INthe Burton household that fall, a leaven was working. Mary's mismatched eyes held a tranquillity of quiet self-satisfaction. She had found somewhere a second fashion magazine and often when she was alone in the little room under the eaves she snipped industriously away at the imaginary patterns of gorgeous gowns, or listened to the fervent pleadings of make-believe suitors.
But the secret was all her own of how something in her had awakened. This little girl would never again be precisely the same Mary Burton who had started out that Saturday afternoon with a heart full of rebellion and who had come back appeased.
And Ham, his mother feared, was finding his burdens too heavy for young shoulders. He had made no complaint, but an expression of settled abstraction had come into his face and at home he was always silent.
After the falling of the first heavy snow neither Paul nor Mary ventured out to school, but Ham's avid hunger for education lost no coveted day of the term. When his morning work was ended, wrapped in patched mackinaw and traveling on snowshoes, he made the trip across the white slopes, where only the pines were green, and came back at the day's end for his evening chores. The trip was a bit shortened now because the lake was ice-locked and he could cross between the flag-marked holes of the pickerel-fishers. He had been afraid to speak of those things whichwere burning consumingly in his mind; afraid that if once he let slip the leash of restraint he would be carried away on a tide of passion. But some day he must speak, and, strangely enough, the match that lighted the train of powder was the second coming of the young man who had met Mary on the road.
He came near nightfall, on snowshoes, and when he knocked it was the girl who opened the door. At first, she did not recognize him because the mountain tan had given way to a pallor of recent illness and the face was very thin. But as soon as he smiled, the whimsical eyes proclaimed him.
"You—you haven't died yet," Mary Burton spoke instinctively, and stood holding the door open to the blustering of the sharp wind, quite forgetful that she was barring his way. But the young man who had come out of the thickening twilight laughed. He shook the snow off his mackinaw, for a fresh downfall was making the air almost as white as the drifts below.
"Not yet," he assured her, "but unless you let me come in out of the cold I shall probably perish on your doorstep."
Tom Burton, the father, sat gazing at the stove in the center of the room. He was propped in a heavy chair with cushions about him, and he, too, had grown thinner and rawer of joint. He had been for some time thus silently staring ahead with a pipe long forgotten and dead of ash in his hand and an old newspaper—so old as to be no longer a newspaper—lying where it had dropped near his side. A painter might have seen in the pose a picture of the felled and beaten fighter; the burden-bearer chafing under enforced idleness and the imprisonment of an irritable convalescence.
"Yes, come in, or go out, whoever you are—andshut the door!" There was no hospitality in the irascible greeting of the manor's lord, and the face he half-turned to inspect the stranger was devoid of welcome. It was mirthless from its deep eyes to the lips and chin that were hidden in a patriarchal spread of beard.
Mary for some reason flushed deeply as she stood aside and timidly smiled as though in amends of courtesy.
The young man went straight to the stove and began loosening the collar of his heavy mackinaw. For a moment, without rising or taking any notice beyond a curt nod, old Tom Burton bent upon him eyes of incurious gravity.
"I take it you are Thomas S. Burton," began the young stranger. "My name's Edwardes and I have a shack back in the hills. The snowstorm has delayed me and I must throw myself on your hospitality for the night."
"Yes." Thomas Burton spoke slowly and dully, and this, too, was a result of his illness, for in past days his voice had rung stentorian above the blows of axes in the timber. "Yes, I've heard of you. You're the millionaire hobo. When a man's got plenty of money and chooses to live alone in a country that 'most everybody else is leavin', he's tolerable apt to be heard of."
The comment was not softened with the modification of banter, but rasped with the twang of suspicion as though the speaker expected to give offense—and did not care. Young Edwardes received it with a peal of laughter so infectious that the man in the chair looked up, surprised.
"So that's how they figure me out, is it?" inquired the traveler. "I suppose though," he added as if inanswer to his own question, "no man knows what portrait public opinion paints of him. At all events I'm a harmless hobo and quite willing to pay when I put my fellow-man to inconvenience. I live in the mountains by the sentence of my doctors."
"Lunger, eh?" Burton nodded his head comprehensively, but quite without sympathy; and the guest bowed his assent.
"Some folks turns lungers away," commented the host reflectively, "but that's only in the summertime when the vacation boarders kicks on 'em. As for me, I don't take in boarders summernorwinter, but when the snow drives a man in I don't drive him out."
"So they accept us in the winter, do they, and cast us out in the summer when the ribbon-clerks come?" Edwardes spoke musingly, yet amusedly, and in his accustomed manner of self-communion. "After all, men are much alike everywhere, aren't they? The lepers must not walk the streets of Jerusalem, but they may sit in full concourse at the Jaffa and Damascus gates where their wrappings are brushed by every caravan that goes in or out."
Ham, who was just entering, stood on the kitchen threshold in time to hear a man, whom he had never seen before, talking casually of the world beyond the seas. Perhaps this man knew, too, the cities that brought conquerors as well as prophets into their own; perhaps to him the sepia-tinted monuments of Rome and the great tomb in the Place des Invalides were familiar spots! And the man was young himself—almost a boy. For an instant, Ham stood there while his eyes traveled around the room, contemptuously taking in the cheap lithographs and offensive ornaments which he knew so well and hated so sincerely.He straightened resolutely, and his hands clenched. There would be a time when the earth's greatest artists should contribute paintings for his walls, and palaces give up to him their bronzes and tapestries.
When a half-hour later Ham Burton was alone with the stranger he found himself asking and answering many questions. He had not meant to impart his secret of discontent, but just as Mary had confided her troubles at the roadside, so Ham told his as he sat on the edge of the bed in the chilly attic-room of the farm-house. Perhaps it was because this man had actually seen the things that existed beyond the sky-line, and had walked through the veil of mystery which the boy himself so burned to penetrate. At all events it transpired. Ham had shown his little store of greedily conned books and had bared to the gaze of the other his naked and scorching torture of ambition. The lad knew something of the men who had made themselves masters of the world and wished to know more. Edwardes had not even laughed when Ham declared with naïve conviction: "None of them men ever did anything I couldn't do, if I got the chance." It was impossible to laugh, though listening to such boundless egotism, in the face of so deep a sincerity and such an implicit self-belief as shone from those young eyes.
"Sometimes the great man knows his greatness in advance," said the visitor gravely. "Sometimes it surprises himself. But most of the mightiestmadetheir own chance."
"I know that. I'm going to make mine. Power is what I want an' it's what I'm goin' to have. But I've got to get away from here. Julius Cæsar couldn't do nothin' here."
