Rulers of Kings

A Novel

By
Gertrude Atherton

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
1904

Copyright, 1904, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.
Published April, 1904.

To
Poultney Bigelow
one of the
small band of American writers
who dares at all times to tell the truth
whose patriotism is genuine and useful
and who has revealed to us so
much of modern Europe

May it not be that in every family there are unborn children—souls that have come too late perhaps to find a medium, yet, in consequence of their hereditary particles, unable to seek it elsewhere? We know not what mysterious dissolutions and recombinations of spirit take place in the realm where the released forces go, with what deliberation the essences of families are remixed; oftenest, no doubt, with commonplace results; sometimes with intent to bring humiliation and disaster upon a house which has transgressed too many laws; yet again, combining the great characteristics of mind and soul and temperament of those who have distinguished themselves in history, with such weaknesses as must inevitably destroy all three—as in the notable instance of the last Rudolf von Hapsburg. Again, the best may have been remixed with only enough of human weakness and passion that love may be inspired instead of awe, that happiness without disaster may be possible. And yet the most fortunate of these fusions may be finished too late for its generation, and be forced to bide its time invisible; or perhaps, by some spiritual statute of limitations, is deprived of its earthly rights forever. Nevertheless, it may linger in spirit where it should walk in its servant of flesh, and unknown, unsuspected, take its part in the daily life of its kin, having its own influence perhaps on their destinies and on history. And the romanticist, so much of whose time is spent in the unreal world, may fancy, once in a way, that one of these belated souls has swum into his ken, and that his privilege is to rescue it, to fit it to the part for which Nature so tirelessly equipped it.

Note.—The dinner described in Chapter IV., Part II. occurred in 1897, but it being necessary that the action of the story should take place several years later, I have brought it forward. This of course could not have been done had certain circumstances arisen which might have given immediate historic results to the speech of the Emperor of Germany. Those circumstances not having arisen, it makes little difference whether the speech was delivered yesterday or six years ago. Otherwise, the dinner, the speech, its effect upon the Hungarian magnates present, its reception next day by the Hungarian press and people, were as described.

PART I

RULERS OF KINGS

I

WHEN Fessenden Abbott heard that he was to inherit four hundred millions of dollars he experienced the profoundest discouragement he was ever to know, except on that midnight ten years later when he stood on a moonlit balcony in Hungary, alone with the daughter of an Emperor, and opened his contemptuous American mind to the deeper problems of Europe.

His ambition had been immeasurable, yet almost defined. His hopes had been the confident imperious extravagances of a youth in whom narrow circumstances and a high indomitable spirit had developed that ardent personal force which equips man to conquer life. His ideals had soared in stellar spaces—ideals created by passionate brooding on the careers of Washington, Hamilton, Napoleon, Nelson, Cromwell, Kossuth, the great Hunyadis, Alexander, Cæsar, Rudolph the First of Austria. How he had pored over the lives of this catholic assortment of heroes while his fingers froze and the winds roared through the Adirondack wilderness; on hot summer afternoons as he trudged behind his plough, the reins wound about one arm, his book in the bend of the other, vaguely wondering sometimes why his manifest delinquencies were never noticed.

As he looked back he marvelled at the bluntness of his observation. His difference from the other young men of that high gallery of the continent must have been obvious, and whenever he thought of his dead mother it was to associate her with a magnificence of personal environment which in time he grew to believe he had borrowed from the Arabian Nights for the more loyal framing of a created memory; certainly in real life, even in those huge cities where men made money, even in the vast cold palaces of Europe, of which he had read, there could be nothing to-day like those splendors which haunted his young mind.

He had just investigated the interiors of the toys of his third Christmas when he was made to keep so quiet for four days that he became a miserable and obstreperous baby; on the fifth he forgot the troubles of his past in a twelve-hours’ journey with his doting father. His indulgent nurse had been dismissed, and a woman with a white cap and a firm admonishing eye formed the rear of his body-guard, and held him to the window when his restless legs sent his father to the smoking compartment. He could remember still his bewildered sensation as the train climbed slowly through dark forests, as hard black peaks travelled across his blinking vision. Of the night ride through the woods in a springless wagon he recalled little but the sharp accentuations of the “bull’s-eye” and the deep sighs of his nurse. After that, life for several years was too monotonous for memories. He lived in a farm-house without toys and sweets—which he quickly forgot—and after the departure of his nurse at the end of three months his was the life of any mountain-boy; out of doors in the wildest weather, out of bed at six o’clock, cuffed, spanked, roughly petted by the farmer’s mother, beside whose bed he slept during the remaining years of his childhood. Twice a year his father came and spent a day on the Nettlebeck farm. In summer Fessenden led him through the woods, and exhibited his many treasures, expounded the forest lore to which he had instinctively applied himself as soon as he could run alone—unanticipative of the lore to which it would be the golden key in more difficult years. In winter they sat in the best parlor, close to a red stove, which made the boy, little used to the luxury of fires, sleepy and almost ill. Neither woods nor fire inspired Mr. Abbott to many words. He examined the boy in his studies, and took his physical measurements, comparing them with previous entries in a little red book. Then, after an interval of sound fatherly advice, and another of tender interest, he usually went to sleep; or remained motionless for hours, his weary eyes fixed and rapt, his lips and nostrils quivering occasionally, but stern, immobile, relentless, the lower lip raised, the upper drawn down and under. His little son fidgeted, coughed respectfully, yawned shamelessly, and finally stole away. Mr. Abbott, upon his arrival, always presented Fessenden with a box of books, several red sweaters, and, as soon as he was old enough, a new pair of trousers—for his Sunday use; the boy wore overalls on other days. Mr. Abbott forbade him to clothe his more conspicuous part in anything but red, that he might be found in briefer time if lost, and avoided with less effort in the hunting season.

The books were selected with a careful regard for his succeeding years, and under their insidious gardening his imagination developed and his horizon receded. He received his elementary schooling from a young woman on a neighboring farm. At the same time his body grew tall and strong and his temper fierce. He took as easily to fighting as to books; he was sometimes ignominiously whipped by hulking mountain-boys, sometimes he won against heavy odds, for he had an instinct for the scientific rules of the game, a long wind, hard muscles, and the primitive delight of the small boy in war. The fights were not uncommonly for the favor of some baby minx, but oftener for the pure lust of battle. He was frequently mangled and battered when his father arrived, but Mr. Abbott merely laughed, and, on the whole, seemed to approve his appearance. So passed the uneventful years until his tenth birthday, when life began to ring its changes.

II

Mr. Abbott sat in the rocking-chair by the hot stove regarding his son with his dreamy far-seeing eyes. For the first time Fessenden wondered who and what his father was. This man was like no one in the books he had read, like no one in the Adirondacks. He was a boy of direct methods, and was about to ask for information when his father spoke.

“I am more gratified at your physical development than you will ever know, my son,” said Mr. Abbott, tenderly. “When I brought you here you were fragile and undersized; it was thought that your chance of becoming a strong man, or of reaching manhood at all, was perhaps two in ten. But I knew the magic of the mountains; I made my experiment, and I have succeeded. There are other things I wish to say to you, however, so sit down and listen attentively.”

Fessenden, in a glow of expectation, fell upon a corner of the sofa, and Mr. Abbott continued.

“Originally I planned to speak to you decisively when you were thirteen or fourteen, but it seems to me that you are brighter than most boys of your age; I think I cannot begin too soon to prepare you for the future. Some boys are taught to say their prayers. I presume you have been taught to say yours by our good Mrs. Nettlebeck, and I am sure I hope you say them; but I want you to repeat, every Saturday night before you lie down, these words I am going to teach to you; if you forget them, to rise in the coldest and darkest night, stand in the middle of the room, and repeat them twice. The words are these—write them down: ‘Life is a fight. Millions fail. Only the strong win. Failure is worse than death. Man’s internal strength is created by watching Circumstance like a hawk, meeting her every spring stiff and straight, laughing at her pitfalls—which in the beginning of life are excess, excess, and always excess, and all manner of dishonor. Strength is created by adversity, by trying to win first the small battles of life, then the great, by casting out fear, by training the mind to rule in all things—the heart, the passions, the impulses, which if indulged make the brain the slave instead of the master. Success, for which alone a man lives, if he be honest with himself, comes to those who are strong, strong, strong.’ When you have finished that I want you to repeat ‘No’ aloud for ten minutes. The time will come when you will rejoice that ‘No’ flies, instead of moving reluctantly, to your tongue. As for that prayer I have given you, you may not understand it all now, but you will as you grow older, better and better; you will analyze and ponder upon it. Life is choked and gasping with young men trying to get a decent living, with thousands besides struggling for a career, reputation. I shall do my best to educate you, but I want you to grow up with the distinct understanding that you must support yourself when that preparatory period is over. I may be able to help you to some sort of a position, but I may be dead—and I must do what I can for your sister—”

“My what?” shouted Fessenden. “You never told me I had a sister!”

