{0383}
“So did lots of others,” replied Mr. Fletcher, cheerfully. “Yes, I know about it. And I'm not sure but it was a lucky thing for me.” He spoke still more cheerfully, and Jack looked at him inquiringly.
“Are you open to an offer?”
“I'm open to almost anything,” Jack answered, with a puzzled look.
“Well,” and Mr. Fletcher settled back in his chair, “I can give you the situation in five minutes. I've been in this business over thirty years—yes; over thirty-five years. It has grown, little by little, until it's a pretty big business. I've a partner, a first-rate man—he is in Europe now—who attends to most of the buying. And the business keeps spreading out, and needs more care. I'm not as young as I was I shall be sixty-four in October—and I can't work right along as I used to. I find that I come later and go away earlier. It isn't the 'work exactly, but the oversight, the details; and the fact is that I want somebody near me whom I can trust, whether I'm here or whether I'm away. I've got good, honest, faithful clerks—if there was one I did not trust, I wouldn't have him about. But do you know, Jack,” it was the first time in the interview that he had used this name—“there is something in blood.”
“Yes,” Jack assented.
“Well, I want a confidential clerk. That's it.”
“Me?” he asked. He was thinking rapidly while Mr. Fletcher had been speaking; something like a revolution was taking place in his mind, and when he asked this, the suggestion took on a humorous aspect—a humorous view of anything had not occurred to him in months.
“You are just the man.”
“I can be confidential,” Jack rejoined, with the old smile on his face that had been long a stranger to it, “but I don't know that I can be a clerk.”
Mr. Fletcher was good enough to laugh at this pleasantry.
“That's all right. It isn't much of a position. We can make the salary twenty-five hundred dollars for a starter. Will you try it?”
Jack got up and went to the area window, and looked out a moment upon the boxes in the dim court. Then he came back and stood by Mr. Fletcher, and put his hand on the desk.
“Yes, I'll try.”
“Good. When will you begin?”
“Now.”
“That's good. No time like now. Wait a bit, and I'll show you about the place before we go to lunch. You'll get hold of the ropes directly.”
This was Mr. Fletcher's veteran joke.
At three o'clock Mr. Fletcher closed his desk. It was time to take his train. “Tomorrow, then,” he said, “we will begin in earnest.”
“What are the business hours here?” asked Jack.
“Oh, I am usually here from ten to three, but the business hours are from nine till the business is done. By-the-way, why not run out with me and spend the night, and we can talk the thing over?”
There was no reason why he should not go, and he went. And that was the way John Corlear Delancy was initiated in the string business in the old house of Fletcher & Co.
Few battles are decisive, and perhaps least of all those that are won by a sudden charge or an accident, and not as the result of long-maturing causes. Doubtless the direction of a character or a career is often turned by a sudden act of the will or a momentary impotence of the will. But the battle is not over then, nor without long and arduous fighting, often a dreary, dragging struggle without the excitement of novelty.
It was comparatively easy for Jack Delancy in Mr. Fletcher's office to face about suddenly and say yes to the proposal made him. There was on him the pressure of necessity, of his own better nature acting under a sense of his wife's approval; and besides, there was a novelty that attracted him in trying something absolutely new to his habits.
But it was one thing to begin, and another, with a man of his temperament, to continue. To have regular hours, to attend to the details of a traffic that was to the last degree prosaic, in short, to settle down to hard work, was a very different thing from the “business” about which Jack and his fellows at the club used to talk so much, and to fancy they were engaged in. When the news came to the Union that Delancy had gone into the house of Fletcher & Co. as a clerk, there was a general smile, and a languid curiosity expressed as to how long he would stick to it.
In the first day or two Jack was sustained not only by the original impulse, but by a real instinct in learning about business ways and details that were new to him. To talk about the business and about the markets, to hear plans unfolded for extension and for taking advantage of fluctuations in prices, was all very well; but the drudgery of details—copying, comparing invoices, and settling into the routine of a clerk's life, even the life of a confidential clerk—was contrary to the habits of his whole life. It was not to be expected that these habits would be overcome without a long struggle and many back-slidings.
The little matter of being at his office desk at nine o'clock in the morning began to seem a hardship after the first three or four days. For Mr. Fletcher not to walk into his shop on the stroke of ten would have been such a reversal of his habits as to cause him as much annoyance as it caused Jack to be bound to a fixed hour. It was only the difference in training. But that is saying everything.
Besides, while the details of his work, the more he got settled in them, were not to his taste, he was daily mortified to find himself ignorant of matters which the stupidest clerk in the office seemed to know by instinct. This acted, however, as a sort of stimulus, and touched his pride. He determined that he would not be humiliated in this way, and during office hours he worked as diligently as Mr. Fletcher could have desired. He had pledged himself to the trial, and he summoned all his intelligence to back his effort.
And it is true that the satisfaction of having a situation, of doing something, the relief to the previous daily anxiety and almost despair, raised his spirits. It was only when he thought of the public opinion of his little world, of some other occupation more befitting his education, of the vast change from his late life of ease and luxury to this of daily labor with a clerk's pay, that he had hours of revolt and cursed his luck.
No, Jack's battle was not won in a day, or a week, or a year. And before it was won he needed more help than his own somewhat irresolute will could give. It is the impression of his biographer that he would have failed in the end if he had been married to a frivolous and selfish woman.
