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Fessenden drew his leg over his horse’s neck and looked idly about him. The sun was directly overhead; he had forgotten his compass, and, apparently, he was lost in the very middle of the great plain of Hungary. Buthe had been lost many times before, and in far worse places than this green and smiling expanse; so flat and lying in an atmosphere of such clarity he could well believe the gentle Magyar boast that with the naked eye a man could be distinguished from a beast at a distance of fifteen miles. There appeared to be nothing whatever on the horizon; but an occasional small farm dotted the prairie, and here and there he saw a goose girl with her little flock, a shepherd in his native costume: a long white coat of spun wool, with panels of black embroidered at the edges; a garment as immaculate as if just from the loom, and swung carelessly about the shoulders, the sleeves evidently designed for ornament alone. The little goose girls might have stood for a study in lonely childhood; as Fessenden turned his head one was the solitary figure in the vast expanse behind him; but when he passed her she had nodded brightly and seemed quite content with her lot. It was not his first visit to Hungary; he had voyaged on the Danube and the Theiss in his canoe, and had climbed Retyezat to the lake of Zenoga, making his way thence into Roumania. He knew something of the language and much of the hospitality of the amiable peasant people, and could recall no other country in whose wilderness he would rather be lost. Moreover, the great plains of Hungary reminded him of the wild reaches of his own country. They were green and smiling, indescribably friendly and gentle of aspect, in spite of the barbarous hordes, the fierce battles that had ravaged them, the blood that had soaked their soil; and the American deserts, without history of consequence, scowled eternally at the sun that devoured them, and gave no hospitality to man. But both represented Nature in one of her abrupt desires to emulate the plains of Space; both gave man a sense of personal freedom, of disseverance from the complicationsof life. And the great Alfold had long since suggested to the practical mind of Fessenden what could be done with the Western deserts; in the last five years he had reclaimed the largest of them by means of a complicated system of irrigation, and encouragement of immigration from the Eastern States. One of his dreams was to make the United States fertile and productive from end to end, if only to relieve the congestion in the great centres and give the plain people of his country the happiness they constantly, with reason or without, demanded as their birthright. But he had sighed humorously more than once as he reflected that to compass all his plans would require at least two more lifetimes than Nature had placed at the disposal of any man.
But he had accomplished a great deal, and he was only thirty-one. Thirty years more, and did his energies survive devastating tropical fevers, the rarely relaxing strain of organizing and guarding industries, investments, transit systems, the ever-trembling aggregations of capital called Trusts, sound a money basis as his own were built upon, all the manifold ramifications of a fortune, which, through the increased resources of the country during the past ten years, through his own and his father’s genius, and by the mere force of momentum, was now close upon a billion dollars; still far in the lead of all the other colossal fortunes which in the past decade had raised the United States to a position no less menacing to herself than to the rest of the world; did not only his health, his life, survive the strain, but his ambition, his hope, his faith in the worth while, then might he expect something like immortal fame.
Most men would have said that he had fame and power enough to satisfy any man of his years. Hisaccomplishment in South America alone had made his name a byword on two hemispheres. In company with his college friend, Jeremiah Keene, who promptly renounced the Northwest, he had gone to South America, intent upon fencing it off from European invasion and saving his country from what he believed must otherwise be an inevitable and humiliating war. Privately, he thought the Monroe Doctrine an obsolete absurdity, and heartily wished it never had been conceived. Like all of his countrymen who thought, he would infinitely have preferred the civilizing forces of Europe in South America to the tumultuous opera-bouffe republics of vicious hybrids, where no American could invest his money with a reasonable certainty of seeing the tail of it a year hence; but the Monroe Doctrine was as sacred to the American people as the Lord’s Prayer, therefore the only thing to do was to make it theirs in fact as well as in fancy, and such an accomplishment must be the work of one man, of a citizen of the United States, who possessed that hitherto unheard-of combination of boundless wealth and burning patriotism. The government would never give a serious thought to the matter until the fleets of Europe were in the Caribbean Sea.
The three years in South America Fessenden looked back upon as the most picturesque and satisfying of his life. He had twice nearly died of fever, and he had been stabbed and shot, but life had been adventurous, exciting, never worth a moment’s purchase; above all, one long test of his gifts and resources, with victory in the end. Where immediate bribery had availed not with the suspicious villain in temporary power, he had tracked the biding rival to his lair, furnished him with the necessary outfit and promises, while Keene and other agents persuaded the ever-disaffected people that anotherrevolution was due. With the impromptu gunboats and inexhaustible ammunition sent down by Mr. Abbott, the revolution was an invariable success, and the enthroned dictator, with all the vices of his kind, was still shrewd enough to comprehend that did he wish his reign to be permanent he must be true to his benefactor and give him a free hand.
As a state passed into Fessenden’s control he built a railroad close to the coast, and as he employed native labor as much as possible, and there was a rapid influx of American merchants, he was reverenced as the White God who had brought security and prosperity to a tormented country.
With the more advanced states it was a mere question of capital, particularly as the enterprise was a private one, and sure to bring an increase of civilization and wealth. The last tie had been laid seven years ago, and South America girdled by a complete system of railways, with at least one train on each section running daily. To-day the trains had increased ten per cent., many thousands of discontented North Americans had emigrated, there were American school-houses, churches, villages, and towns in every state, and a new and enormously profitable investment had been found for American capital. Four hundred thousand negroes had emigrated, and, reverting easily to a state of amiable and naked barbarism—sinking to the bottom as naturally as the black mud of the Mississippi—worked in the fields for the white man and forgot the Constitution of the United States. Fessenden’s praises had been sung until he might have become conceited and obnoxious had it not been for the hostile press, which called him a robber baron, an unscrupulous blood-letter, and a future Czar; and so preserved the balance.