When Jefferson Edwardes came down stairs Mary, who had slipped timidly away, edged into the room, bashful and adorned. She had put on her best dress, and her lustrous hair was braided and coiled on her head, after the instruction of one of her fashion plates. As the visitor saw her he once more checked his inclination to laugh, for the marvelous mismated eyes were fixed on his face and they held an almost passionate anxiety to be approved by the man who had prophesied her beauty. The thin child with her hair so inappropriately dressed in the style of her fashionable elders—or what she fondly believed to be their style—would have been a ludicrous little figure had she not been, in her eagerness, too serious for humor. The one detail in which she thought she could follow the dictates of Fashion's decree was this arrangement of her hair, and that she had attempted. Now she stood first on one foot then on the other, watching in suspense to see if she had succeeded.
So the stranger slipped over unobserved and with a courtier's smile raised a tiny hand to his lips.
"I am a good prophet," he assured her, and now he let the suppressed merriment dance at will in his pupils, "but don't forget that a queen's queenliest necessity is—kindness."
And so, while Mrs. Burton and the elderly aunt busied themselves over the stove and the father napped restlessly, the sleeping thing that had not heretofore given warning was ripening for its outburst.
When the evening meal was finished and the family sat listening to the stranger's talk, Thomas Burton suddenly demanded: "Are they still quittin' over your way?"
Young Edwardes nodded.
"Except for one or two shiftless fellows like myself," he responded, "my immediate section is deserted. A half-dozen families moved out this fall. The general verdict seems to be that the fight's not worth while."
Tom Burton growled deeply. "The country mayn't be much," he grudgingly admitted, "but how do these fellers that are leavin' all they own behind 'em expect to better themselves? Ain't a few rocky acres better'n none at all? That's what I asks 'em and they ain't got no answer to give me. Ain't a little bit better than nothin' whatsoever?"
The visitor did not immediately reply. He seemed to be reflecting, and, when his answer came, Ham straightened himself in his seat and sat rigid as if struggling to fix a seal on his own lips and remain a silent listener.
"Perhaps so and perhaps not," suggested Edwardes. "The open sea doesn't offer much prospect in a storm, but it may be better than a sinking ship."
Tom Burton's eyes lighted with the same stubborn glint that had given his Pilgrim forefathers kinship with the granite of their shores.
"My ancestors have lived here since they ran the Indians out," he said quietly. "They're buried here an' they fought for this country an' won it. I guess what they bled for is worth holdin'."
"Your forefathers fought for the whole land, not only this section of it," suggested Edwardes mildly. "Right here the acres are stony and unproductive. You can't hope to compete with the farmer whose crops grow near arteries of transportation."
"All we need is roads—an' aqueducts—an' some day they'll come."
"Perhaps," admitted the younger man. "The question is how many can hold out till then?"
Tom Burton looked up and for an instant his eyes blazed. "Well, for one, I can! By God, I don't mean to be run away from my home by a panicky notion of hard times. I can stay here an' fight to a finish—an' when I'm licked, my boys can go on fightin'."
His eldest son rose and paced the floor with the restlessness of a caged leopard. At the black window he halted to gaze out on the bitterness of the night. The ultimatum of his father's obstinacy galled him beyond endurance. He heard himself pledged to the emptiness and futility of a life-sentence which he loathed; from which he was seeking escape and his soul clamored to rise in its vehement repudiation. Yet he felt that just now his heart was in too hot a conflagration to make speech safe. If he spoke at this moment he must speak in violent passion and bitter denunciation, and so with his hands tautly clutched at his back he held his counsel and paced the floor. Old Tom Burton's unaccustomed hours in the confinement of convalescence had left him petulant. The courtesy of the stranger's argument was lost upon him. All he saw was that it was argument, and he was in a condition to be irritated by little things.
For a while he watched the restless wanderings of his son from window to stove and from stove back to window, then his voice broke out sharply in dictatorial peevishness.
"What ails you, boy?" he demanded. "Have you got St. Vitus' dance? Sit down an' quit frettin' people with your eternal trampin' about."
Even then, though his face was white with suppressed feeling, Ham held hard to the curb of silence and took a chair, apart, where he sat rigid.
"It's them that sticks to their guns that wins out," declared the bearded man, looking around as if challenging contradiction, and, when none came, frowning on in silence. Then suddenly his eyes fell on the figure of little Mary, who sat behind the table with her thin face resting in her hands and her eyes burning with thoughts of that great wonder-world which their visitor knew so well. His presence in the room seemed to the child to bring its marvels almost within touch. For the first time the father recognized the ludicrous massing of coils on the top of the little head instead of the simple braids that should be falling over her shoulders, and, in his mood of irritation, the affectation of grown-up adornment angered him inordinately.
"What damned foolishness is that?" he demanded. "What started you to putting on a lot of new airs all of a sudden? Do you think you're the Queen of Sheba?"
The girl shrank back into the shadows at the edge of the room, and, as young Edwardes glanced that way, he heard a muffled sob and knew that she had fled up the stairs in chagrin, a pitiful little would-be princess whose dream splendor had been shattered with a reprimand. His intuition told him that she already lay curled up on her bed, sobbing bitterly against the pillow where the coiled hair—now angrily torn down from its burnished coronal—lay heaped and tangled about her head.
"I'm afraid," volunteered the guest with deep embarrassment, "I'm to blame. I met Mary on the roadside once as I went down to the city, and she told me how the children had been teasing her because she wasn't pretty, I tried to comfort her with a prophecy that her wonderful eyes and hair would establish her claims to beauty."
"So it was you, was it?" demanded Tom Burton shortly, "that set her thoughts upon vanity—well, I don't thank you."
The boy, sitting with every nerve under painful control, felt his breath come quick and deep until his chest heaved, and words leaped to his lips which, with a supreme effort, he bit back. This whole intolerable fallacy of outgrown and hard-shelled narrow-mindedness was spurring him to outbreak, yet for a moment more he held himself in check.
But to the father the incident of Mary's offending was closed, his mind was already back with his problem and his next words were a stubborn reiteration: "Yes, sir, me an' my boys will fight it out here where we belong."
Suddenly spots of orange and red swam before Ham's eyes. Deep in his being something snapped, and, as a fuse spark reaches and ignites its charge, so something fired the eruption that broke volcanically in each nerve.
He rose suddenly and stood before his father, and his words came with the molten heat of overflowing lava.
"An' when you've fought yourself to death an' I've fought myself to death, an' we're both licked, what in hell have we been fightin' for?"
The passionate question fell with the sudden violence of a bursting bomb, and the father's jaw stiffened. For an instant, amazement stood out large-writ in every feature. Ham had thought much, but, in his home, he had never before voiced a syllable of his fevered restlessness.
"We're fightin' for our rights. We're fightin' for what the men that came in theMayflowerfought for," said Tom Burton gravely. "Our homes an' our rightful claim to live by the soil we till." Strangely enough, for the moment, the older man's voice held no excitement.
"That may suit you." Now the boy's vehemence was fully unleashed. "You may be willin' to die fightin' for a couple of cows and a few hundred rocks that you bump your knees on when you try to plow. As for me, I ain't! When I fight, I want it to be a fight that counts, for a reward that's worth winnin'."