Mr. Fletcher was known as a very strict man of business, and as little else. But he was a good judge of character, and under his notions of discipline and of industry he was a kindly man, as his clerks, who feared his sharp oversight, knew. And besides, he had made a compact with Edith, for whom he had something more than family affection, and he watched Jack's efforts to adjust himself to the new life with sympathy. If it was an experiment for Jack, it was also an experiment for him, the result of which gave him some anxiety. The situation was not a very heroic one, but a life is often decided for good or ill by as insignificant a matter as Jack's ability to persevere in learning about the twine and cordage trade. This was a day of trial, and the element of uncertainty in it kept both Mr. Fletcher and Jack from writing of the new arrangement to Edith, for fear that only disappointment to her would be the ultimate result. Jack's brief notes to her were therefore, as usual, indefinite, but with the hint that he was beginning to see a way out of his embarrassment.
After the passage of a couple of weeks, during which Mr. Fletcher had been quietly studying his new clerk, he suddenly said to him, one Saturday morning, after they had looked over and estimated the orders by the day's mail, “Jack, I think you'd better let up a little, and run down and see Edith.”
“Oh!” said Jack, a little startled by the proposal, but recovering himself; “I didn't suppose the business could spare me.”
“I didn't mean a vacation, but run down for over Sunday. It must be lovely there, and the change will make you as keen as a brier for business. It always does me. Stay over Monday if the weather is good. I have to be away myself the week after.” As Jack hesitated and did not reply, Mr. Fletcher continued:
“I really think you'd better go, Jack. You have hardly had a breath of fresh air this summer. There's plenty of time to go up-town and get your grip and catch the afternoon train.”
Jack was still silent. The thought of seeing Edith created a tumult in his mind. It seemed as if he were not quite ready, not exactly settled. He had been procrastinating so long, putting off going, on one pretext or another, that he had fallen into a sort of fear of going. At first, absorbed in his speculations, enthralled by the company of Carmen and the luxurious, easy-going view of life that her society created for him; he had felt Edith and his house as an irritating restraint. Later, when the smash came, he had been still more relieved that she was out of town. And finally he had fallen into a reckless apathy, and had made himself believe that he never would see her again until some stroke of fortune should set him on his feet and restore his self-respect.
But since he had been with Fletcher & Co. his feelings had gradually undergone a change. With a regular occupation and regular hours, and in contact with the sensible mind and business routine of Mr. Fletcher, he began to have saner views of life, and to realize that Edith would approve what he was now attempting to do much more than any effort to relieve himself by speculation.
As soon as he felt himself a little more firmly established, a little more sure of himself, he would go to Edith, and confess everything, and begin life anew. This had been his mood, but he was still irresolute, and it needed some outside suggestion to push him forward to overcome his lingering reluctance to go home.
But this had come suddenly. It seemed to him at first thought that he needed time to prepare for it. Mr. Fletcher pulled out his watch. “There is a later train at four. Take that, and we will get some lunch first.”
An hour of postponement was such a relief! Why, of course he could go at four. And instantly his heart leaped up with desire.
“All right,” he said, as he rose and closed his desk. “But I think I'd better not stay for lunch. I want to get something for the boy on my way uptown.”
“Very good. Tuesday, then. My best regards to Edith.”
As Jack came down the stairway from the elevated road at Twenty-third Street he ran against a man who was hurrying up—a man in a pronounced traveling-suit, grip-sack and umbrella in hand, and in haste. It was Mavick. Recognition was instantaneous, and it was impossible for either to avoid the meeting if he had desired to do so.
“You in town!” said Mavick.
“And you!” Jack retorted.
“No, not really. I'm just going to catch the steamer. Short leave. We have all been kept by that confounded Chile business.”
“Going for the government?”
“No, not publicly. Of course shall confer with our minister in London. Any news here?”
“Yes; Henderson's dead.” And Jack looked Mavick squarely in the face.
“Ah!” And Mavick smiled faintly, and then said, gravely: “It was an awful business. So sudden, you know, that I couldn't do anything.” He made a movement to pass on. “I suppose there has been no—no—”
“I suppose not,” said Jack, “except that Mrs. Henderson has gone to Europe.”
“Ah!” And Mr. Mavick didn't wait for further news, but hurried up, with a “Good-by.”
So Mavick was following Carmen to Europe. Well, why not? What an unreal world it all was, that of a few months ago! The gigantic Henderson; Jack's own vision of a great fortune; Carmen and her house of Nero; the astute and diplomatic Mavick, with his patronizing airs! It was like a scene in a play.
He stepped into a shop and selected a toy for the boy. It was a real toy, and it was for a real boy. Jack experienced a genuine pleasure at the thought of pleasing him. Perhaps the little fellow would not know him.
And then he thought of Edith—not of Edith the mother, but of Edith the girl in the days of his wooing. And he went into Maillard's. The pretty girl at the counter knew him. He was an old customer, and she had often filled orders for him. She had despatched many a costly box to addresses he had given her. It was in the recollection of those transactions that he said: “A box of marrons glaces, please. My wife prefers that.”
“Shall I send it?” asked the girl, when she had done it up.
“No, thanks; we are not in town.”
“Of course,” she said, beaming upon him; “nobody is yet.”
And this girl also seemed a part of the old life, with her little affectation of familiarity with its ways.
He went to his room—it seemed a very mean little room now—packed his bag, told the janitor he should be absent a few days, and hurried to the ferry and the train as if he feared that some accident would delay him. When he was seated and the train moved off, his thoughts took another turn. He was in for it now.
He began to regret that he had not delayed, to think it all out more thoroughly; perhaps it would have been better to have written.
He bought an evening journal, but he could not read it. What he read between the lines was his own life. What a miserable failure! What a mess he had made of his own affairs, and how unworthy of such a woman as Edith he had been! How indifferent he had been to her happiness in the pursuit of his own pleasure! How would she receive him? He could hardly doubt that; but she must know, she must have felt cruelly his estrangement. What if she met him with a royal forgiveness, as if he were a returned prodigal? He couldn't stand that. If now he were only going back with his fortune recovered, with brilliant prospects to spread before her, and could come into the house in his old playful manner, with the assumed deference of the master, and say: “Well, Edith dear, the storm is over. It's all right now. I am awfully glad to get home. Where's the rascal of an heir?”