Then had come the long years at home, varied only bythe yearly tramp in Europe and an occasional visit to South America, where Keene was his general representative, and his boyhood chum, Jeff Hunter, his scout and secret agent. Two-thirds of the control of affairs had gradually passed into his hands, but he had found time to carry out his father’s more personal programme as well as his own: the great army of working-men in his employ believed in him blindly, and withstood the pressure of trades-unions. He had, indeed, raised the standard of wages throughout the United States, and had made so many bitter enemies that much of his best talent was consumed in circumventing the attempts of other great capitalists to ruin him. With the decent laboring man he was more popular than any President of the United States could hope to be; and this class was not only grateful for his actual benefits, and appreciated his sincerity, but believed that he had been as especially created to pilot the United States through her difficulties as the great men of the early days of the republic. His methods and his genius were different, but so were the times. With the professional politician of the laboring class, with that breed who made their bread and beer by agitating, he was deservedly unpopular, but he now had most of them in his pocket, and they gave him little trouble. He hoped to bring about a condition of living in the United States which would avert a death struggle between capital and labor; if this task were beyond him, then would he at least be in a position in some measure to control it.
When the war broke out with Spain it was a matter of deep mortification and disappointment to him that the great electrical and mechanical ideal he had conceived in his youth was so far from completion. It had, indeed, given him more trouble than all his other enterprises together. Three accomplished electricians had metwith violent deaths in the building on the prairie, and he had their discontented families on his hands. Two reporters had been maimed for life while attempting to solve a mystery which annoyed the public, accustomed to the easy elucidations of the press, and others had “lost their jobs” for failure as signal, if less painful. All these men were among Fessenden’s bitterest and most enterprising foes.
Again and again, when his keenest attention was demanded in New York, he had received an excited telegram bidding him hasten to the spot and witness the final combination which was to affect the great result; and as invariably he had added to the sum of his disappointments. Five years ago the buildings, in the course of a wind-storm, had burned to the ground, and not only the difficult and expensive machinery had gone with them, but the personal effects of several hundred men. More than once Fessenden’s faith had been shaken, and even with the vast resources at his disposal he had hesitated before the increasing costliness of his coy ideal; but he dreaded the possibly demoralizing effect of his first failure; the position in which he could place the United States lured him on; and his father believed in the idea and encouraged him to persist. When the war threatened, Fessenden went out to his Western settlement and worked in the laboratory and machine-shops himself. At the last possible moment he hastened home and raised one of the most satisfactory regiments that went to Cuba. By this time he was a rigid disciplinarian, and his original genius for detail was fully developed. He also found his opportunity to distinguish himself, and returned to New York better pleased with life than since he had left South America.
And the old Fessenden? There was much of him left,for strong individualities with the eternal boy in them change less than psychologists would have us believe, however much they may develop. He was less enthusiastic about some of his old ideals; his patience was at the same time greater and less; he was even more practical than Nature had made him, matter-of-fact and intolerant of shams, and somewhat hardened and cynical by his constant manipulation of fabulous wealth and the buying of men. Although money would never be his god, his life and times had taught him to respect, almost to reverence it as the mightiest force in the world of his day. He had in his brief span watched the crumbling of ancient aristocracies, the progressive ascendency of the middle classes all over Europe, their reconstruction of power in their various states, their contributions to solidity and permanence, their slow absorption of the helpless classes above, and their increasing contempt for royal figure-heads; in his own country he had witnessed an outburst of wealth that in volume and results had never occurred before in the history of the world. He saw the financial centre of gravity swinging steadily from London to New York, the enormous aggregations of capital, combined with the unlimited production of the United States, controlling the markets of the world. Money had raised the United States from a negligible quantity, often mentioned with disrespect, into a menace which was winning for her the precarious tributes of hatred and abuse, more especially since she had let it be seen that she estimated affectionate overtures at their just value.
Therefore was her most characteristic product filled with a quiet and gentle arrogance, sadly, if contemptuously, confident of the illimitable powers of wealth, and owning to a sincere respect for but one man in Europe. With that man, in spite of a deep and mutual friendship,he played many a game of chess, and once in a while he was beaten.
He no longer regarded the severe and ofttimes thunderous visage of William of Germany with envy; for time and work, fever and bitter anxieties had robbed his own face of all its freshness and most of its youth. His long body had lost its lankness, and was closely knit, properly covered, and very erect and imposing; but his face was thin, sallow, lined, and his finely cut features had acquired the sharpness peculiar to the American of intellect who gives his life to practical affairs—the sort that has the mere million-making kink is always as fat of face as of wit. But his smile was still quick and delightful, and his eyes, if sharper, were as bright and dark, sometimes as happy and eager as ever. He had acquired the trick of throwing back his head, lowering his upper lid, and darting a look over a cheek-bone, which was merely impish, or peculiarly disconcerting, according to his mood. As regards the rest of his personal appearance on this October morning in Hungary, he wore a sweater, the oldest pair of trousers in his wardrobe, and a straw hat with the brim turned down—by which it will be seen there was a good deal of the old Fessenden left.
Indeed there was a great deal; and as he rode straight towards the gala village on Count Zrinyi’s estate, he was in a very susceptible not to say sentimental frame of mind—which was usually the case when he was alone in Europe. The fountain of romance in the depths of him still bubbled. He had worked it deeply in the way of adventure and the realizing of patriotic ideals, superficially when he met an attractive woman. But life had pressed him too hard for love; moreover, he was easily disillusioned, and this particular ideal increased in stature and seemed ever more impossible of attainment.He stood on a lonely height himself, and he wanted a woman who stood on one as lonely.