The bearded face darkened with the hard intolerance of the patriarchal order; an order which brooks no insubordination. But the lad spoke before the words of discipline found utterance.
"Let me finish, father, before you say anything. What I've got to say is somethin' that ain't just come into my mind. It's somethin' that's kept me awake of nights an' I've got to say it. I've sat here an' listened, an' I ain't put in my oar, but I can't be muzzled, an' you might as well hear me out—because there ain't power enough in the world to stop me."
"An' supposin'—" Tom Burton spoke brusquely, yet with something more like amusement in his eyes than had previously shown there—"supposin' I ain't inclined to listen to you?"
"Then you'll just force me to leave you here—an' you can't hardly get on without me."
"You mean you'd run away?"
"I'd hate to, but once I was going to. I stayed because you needed me."
"I guess I could keep a watch on you, if I had to," announced the father shortly.
"You couldn't keep a ball an' chain on me," retorted the son. "I wouldn't be much use that way about the farm."
The elder Burton very deliberately lighted his pipe. Like many men who fly suddenly into passions at nothing, he had the surprising faculty of remaining calm when anger might be expected. Now he said only, "Let's hear your notion, son. What's been keepin' you awake of nights?"
"It hasn't been just thinkin' about myself that's done it," began Ham, steadying his voice, though it still held a throb of fervor which neither his father nor mother had ever heard before. "I've been thinkin' about all of you. You an' mother are workin' your fingers to the bone an' your hearts to the breakin' point—for what? Just now you sent Mary away cryin' to bed because she wanted to be pretty. Why shouldn't she want to be? Isn't it part of a woman's mission? You call a thing vanity that's just havin' some life an' ambition in her heart. What's life got in store here for Mary or for Paul or for me? We're startin'—not endin' up. We have our ambitions. If we stay here Mary will be drudgin' till she dies. Paul's got the soul of a great musician, an' he might as well be dead right now as to stay here, an' as for me I'd a heap rather be dead."
"Oh, I see," commented Tom Burton very drily. "You figure that it'll be pleasanter for us to move into a palace somewhere, an' have a dozen or two servants waitin' on us. All right, where's the palace comin' from?"
Ham spoke in absolute confidence. "I'll get it for you—as many palaces as you want," he declared with steady-eyed effrontery; "if only you give me the chance.All I ask is this. For God's sake, take the chain off me—let me get into the fight."
Ham Burton was a tall and well-thewed lad for his age. His muscle fiber had drawn strength from the ax and the log-pole, but as yet it had not become heavy with decades of hard labor. He still stood slender and gracefully tapering from shoulders to waist and just now there was something trance-like in his earnestness which made wild prophecies seem almost inspired. The hard-headed father eyed him with good-humored irony.
"And how do you figure to get us all these things, son?" he inquired.
"I'll show you," came the quick and undoubting response. "All I want you to do is to leave this place and educate me. Every year you stay here you're spending part of what you've laid by, an' none of it ever comes back. Gamble it on me, an' I'll attend to all the rest."
At that the bearded farmer broke into a loud laugh.
"I reckon you're fixed to give me a written guarantee, ain't you?" he demanded. "But maybe just for the sake of makin' talk you'd better tell how you know you can swing such a man-sized contract."
"I know"—the lad's voice mounted into a positive crescendo of conviction—"I know by somethin' that tells me, an' it's somethin' that can't lie. The prophets knew that God had picked 'em out because He told 'em so in visions. I haven't just heard voices in dreams I've had the voice in me and I know—knowI tell you—that, with a chance, I can be as great a man as any man ever was. I'm not guessin' or deludin' myself. I tell you, Iknow! I've always known."
"I reckon, Ham," said the father gravely, "I cantell you the name of this thing that's been informin' you how great a man you can get to be. It ain't nothin' under God's heaven but self-conceit."
But the boy swept on. "Napoleon's first friends were folks that ran a laundry, but afterward kings couldn't talk to him unless he gave 'em permission. John Hayes Hammond, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, were all poor boys. None of those men had any better blood in their veins than I've got in mine, an' if you want to call it that, none of 'em had more self-conceit."
"I reckon you've got good enough blood to have better sense," observed the father shortly. Then with a very human inconsistency he added, "I don't often brag about it, but my middle name is Standish and Miles Standish was an ancestor of mine."
"And my name," retorted the boy, "is Hamilton, and Alexander Hamilton's family were ancestors of my mother's. I reckon neither of those men would feel very proud to see us settin' down here, wearin' our lives away in a country where the ends won't meet."
"This damned foolishness has gone far enough," ruled the elder in a voice of finality, his amusement suddenly giving way once more to sternness. "I've listened to you because you seemed to be full of talk an' I was willin' to let you get it off your chest, but I don't need counsel from any cub of a boy. I'm nigh onto fifty years old an' I've run my family all these years. I had enough brains to get on with before you was born an' if you've got all the sense you think you've got, you got it from me an' your mother. Until you get to be twenty-one, you'll do what I bid you. Heretofore you've done it willin'ly. I hope you'll go on doin' it that way—but if you don't, I guess I'mstill man enough to make you. Now go to bed—an' go quick."
The lad flushed to his cheekbones and for a moment he made no move to obey. Under the tyrannizing manner of his father's voice his spirit rose in rebellion. Tom Burton strode over and his attitude was threatening. "Did you hear what I said to you?" he inquired. "Are you going by yourself, or have I got to take you upstairs?"
Slowly and with a strong self-mastery, Ham came to his feet. "I'll go to bed now," he replied quietly, "because it would be a pity for us to quarrel—but I've got a few more things to say, and, after awhile, I guess you'll have to listen to 'em. We'll talk about this thing some more."
"We'll talk about it some more—when I get good an' ready—if I ever do—an' if I don't we won't never talk about it any more. Go to bed!"
When the lad disappeared up the stairway, he left a long and constrained silence behind him. From the mother's chair came a sound that hinted at secret weeping, and at last Tom Burton straightened his hunched shoulders and gazed across at young Edwardes, whose eyes were no longer smiling, but very sober.
"I hope you're satisfied now," said the host bitterly. "You've played merry hell with this family. Yesterday my son did my bidding without question. My daughter was an obedient child an' a natural one without foolishness. You've been under my roof three hours an' my house rises rebellious against me in my old age. And you bear a name that's always stood for order an' wisdom—not for stirrin' up trouble. I reckon I ought to turn you out in the snow, but I won't—I only hope you're satisfied."
"Mr. Burton," answered the young millionaire quietly, "I should be sorry to have you think that. If I have kindled a spark in little Mary that you never saw before it is nothing of which either you or she need feel ashamed. As for the boy, it was not I who incited him. He has been suppressing thoughts until now that reached the point of eruption, that's all." He paused, then added very thoughtfully: "Even if I did influence them both, it was as the unconscious tool upon which the hand of Destiny chanced to fall. The boy only seeks fulfilment; fulfilment that will make life better for all of you—if he succeeds."