“Did I not? I should have thought I must have mentioned it. She was born when your mother died, and her name is Alexandra. Do not interrupt me again, and listen attentively. I wish you, as I have just said, to grow up with the clearly defined idea that you must make your own way in the world, make every dollar you spend, owe your position, and the respect you may be able to inspire, to your personality—to the dignity of your character and the brilliancy of your mind. I shall keep you here until you are ready for college, where I hope to be able to send you; for, unlike many Americans, I believe in educating a man like a gentleman. I have just met with a piece of extraordinary good fortune: the other day an old friend called on me for the first time in many years; he told me that his son, a Harvard man, and a profound student, was so delicate that he might be obliged to spend the remainder of his life in the high altitudes. I called on the young man immediately—his name is Stanley Morris—and persuaded him to come here, for I realized what such companionship would mean to my bright little son. He was very glad of the suggestion, and agreed, for the sake of a small annual sum, to become your teacher—in time to prepare you for college. It was a great relief to my mind, for I want you to remain in this healthy mountain region until you are grown, and, of course, expensive tutors and schools are out of the question. He will be able to teach you German and French among other things, and he has a large library. Therefore, I shall not send you any more books. Fortunately you need only these rough clothes up here. I feel quite confident that I shall be able to afford the small yearly sum Mr. Morris demands. But you are never to forget that you are studying for equipment, not as the mere routine of youth. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Fessenden was deeply impressed, but longing, nevertheless, to get away from the stove and steer the conversation to lighter topics. His young brain felt as if it had been hammered. “Couldn’t you send my sister up here?” he asked.

“No; you will have little in common till you are grown. You would act detrimentally upon each other. Girls have such a different part to play in life,” he concluded, somewhat vaguely.

“I’d like her picture.”

“I will send it to you, but you are to promise me first that you will not write to her. I want no sentimental nonsense.”

“I hate to write letters, so I don’t mind promising.”

There was a long silence during which Mr. Abbott dreamed and Fessenden squirmed.

“Are you a success, father, or a failure?”

Mr. Abbott jumped. “I?—well—I will let you judge of that for yourself when you are grown.”

“Do you keep a grocery store?—or teach school?—or write books?”

“No,” Mr. Abbott laughed. “But I get my humble living honestly. I am a lawyer by profession.”

“What is a lawyer?”

“Dear, happy child! All in good time, my boy. Now run out in the air if you like. Your cheeks are very red. Perhaps you will find an apple in my bag.”

III

During the following week Fessenden read little and was too amiably excited for battle. He had seen few strangers in that primeval wilderness—no gentleman but his father; and Mr. Abbott had taken pains to admonish him that he was never to forget he was a gentleman—to criticise his table manners, gait, and carriage. In the course of his last visit, after he had twice swept his son’s elbows off the table and arrested his knife on its flight to the butter-dish, he had said, severely: “I am not raising you to be a congressman from a backwoods district. Without manners your morals might just as well be bad as good. I am no democrat. I believe in hard work, and above all things I despise the idle fools that rich fathers foist upon the world; but I equally despise the man who ever forgets he was born a gentleman. You were. One reason why I have persuaded Stanley Morris to come here is that you may be reminded constantly that you are not to grow up a country lout, and disgrace—your sister, when the time comes for you to meet. Do you think that small head can remember all this tiresome advice?”

“Youbetcherlife! But can’t I fight any more?” Fessenden had asked anxiously. “I feel my goodest when I’ve wiped the face off’n a chap.”

“Oh, fight all you like. Never take an insult. Never see a woman insulted. Never take a back seat. If you did I’d disown you. But put on no airs, even when you are being properly educated by Morris. I despise a snob as much as I abhor a weakling.”

“What is a snob?”

“The snob is a man who furnishes comedy for others and tragedy for himself.”

Fessenden’s eyes were a hard blue stare, but experience had taught him that when his father was cryptic he did not intend to be questioned further.

Two rooms on the second floor facing the south were put in such order as young Abbott had heretofore associated with the unlicensed imagination of the story-teller. Not only were the walls covered with heavy red paper, but a special car was switched off at a distant station, and its contents, when hauled the intervening miles and unpacked, proved to be worn but red and luxurious furniture, four bookcases, several heavy rugs, two stoves, and some nine hundred books. Fessenden unwrapped and shelved every book, his fingers tingling, unfaithful for the moment to his chipmunks and rabbits, his hidden places in the forest where he was the mighty leader of an invisible robber band.

When all was in order, Mr. Stanley Morris arrived. He was very tall and attenuated, with a bulging brow and long pale fingers. Nature had designed him for the ascetic and scholar, and doubtless had taken back a mere sufficiency of his lung cells to complete her purpose. On this shelf of the world he could live into old age, pack his avid brain with the master thoughts of other men, and one day, possibly, give to the world a thought system of his own.

“He kinder gives me the dumps,” remarked Fritz Nettlebeck, as he filled his pipe in the kitchen that evening. “I don’t take to people who looks as if their brains was distributed all over them. His head-piece is twice the size of an ordinary man’s, but he looks as if he kept that for Sundays, and any other part of him would do as well for other days.”

“You’re gitten imagination,” said Christina, with contempt. She was a sour and elderly virgin, hard-worked, now that her mother was growing old, and disapproving of her brothers in all their phases. Beaux were few in that vast and lonely wilderness, and these few had passed her by. Even the hired man had failed to succumb to the potencies of propinquity and the only woman. She was an uncommonly good cook for an American of her class—her parents were Hamburgers—and had won favor with the campers who ventured into this part of the Adirondacks, Mr. Abbott among the number; but if her cake was delicate, her griddle-cakes light, her venison a culinary achievement, her temper had been bitter from childhood, her sarcasm a thing to make a strong man falter and slink away. Christina was very proud of this substitute for scholarship, and persuaded herself that it compensated her for all that lay buried in ligneous spinsterhood. “The young un’ll have to turn to now, I guess,” she continued. “Much chores you’ll git out of him if he’s got to learn all them books. And he’s real handy about the house, too. He’s mended a power of things for me.”

“You’re sweet on that kid,” said Nettlebeck, with borrowed sarcasm. “It’s about the only soft spot you’ve got. But if you make him sick again on cocoanut-cake, and his father finds it out, he’ll be packed off, I give you that.”

“Who is that father of his, anyhow?” Christina never argued when she was sure of defeat; and having sat up all night with Fessenden—who had stolen the greater part of the cake—she was not prepared to face the enemy. “I don’t believe he’s as poor as he makes out. The mortgage is paid off this farm, I happen to know—”

“And you’re insinuatin’ that your two brothers ain’t hard-workin’ enough to pay it off theirselves!” cried Nettlebeck, bringing his fist down on the table with such violence that Christina’s pile of clean plates rattled, and she gave a wholly feminine shriek. “If you ever insult me like that again I’ll git a wife, and how’ll you like that?”

This threat never failed to subdue Christina, for although she shrewdly guessed that no girl within a radius of a hundred miles had the courage to become her sister-in-law, she knew that a desperate man might make a pilgrimage to some distant town which her fame had not penetrated. She sniffed, muttered something about not being minded to insult her own family, whatever she might think of folks in general, and carried off her dishes to their shelves.

“Mr. Abbott,” resumed Nettlebeck, having given his wrath such time to cool as a female could expect, “is a generous and self-sacrificin’ father, and he just worships that kid; he’d wear one suit of clothes a year to give him what he needed, and of course keep don’t cost much up here. As for this here Morris, he’s spent all his money on books and furniture, thinkin’ he was goin’ to be a college professor. Mr. Abbott must have got him cheap. And the little we git from the old man’s regular. Just you remember that.”

“I ain’t forgettin’. Nobody asked you to make excuses for Mr. Abbott bein’ alive. I s’pose he ain’t payin’ fur that canoe, either.”

“That there canoe is a second-handed one, and I got it dirt cheap. Mr. Abbott consulted me about it when he was here last, and asked me to do the best I could, as he’d like the kid to have a canoe if one could be got inside his means. But Fess ain’t to know it’s here till his birthday comes round; so mind your own business till the ice goes out, if you can.” And Mr. Nettlebeck slouched off to join his brother in the barn and avoid further questions.

“I ain’t no fool,” confided Christina to herself, as she “covered” her fire. “But I know which side my bread’s buttered on, and the young un’ll git no hint from me. Then when our share in raisin’ him is over, there’ll be a big present all-round, or my name ain’t Christina Nettlebeck. There’s been too many campers in these woods in my time, and I know a rich man and a gentleman when I see one. Mr. Abbott was the worst-lookin’ tramp in the woods I ever saw, and that’s a sure sign. It’s lucky, though, the kid’s what he is, for I couldn’t stand a hateful brat, nohow.”