{0397}
Instead of that, he was going with nothing, humiliated, a clerk in a twine-store. And not much of a clerk at that, he reflected, with his ready humorous recognition of the situation.
And yet he was for the first time in his life earning his living. Edith would like that. He had known all along that his idle life had been a constant grief to her. No, she would not reproach him; she never did reproach him. No doubt she would be glad that he was at work. But, oh, the humiliation of the whole thing! At one moment he was eager to see her, and the next the rattling train seemed to move too fast, and he welcomed every wayside stop that delayed his arrival. But even the Long Island trains arrive some time, and all too soon the cars slowed up at the familiar little station, and Jack got out.
“Quite a stranger in these parts, Mr. Delancy,” was the easy salutation of the station-keeper.
“Yes. I've been away. All right down here?”
“Right as a trivet. Hot summer, though. Calculate it's goin' to be a warm fall—generally is.”
It was near sunset. When the train had moved on, and its pounding on the rails became a distant roar and then was lost altogether, the country silence so impressed Jack, as he walked along the road towards the sea, that he became distinctly conscious of the sound of his own footsteps. He stopped and listened. Yes, there were other sounds—the twitter of birds in the bushes by the roadside, the hum of insects, and the faint rhythmical murmur of lapsing waves on the shore.
And now the house came in view—first the big roof, and then the latticed windows, the balconies, where there were pots of flowers, and then the long veranda with its hammocks and climbing vines. There was a pink tone in the distant water answering to the flush in the sky, and away to the west the sand-dune that made out into the Sound was a point of light.
But the house! Jack's steps were again arrested. The level last rays of the disappearing sun flashed upon the window-panes so that they glowed like painted windows illuminated from within, with a reddish lustre, and the roofs and the brown sides of the building, painted by those great masters in color, the sun and the sea-wind, in that moment were like burnished gold. Involuntarily Jack exclaimed:
“It is the Golden House!”
He made his way through the little fore yard. No one was about. The veranda was deserted. There was Edith's work-basket; there were the baby's playthings. The door stood open, and as he approached it he heard singing—not singing, either, but a fitful sort of recitation, with the occasional notes of an accompaniment struck as if in absence of mind. The tune he knew, and as he passed through the first room towards the sitting-room that looked on the sea he caught a line:
“Wely, wely, but love is bonny, for a little while—when it is new.”
It was an old English ballad, the ballad of the “Cockle-shells,” that Edith used to sing often in the old days, when its note of melancholy seemed best to express her happiness. It was only that line, and the voice seemed to break, and there was silence.
He stole along and looked in. There was Edith, seated, her head bowed on her hands, at the piano.
In an instant, before she could turn to the sound of his quick footsteps, he was at her side, kneeling, his head bowed in the folds of her dress.
“Edith! I've been such a fool!”
She turned, slid from her seat, and was kneeling also, with her arms thrown about his neck.
“Oh, Jack! You've come. Thank God! Thank God!”
And presently they stood, and his arms were still around her, and she was looking up into his face, with her hands on his shoulders, and saying “You've come to stay.”
“Yes, dear, forever.”
The whole landscape was golden, the sea was silver, on that October morning. It was the brilliant decline of the year. Edith stood with Jack on the veranda. He had his grip-sack in hand and was equipped for town. Both were silent in the entrancing scene.
The birds, twittering in the fruit-trees and over the vines, had the air of an orchestra, the concerts of the season over, gathering their instruments and about to depart. One could detect in the lapse of the waves along the shore the note of weariness preceding the change into the fretfulness and the tumult of tempests. In the soft ripening of the season there was peace and hope, but it was the hope of another day. The curtain was falling on this.
Was life beginning, then, or ending? If life only could change and renew itself like the seasons, with the perpetually recurring springs! But youth comes only once, and thereafter the man gathers the fruit of it, sweet or bitter.
Jack was not given to moralizing, but perhaps a subtle suggestion of this came to him in the thought that an enterprise, a new enterprise, might have seemed easier in May, when the forces of nature were with him, than in October. There was something, at least, that fell in with his mood, a mood of acquiescence in failure, in this closing season of the year, when he stood empty-handed in the harvest-time.
“Edith,” he said, as they paced down the walk which was flaming with scarlet and crimson borders, and turned to look at the peaceful brown house, “I hate to go.”
“But you are not going,” said Edith, brightly. “I feel all the time as if you were just coming back. Jack, do you know,” and she put her hand on his shoulder, “this is the sweetest home in the world now!”
“It is the only one, dear;” and Jack made the statement with a humorous sense of its truth. “Well, there's the train, and I'm off with the other clerks.”
“Clerk, indeed!” cried Edith, putting up her face to his; “you are going to be a Merchant Prince, Jack, that is what you are going to be.”
On the train there was an atmosphere of business. Jack felt that he was not going to the New York that he knew—not to his New York, but to a city of traffic; down into the streets of commercial enterprise, not at all to the metropolis of leisure, of pleasure, to the world of clubs and drawing-rooms and elegant loiterings and the rivalries of society life. That was all ended. Jack was hurrying to catch the down-town car for the dingy office of Fletcher & Co. at an hour fixed.
It was ended, to be sure, but the struggle with Jack in his new life was not ended, his biographer knows, for months and years.
