for both season and market conspired in his behalf)
that at the end of the time he could repay Gilbert a substantial part
of the purchase price. Then he went, or was sent, to Transylvania.
It was Gilbert's idea. He came into the house on Cass's plantation
one night to find Cass at his books. He walked across the room to the
table where the books lay, by which Cass now stood. Gilbert stretched
out his arm and tapped the open book with his riding crop. "You
might make something out of th.at," he said. The journal reported