IV

Like all invalids, Morris had little affection for any one but himself, but what he lacked in human sympathy he atoned for in courtesy of manner and nicety of conscience. He instructed Fessenden until that restless youngster besought Nettlebeck to find him many “chores.” But Fessenden was still too small to chop down trees, to plough ice, or to saw wood, and there is little other work in the mountains in winter. There was no alternative but to accommodate himself to his new condition, and brace his endurance by repeating his father’s advice and attempting to understand it. At the end of the long winter he was studying hard and fighting less. Now that he did not recite on the neighboring farm, there was no one to fight with, except on such rare occasions as when a boy came to borrow of Christina after some culinary disaster at home or some unexpected shortage at the mountain “store.” Fessenden, no matter how deep in study, seemed to scent the messenger from afar, and was standing in the middle of the slippery road, his muscles bunched, his eye glaring like a tiger’s, when his expectant foe, uttering a hideous war-whoop, flung his bag into a snowdrift and hurled himself upon the champion. Upon these occasions, Dolf, the younger of the Nettlebeck brothers, always dropped his work and encouraged the sport. When it was over, no matter what the issue, Christina invariably cuffed Fessenden, then made him a cake; and gentle old Mrs. Nettlebeck wept profusely as she sponged him off, convinced that it would yet be her mournful duty to lay him out. Her own sons had the peaceful blood of the German peasant in them, and this enterprising American lad was a dear and perpetual mystery. Upon one occasion, when he looked like a blind puppy, and study was out of the question for two days, Morris improved the occasion in the interest of reform.

“You are a great fighter, Fess,” he began, tactfully; “and it does my poor blood good to watch so much energy explode. Only it seems to me a waste. Why don’t you concentrate your energy in your brain and become a leader by the force of superior will and intelligence?”

“When I fight with my head I fight with its outside,” replied Fessenden dryly. “I’ve got to make myself understood, and I do, you bet. And I’m not complaining of the headache next day, neither.”

“Think of what I’ve said, however. You have established your reputation as a fighter; you occupy the proud position of champion among boys of your own age and older. The raging hate which must saturate you when fighting like a savage would make me feel mean and terrified for days after. It is all very well to know how to use your fists, and no doubt they are of service to you here, and at your age; but they will play a small part in after-life, and your character will play a very great one. You are so constituted that if you would learn to control yourself you could command your fellows with little effort; and at least when you fight try not to hate so hard.”

“How would you like Christina’s puddings with all the raisins left out? Would you mind reading to me?”

“As long as you like.” And Morris made him comfortable on the sofa, and read from the lives of ancient warriors until the heir of the ages fell asleep.

Fessenden’s mind at this time was a virgin field into which seeds fell to rise again and be tended by a curious young tiller. Those flung into a fertile crevice by Morris, who took the responsibility very seriously, put out their green heads in time. Fessenden nodded his recognition, and, although they were by no means his favorite products, between their insistency and a decreasing lack of opportunity, he arrived, in the course of another year, at the conclusion that it might be interesting to make boys follow his lead without resorting to primitive methods. “I suppose one might as well wait till one has a real call to fight,” he remarked to himself with philosophy. “The animals don’t fight till they have to—none, that is, but dogs, and perhaps that’s living so much with us—we sickin’ them on and all that. It’s good to fight, though,” he added, with a long sigh, “even if the headache does last longer than the fun—that’s a point. Perhaps Mr. Morris is right, although I’d like to know what he knows about it. Maybe I’ll try the other tack and see what there’s in it, but there are some things will make my fists fly till I’m eighty. I guess I wasn’t cut out for a Sunday-school teacher.” Nevertheless, he worked himself into such a terrific rage the next time he was challenged—after an unusual period of virtuous abstinence—that he was thoroughly frightened at the result: for several days he felt flat and peevish, and more worn out in mind than in body. Morris came upon him in the forest where he was seated on a stump dismally chewing a cud, and embraced an obvious opportunity.

“After all,” he said sympathetically, “what you fight for is supremacy, is it not? Why not get it some other way? Although you poison yourself with the hate you feel while actually fighting, hate is never the motive of battle with you. You like all these boys well enough, but you must find out who is the best man or burst. Find it out some other way—or rather, having decided that point, try others. Besides, the great man uses the brute force of others, he rarely indulges in it himself. Did not Napoleon sit aloft on a hill while his hundreds of thousands of nameless minions did the fighting? So long as they could see that being whom they looked upon as an emanation from the divine intellect, they were willing to fight like fanatics, but if he had rushed forward with a musket and fallen, the ranks would have scattered in irretrievable panic. Are you cultivating your prowess to fight years hence when a great man orders you out?”

“Not much,” growled Fessenden.

“Well, take me out in your canoe now. We’ll talk it over further this evening.”

Fessenden’s twelfth birthday occurred a week later, and he persuaded Christina to give him a party and invite his enemies. They came, howling through the mountain passes, brandishing big sticks as a manifest of their readiness for the fray. But although, having been invited to dinner and birthday cake, they expected a respite of perhaps two hours, they were disconcerted, and privately alarmed at being received by young Abbott quite in the style of the grand seigneur. He wore a new white sweater and a new pair of trousers, and he had been scrubbed and brushed by Mrs. Nettlebeck until, to mountain taste, he was offensively godly. He greeted his weather-beaten guests with a hearty grip of the hand, insinuated his appreciation of the forgiving spirit so touchingly displayed, and when he had them all seated about the table in the large kitchen he entertained them brilliantly with anecdotes from his most exciting books, while they devoured Christina’s substantial dainties. When he had gorged them into a state of sleepy good-nature, he led them out into the woods, and, mounting a stump, invited them to spin yarns of personal prowess. Each youth in turn told a tale of terrible adventure and glorious triumph, which Fessenden applauded as a host should. When they were alert once more and ready for action, he organized them into a band of pirates, and they scuttled several ships with such demoniacal vigor that they worked off all the steam that was left in them; and departed at nightfall vowing that Fessenden—who was now dirty enough to satisfy the most exacting standard—was the finest fellow in the woods, and that they’d never had such a Time since they were born.

After supper Fessenden untied his canoe, Pocahontas—whom he loved better than any mortal except his father—and pulled out into the evening shadows. The Nettlebeck farm was on a clearing of some fifty acres on the north and east shores of a large lake. Surrounding it on three sides was the virgin unkempt forest, as yet undesecrated by the lumberman or the logger. Just beyond the clearing the forest grew to the shores of the lake—a body of water so clear that in the early morning and evening, until the ice came, or except when the winds raged, the great spruces and pines, the beeches and maples, looked as if petrified in one of the old glaciers which had ground this vast region into form. Beyond the lake, beyond the surrounding forest, rose the encircling chain of gentle peaks, some barren rocks of eccentric shape, others black with woods. This evening their upper slopes were white with a late fall of snow. The Nettlebecks, like all American farmers, had done what they could to make Nature hideous, and their big house with its haphazard additions, the barns and boat-house, the ragged orchard and vegetable garden, were like a patchwork apron on the robes of a goddess. But Fessenden had turned his back on the Nettlebeck outrage, and not a shingle could he see—not a column of smoke. The blue shadows on the mountains were melting as the stars came out. The silence was so intense that Nature seemed to laugh noiselessly at man’s puny attempt to impress himself upon her higher solitudes.

Fessenden shot his canoe round a bend, and entered a long water-pass, irregular, half-choked with reeds and swamp, dark from the forest on the slopes of the gorge. It led to another lake, the second in a long chain of lakes great and small, on many of which some farmer had made his clearing and erected his monstrosities. But the gorge was long, and the next lake too wild and rocky to invite the attentions of man. Fessenden could paddle far, and fancy himself as alone in the great Adirondack wilderness as the first Red Indian. From the day when Mrs. Nettlebeck had allowed him to run unattended, much of his time had been spent apart. The nearest neighbor lived three miles away, on the farm where with several other boys he had attended school of a sort for four months in the year. The boys were kept busy at other times, and only sought him out when, like himself, they ached for a fight. Solitude had become as necessary in his life as his bed and his bread; and except when storms raged and the thermometer stood too far below zero, he left the house the moment his studies with his tutor were over, and took his reading into the woods or his canoe. On Saturdays and Sundays he was not permitted to open a book, and during the short summer there were no mental tasks. He spent these holidays in the woods or on the water, only returning to the house for his evening meal and his hard bed. Occasionally Morris accompanied him, and taught him much of practical forestry; but although the man and the boy were good friends, each preferred his solitudes—his long silences.