It was long before he could pass his club windows without a pang of humiliation, or lift his hat to a lady of his acquaintance in her passing carriage without a vivid feeling of separateness from his old life. For the old life—he could see that any day in the Avenue, any evening by the flaming lights—went by in its gilded chariots and entrancing toilets, the fascinating whirl of Vanity Fair crowned with roses and with ennui. Did he regret it? No doubt. Not to regret would have been to change his nature, and that were a feat impossible for his biographer to accomplish. In a way his life was gone, and to build up a new life, serene and enduring, was not the work of a day.
One thing he did not regret in the shock he had received, and that was the absence of Carmen and her world. When he thought of her he had a sense of escape. She was still abroad, and he heard from time to time that Mavick was philandering about from capital to capital in her train. Certainly he would have envied neither of them if he had been aware, as the reader is aware, of the guilty secret that drew them together and must be forever their torment. They knew each other.
But this glittering world, to attain a place in which is the object of most of the struggles and hungry competition of modern life, seemed not so real nor so desirable when he was at home with Edith, and in his gradually growing interest in nobler pursuits. They had decided to take a modest apartment in town for the winter, and almost before the lease was signed, Edith, in her mind, had transformed it into a charming home. Jack used to rally her on her enthusiasm in its simple furnishing; it reminded him, he said, of Carmen's interest in her projected house of Nero. It was a great contrast, to be sure, to their stately house by the Park, but it was to them both what that had never been. To one who knows how life goes astray in the solicitations of the great world, there was something pathetic in Edith's pleasure. Even to Jack it might some day come with the force of keen regret for years wasted, that it is enough to break a body's heart to see how little a thing can make a woman happy.
It was another summer. Major Fairfax had come down with Jack to spend Sunday at the Golden House. Edith was showing the Major the view from the end of the veranda. Jack was running through the evening paper. “Hi!” he cried; “here's news. Mavick is to have the mission to Rome, and it is rumored that the rich and accomplished Mrs. Henderson, as the wife of the minister, will make the Roman season very gay.”
“It's too bad,” said Edith. “Nothing is said about the training-school?”
“Nothing.” “Poor Henderson!” was the Major's comment. “It was for this that he drudged and schemed and heaped up his colossal fortune! His life must look to him like a burlesque.”
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CONTENTSIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXVXVIXVIIXVIIIXIXXXXXIXXIIXXIIIXXIVXXVXXVI
CONTENTS
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On a summer day, long gone among the summer days that come but to go, a lad of twelve years was idly and recklessly swinging in the top of a tall hickory, the advance picket of a mountain forest. The tree was on the edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly down to the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in the narrow valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose loud, unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the voice of some tradition of nature that he could not understand.
He had climbed to the topmost branch of the lithe and tough tree in order to take the full swing of this free creature in its sport with the western wind. There was something exhilarating in this elemental battle of the forces that urge and the forces that resist, and the harder the wind blew, and the wider circles he took in the free air, the more stirred the boy was in the spring of his life. Nature was taking him by the hand, and it might be that in that moment ambition was born to achieve for himself, to conquer.
If you had asked him why he was there, he would very likely have said, “To see the world.” It was a world worth seeing. The prospect might be limited to a dull eye, but not to this lad, who loved to climb this height, in order to be with himself and indulge the dreams of youth. Any pretense would suffice for taking this hour of freedom: to hunt for the spicy checker-berries and the pungent sassafras; to aggravate the woodchucks, who made their homes in mysterious passages in this gravelly hillside; to get a nosegay of columbine for the girl who spelled against him in school and was his gentle comrade morning and evening along the river road where grew the sweet-flag and the snap-dragon and the barberry bush; to make friends with the elegant gray squirrel and the lively red squirrel and the comical chipmunk, who were not much afraid of this unarmed naturalist. They may have recognized their kinship to him, for he could climb like any squirrel, and not one of them could have clung more securely to this bough where he was swinging, rejoicing in the strength of his lithe, compact little body. When he shouted in pure enjoyment of life, they chattered in reply, and eyed him with a primeval curiosity that had no fear in it. This lad in short trousers, torn shirt, and a frayed straw hat above his mobile and cheerful face, might be only another sort of animal, a lover like themselves of the beech-nut and the hickory-nut.
It was a gay world up here among the tossing branches. Across the river, on the first terrace of the hill, were weather-beaten farmhouses, amid apple orchards and cornfields. Above these rose the wooded dome of Mount Peak, a thousand feet above the river, and beyond that to the left the road wound up, through the scriptural land of Bozrah, to high and lonesome towns on a plateau stretching to unknown regions in the south. There was no bar to the imagination in that direction. What a gracious valley, what graceful slopes, what a mass of color bathing this lovely summer landscape! Down from the west, through hills that crowded on either side to divert it from its course, ran the sparkling Deerfield, from among the springs and trout streams of the Hoosac, merrily going on to the great Connecticut. Along the stream was the ancient highway, or lowway, where in days before the railway came the stage-coach and the big transport-wagons used to sway and rattle along on their adventurous voyage from the gate of the Sea at Boston to the gate of the West at Albany.
Below, where the river spread wide among the rocks in shallows, or eddies in deep, dark pools, was the ancient, long, covered, wooden bridge, striding diagonally from rock to rock on stone columns, a dusky tunnel through the air, a passage of gloom flecked with glints of sunlight, that struggled in crosscurrents through the interstices of the boards, and set dancing the motes and the dust in a golden haze, a stuffy passage with odors a century old—who does not know the pungent smell of an old bridge?—a structure that groaned in all its big timbers when a wagon invaded it. And then below the bridge the lad could see the historic meadow, which was a cornfield in the eighteenth century, where Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms came suddenly one summer day to the end of their planting and hoeing. The house at the foot of the hill where the boy was cultivating his imagination had been built by Captain Rice, and in the family burying-ground in the orchard above it lay the body of this mighty militia-man, and beside him that of Phineas Arms, and on the headstone of each the legend familiar at that period of our national life, “Killed by the Indians.” Happy Phineas Arms, at the age of seventeen to exchange in a moment the tedium of the cornfield for immortality.
