Gordon Keith

Gordon Keith, by Thomas Nelson
Page,

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Title: Gordon Keith
Author: Thomas Nelson Page
Release Date: November 17, 2004 [eBook #14068]
Language: English
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GORDON KEITH
by
THOMAS NELSON PAGE
With Illustrations by George Wright
1903

TO
A GRANDDAUGHTER
OF ONE LOIS HUNTINGTON

CONTENTS
I. GORDON KEITH'S PATRIMONY
II. GENERAL KEITH BECOMES AN OVERSEER
III. THE ENGINEER AND THE SQUIRE
IV. TWO YOUNG MEN
V. THE RIDGE COLLEGE
VI. ALICE YORKE
VII. MRS. YORKE FINDS A GENTLEMAN

VIII. MR. KEITH'S IDEALS
IX. MR. KEITH IS UNPRACTICAL
X. MRS. YORKE CUTS A KNOT
XI. GUMBOLT
XII. KEITH DECLINES AN OFFER
XIII. KEITH IN NEW YORK
XIV. THE HOLD-UP
XV. MRS. YORKE MAKES A MATCH
XVI. KEITH VISITS NEW YORK, AND MRS. LANCASTER SEES
A GHOST
XVII. KEITH MEETS NORMAN
XVIII. MRS. LANCASTER
XIX. WICKERSHAM AND PHRONY
XX. MRS. LANCASTER'S WIDOWHOOD
XXI. THE DIRECTORS' MEETING
XXII. MRS. CREAMER'S BALL
XXIII. GENERAL KEITH VISITS STRANGE LANDS
XXIV. KEITH TRIES HIS FORTUNES ABROAD
XXV. THE DINNER AT MRS. WICKERSHAM'S
XXVI. A MISUNDERSTANDING
XXVII. PHRONY TRIPPER AND THE REV. MR. RIMMON

XXVIII. ALICE LANCASTER FINDS PHRONY
XXIX. THE MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE
XXX. "SNUGGLERS' ROOST"
XXXI. TERPY'S LAST DANCE AND WICKERSHAM'S FINAL
THROW
XXXII. THE RUN ON THE BANK
XXXIII. RECONCILIATION
XXXIV. THE CONSULTATION
XXXV. THE MISTRESS OF THE LAWNS
XXXVI. THE OLD IDEAL

ILLUSTRATIONS
She was the first to break the silence (frontispiece)
"If you don't go back to your seat I'll dash your brains out," said Keith
"Then why don't you answer me?"
Sprang over the edge of the road into the thick bushes below
"Why, Mr. Keith!" she exclaimed
"Sit down. I want to talk to you"
"It is he! 'Tis he!" she cried
"Lois--I have come--" he began
CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY
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