To-night Fessenden was in a strangely exultant mood which he was anxious to understand. He was tired, for he had played hard; but it was a pleasant languor beside the exhaustion which followed his pitched battles, to say nothing of their accompaniment of gaping wounds and nervous depression. He had passed successfully through his first attempt at diplomacy and self-command; his fists had ached more than once, for Jeff Hunter was in fine fighting trim and invariably lashed his crimson tide; and he tasted all the sweets of power, of dominating in a new rôle, of discovering unsuspected talents, and of using them easily in the control of his fellows. He looked back upon his career of fists and blood, this youngster of twelve, with much the same disgust and contempt as might animate a debauchee crossing the threshold of reform. He did not return home until midnight, and in those lonely hours under the stars, in the profoundest stillness that America can give us, his ambition was born. He felt able to go out and conquer the world then and there; but he was modest by an earlier endowment, and the value of a sound education had been impressed upon his responsive mind. But his soul took a long flight, and met on high vague and beautiful shapes, which, when he was older, he knew men called ideals—looked down upon a wonderful world far beyond these mountains, wherein was stored the records of an eternity of great deeds, where greater still were doing; where, in the nebulous galleries of time, things beyond human imaginings awaited the quickening touch of men still in the making.

Fessenden returned and raided the pantry for a glass of milk, but it was some time before he sought his bed. In the depths of his soul the sleeping man still muttered, and he felt like Mercury poised for a flight and not knowing which way to turn, but half drunk with wondrous possibilities. The full moon hung low on the reflecting lake. The mountain-tops were white, their lower forests black. The deer came noiselessly out of the woods and drank. The sublime and lonely scene murmured voicelessly of its greater kin in the highest valleys of the alpine world. Fessenden, standing on the upper veranda of the house, again saw only Nature, unchanged since a thousand years. Her silences might never have been broken.

“You—kid!” cried a shrill voice as a window flew open. “What on earth are you doin’ up this time of night? Lands sakes! Git into bed this minute or I’ll come out and cuff you good.” And Fessenden, who had a wholesome respect for Christina, fled to his room and was asleep in ten minutes.

V

But although solitude moulded unceasingly in the structure of Fessenden Abbott’s character, and with coincident intellectual development opened Gothic spaces in his soul which made him lastingly different from the city-bred man, yet was his life on the whole much like that of any healthy youngster of his age who lived his boyhood in an American wilderness. He played pioneer to his complete satisfaction, and blazed trails in all directions through the forest. In company with the redoubtable Jeff Hunter, he built a hut on an island in a lake of wild and uninhabitable surroundings, and impersonated Crusoe to his old enemy’s Friday. This social triumph was not won without another struggle, partly fistic, partly diplomatic; and Fessenden regarded the issue as his greatest achievement. After the first supper, cooked by Friday and eaten with the graciousness of royalty by his master, Jeff succumbed amiably and followed Fessenden on such adventurous tramps as his hard-working father would permit. They spent many days and nights, during the summer months, on the island, from which they sallied forth into the forest or to the high peaks of the range in search of Nature’s dearest terrors. They were once treed by a bear, whose cubs they stumbled over; but managed to escape, by climbing from tree-top to tree-top, when the bear was obliged to return to maternal duties; they had, with what discrimination was possible, selected trees too slender for the bear to mount. During one of Mr. Abbott’s visits he was entertained on the island; and by the light of a camp-fire and to the accompaniment of ominous sounds in the surrounding forest was regaled by an account of this adventure, to say nothing of one with a panther, and yet another with a catamount, told by Fessenden in a direct unvarnished style which made his father tingle with pride and an echo of youth. Shortly after, Fritz Nettlebeck remarked to the boys that he had two shotguns which “he guessed they were old enough to use, and he’d teach ’em and give ’em the loan of the guns provided they learned how to shoot straight and would promise to be careful.” The immediate result was an indiscriminate slaughter and loud protests from Christina, who viewed an overstocked and gory larder with disfavor. When, however, they had riddled and dragged home a bear, they were thereafter too proud to kill small game for other than purposes of replenishment. In the hunting season they spent their Saturdays on the runs, and killed more deer than the law allowed. One fine buck was shipped to Mr. Abbott by Nettlebeck. Fessenden had brought it down, and it was the prize of the season. Having achieved this fresh distinction, Fessenden, who, if he now fought rarely, still burned with youthful ambitions, which had no relation to the swirling yet luminous desires in his soul, organized a canoe race in which boys from seven lakes competed. As his practice had been constant for three years, and as he applied a very superior brain to the sport, he not unnaturally came off best man; but this he did not realize, and he embraced his canoe that night in a glow of complete happiness. He had named her after his favorite girl in history, and he loved her with his first boyish passion.

VI

Fessenden shivered and sat up in bed. It was the first time he had ever heard sounds in the house at this hour, and even the birds and the cocks were still asleep. He felt more oppressed than curious, and, dressing hastily, opened his window and slipped out upon the veranda. The moon shone on vast fields of ice and snow, on white peaks sharply defined against the dark starry sky, on great stretches of woods whose heavy spruce and naked maples were laden and glittering. The lake was a sheet of ice several feet in depth. Fessenden had driven a team across it yesterday to the opposite woods, where the men were chopping trees blown down in a recent storm. The thermometer was very low, but the air so still that the cold had no sting in it. Without the house the world might have been dead; but not so within. Several people seemed to be moving about in a curious and stealthy manner. Suddenly some one ran down the hall and back again. Immediately after there was a scream from Christina, followed by a silence so sudden and complete that it seemed profounder than that without.

How he realized at once that Mrs. Nettlebeck was dead he never knew. She had not been a strong woman for years, and had spent more and more of her time in the big rocking-chair, looking out on the lake or reading her Bible; but when he had kissed her as usual the night before, she had prodded him playfully in search of damaged bones, and told him in her broken English that she forgot she was too old to work while she watched him skate and turn somersaults on the ice. Fessenden knew that she loved him more than she did her own children, for he interested her and they did not, and he showed her much demonstrative affection, which they thought beneath their religiously acquired Americanism—if indeed there were any impulses left in those dry economical natures. And now Fessenden looked about vaguely as if in search of the fleeing spirit. For the moment it seemed to him that he vibrated in unison with the great forces beyond the Universe. It was several days before he was conscious of grief and his loss, but he tingled with cosmic curiosity.

Morris’s window was open, and himself buried under so many blankets that he did not hear Fessenden enter the room. He sprang up when gripped by the shoulder, however, and after a brief visit to the death-chamber returned and endeavored until morning to answer his pupil’s eager almost incoherent questions. He expounded every belief he had investigated. After Fessenden had concluded that he would prefer to think of his poor old friend in that Nirvana where there was no more work, he went out and spent the day in the woods by himself. This new idea of Death and its impenetrability to mortal light seemed to him magnificent; and Christina, hastily patching together a shroud out of sheets—old sheets at that—and Fritz and Dolf, not even assisted by the hired man—who was sent to chop wood as usual—hammering together a rude coffin, while a few neighbors stamped through the defiles to “help lay the old lady out,” filled his ardent young mind with revolt.

The burial-ground was ten miles distant, close by a church, a mountain store, a post-office, and three or four houses—a hamlet in a clearing through which a stage passed twice a week. Once a month the church was visited by an itinerant preacher. Mrs. Nettlebeck, to the satisfaction of her family, had accommodated her setting forth to the Methodist’s returning flight, and, as there was no time to lose, her remains, on the night following her death, were placed on the “jumper”—a low sledge—and driven through the snowdrifts of the forest by torchlight. Fritz drove; Christina stood beside him, arrayed in fragments of hastily contributed black; Fessenden and his faithful chum tramped in the rear; and Dolf and the hired man lighted the way with great pine torches. The jumper was on runners; the men and the boys wore snow-shoes, for the snow was often five or six feet deep; now and then the rude vehicle plunged into a drift and had to be dug out, while the coffin was deposited beyond the reach of the plunging horses. Once the coffin disappeared, and as no one could remember exactly where it had been placed, and the pitch-pine was smoking heavily, it was some time before the treacherous catafalque was discovered. After the box had been dug out and safely hearsed, Fessenden let fly his wrath.

“Why on earth can’t you bury the poor old lady in the forest?” he demanded. “You’re treating her horribly, in my opinion; and I’d like to know what better church-yard any one wants than the woods.”

“I guess this family’ll git Christian burial every time,” replied Fritz. “But I must say it’s mighty inconvenient dyin’ in the winter. Still, we can spare the time better than if we was sowin’ or harvestin’; there’s something in that. You can’t for to git everything right in this world.”