There was a tradition that years after, when the Indians had disappeared through a gradual process of intoxication and pauperism, a red man had been seen skulking along the brow of this very hill and peering down through the bushes where the boy was now perched on a tree, shaking his fist at the hated civilization, and vengefully, some said pathetically, looking down into this valley where his race had been so happy in the natural pursuits of fishing, hunting, and war. On the opposite side of the river was still to be traced an Indian trail, running to the western mountains, which the boy intended some time to follow; for this highway of warlike forays, of messengers of defiance, along which white maidens had been led captive to Canada, appealed greatly to his imagination.
The boy lived in these traditions quite as much as in those of the Revolutionary War into which they invariably glided in his perspective of history, the redskins and the redcoats being both enemies of his ancestors. There was the grave of the envied Phineas Arms—that ancient boy not much older than he—and there were hanging in the kitchen the musket and powder-horn that his great-grandfather had carried at Bunker Hill, and did he not know by heart the story of his great-grandmother, who used to tell his father that she heard when she was a slip of a girl in Plymouth the cannonading on that awful day when Gage met his victorious defeat?
In fact, according to his history-book there had been little but wars in this peaceful nation: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the incessant frontier wars with the Indians, the Kansas War, the Mormon War, the War for the Union. The echoes of the latter had not yet died away. What a career he might have had if he had not been born so late in the world! Swinging in this tree-top, with a vivid consciousness of life, of his own capacity for action, it seemed a pity that he could not follow the drum and the flag into such contests as he read about so eagerly.
And yet this was only a corner of the boy's imagination. He had many worlds and he lived in each by turn. There was the world of the Old Testament, of David and Samson, and of those dim figures in the dawn of history, called the Patriarchs. There was the world of Julius Caesar and the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the Old Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a necessity of his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth declension were made to be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part of his education. He had not been told that they were really a part of the other world which occupied his mind so much of the time, the world of the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe, and Coleridge and Shelley and Longfellow, and Washington Irving and Scott and Thackeray, and Pope's Iliad and Plutarch's Lives. That this was a living world to the boy was scarcely his fault, for it must be confessed that those were very antiquated book-shelves in the old farmhouse to which he had access, and the news had not been apprehended in this remote valley that the classics of literature were all as good as dead and buried, and that the human mind had not really created anything worth modern notice before about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not exactly an ignorant valley, for the daily newspapers were there, and the monthly magazine, and the fashion-plate of Paris, and the illuminating sunshine of new science, and enough of the uneasy throb of modern life. Yet somehow the books that were still books had not been sent to the garret, to make room for the illustrated papers and the profound physiological studies of sin and suffering that were produced by touching a scientific button. No, the boy was conscious in a way of the mighty pulsation of American life, and he had also a dim notion that his dreams in his various worlds would come to a brilliant fulfillment when he was big enough to go out and win a name and fame. But somehow the old books, and the family life, and the sedate ways of the community he knew, had given him a fundamental and not unarmed faith in the things that were and had been.
Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating as it was wicked. The preacher said the world was wicked and vain. It did not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he knew. Of course the boy had no experience. He had never heard of Juvenal nor of Max Nordau. He had no philosophy of life. He did not even know that when he became very old the world would seem to him good or bad according to the degree in which he had become a good or a bad man.
In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but of trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite opportunities. His name—Philip Burnett—with which the world, at least the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks, did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been confronted with it as something apart from himself. But the Philip that he was he felt sure would do something in the world. What that something should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be difficult to write a poem like “Thanatopsis” if he took time enough, building up a line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform. This was a pleasing imagination. Surely his aunt and his cousins in the farmhouse would have more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and treat him with more consideration, and perhaps they would be very anxious about him when he was away in battles, and very proud of him when he came home between battles, and went quite modestly with the family into the village church, and felt rather than saw the slight flutter in the pews as he walked down the aisle, and knew that the young ladies, the girl comrades of the district school, were watching him from the organ gallery, curious to see Phil, who had gone into the army. Perhaps the preacher would have a sermon against war, and the preacher should see how soldierlike he would take this attack on him. Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a reasonable ambition? Perhaps his town would be proud of him if he were a lawyer, a Representative in Congress, come back to deliver the annual oration at the Agricultural Fair. He could see the audience of familiar faces, and hear the applause at his witty satires and his praise of the nobility of the farmer's life, and it would be sweet indeed to have the country people grasp him by the hand and call him Phil, just as they used to before he was famous. What he would say, he was not thinking of, but the position he would occupy before the audience. There were no misgivings in any of these dreams of youth.
The musings of this dreamer in a tree-top were interrupted by the peremptory notes of a tin horn from the farmhouse below. The boy recognized this not only as a signal of declining day and the withdrawal of the sun behind the mountains, but as a personal and urgent notification to him that a certain amount of disenchanting drudgery called chores lay between him and supper and the lamp-illumined pages of The Last of the Mohicans. It was difficult, even in his own estimation, to continue to be a hero at the summons of a tin horn—a silver clarion and castle walls would have been so different—and Phil slid swiftly down from his perch, envying the squirrels who were under no such bondage of duty.
Recalled to the world that now is, the lad hastily gathered a bouquet of columbine and a bunch of the tender leaves and the red berries of the wintergreen, called to “Turk,” who had been all these hours watching a woodchuck hole, and ran down the hill by leaps and circuits as fast as his little legs could carry him, and, with every appearance of a lad who puts duty before pleasure, arrived breathless at the kitchen door, where Alice stood waiting for him. Alice, the somewhat feeble performer on the horn, who had been watching for the boy with her hand shading her eyes, called out upon his approach:
“Why, Phil, what in the world—”
“Oh, Alice!” cried the boy, eagerly, having in a moment changed in his mind the destination of the flowers; “I've found a place where the checker-berries are thick as spatter.” And Phil put the flowers and the berries in his cousin's hand. Alice looked very much pleased with this simple tribute, but, as she admired it, unfortunately asked—women always ask such questions:
“And you picked them for me?”