"Yes—if he succeeds. All he's got to do is to start out empty-handed and lick the world to a frazzle. All I've got to do is to gamble the little savings of twenty-five years of frugal living on his being able to do it."
"That," said Edwardes, "was hardly what I meant. If you'll let me make one suggestion, since you credit me with already having done so much, it is this. That boy may be, or may not be, the genius he thinks himself, but he's got a brain that drives and torments him. Hethinks! If you will treat him as a counsellor and argue with him without sternness it will pay you. The final decision will rest with you, but let him argue. Don't choke him off and make a vassal of him instead of a son. His type of brain can't be leashed."
The father sat moody and did not at once reply. Finally he shook himself out of his reverie and repeated: "Argue with him? How can a man argue with a boy that thinks he's a genius and a miracle-worker? Besides, while he's gabbin' nonsense he can look at you with somethin' in his eyes that makes you feel like a fool."
"Let me remind you of one thing." The youngman from the outer world spoke very quietly. "The chapters of history that stand out in boldest relief are chapters dealing with men whoweremiracle-workers, men who had something in their eyes that dominated other men. I have been reared close enough to the center of financial achievement to have seen something of that. Perhaps that boy of yours is born with the stamp of victory upon him—who knows? Given the chance, he may fulfill his own visions. Both of your sons are dreamers, but the elder may be a doer of dreams as well as a dreamer of dreams. He's an unquenchable flame. Don't force him to smolder until he bursts into blaze. Give him a chance to talk. Give him a safety-valve."
Tom Burton drew his brows close over perplexed and baffled eyes; eyes full of foreboding and anxiety. His voice was full of bewilderment. "What does it all mean?" he murmured half-aloud. "What's the cause of all these voices an' protests where everything's been quiet an' peaceable up to now? Why ain't we never heard nothin' about all this before if it's such a big thing an' a thing that the Lord intended?" He gazed about him helplessly and with the face of one who sees omens and cannot construe them, but who feels a nameless fear of their portent.
"At all events," reiterated the guest, "you will do well to hear what the boy wants to say, and now I will bid you good-night."
When he had gone, the older man sat in thought for awhile, and, when next his voice broke the silence, it was in a much softened timbre, a voice tinged with tenderness.
"Mother," he called in an undertone, and the woman who had borne his children and stood shoulder toshoulder with him through the years of fight, came over and knelt at his knee. He took her hand and held it for a while in silence, and then he said a little brokenly: "Mother, when we first came here from the little church down there, this house looked pretty good to us, didn't it?"
"To me, Tom," she said softly, "it has always looked good."
"Do you remember," he went on irrelevantly, "when we brought that slip of vine from the mountain and planted it by the porch? It's over the roof now."
The woman only pressed his hand; and after a moment he went on.
"There are a couple of graves out there in the churchyard that I'd hate mightily to leave."
"The two we lost," she whispered.
"An' yet maybe if we stay here we'll lose 'em all." Tom Burton was making a decided effort to hold his voice steady.
"Don't—don't, Tom," protested the woman.
"When you married me, Elizabeth," he went on with the air of one resolved to take full account, "I reckon you could have done a good deal better, it's been a long fight here an' a hard one."
"I've been happy," she told him.
"Your hand was right slim then, an' now it's hard from work. To me, there ain't no other hand as beautiful, mother, but there's no use denying that we can't hold out much longer, unless the children stand by an' help us."
"They will, Tom. They will. Ham may talk, but he won't desert."
"I know that, but the question is, have we got the right to hold them here? Is Ham raving, or is heright? That's the question you an' me have got to decide, mother."
"Do you think, Tom," she demanded, rising and anxiously looking at him, "do you think that even if we had all the things money could give us—we'd be any happier in the long run? Life's been hard with us, but it's always been wholesome."
"I'm contented, mother, but what does well enough for old blood may not satisfy the young. It ain't the first time I've thought about this thing. They're quittin' all round us, an' they're quittin' because they're beat. I've always thought this country could be redeemed. If boys like Ham thought so, too, it might be done, but it takes young blood, and if a feller's heart ain't in it, he can't do it."
Her only answer was a sigh, and he continued: "We've still got enough laid by in the bank to live somewhere for a few years an' give the children decent educations. If we stay here too long maybe we can't even do that. What shall we do?"
For a while they sat without talk, and then the mother brokenly suggested: "Let's hear what Ham says an' let's make up our minds slow."
Together they rose, and, blowing out the lamp, went up the stairs. As they passed Ham's door they paused, and the father whispered, "I don't want the boy to think I'm hard on him."
Inside, there was no light, but they could hear the eldest son thrashing restlessly about in his bed, and they knew that he was not sleeping.
Outside the snow was still falling with quiet relentlessness. It was wrapping deeper and deeper the white slopes of the mountains and piling feathery drifts against the windward sides of the sighing pines. Hereand there a burdened branch creaked under its travail. Now and then the wind that drove the snow rose to a gusty whisper, and a stark limb scraped the eaves of the house with grating, lifeless fingers. But between the occasional stress-cries of the storm, there came the low, dirge-like monotony of the sifting snowfall. And as always in old houses there were the little voices and the minute nameless stirrings of the night. The ghost-moan of drafty chimneys and the creak of warped timbers became audible accentuators of the silence.
Ham heard them all and to him they were like the wretched echoes of a jail where the small clicking night-sounds creep into dreams and poison them with reminders of confinement. His brain was hot with a fever of restiveness and beyond his cell-like room he saw the world from which he was barred: the world which the tongueless voice in his heart kept heralding to him as his own world to conquer.
In another bed across the carpetless floor rose and fell the even breath of Edwardes, who was sleeping as a man sleeps after fighting a blizzard. Under the boy's own hot cheek was the roughness of a slipless pillow and his limbs thrashed between coarse sheets that covered a lumpy mattress.
Out beyond the barriers of the snow-stifled mountains stretched endless continents and seas inviting his soul. Men of alien races and alien thought trod lands where palm trees nodded along white beaches and where the sea was blue as sapphire. Thousands of miles away were deserts agleam with gold and caravans swinging between the burning arch of the sky and the scorching sands. Great cities rose before his eyes, beckoning him, calling to him: brooding cities of gray turrets and foggy streets; strange cities lit with sunsetfires on domes and minarets; laughing cities gay with festivals. All these things he was hungry to see; to see as a master of the world walking its varied ways, achieving its affairs. Through his waking dreams marched a parade of great figures, Hannibal, Cæsar the Corsican, Talleyrand, Disraeli, Montagu, Pitt, the men with whom this tongueless voice proclaimed his brotherhood; the men who had found life's granite as hard as that which lay heaped about him, who had conquered it and chiseled it into monuments of history. His hand slipped under his pillow and closed on the dollars he had made. His troubled face smoothed into a smile.
"Slivers Martin paid me ten dollars," he murmured to himself, "an' I bought the lot of 'em for seven."