And the tramp went on through the forest, where the late moon rarely penetrated, and the wild torches peopled the caverns of the dark with the evil spirits which had haunted the forests of the old peasant’s childhood, and cast sinister shadows over the stark outline bumping close to the ground. Mrs. Nettlebeck had been a bit of a cynic in her way, for she had never been persuaded that the transit from her quaint comfortable village in the toy state of Hamburg to this souring struggle for existence in an aboriginal wilderness had exalted her second condition over her first; and Fessenden wondered if she were smiling grimly in her coffin at the hardships of her final journey.

They arrived at the settlement in the late sunrise, but although several neighbors had assembled to help them, neither pick nor spade made any impression on the frozen snow, many feet in depth, which covered the church-yard and its graves. The preacher managed to flounder through the drifts to his duty, and preached a long and dismal sermon on the platitudes of life and death, which further outraged Fessenden; and then Mrs. Nettlebeck was stowed away in a little room behind the pulpit to wait till the spring came and the “ice went out.”

VII

It was several days before Fessenden realized that he felt something more than natural grief at the death of Mrs. Nettlebeck. He knew that his father loved him, but Mr. Abbott’s visits were brief and far between, and his infrequent letters rarely covered a sheet of notepaper. Fessenden now had his ardent following among the boys of his region, but boys manifest their liking by loyalty, not by sentiment. Fritz and Dolf treated him with good-natured indifference; he would as soon have thought of kissing one of the scraggy winter maples as Christina, in spite of her cross indulgence, and Morris might have been a disembodied spirit. Mrs. Nettlebeck had been his one steady well of affection. She had petted and crooned over him since he had come to her, a baby in a chronic state of disapproval with his nurse; and the large measure of rejected love that was still in her she had lavished upon him daily. He had taken it as a matter of course, for he was lordly and masculine, and there was no sharp contrast of neglect and ill-treatment to fuse it into light. But now that the magic had gone abruptly from him, and there was nothing to take its place, he felt himself up against the barren rocks of life; for the first time the future seemed to hold vague and unknown terrors, the present to be less than the supremely satisfactory thing he had esteemed it. He went first for consolation to his canoe, whom perhaps he loved the more ardently as her responses held an exciting element of doubt. But Pocahontas, like the bears, seemed to “deaden” in winter, at all events to be coldly impersonal until she was skimming above the sunken ice before the first breeze of spring. So he left her to the chill repose of the boat-house, and poured out his lonely and frightened soul to his father. Mr. Abbott answered that he would go up to see him at once, and did manage to pay his son a flying visit in the course of a month. But by this time Fessenden was ashamed of his reckless exhibition of sentiment, and, like a true American, had jealously concealed his gushing fountains under a cool, alert, and practical exterior. When his father arrived his head was high, and his blue eyes keen and bright, his very muscles expressive of masculine impatience with the soft side of life. Mr. Abbott had brought him a fishing-rod, which appeared to afford immediate consolement; and then, somewhat to his father’s relief, he began to talk about American history.

“Mr. Morris wanted me to wait until I had read more of English and foreign history,” he said. “But I couldn’t, and I’ve been reading out of hours. We’ve a great country, haven’t we?”

“Great.”

“Up here they all think it’s the greatest in the world. Is it?”

“That is largely a matter of experience. Personally, I see more in the future than in the present. We have never been whipped. That is fatal to steady and rounded development. A nation, like man, is full of vanity until life has trounced him more than once.”

“I should hate it if we had ever been licked. And we have had such grand men to guide us—I have read the lives of Washington and Hamilton and Franklin; and we have such grand ideals—after I read the Declaration of Independence I went out into the woods and whooped and whooped. With that to live by we can’t be in need of a trouncing; and of course all other men try to follow in the footsteps of our great ones—there are a lot of others whose lives I haven’t had time to read yet.”

Mr. Abbott turned his eyes to his son’s flushed face, and opened his straight lips as if about to smile and speak. But he closed them quickly, and brought down his lids over his cold dreaming eyes.

He answered in a moment: “Our ideals, like our theories, are the best in the world. When you are launched out into the hustle, it will be time enough to know how they work. Meanwhile, don’t worry about your country—it has an amazing power of taking care of itself; but develop your intellect and your strength of character. Do you repeat that lesson of mine once a week?”

Mr. Abbott invariably asked this question, and Fessenden was usually able to nod satisfactorily. He continued: “A man who came up here once said that this was the rich man’s country, that the poor man was getting less and less of a show, and often couldn’t get justice. They all argued after that—it was down at the store; but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere, and I’d like to know what he meant. Was he only talking? Is that the reason you are poor? You seem to me the cleverest man in the world—and even Mr. Morris thinks an awful lot of you—he’s not much on admiring. Are you ground down by the rich? I should think you could sail into ’em, and send ’em all higher’n a kite.”

Mr. Abbott opened the door of the stove and poked the fire. Its red glow was reflected in his face, usually the hue of leather.

“I cannot say that the rich have interfered with me,” he replied, after a considerable pause. “I have chosen my own course, and have felt justified in pursuing it. Don’t believe all this twaddle about the rich, my son. It is their enterprise that has made this country great, not the growling of the failures. It is they who encourage and promote industries, whether their employees like their manner of doing it or not. It is they who make the money circulate, find employment for millions, keep the fires crackling under the great boiling caldron. Moreover, most of them have risen from the ranks of these grumblers—who, one and all, dream of reaching their altitude and having their chance to dictate to those still below. Never forget that point. Every working-man on strike is a potential millionaire—in fact as well as in fancy—for this country offers equal chances to all. It is the brains of the men that are not equal; and every millionaire has only himself—in rare instances his immediate forebears—to thank that he is not still grovelling with the herd, close to the wall.”

“Then of course the millionaires have the really great minds nowadays. Having done such wonderful things, I should think they would feel as if all the rest of the world were their children.”

“H’m! My son, I think it is time for you to go to bed.”

VIII

Fessenden, until his Great Love Affair, which occurred when he had rounded his seventeenth year, lived in his books and the future, finding less and less companionship in his now humble and devoted band of followers. This interval of four years was pricked out by two variations only: the gradually discontinuing visits of his father and the slight change incident upon a letter received from Mr. Abbott on his son’s fifteenth birthday:

“My dear Boy”—(this letter began, in the well-bred but curiously unexercised handwriting which sometimes made Fessenden wonder if his father never wrote to any one else)—“It may be some time, perhaps years, before we meet again. I shall give you no reason now for this additional separation, so painful to me. When the time comes I shall explain, and you will find the explanation satisfactory. Meanwhile, I shall write to you twice a year, remind you of all the advice and admonition I have given you, and ask many questions. I am very much gratified with Mr. Morris’s accounts of you. It is in your blood to take naturally to books. I hope and pray that other things may come as readily to you in due course.

“I have now concluded that you are old and strong enough to support yourself—barring your tuition, which I shall manage to meet. I am writing to Nettlebeck to put you to work during the fine weather. As you know, I prefer you should not study during those months, and you will be paid what will more than meet your expenses the year round. You are quite equal to the work of a farm-hand, and it is time you knew how it feels to earn money. It will also be a very considerable relief to me, besides accustoming you to the fit of the harness before it is imperatively necessary to put it on. Your sister is well, and sends you her love. I add mine, and I beg you to believe that in spite of appearances I love you devotedly—more than I have ever loved any one. You ask for my picture. I have never had one taken. I have my reasons. One is that a man always seems to me most of an ass when smirking on cardboard.

“Your very affectionate
“Father.”

“He believes in disciplining,” remarked Fessenden to Morris, with some acerbity. He was not enchanted at the prospect of being a farm-hand. “If I must I must, but somehow I can’t believe my father is as poor as he makes out. If he is poor, it must be because he wants to be, for it always seems to me as if a sort of power came straight out of him, and hit me hard. And up here, where all men are equal—quite unlike what you say it is in cities—the Nettlebecks show him more respect than they ever show any one else.”

“That is the mere force of personality. You can have the same experience when you are grown, if you make of yourself a strong and isolated spirit, not a mere creditable member of a type. As for your father, his opinions are worth their weight in gold. Obey him without question—therein lies the success of your future. He is not only a man of remarkable brain-power, but he is between three and four times your age. He is helping you now out of his own experience. Be thankful that he takes so great an interest in you, instead of spoiling you in the usual criminal American fashion.”

“His interest appears to be more excessive than his love.”

“Cannot you take love on trust?”

“Does anybody take anything on trust? Can I eat nails and believe them bread? I know what I see, what I feel, what I am permitted to enjoy. I might say to myself twenty times a day, ‘My father loves me,’ and it wouldn’t make one-thousandth the impression that a weekly visit of ten minutes would.”