This was a cruel dilemma. Phil was more devoted to his sweet cousin than to any one else in the world, and he didn't want to hurt her feelings, and he hated to tell a lie. So he only looked a lie, out of his affectionate, truthful eyes, and said:
“I love to bring you flowers. Has uncle come home yet?”
“Yes, long ago. He called and looked all around for you to unharness the horse, and he wanted you to go an errand over the river to Gibson's. I guess he was put out.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He asked if you had weeded the beets. And he said that you were the master boy to dream and moon around he ever saw.” And she added, with a confidential and mischievous smile: “I think you'd better brought a switch along; it would save time.”
Phil had a great respect for his uncle Maitland, but he feared him almost more than he feared the remote God of Abraham and Isaac. Mr. Maitland was not only the most prosperous man in all that region, but the man of the finest appearance, and a bearing that was equity itself. He was the first selectman of the town, and a deacon in the church, and however much he prized mercy in the next world he did not intend to have that quality interfere with justice in this world. Phil knew indeed that he was a man of God, that fact was impressed upon him at least twice a day, but he sometimes used to think it must be a severe God to have that sort of man. And he didn't like the curt way he pronounced the holy name—he might as well have called Job “job.”
Alice was as unlike her father, except in certain race qualities of integrity and common-sense, as if she were of different blood. She was the youngest of five maiden sisters, and had arrived at the mature age of eighteen. Slender in figure, with a grace that was half shyness, soft brown hair, gray eyes that changed color and could as easily be sad as merry, a face marked with a moving dimple that every one said was lovely, retiring in manner and yet not lacking spirit nor a sly wit of her own. Now and then, yes, very often, out of some paradise, no doubt, strays into New England conditions of reticence and self-denial such a sweet spirit, to diffuse a breath of heaven in its atmosphere, and to wither like a rose ungathered. These are the New England nuns, not taking any vows, not self-consciously virtuous, apparently untouched by the vanities of the world. Marriage? It is not in any girl's nature not to think of that, not to be in a flutter of pleasure or apprehension at the attentions of the other sex. Who has been able truly to read the thoughts of a shrinking maiden in the passing days of her youth and beauty? In this harmonious and unselfish household, each with decided individual character, no one ever intruded upon the inner life of the other. No confidences were given in the deep matters of the heart, no sign except a blush over a sly allusion to some one who had been “attentive.” If you had stolen a look into the workbasket or the secret bureau-drawer, you might have found a treasured note, a bit of ribbon, a rosebud, some token of tenderness or of friendship that was growing old with the priestess who cherished it. Did they not love flowers, and pets, and had they not a passion for children? Were there not moonlight evenings when they sat silent and musing on the stone steps, watching the shadows and the dancing gleams on the swift river, when the air was fragrant with the pink and the lilac? Not melancholy this, nor poignantly sad, but having in it nevertheless something of the pathos of life unfulfilled. And was there not sometimes, not yet habitually, coming upon these faces, faces plain and faces attractive, the shade of renunciation?
Phil loved Alice devotedly. She was his confidante, his defender, but he feared more the disapproval of her sweet eyes when he had done wrong than the threatened punishment of his uncle.
“I only meant to be gone just a little while,” Phil went on to say.
“And you were away the whole afternoon. It is a pity the days are so short. And you don't know what you lost.”
“No great, I guess.”
“Celia and her mother were here. They stayed all the afternoon.”
“Celia Howard? Did she wonder where I was?”
“I don't know. She didn't say anything about it. What a dear little thing she is!”
“And she can say pretty cutting things.”
“Oh, can she? Perhaps you'd better run down to the village before dark and take her these flowers.”
“I'm not going. I'd rather you should have the flowers.” And Phil spoke the truth this time.
Celia, who was altogether too young to occupy seriously the mind of a lad of twelve, had nevertheless gained an ascendancy over him because of her willful, perverse, and sometimes scornful ways, and because she was different from the other girls of the school. She had read many more books than Phil, for she had access to a library, and she could tell him much of a world that he only heard of through books and newspapers, which latter he had no habit of reading. He liked, therefore, to be with Celia, not withstanding her little airs of superiority, and if she patronized him, as she certainly did, probably the simple-minded young gentleman, who was unconsciously bred in the belief that he and his own kin had no superiors anywhere, never noticed it. To be sure they quarreled a good deal, but truth to say Phil was never more fascinated with the little witch, whom he felt himself strong enough to protect, than when she showed a pretty temper. He rather liked to be ordered about by the little tyrant. And sometimes he wished that Murad Ault, the big boy of the school, would be rude to the small damsel, so that he could show her how a knight would act under such circumstances. Murad Ault stood to Phil for the satanic element in his peaceful world. He was not only big and strong of limb and broad of chest, but he was very swarthy, and had closely curled black hair. He feared nothing, not even the teacher, and was always doing some dare-devil thing to frighten the children. And because he was dark, morose, and made no friends, and wished none, but went solitary his own dark way, Phil fancied that he must have Spanish blood in his veins, and would no doubt grow up to be a pirate. No other boy in the winter could skate like Murad Ault, with such strength and grace and recklessness—thin ice and thick ice were all one to him, but he skated along, dashing in and out, and sweeping away up and down the river in a whirl of vigor and daring, like a black marauder. Yet he was best and most awesome in the swimming pond in summer—though it was believed that he dared go in in the bitter winter, either by breaking the ice or through an air-hole, and there was a story that he had ventured under the ice as fearless as a cold fish. No one could dive from such a height as he, or stay so long under water; he liked to stay under long enough to scare the spectators, and then appear at a distance, thrashing about in the water as if he were rescuing himself from drowning, sputtering out at the same time the most diabolical noises—curses, no doubt, for he had been heard to swear. But as he skated alone he swam alone, appearing and disappearing at the swimming-place silently, with never a salutation to any one. And he was as skillful a fisher as he was a swimmer. No one knew much about him. He lived with his mother in a little cabin up among the hills, that had about it scant patches of potatoes and corn and beans, a garden fenced in by stumproots, as ill-cared for as the shanty. Where they came from no one knew. How they lived was a matter of conjecture, though the mother gathered herbs and berries and bartered them at the village store, and Murad occasionally took a hand in some neighbor's hay-field, or got a job of chopping wood in the winter. The mother was old and small and withered, and they said evil-eyed. Probably she was no more evil-eyed than any old woman who had such a hard struggle for existence as she had. An old widow with an only son who looked like a Spaniard and acted like an imp! Here was another sort of exotic in the New England life.