WHENyoung Jefferson Edwardes set out the next morning for his winter's imprisonment in the shack where he must fight the white specter of slow death, amid the white isolation of the snow, he left behind him a household to all outward seeming as quiet as it had ever been. But all that morning and afternoon while Ham was away at school, Tom Burton sat deeply engrossed in calculations involving scraps of paper upon which he was laboriously figuring, and frequent consultation of a slender bank-book. And Ham, as he trudged back across the snow, came with a face set for combat. Hitherto he had obeyed and now the time had come when his inherent power of leadership must assert itself. If the world could not conquer him—and he was utterly certain it could not—he must not flinch from the task of riding down the first opposition he met—even though it be the opposition of his own blood. Afterward his family should know only tenderness and ease and luxury, but now they must acknowledge his mastery.
Of the possibility of failure he never dreamed. His star was in the heavens and Destiny had spoken. Just as the cork plunged to the bottom of the pail must inevitably rise to the top, so he must rise. He was of the oligarchy of the great, of the chosen of the gods, and now the voices of Destiny were calling him to the undertaking of his mission. Tonight the question must be thrashed out, yet when he arrived at the house hewent quietly about the round of monotonous chores and after that sat through the evening meal with no mention of the things in his heart. It was his father who first broached the subject and he broached it bluntly while the family sat about him, in the spirit of the primitive family council.
"Ham," he said slowly, "I've been sittin' here all day turnin' your notions over in my mind. You want to go away from here and to abandon this place where you was born; where your mother and me started housekeepin'; where we've lived for twenty years. If we decided to do that—an' it wouldn't be no easy thing for either your mother or me—what plans would you aim to carry out?"
The boy shook his head. He did not shake it in the abashed fashion of one confronted with a question for which he has no answer, but with the frank manner of one brushing aside a trivial and irrelevant question.
"I don't know yet. First I've got to have an education, then I'll decide what I'm going to do, and when I decide I'll succeed."
The father's brows knitted themselves gravely and with displeasure. "Then, after all your talk and bragging, you haven't got no definite plan. All you argue for is cutting loose from the roof over us an' livin' up our little savin's."
"I know that I can give you big things in the place of little things." The lad's voice again mounted and into his face came the flush of assured inspiration. "The thing that tells me is something you wouldn't understand. I can't any more put it into words for you than I can tell you why the moon swings the tides, but it's just as dead sure as that an' I can feel it here." He clapped his hands over his heart and went on withquiet certainty: "I don't know no name to call it by except a feelin' of power. There's only one thing in God's whole world that can stop me, an' that's ignorance and lonesomeness. You call it all dreamin'—well, give me a chance and I'll make it all so real that you can't have any more doubts."
"I thought," said Tom Burton a bit wearily, "that maybe you might have some sensible argument, but all you've got is moonshine. I've been settin' here figurin' all day so that, if you could convince me, I'd know where I stood with the bank, but it don't hardly seem worth talkin' about."
"I can't make you understand," declared the boy unwaveringly, "because you're thinkin' in hundreds where I'm thinkin' in millions. You ask me about details. All I know is that I've got a destiny to be as great as any man can be an' that success is goin' to be my slave. I don't know what I'm going to do because I haven't seen yet what battle-field is best worth winnin'. When I see what's the biggest—I'll win it."
"So you want us to take what we've saved and gamble it all on your good opinion of yourself. Do you realize, my son, that we ain't got much and that we've saved what we have got by goin' without all our lives? When that's gone, we won't have nothin' left to gamble with a second time. Ain't it a good deal to pay for learnin' the folly of self-conceit?"
The boy's answer was direct and swift and confident. "One chance is all I need. It's only a coward that wants a guarantee of more chances, if he fails once. What sort of a farmer do you think Paul will ever make? He couldn't heft a second-growth log of timber. But out there in the world where a man's rated higher than a mule maybe Paul's got it in himto be great. Some day Mary's goin' to be a woman and a beautiful woman. She's got a right to life. Don't you ever see the difference between life an' just livin'? It's the difference between havin' a soul and havin' nothin' but a belly."
"Do you suppose"—the father spoke petulantly despite his resolution to hear his son to the end—"do you suppose we've always been poor because we liked it?"
"If you stay poor," came the prompt retort, "it's because you won't let me change it. We're stayin' here an' slowly starvin' our hearts an' brains an' souls because Money's got us bluffed. I'm goin' to make money my slave an' not my master—an' if you'll trust me you can have it to play with."
"You tell me that you are one of the almightiest great men that was ever born, an' that somethin' keeps on tellin' you so. You tell me that I can't understand the voice you hear," said Tom Burton slowly. "Don't you know that all the lunatic asylums are full of Emperors of Germany and Kings of England—an' they all hear them same kind of voices? That's why they're there."
"But there's one Emperor of Germany and one King of England outside them places—an' they're on thrones. All the masters of the world have felt their power an' folks have laughed at 'em—at first." Ham spoke with desperate seriousness that made his eyes glow steadily and forcefully. "And yet the big things have been done by those men, and from the firsttheyknew that they were different. You say I've been braggin'. Did you ever hear me say one word before yesterday about bein' different from any other boy? I'm sayin' it now because there isn't any use in lyin'.Iknowjust as well as if I'd already done it, that I can look down on other successful men as far as a mountain-top looks down on a little hill. I've done my work here on this farm, an' I haven't ever shirked. Now I want my chance—an' I don't want my family to go to seed. I want the blood of the Standishes and the Hamiltons to climb up and not to run down hill and die out in a rotting puddle at the bottom. I want these things and I'm goin' to have 'em—This farm an' you have fought for a lifetime an' the farm's whipped you. I tell you there is just one thing in God Almighty's world that can whip me—just one thing that I'm afraid of—an' it's this farm. If you stay here I reckon I can't hardly desert you, but I'd rather you'd kill me outright. That's all I've got to say."
Tom Burton rose from his chair and took two or three turns across the frayed strips of carpet. His eyes were no longer the eyes of a father irritated by the insubordinate fret of a fledgling son begging permission to test his wings. His bearded face bore the seamed uncertainty of his deeply vexed spirit. Perhaps in that moment there came to him some sense of conversion to the prophet-like assurance of his son. Perhaps he felt the dread of transplanting and a vague wonder whether the gifts of wealth, if they came, might not bring disaster in their wake. At last he turned, cramming his hands into his trousers' pockets, and swept the little family circle with eyes in which flashed something of patriarchal fire.
"Mother," he demanded, "you have heard what the boy says. Does it sound like reason to you, or is it just a stripling's restlessness?"
Elizabeth Burton looked from her husband's face to that of her eldest child. It seemed to her that thefather's eyes were wistful and sorely distressed, and that the son's face was tightly drawn with a feverish burning of the eyes. Suddenly she felt like an arbiter called to judge between them. Her boy with his Cæsar's ambition was breaking his heart to go. Her husband, with much of life behind, could only yield with something like a break in his own. Her eyes moistened.