“A weekly visit from Mr. Abbott—” Morris checked his laugh abruptly. “Your father is not too strong, and hates travelling. But you have brain and imagination; it is odd you should need the regularly administered pap of the ordinary youth.”

“I am human,” responded Fessenden dryly; and as usual he went to Pocahontas for comfort and counsel.

The world was green on this birthday of his, for the spring had come early. The snow had gone from the mountains, the young maple-leaves were fluttering in the forest, the fields were green, the golden sunshine flooded the lake. There was a light breeze, and Fessenden unfurled his sails and thought into the sympathetic soul of his canoe.

“Perhaps, on the whole, I like the idea,” he admitted.

“With one or two exceptions, our great men have risen from the ranks—were hired men, grocery-store clerks, born in log-cabins, and all that sort of thing. To be sure, my favorites happen to be the ones who were not; still it seems to be the proper thing in this country, and as I intend to be a great man, old girl, I am contented to start at the proper place—no log-hut could be uglier than the Nettlebeck farm-house, and I am going to be a hired man, all right. I can’t help being thankful that it isn’t to be a grocery-store clerk. What am I to be? What am I to be? Can’t you give me a hint?” He laid his ear to the spot where he fancied the heart of Pocahontas beat warmly, and for him alone. “When I read the life of a great warrior, I want to be one. Upon some other occasion I want to be a great statesman and orator, and spout the seventh-of-March speech in the woods, as exalted as if the world listened—and feel like a fool afterwards. Write? Morris says there are too many writers now, and that my brain is that of the man of action. He certainly seems to know more about it than I do, and as for you, my beauty, you’re a selfish hussy. When your sails are up you think of nothing but filling your belly with wind.”

IX

Fessenden was so preoccupied that even the voices and laughter of girls did not attract his attention for some moments. He was inserting the little nickel troughs called spiles into the trees of the maple orchard, and hanging the red buckets beneath to catch the sap. Dolf was in the sugar shanty nearby, scouring out the vats, for the boiling would begin to-morrow, and maple-sugar was an industry from which the Nettlebecks derived a yearly income of several hundred dollars. This year Fessenden, who was now seventeen and tired of being a farm-hand, had stipulated that he was to work on shares, arguing that if he did two-thirds of the work he was entitled to at least one-third of the profits. Nettlebeck, after some demur, and a long growl over his pipe one evening, capitulated when young Abbott threatened to stake off a claim on government land and in partnership with Jeff Hunter build his own vats. Fessenden was feeling much elated over his rise in life, and his imagination was running riot in a great future to which sugar should be the stepping-stone—he had recently read several articles on self-made men in magazines sent to Morris—when his house of cards came tumbling down, and the future financier rose from the ruins, a blushing, shivering, gibbering swain.

“This here is Grace Morton, Fess,” remarked the dry young voice of Mamie Hunter. “She’s come to stay with me a spell. Lives down to Malone, and ain’t very well.”

During this elaborate introduction Fessenden was gazing into the soft black eyes of the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Her hair was dark, her features fragile and regular; she wore a black frock and a red-peaked cap, red about her throat and tiny waist. Her complexion was sickly, her figure might have been that of the last woman, but Fessenden saw no defects. Neither did he recognize the vacant, the utterly commonplace mind that looked from that sweet unchanging face. She was a little beauty in her way, and wholly unlike the buxom rough-handed girls of his district; there pervaded her that neutral refinement which nature has lavished with such a curious lack of discrimination upon all classes in the United States; and to Fessenden, who had never seen even a village, she seemed city-bred and fashionable. She blushed under his devouring gaze, and then she looked like a wild rose of the woods; one barrier fell. She raised her eyes and glanced vaguely round.

“I’ve never seen the sap running before,” she remarked. “It looks real nice. Is it sweet like what we eat on cakes?”

“You goose!” exclaimed Miss Hunter. “It’s got to be boiled down first—the water boiled out of it; not that it’s so bad now.”

Fessenden had produced a tin cup and filled it with the running liquid. “Will you taste it?” he asked hoarsely.

She took the cup from him, and their fingers met. He trembled. She did not, and tasted the sap daintily. “Well, I like it,” she announced. “It’s real refreshing, and we had a long walk over here. I never walked so far before, and I’m all tuckered out. I guess I’ll sit down.”

Fessenden hastily cleared off a log, and regretted that he had no coat to fling upon it—for obvious reasons he could not remove his sweater. She seated herself with the fastidious little manner which pervaded her personality, and Miss Hunter, remarking that she guessed she was not wanted, strolled off to call on Christina. Fessenden, humbly craving permission, seated himself beside the beauty from Malone, regardless of the sap that was flowing from the punctured trees which still awaited spile and bucket. They talked disconnectedly of various things, no one of which could Fessenden recall later. Her remarks were pleasant and meaningless and she was utterly unmoved. She thought this young mountaineer very handsome and clever-looking, and she had a faint romantic preference for tall men; but her poor little body was not destined for reproduction, and her brain was too small for imagination and sentiment. She was vain and liked attention, but she was without guile, and as she had no immediate reason for marrying, her mother keeping a small store comfortably, she encouraged no one of her admirers, while accepting the homage of several as a matter of course. The wild tempest in Fessenden she could not have understood with the aid of a miracle.

“Is this your first visit to the woods?” asked Fessenden, who wondered dully why he was so stupid; he could think of nothing to say to this divine creature, and words, as a rule, came to him almost as rapidly as thoughts.

“No, I’ve never been before. I always wanted to.” Her voice was sweet and thin; it was only when she raised it that it escaped through her nose. To the infatuated Fessenden it sounded like the rilling of one of the minor streams in the woods.

“I hope you’ll stay a long while.”

“I guess I will. Most of our folks’ve died of consumption, and I’ve had a hackin’ kind of cough. But I guess I’ll get over it here. I’m better already.”

If there was a mutter of protest from the race in Fessenden’s depths he let it pass unheeded. His suddenly conceived and violent passion needed but the lash of pity to transform him from the individual into the type, tumultuous with sentimental desire; the instinct of the strong to protect the beloved weak, keen and quick; pouring into a flimsy shell such an ideal as man knows only in his dreams—the determination to possess this inestimable treasure though the world stood still and the angels warned through brazen trumpets.

“I hope this log isn’t damp,” he said anxiously. “I’d better fetch you something from the house to sit on.”

“Oh, I’d be afraid to stay here alone, and I can’t walk another step. It’s bad enough to walk home. I guess this log’s all right. Have you ever been to Malone?”

“Never!” Fessenden for the first time realized his rude wild state. “I’ve never been twenty miles from here.”

“My! you are a country bumpkin. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings,” she added contritely as Fessenden’s sunburnt face assumed a purple hue. “I’m always saying silly things. You mustn’t mind me. The boys always say I just rattle out anything that comes into my head, and they don’t mind a bit.”

“I’m sure I don’t either,” said Fessenden quickly; he was determined to equal the Maloner in insensibility. “I should think”—he blundered somehow through his first compliment—“that anything you said would be about right.”

“Well, that’s what they tell me,” she replied complacently. “You can get me another cup of that sap if you like.”

Fessenden held the cup to her mouth, which was thin and curved and scarlet. Then, partly because his emotions were rendering him speechless, partly because he was fired with the primitive desire of the male to show off before the female, he swung his axe to his shoulder and muttered that he guessed he’d better cut down a tree; he was wasting too much time.

His axe he always carried with him. It occupied a place in his affections second to his canoe, and preceding a more lukewarm passion for his gun. In a moment Miss Grace Morton, of Malone, was admiring a lithe strong back, the supple free action of two brawny arms as the axe swung as easily as a switch, cutting straight and deep at every stroke. The old tree was quickly brought to earth, and Fessenden leaned on his axe and dared once more to look into the soft eyes beneath the red cap.

“It was time that old tree came down,” he remarked huskily, yet with a fair assumption of indifference. “It hasn’t given any sap for two years, and has been bothering the other trees.”

“Bothering? You talk as if trees was people.”

“Well, they are in a way—that is, they’ve often seemed alive to me.”

“My! You ain’t crazy, are you?”

Fessenden laughed, and a term of endearment ran close to the tip of his tongue. “People who live much alone have odd fancies. But that doesn’t mean they’re crazy.”

“I guess they’re crazy enough if they’re too different. But you look real sensible. I presume you’re all right.”

She looked adorable in her feminine attempt to console him, and Fessenden wheeled about and swung the axe victoriously into a fruitful maple. This time the young lady was bored. She preferred conversation, and this mountain stripling certainly was handsomer than the Malone small-fry who worshipped at her shrine.