Celia had been brought to Rivervale by her mother about a year before this time, and the two occupied a neat little cottage in the village, distinguished only by its neatness and a plot of syringas, and pinks, and marigolds, and roses, and bachelor's-buttons, and boxes of the tough little exotics, called “hen-and-chickens,” in the door-yard, and a vigorous fragrant honeysuckle over the front porch. She only dimly remembered her father, who had been a merchant in a small way in the city, and dying left to his widow and only child a very moderate fortune. The girl showed early an active and ingenious mind, and an equal love for books and for having her own way; but she was delicate, and Mrs. Howard wisely judged that a few years in a country village would improve her health and broaden her view of life beyond that of cockney provincialism. For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement than strength of mind, and passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive little woman, she did not lack a certain true perception of values, due doubtless to the fact that she had been a New England girl, and, before her marriage and emigration to the great city, had passed her life among unexciting realities, and among people who had leisure to think out things in a slow way. But the girl's energy and self-confidence had no doubt been acquired from her father, who was cut off in mid-career of his struggle for place in the metropolis, or from some remote ancestor. Before she was eleven years old her mother had listened with some wonder and more apprehension to the eager forecast of what this child intended to do when she became a woman, and already shrank from a vision of Celia on a public platform, or the leader of some metempsychosis club. Through her affections only was the child manageable, but in opposition to her spirit her mother was practically powerless. Indeed, this little sprout of the New Age always spoke of her to Philip and to the Maitlands as “little mother.”
The epithet seemed peculiarly tender to Philip, who had lost his father before he was six years old, and he was more attracted to the timid and gentle little widow than to his equable but more robust Aunt Eusebia, Mrs. Maitland, his father's elder sister, whom Philip fancied not a bit like his father except in sincerity, a quality common to the Maitlands and Burnetts. Yet there was a family likeness between his aunt and a portrait of his father, painted by a Boston artist of some celebrity, which his mother, who survived her husband only three years, had saved for her boy. His father was a farmer, but a man of considerable cultivation, though not college-bred—his last request on his death-bed was that Phil should be sent to college—a man who made experiments in improving agriculture and the breed of cattle and horses, read papers now and then on topics of social and political reform, and was the only farmer in all the hill towns who had what might be called a library.
It was all scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate, and the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Young's Travels in France, a copy of The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe Harold. Probably these odd volumes had not been considered worth any considerable bid at the auction. From his mother, who was fond of books, and had on more than one occasion, of the failure of teachers, taught in the village school in her native town before her marriage, Philip inherited his love of poetry, and he well remembered how she used to try to inspire him with patriotism by reading the orations of Daniel Webster (she was very fond of orations), and telling him war stories about Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Farragut and Lincoln. He distinctly remembered also standing at her knees and trying, at intervals, to commit to memory the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He had learned it all since, because he thought it would please his mother, and because there was something in it that appealed to his coming sense of the mystery of life. When he repeated it to Celia, who had never heard of it, and remarked that it was all made up, and that she never tried to learn a long thing like that that wasn't so, Philip could see that her respect for him increased a little. He did not know that the child got it out of the library the next day and never rested till she knew it by heart. Philip could repeat also the books of the Bible in order, just as glibly as the multiplication-table, and the little minx, who could not brook that a country boy should be superior to her in anything, had surprised her mother by rattling them all off to her one Sunday evening, just as if she had been born in New England instead of in New York. As to the other fine things his mother read him, out of Ruskin and the like; Philip chiefly remembered what a pretty glow there was in his mother's face when she read them, and that recollection was a valuable part of the boy's education.
Another valuable part of his education was the gracious influence in his aunt's household, the spirit of candor, of affection, and the sane common-sense with which life was regarded, the simplicity of its faith and the patience with which trials were borne. The lessons he learned in it had more practical influence in his life than all the books he read. Nor were his opportunities for the study of character so meagre as the limit of one family would imply. As often happens in New England households, individualities were very marked, and from his stern uncle and his placid aunt down to the sweet and nimble-witted Alice, the family had developed traits and even eccentricities enough to make it a sort of microcosm of life. There, for instance, was Patience, the maiden aunt, his father's sister, the news-monger of the fireside, whose powers of ratiocination first gave Philip the Greek idea and method of reasoning to a point and arriving at truth by the process of exclusion. It did not excite his wonder at the time, but afterwards it appeared to him as one of the New England eccentricities of which the novelists make so much. Patience was a home-keeping body and rarely left the premises except to go to church on Sunday, although her cheerfulness and social helpfulness were tinged by nothing morbid. The story was—Philip learned it long afterwards—that in her very young and frisky days Patience had one evening remained out at some merry-making very late, and in fact had been escorted home in the moonlight by a young gentleman when the tall, awful-faced clock, whose face her mother was watching, was on the dreadful stroke of eleven. For this delinquency her mother had reproved her, the girl thought unreasonably, and she had quickly replied, “Mother, I will never go out again.” And she never did. It was in fact a renunciation of the world, made apparently without rage, and adhered to with cheerful obstinacy.