"If he feels called into the world, Tom—" she began, then halted. The husband waited, and she went on again. "If he feels it so strong, maybe it must mean something. It's mighty hard to say. But, Tom, I know Ham better than anybody else does. He's not the kind of boy to leave us alone. If we need him he'll stay."
"That's not the question, mother." The father who had yesterday been dictatorial and intolerant was now the just judge who refused to be beguiled by personal preferences. Only his pupils betrayed the pathos of his inward suffering. "It's a right hard question as I see it. This place means home to me, but I'm about played out. If we stay it's Ham that's got to wear the harness, an' I know just how heavy the harness is. It would gall him an' blister him even if he wasn't already chafin' with discontent. It seems like he can't do it willin'ly. Can we let him do it any other way? We're lookin' back, mother, but I reckon life runs forward."
"It ain't just my life I'm thinkin' about—" broke in Ham's voice, but his father stopped him with an uplifted hand.
"You've had your say, son, for the present," he reminded; and the boy fell silent.
Tom Burton turned to the maiden aunt who sat under the lamplight with her sewing on her lap. Hesaw that her lips were intolerantly compressed and that her needle came and went in protesting little jabs. "Hannah," he quietly inquired, "what do you think?"
The elderly woman whose sternness of view had been tempered by neither maternity nor breadth of experience shook her head.
"I don't know as I'm called on to express what I think, Tom," she replied with cold disapproval. "I've always held that it's a sinful thing to be dissatisfied with what God wills. He put us here an' I reckon if He hadn't meant us to live here He'd have put us somewhere else."
"I guess, Hannah—" Tom Burton's eyes for just a moment lighted into a humorous smile—"we couldn't hardly expect God to move us bodily. But if we do go away from here you can have the comfort of figuring that if He hadn't wanted us to go there we wouldn't be there." He looked over at little Mary, who alone had not spoken.
"Daughter," he suggested, "you're too young to have to decide such things, but you might as well speak up, too. It looks like the day has come for children to lay down the law to their elders. What do you think about leavin' the old home, the only home we've ever known?"
The child, surprised at being called into the council, dropped her eyes, then, suddenly glancing up and meeting Ham's gaze, she felt a courage beyond her own, and stammered: "I'd like to see the world and—and—well, just to see all the wonderful things—and to know everything."
Tom Burton's lips stiffened. "A long time ago a couple of people lived in the Garden of Eden," he said shortly. "And I reckon what Eve said wasn't muchdiff'rent from that. Well, they moved away all right."
There was a long silence in the room, and the father at last broke it with his eyes fixed on his eldest son.
"Those great men you talk about, Ham—" he spoke with deliberate gravity—"them fellers you seem to think are sort of brothers of yours—most of them came to times when they saw things topplin' down all round 'em. They sent your Napoleon to St. Helena an' a lot of others didn't do much better in the long run. Julius Cæsar was pretty great an' pretty ambitious. He fell. There's a heap to be said fer livin' straight an' simple. We're self-respectin' men an' women with clean blood in our veins that don't have to bow down to no man. We've lived honest an' worked hard, but sometimes when spring comes on an' I'm followin' the plow an' the blackbirds are followin' me along the furrow, I feel like God ain't so far away. When they buries me out there amongst those I've loved an' been true to, I reckon I'll rest."
"Your father," the son reminded him, "wasn't a young feller when Lincoln called for volunteers, but he didn't stay here because he wanted to rest. He went, an' now he's restin' down there at Shiloh. I want to answer my call. I'm willin' to take my chance of restin' where death finds me."
Outside, across the ice-locked lake and through the snow-burdened forest swept the wolf-like howl of the wind.
Inside, there was the silence of a deeply troubled indecision. At last, Tom Burton said:
"It's a right-hard thing to stake the welfare of a family on a boy's notion of his own greatness—a notion that ain't never been tried out. There's justone thing you've convinced me of, and it's this: You may not be able to do anything worth-while in the world outside. You may be a failure there, but I'm pretty sure, in your frame of mind, you'll be a failure here. The man that makes a fight here has got to have his heart in it an' he's got to love the soil. That don't fit your case! I ain't ready to admit yet that I ain't the head of my own family. I ain't made up my mind yet what we'll do. Maybe we'll stay right here an' maybe we'll go away." The father ran one hand wearily through the thick hair on his forehead and shook his head. "I've heard you out, an' we'll all think on it an' dream on it. I've found right often when a feller's perplexed an' can't reach a conclusion, he goes to sleep an' wakes up with a clearer judgment. Once a mistake is made, it can't be unmade; but I don't want you to think that I ain't ponderin' this question."
Ahead of him Ham saw Paul and Mary slip up the stairway and his aunt rise, with the stiff disapproval of silence, and leave the room. He himself remained only a few minutes longer and then with a low-voiced good-night he pressed his father's hand, and felt the grip of stern affection on his own. He took up and lighted the small lamp that was to light him to bed, and as he climbed the boxed-in stairway, the shadows wavered on the walls at each side, and he heard the wail of the wind around the eaves.
When he set the lamp down and began undressing he realized for the first time the gnawing weariness of muscles that the day had taxed with chores and tramping. Tomorrow morning he must rise while the windows still let in only the chilling gray of dawn. Yet he stopped with half his clothes removed, and, goingto an improvised shelf in the corner, took down a battered volume. It was not until the lamp warned him of the spent hours with its dying sputter that he laid aside the resonant sentences in which Carlyle had been talking to him of heroes and their worship. In another room across the hall he had heard stirrings for an hour after the silence of sleep had fallen on the rest of the house.
There Mary, unable to compose herself at once, had been snipping at the pattern of a gown with which, in her fancy, she was to charm those men who did not wear lumbermen's socks and neglect their razors. But now even Mary was asleep. It was cold in the room, and outside the world was bitter, but Ham was far from sleep. In his mind still worked and seethed the unresting ferment which had become a torment. The annals of the great had fired him to passion. The littleness of his room and of his life stifled him. He wanted to breathe freer, and, drawing on his mackinaw, he tiptoed noiselessly down the stairs and let himself out into the night.
There he found a frozen world, shut in by low-drifting clouds and swallowed in a smother of darkness. Even the snow was gray, but at least there he could look out across space.
As though his eyes followed a compass needle, he slowly swung them until his gaze set toward his desire, and because vaguely he thought of New York as the center of the great outer world, his face was to the south.
The wind moaned about him and somewhere far off he heard the ripping groan of an overladen tree giving way under its paralysis of sleet. In himself he felt something also breaking away from its old place. Hefelt forces rending their bonds and straining for freedom, and it almost seemed to his burning eyes that while he gazed toward that spot hundreds of miles away which he had never seen, there slowly kindled in the sky a pale and luminous aura, such as hangs over the spires and shafts of a giant city. His fancy pictured the unsainted halo that gleams above thronged and never-sleeping streets: streets that always beckon. Vague echoes of sounds came toward him, warring in the teeth of the wind; sounds of the many voices and the many clamors that merge into one dull, insistent roar: the voice of the city.