She coughed pleasantly but imperiously, and as Fessenden turned quickly the sun blazed full upon her, covering her bright hair with little golden sparks. Her eyes looked babyish and wistful; she had one of those mouths that quiver when pouting. The poor little creature was the more dangerous for being quite natural and sincere. She had neither the brains nor the energy for coquetry, and even to youths of some slight experience she seemed as perfect as she was pretty.

Fessenden threw aside his axe. “Let’s go down to the lake,” he said, with brutal abruptness. “It’s not far, and I’ll row you and Mamie home—here she comes.”

He strode on ahead, and when the girls reached the shore he had one of the boats drawn up to the landing. He rowed with such swift strong strokes that the light craft fairly flew up the lake.

“My, Fess!” remarked Mamie Hunter. “You appear to be in a hurry—must have wasted time after I left you.”

“Of course the trees have to be spiled, but Miss Morton was too tired to walk home. You shouldn’t have brought her such a distance the first time.”

“She didn’t calculate on finding a nurse ready made; she’s real fortunate. Perhaps you’ll come over and carry her next time.”

“I should like to.” He smiled protectingly into the impassive expectant eyes; even in the throes he was the lordly male. Moreover, pride had shaken him into a temporary possession of his senses. “What do you think of our scenery?” he asked Miss Morton.

“It’s real pretty.”

“Pretty? Beautiful, I should call it.”

“Yes, I guess beautiful suits it better.” If he had applied to it erudite and foreign adjectives she would have assented as amiably.

“Fess is a crank,” advised Mamie. “You mustn’t mind anything he raves over. You’ll be the next thing, I suppose—he’ll find it quite a relief after so much brain work.” Mamie was an admirer and disciple of Christina, besides possessing a quick and observing eye of her own. She had a long, investigating nose, and no beauty whatever; but with the boys, whom she treated villanously, she was the most popular girl in the district.

“Have you read much?” asked Fessenden of his divinity, ignoring Mamie.

“Oh yes.”

“What? Shakespeare? History? Biographies?”

“I guess so. I always forget people’s names that write things.”

And even then the rosy halo swirled unrent. Fessenden returned home and viciously punctured his trees. At supper he was so incoherent that Christina arose and felt his pulse. He passed the greater part of the night wandering in the woods. During the ensuing fortnight he spent every evening at the Hunters’. Several times the girls came to the sugar shanty where he was boiling, and he rowed them home in the dusk. He lived aloft with the gods and the goddesses, one of whom was Grace, who gradually assumed heroic proportions. It mattered not that every interview betrayed her paucity the more pitifully; it mattered not that he never once struck fire in that meagre breast, that never once did her brain respond to the confidences, the ambitions, the aspirations he poured into her puzzled and ofttimes weary ear. He no longer loved Grace, little as he realized that world-old fact; he loved the ideal it was her limited destiny to quicken in his imagination. The great forces rushing through his veins and thumping in his brain had nothing in common with mere facts and girls. They were having their first innings, and not even grateful to the cause. Nothing in the vagaries of nature is more inexplicable than nine-tenths of what, for want of a better name, is called love. It is a wanton waste of good energy and a lamentable waste of spiritual forces; for the passion moves the victim to all sorts of unselfish impulses, exalted emotion, and even religion, all of which, in the reaction when delusion is over, are finely scorned. That love which is composed of an instinct for companionship, and a complete honesty of emotions, and is lacking in sentimentalism and the tragic note, delays its arrival, to people of ardent imagination, until so late that they must have much richness of nature and large recuperative powers to dismiss into the past the memory of all they have spent. The theory that the blind passion of youth springs from the relentless instinct of reproduction is true only in part, for some of the maddest passions are inspired by anæmic and useless women, and the earth has its full measure of sickly children. If Nature has any well-defined plan she has as yet hesitated to reveal it, and it is probable that she is still amusing herself in her laboratory. Most love would appear to be a momentary fever of the imagination to which the body responds, and the soul, always struggling for utterance, tries its wings, flies a little span, and flatters the brain: when a man is in love then is he most pleased with himself; he never imagined that for heights and depths, within an apparently trite exterior, he was so remarkable a being; and until the wave recedes he bestows a like approval on the chance object who, in the prettiness of her hour, or by some trick of manner, bulged his ego into grander proportions.

Considering the issues, it was fortunate in many respects that Fessenden had the inevitable attack so early in life.

He was subjected to an unmerciful chaffing, to the most sarcastic achievements of Christina’s tongue, and to more than one crude remark by Mr. Nettlebeck; in subject the eternal damnation tendency of young fools to fall in love with a bigger fool than themselves—in this case as useless a bit of furniture as ever littered the earth. Morris for a time ignored the episode, but after Fessenden, who scorned his tormentors, overflowed one day in the presence of the polite philosopher, and announced that he intended to marry as soon as he had a maple-grove of his own—college had no further charms for him—the tutor and Nettlebeck had a long and meaning conference. At its conclusion Morris spent an hour in composition, the farmer hitched up his buckboard and, in spite of the pressing duties of the season, drove thirty miles to the station and gave the letter to an obliging conductor to post in New York. Nettlebeck, not many days later, took a trip which lasted nearly a week.

X

Fessenden, who had long since proposed to Grace and been listlessly accepted, started as usual for the Hunters’ one evening, striking through the woods. The moon illuminated the recesses, in which the snow still lingered, and Fessenden strode along, idealizing even that beautiful forest; for would it not, in another hour, shelter two divinely selected beings? He still trod the upper ether, but even in that rarefied atmosphere he experienced a slight chill as he saw Jeff Hunter hastening towards him through the romantic reaches.

Jeff, who under Fessenden’s training had acquired a direct and uncompromising method of speech, wasted no time in coming to the point.

“I’ve got bad news for you,” he announced. “Grace’s gone, and she won’t come back, neither.”

Fessenden, who had a confused sense that he was tumbling through space, merely stared at Jeff, who continued:

“Her ma came this morning and yanked her off—said she’d have no such nonsense with a girl who was not strong enough to darn her own stockings, let alone getten’ married. Grace cried, of course—all girls do whenever they get an excuse—but soon dried up when her ma said she’d take her out West and show her something of the world. Grace told me to tell you she guessed it was all right, she hadn’t felt much like getten’ married, anyway; she’d only said yes because it wouldn’t have been any use to say no; and the old lady told me to tell you that it was no sort of use to follow her, for she was coverin’ up her tracks—she’s a tartar, that one, and I guess you needn’t cry that you ain’t goin’ to have her for a mother-in-law; and I guess she’s got enough money to go ’s fur ’s she likes—she told me she’d be five hundred miles away before night. As for Grace, Fess, she ain’t worth one of the ribs in Pocahontas—that’s the reason I didn’t warn you this morning.”

“Good-night,” said Fessenden.

The blood had rushed to his head. It remained there and confused him, until, after a brief sleep, he awoke next morning; then he burst in upon the astonished Morris and raged like a madman. He smashed a window and two chairs, vowed that he would walk to the West, that he knew Grace loved him, and that if she did not he had no use for life anyway.

Morris brought him partly to his senses by the ironic method, to which Fessenden was peculiarly susceptible, and then suggested that he put a sandwich in his pocket and spend the day in the woods.

“When you are a rational being once more I shall be glad to see you again and talk it over. I sincerely hope I may be able to help you in some way. But we all have to go through this, my boy. It is as inevitable as the phenomenon of man and woman itself, and must be taken as philosophically as the ills of the flesh, which under the proper diffusion of scientific knowledge will be obviated in time. It is to be hoped that puppy-love will prove an equally amenable microbe. Now take to the woods and think like a man.”

Fessenden took to the woods, but the time was not yet come when he could think like a man. Calf-love has furnished the mills of the wits since the first pen impaled the emotions; but it may be a hideous experience to youths in whom are the makings of strong and passionate men. The academic standard arbitrarily established by our literary powers has given the world an entirely false idea of the American temperament, which, in its masculine half, at least, is excitable and sentimental. It is their capacity for intense and powerful emotion, making them in mob capable of the maddest excesses of enthusiasm, which is the deep indestructible bond of unity in the American race; that has saved it from passing off long since in fireworks; that, when it has found the courage and acquired the brain-power to struggle through its artificial envelope, will permit it to become as great as it now thinks it is.

Poor Fessenden had not yet reached the analytical stage. He went out into the forest and suffered horribly. He wept and raved, and believed that so far as he was concerned the world had reached its finish. For the time he was primeval man balked of the first woman; later, when the acute stage had passed, and imagination had returned, every fine impulse and need of his nature which had leaped to assertion under the quickening process of idealized woman seemed to have withered out of him under the sudden blight. He felt shorn, impoverished, hopeless; worse than all, helpless. To pursue would be less than folly. Only a fortune and a detective could have found the indifferent girl, hidden in the skirts of a determined mother; and he had not a penny. The little he made beyond what Nettlebeck charged him for his board went, after the replenishment of his rough wardrobe, to New York for books. His helplessness degraded his manhood, added to the sum of his miseries. He stood two days of this mental hell, during which he ate little and slept less, and then he shouldered his axe and put a sandwich in his pocket.