But although for many years Patience rarely left her home, until the habit of seclusion had become as fixed as that of a nun who had taken the vows, no one knew so well as she the news and gossip of the neighborhood, and her power of learning or divining it seemed to increase with her years. She had a habit of sitting, when her household duties permitted, at a front window, which commanded a long view of the river road, and gathering the news by a process peculiar to herself. From this peep-hole she studied the character and destination of all the passers-by that came within range of her vision, and made her comments and deductions, partly to herself, but for the benefit of those who might be listening.
“Why, there goes Thomas Henry,” she would say (she always called people by their first and middle names). “Now, wherever can he be going this morning in the very midst of getting in his hay? He can't be going to the Browns' for vegetables, for they set great store by their own raising this year; and they don't get their provisions up this way either, because Mary Ellen quarreled with Simmons's people last year. No!” she would exclaim, rising to a climax of certainty on this point, “I'll be bound he is not going after anything in the eating line!”
Meantime Thomas Henry's wagon would be disappearing slowly up the sandy road, giving Patience a chance to get all she could out of it, by eliminating all the errands Thomas Henry could not possibly be going to do in order to arrive at the one he must certainly be bound on.
“They do say he's courting Eliza Merritt,” she continued, “but Eliza never was a girl to make any man leave his haying. No, he's never going to see Eliza, and if it isn't provisions or love it's nothing short of sickness. Now, whoever is sick down there? It can't be Mary Ellen, because she takes after her father's family and they are all hearty. It must be Mary Ellen's little girls, and the measles are going the rounds. It must be they've all got the measles.”
If the listeners suggested that possibly one of the little girls might have escaped, the suggestion was decisively put aside.
“No; if one of them had been well, Mary Ellen would have sent her for the doctor.”
Presently Thomas Henry's cart was heard rumbling back, and sure enough he was returning with the doctor, and Patience hailed him from the gate and demanded news of Mary Ellen.
“Why, all her little girls have the measles,” replied Thomas Henry, “and I had to leave my haying to fetch the doctor.”
“I want to know,” said Patience.
Being the eldest born, Patience had appropriated to herself two rooms in the rambling old farmhouse before her brother's marriage, from which later comers had never dislodged her, and with that innate respect for the rights and peculiarities of others which was common in the household, she was left to express her secluded life in her own way. As the habit of retirement grew upon her she created a world of her own, almost as curious and more individually striking than the museum of Cluny. There was not a square foot in her tiny apartment that did not exhibit her handiwork. She was very fond of reading, and had a passion for the little prints and engravings of “foreign views,” which she wove into her realm of natural history. There was no flower or leaf or fruit that she had seen that she could not imitate exactly in wax or paper. All over the walls hung the little prints and engravings, framed in wreaths of moss and artificial flowers, or in elaborate square frames made of pasteboard. The pasteboard was cut out to fit the picture, and the margins, daubed with paste, were then strewn with seeds of corn and acorns and hazelnuts, and then the whole was gilded so that the effect was almost as rich as it was novel. All about the rooms, in nooks and on tables, stood baskets and dishes of fruit-apples and plums and peaches and grapes-set in proper foliage of most natural appearance, like enough to deceive a bird or the Sunday-school scholars, when on rare occasions they were admitted into this holy of holies. Out of boxes, apparently filled with earth in the corners of the rooms, grew what seemed to be vines trained to run all about the cornices and to festoon the pictures, but which were really strings, colored in imitation of the real vine, and spreading out into paper foliage. To complete the naturalistic character of these everlasting vines, which no scale-bugs could assail, there were bunches of wonderful grapes depending here and there to excite the cupidity of both bird and child. There was no cruelty in the nature of Patience, and she made prisoners of neither birds nor squirrels, but cunning cages here and there held most lifelike counterfeits of their willing captives. There was nothing in the room that was alive, except the dainty owner, but it seemed to be a museum of natural history. The rugs on the floor were of her own devising and sewing together, and rivaled in color and ingenuity those of Bokhara.
But Patience was a student of the heavens as well as of the earth, and it was upon the ceiling that her imagination expanded. There one could see in their order the constellations of the heavens, represented by paper-gilt stars, of all magnitudes, most wonderful to behold. This part of her decorations was the most difficult of all. The constellations were not made from any geography of the heavens, but from actual nightly observation of the positions of the heavenly bodies. Patience confessed that the getting exactly right of the Great Dipper had caused her most trouble. On the night that was constructed she sat up till three o'clock in the morning, going out and studying it and coming in and putting up one star at a time. How could she reach the high ceiling? Oh, she took a bean-pole, stuck the gilt star on the end of it, having paste on the reverse side, and fixed it in its place. That was easy, only it was difficult to remember when she came into the house the correct positions of the stars in the heavens. What the astronomer and the botanist and the naturalist would have said of this little kingdom is unknown, but Patience herself lived among the glories of the heavens and the beauties of the earth which she had created. Probably she may have had a humorous conception of this, for she was not lacking in a sense of humor. The stone step that led to her private door she had skillfully painted with faint brown spots, so that when visitors made their exit from this part of the house they would say, “Why, it rains!” but Patience would laugh and say, “I guess it is over by now.”