So he stood there shivering and not realizing that the frost was shrewdly biting him. His spirit was the spirit of a hatching eaglet impatiently rapping at the shell which too slowly opens to give it freedom.
"What I did to Slivers Martin," he told himself, "I can do to the rest of them. There ain't much difference between doin' big things an' little things, except that you've got to be where there are big things to do an' you've got toknowyou can do 'em."
ITwas eight o'clock, and the year as well as the day was in its morning. The watch which young Carl Bristoll drew from his pocket was very thin and exquisite, and he did not look at its face. Instead he touched a delicate spring with his finger-nail and listened to the tinkle of its low, silvery chime. This watch might have spoken the hour to a blind man as well as to eyes as clear and engaging as those of its present possessor.
In some Swiss shop, where for generations an hereditary skill of adept fingers had come down from father to son, a master of his craft had toiled long and lovingly over this thin disc of gold which epitomized in its small circumference a perfection of accuracy and beauty. Because it was a prince's plaything and because the young Titan of finance who employed Carl Bristoll as his confidential secretary had brought it back by way of an affectionate gift from his last trip to the Continent, the lad prized it above other possessions. To young Bristoll, who was no unwilling wage-earner, but a hero-worshiper in all the intensity of strong youth, it had been as if an emperor had pinned on his breast the insignia of personal regard.
He put the trinket back into his waistcoat pocket, and strolled to the windows that gave off over the Drive and the Hudson. The softly arching sky found its color echo in the blue of broad waters and beyond them the Palisades were already beginning to show tenderly green and alluring in spring's resurrection. Out in midstream lay the crouching hulk of a battleship, and its somber gray was the one note that contradicted the softness of the morning.
Bristoll turned his face again to the interior, where a flood of sun from the broad window at the back filled the place with eastern light. He never tired of that room, the library where his chief dispatched those matters of more urgent business that pursued him even to his home. It was a room that might have served a potentate as a council-chamber with its treasury of almost priceless art, yet it reflected everywhere the quiet of faultless taste and the elegance born of a restrained and sure discernment.
"And all of it," Carl Bristoll murmured to himself, as he awaited the coming of its master, "he made for himself in a scant ten years, and he stands only at the threshold of his career!" That often repeated formula was a sort of daily tonic with which his ambition reminded itself that life holds no prize locked behind impossible barriers for him who has the courage and resolution to grasp it. Yet had he been older he would have added, "The impossible is only possible to the child of Destiny."
He heard a quiet movement behind him, and turned to find the butler standing at his elbow with a tray of early mail, into which the secretary plunged, separating the purely personal from those letters which the great man saw only through his subordinate's eyes.
"I'm not at all sure, Mr. Bristoll, that the master will rise early," volunteered the servant. "He was with his sister until midnight, and after that Mr. Paul came in and I heard him playing the piano, sir, as late as three o'clock."
Carl laughed. "I had a call from him on the 'phone an hour ago," he answered. "He spoke of a busy day ahead, and suggested an early start. There are some men, Harrow, who find rest simply in changing the brain's occupation."
"Yes, sir, quite so," admitted the butler dubiously. "Still, as the poet says, sir, it's sleep that 'knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,' sir. Sometimes I have apprehensions that the master will overtax his strength."
"I didn't know, Harrow," smiled the secretary, "that you were a disciple of the poets."
"Only, sir, in an unostentatious way," deprecated the man. "It has been my good fortune to serve in families where such niceties have been highly regarded, sir, and, I take it, advantageous associations reflect themselves in one's tastes, sir. But—" he dropped his voice, and came a step nearer—"but, sir, if you will pardon me, sir, I should like to ask a question. You know, of course, that the master's sister arrived last night from Europe?"
Bristoll nodded. He himself had not yet had the privilege of seeing the young woman, the fame of whose loveliness had preceded her: a loveliness which had enthralled men from the Irish Sea to Suez.
"Of course, sir, it's not for me to entertain opinions, but—" The butler paused in evident embarrassment, and the secretary's eyes narrowed a little.
"You are quite right, Harrow," he asserted shortly. "I can't see that you are required to express any opinion."
"Of course, sir, I was only going to say—"
"Well—don't say it."
But, for all his obsequiousness, the admirable Harrow was a persistent diplomat.
"No, sir, of course I sha'n't. I was only going to ask you—"
The secretary looked up with an impatient frown on a forehead shaped for resolution.
"All right. Ask me and have it over."
"I was going to inquire, sir, whether you regard it likely that the new mistress would—as I might say, sir—institute any sweeping changes of régime in ourmilieu? Things have gone on very well, sir, as they were." The interrogation carried a note of sharp anxiety: the apprehension of a petty monarch who might face the fate of being deposed.
"I don't know." The reply was curt, and Harrow with a bow said only, "Yes, sir, thank you. I was just speculating on the possibilities, sir."
For a while there was silence in the library as Bristoll ran through letter after letter, his hand racing over the stenographer's pad upon which he reduced their purport to succinct notes. He always enjoyed these responsible mornings with his chief because they were times of intimate association with a mind that directed colossal operations, and they savored almost of the importance of cabinet meetings.
Often, as he read the fluctuations of the ticker tape or glanced at financial scareheads in the evening papers, he smiled knowingly with the memory of a sentence spoken at the breakfast-table or an edictuttered in this library, which had been the motive power behind the news; and which to the world at large remained an unseen impulse.
Now Bristoll heard a quick step coming down the stairs with a schoolboy's buoyant lightness and the whistling of a popular air. It might have been a college sophomore arriving light-heartedly from his cold plunge, rather than the Titan whose word in the Street was already a thing which no one of the older money-kings could ignore.
Carl Bristoll rose, and Hamilton Burton broke off his whistling to smile gaily as he clapped the younger man on the shoulder and inquired with a voice remarkably soft and musical, "Well, how is our young Minister of Finance this morning?"
Hamilton Montagu Burton stood an even six feet, and from a generous breadth of shoulders, swung back in free erectness, he tapered to a trim slenderness of waist and thigh. In the immaculate elegance of his dress he justified his reputation as the best-clothed man in New York, even while he retained the grace of a seeming carelessness. His eyes, though he had slept a scant four hours, looked out clear-pupiled and tireless, but it was the shape and carriage of the head that proclaimed mastery. The pattern of brow and jaw and clean-cut lip and indomitable eye gave that head an alert power which made it the head of one born to command. The illuminating smile could give way to a sternness and a decision that became ruthless in its dominance, and the eyes could harden like diamonds as swiftly as they could melt.
Carl Bristoll laughed, and after the custom of badinage that had grown up between them he made a bow of mock ceremony as he replied.
"Quite fit, Sire, and your Majesty's appearance proclaims you equally so."
It was hardly the sort of greeting that the outsider might have expected, but neither financier nor secretary was an ordinary type and between them throve an excellent understanding.
As Bristoll read from his notes Hamilton Burton's face lost its smile and became instantly attentive while his questions snapped out clear-clipped and comprehensive.
It seemed that the brain was separated into many zones, each carrying forward its separate functions without interference or confusion. Through the channels of vision, hearing and quick independent thought, varied propositions were at one time being absorbed while the master instinct of coördination was weighing all and planning yet other affairs.
"And now," announced the financier, when the stenographic notes had been read and others written in swift adjudication of their problems, "the rest can wait till we get down-town. There's Harrow calling us to breakfast—and breakfast is an institution I particularly venerate." The master of the establishment turned to the butler and inquired, "Hasn't Miss Burton come down?"
"Miss Burton, sir," replied the man with a shade of uneasiness in his voice, "sent word by her maid that she would breakfast in her room."
The naïve smile faded from Hamilton Burton's face and for an instant it took on something of that aggressive set which men in the Stock-Exchange had come to recognize as precursor of a frenzied day.
"Send word to my sister," he directed quietly, "that I insistently request her to join us at breakfast. Imust see her before I leave the house." He strode with a resilient step about the room, pausing idly before a favorite landscape here and prized bronze there. Patience was one quality which Hamilton Burton had not spent great effort in acquiring. It was his custom to let others adapt themselves to his convenience, yet his eyes were unruffled as he smilingly turned to his secretary. "'Serene I wait—with folded hands,'" he murmured.
But when Harrow returned it was as bearer of a message which marred the serenity of this waiting.
"Miss Burton sends word, sir, that she will receive you in her boudoir in a half-hour. She does not find it convenient to come down to breakfast."
For a moment, Hamilton Burton remained standing and his gray eyes flashed forebodingly, though the line of his lips was not deflected. Then he led the way to the breakfast-room.
"Tell Miss Burton," he ordered shortly, "that we are awaiting her in the breakfast-room. Say to her that I trust she will make the delay short." Then as the butler turned, the master halted him again. "No," he amended, "I'll send a note—give me a sheet of paper."
As the embarrassed servant laid a note-card by his plate, he hastily scribbled:
"Dear Mary, While you are mistress of my house I shall expect you to appear at the breakfast-table. The rest of the day is yours. This is final. Mr. Bristoll and I are waiting and my time is not to be valued lightly. Please do not tax my patience longer."
When Harrow had gone, Burton turned again to Bristoll, and with that systematic quality which madehis brain so versatile he dismissed the annoyance for another matter.
"I want your opinion on the coffee," he said lightly. "It came from the Jungus valley in Bolivia. Men who have drunk it there are not satisfied with any other. In the local market it is costly and as an export it is unattainable."
"Yet you have obtained it," smiled the secretary. "How?"
Burton laughed. "I wanted it," he announced briefly. "So I got it."
"Mr. Burton," the younger man spoke hesitantly, "you look very fit and seem absolutely on edge, but I'm afraid you're rather overdoing things. I don't mean any impertinence of suggestion, but the trout are jumping in the mountain brooks just now. Can't you drop things for a few days and climb into a flannel shirt—and rest? You could go somewhere where the leaves are rustling in the woods and things are as God made them, close to His immortal granite. I don't want to see you break yourself down."
Hamilton Burton was looking at the percolator in which the Bolivian coffee was bubbling as restively as the fires of the volcano at whose base it grew from berry to lush plant and came again to berry. He was balancing a spoon on his forefinger, and smiling with quiet amusement.
"Now that's very thoughtful of our young Minister of Finance." He spoke softly as the fugitive smile played around the corners of his lips. "Very thoughtful indeed, but the suggestion is, after all, unavailable." He paused, and the smile died. "I don't think I've ever become autobiographical with you, have I, Carl?"
The secretary shook his head. "But, of course, youknow I should feel honored at any time you did," he declared with whole-hearted and boyish enthusiasm.
"Very well. Until I was sixteen years old I lived very close to mountains built of God's immortal granite. Whenever I went out to do my chores I barked my shins on God's immortal granite. Whenever I plowed I had to do acrobatics to save as much of the plowshare as possible from God's immortal granite. It's all very pastoral to talk about milk fresh from the sweet-breathed cow, but for ten years I was lady's maid to two singularly repulsive cows—and in time they cloyed upon me. Whenever those Juno-eyed kine lowed for a drink of water, it was up to me to hustle out and serve them—and I never got a tip for my service. To this good day, Carl, the sight of a cow gives me cramps in the fingers and melancholy in the soul. Henceforth I'll take my milk in hermetically sealed jars from one of my own model dairies—and I'll try to forget that its origin is—cows. That cream in the pitcher there came from a farm of mine up in Westchester. Bulk for bulk, it costs me about the same as old champagne, but it's mighty cheap compared to what that other milk came to." He paused and gazed at the spoon balanced on a steady forefinger.
"As for the whisper of the breeze through the silver birches, I've heard it with chilblains on my feet and bruises on my heart and henceforth when I want to see the shadows fall, I'll go and stand under Cheops' pyramid or the Coliseum at Rome or some other edifice reared with human hands as the monument to human achievement that helped to build the world. When I die they'll once more lay me close to Nature's breast, and, being dead, I sha'n't object—but until that time I'll stay away—as far away as possible."
The financier ended his good-humored tirade and glanced up to meet the frankly alarmed gaze of Harrow, who at that moment reappeared in the door.
"Miss Burton says," announced the butler, his usual suavity shaken beyond control, "that there is no answer to your note. She says you already have her reply."
The coffee in the percolator was bubbling furiously, and the ice about the grape-fruit was beginning to melt. Hamilton Burton rose abruptly from his chair. "Please excuse me for a moment, Carl," he said in a low voice. "I will go up and bring my sister down to breakfast."
The furnishing and decorating of Mary Burton's apartments had engrossed her brother's interest for some weeks prior to her arrival and when in answer to his rap a silvery voice said, "Come in," he stood on the threshold of a boudoir as richly and tastefully detailed as a princess of the blood royal could have asked.
But the girl, who sat indolently before her mirror, clad in a morning negligée of exquisite delicacy, was so like a colorful and lustrous pearl that one forgot her surroundings. Hamilton's eyes, the eyes that could change so swiftly from implacability to disarming softness, flashed into pride as he looked at her.
"Mary," he amiably began, "I think there must be some misunderstanding. I asked you to come down."
The girl looked up with a serene smile. "Did they not then give you my message?" she inquired softly. "I told them to say that I would breakfast here."
The man's eyes narrowed and darkened. Something in his domineering spirit bristled, as it always bristled under questioning or opposition.
"Why? You are fully dressed, are you not?"
"Assuredly."
"Then what reason can you have for refusing to come when I ask it? Is it simply that you wish to defy me? I am not accustomed to being disobeyed."