“I’m going over to the river to get a job driving logs,” he said to Nettlebeck. “I’ve had fourteen years of this, and I’d like a change for a week or two. When the logging is over I’ll come home.”

The river was twelve miles distant. Ten minutes after he had started on his tramp through the forest he heard a shout behind him. He answered mechanically, and a moment later was joined by Dolf.

“I thought I’d come along,” panted the younger Nettlebeck. “I ain’t seen drivin’ for six years or so, and it’s good exercise; you have to jump so lively.”

Fessenden shrugged his shoulders ungraciously, and declined conversation, but even here he did not recognize the ever-watchful spirit of his father. Nevertheless the thought of that sympathetic parent spontaneously occurred to him. He was the one person to whom he could have spoken, but he remembered his fiercely reacting pride at the age of thirteen; moreover, he was bound to respect his father’s mandate of complete separation. He had puzzled deeply over the motive which had prompted this decision in a proud and affectionate parent, but had finally put the question aside, as so far beyond his limited experience that he had better apply his inquiring mind elsewhere. He had perfect faith in both the wisdom and the love of his father, in spite of occasional outbursts of disappointment, and although the kind firm hand that guided his destinies and smoothed his path without weakening his spirit was too well covered to attract his attention, some spiritual emanation from it kept his heart from closing and the bitterness of neglect from entering his soul.

They reached the river in three hours, hearing from the forest the roar of the dam, the loud shouts of the men. On their side the woods grew down to the stream, but on the heights opposite and far beyond hundreds of virgin trees had been sacrificed that the people of New York might have their daily news. The gates had just been opened, the river was foaming and racing over the rocks, its surface already crowded with long sections of tree-trunks, while others were rolling down the hill. The boss was short of men, and Fessenden and Dolf were employed at once, for the logs were already becoming jammed. Fessenden had watched “driving” many times, and, jumping from log to log to avoid crushing his feet, while at the same time he pried refractory logs into position and relieved jams, he was soon so deeply occupied learning his new trade, to say nothing of preserving his bones, that Grace lay down among the memories. His passion for proving himself the best man replaced the other, and applying all his intelligence to the task, he was very soon the most expert driver on the river. This elated him and sent consoling rays through the dark recesses of his soul. At night he was so tired that, after the evening meal—a repetition of the two preceding ones of pork, beans, bread, and coffee—he was asleep before he had settled himself in his bunk; and although his spirit may have wept over the hearse in the back alleys of his memory, for he awoke depressed and rebellious, he sprang out of bed at once, ate his beans with a relish, and went to work.

As he tramped home at night two weeks later, he informed himself that he was cured, and when he reached his own comfortable bed he slept until late on the following day; moreover, he enjoyed Christina’s savory dinner with a relish which, as a rule, associates only with an untroubled mind. Then he went for a stroll through his favorite haunts of the forest—a guilty sense of disloyalty had led him to avoid Pocahontas since the day he met Grace—and it all came back. As it rushed upon him, as he realized that he was still in bondage, he trembled in panic. The horror of returning into the torments of a fortnight since was as strong as the overwhelming passion itself. He ran back to the house, the blood pounding in his head, and searched the shelf over Fritz Nettlebeck’s desk, where letters for the household and neighbors awaited the leisurely claimant.

There was nothing for him; and then he realized that, subconsciously, he had expected Grace to defy her mother and write to him—had believed the separation to be a matter of a few weeks; that the time would come when her demand would be as imperative as his own. He leaped up the stairs to his room and rummaged among the papers on his table; there were fragments of exercises in five languages, dead and alive, brief studies of public men, but there was no letter, even from his father. He returned to the forest, his hands and knees trembling, his brain whirling, his panic increasing, muttering vague phrases, filled with terror of the future, confusion, a mad desire for annihilation. Then, as his ego reached its depths and grovelled there, he straightened himself suddenly and, flinging his fist against a tree, exclaimed: “By God, what slavery!” What he had seen of religion as expressed by itinerant and ignorant preachers had left him cold, but he had entire faith in some great force pervading the Universe, although he did not think it worth while to apply a name to it. He bethought himself of this force, and by a violent effort put himself in relation with it, demanding imperiously that some of its strength should pass into him and relieve him from this intolerable state of slavery. His prayer was answered so quickly that for a moment he stood as dazed as if he had been transferred abruptly to another planet. Then he shrugged his shoulders, laughed at his recent self, went down to the lake, and took Pocahontas out for a long, confidential, and somewhat cynical conversation.

He half expected that the obsession would return, but it did not, even when, missing his agonies, he endeavored to evoke their ghosts. Finally he sat down and wrote a long letter to his father.

“It has taught me two things,” he concluded: “the advisability of keeping a tight hold on the bulk of your energies until you are sure of having found the right woman, and the danger of praying for strength to annihilate unless you are quite sure you are not making a mistake. In this case it was all right, but she might have been the one woman; there might have been merely a misunderstanding, and the result would have been the same. I dragged the strength from out there into myself and blasted the thing to the roots. I am convinced that I can evoke that strength whenever I will, but it rather frightens me to think that I might have made this discovery at the wrong time.”

XI

The immediate results of Fessenden’s enslavement and deliverance were a terror of women, which he called contempt, an augmented interest in the great men of history, and a daily mounting ardor for his country. He had the usual school-boy’s idea of the isolated grandeur of the American Republic, and a corresponding resentment against the rest of the world for having annoyed it occasionally. Mr. Abbott, who liked all healthy manifestations in a youth, had asked Morris to let him keep his illusions until he was old enough to accept their loss without bitterness. Fessenden, who had been patriotic enough in all conscience before he met Grace, now burned with a holy fire, built an altar in the depths of the forest, and solemnly devoted his life and energies to the service of the United States—thought of her, dreamed of her, poured upon her all the rejected passion of his nature. But as yet no light had been shed upon the manner in which he should best serve her, and one day he abruptly broached the subject to Morris. The tutor came to attention at once. He had been in correspondence with Mr. Abbott for some time, and was awaiting his opportunity to speak: Fessenden was a delicate subject.

“I have been thinking it over,” he said. “Of course your father’s wish—and mine—has been that you should go to Harvard, but in the few years since I left college things have changed so in America—I am not old as years go, and judging from the occasional newspaper and magazine that comes my way, the world seems to have run by me.” He spoke hesitatingly, as if the subject had been presented to him too abruptly, after all; and Fessenden, who did not count patience among his virtues, beat a roll-call on the window-pane. The woods were green and warm; Pocahontas was making imperious little motions on the lake. A hint, a stimulus, was all he expected from Morris; the final solution would be found in solitude.

“Why not Harvard?” he asked, as Morris continued to look out upon the world in mute reproach. “Of course I expect to go to Harvard. And my father says the world’s all right.”

“Whatever is is right. I am philosopher enough to believe that—but this is the point: the great universities, like Harvard, are for the sons of rich men, or at all events for those of that privileged class who do not have to enter into the great struggle the moment they graduate. If you had even a small income, and purposed to become a man of letters, if you had in you the makings of a professor or a clergyman, I should say Harvard without hesitation, even though you would have to skimp through in a manner that is very humiliating to a gentleman; but I have studied you closely now for seven years, and I cannot associate you with any of the old-fashioned callings. You are peculiarly energetic and practical. You have tremendous ideals, but you would never have the patience to angle for them in an ink-pot, and you have too much common-sense to stump the world as a propagandist. The way for you to achieve great ends is through the medium of money—no one in this country to-day respects anything as much—and through that medium you could make yourself understood at once, and have what following you chose. It seems to me that you could make money in very large amounts—you were born with concentration, obstinacy, and industry; you must excel in all you undertake or burn to ashes in the attempt, and you have an uncommonly good brain. Of course I have only been able to cultivate its intellectual part, and there are a thousand things you must study in the next few years—men, your country, other countries, the great industrial, financial, commercial, and political problems which make up the machinery of the world. Now, if you were merely to be a dilettante in these matters, I should again say Harvard; but as it seems to me that you were born to take an active part in the great world problems, and as you have your living to make, I have thought it expedient to suggest the University of the Northwest—” He paused again and turned away his head; the polite scholar loathed the thought of the Western college. As Fessenden stared at him in earnest attention, he proceeded, in a moment.

“It is quite a remarkable institution in a way, and very cheap. As it is in a small Western town, living costs next to nothing; and as it is not patronized by rich men’s sons, the scale of living is very low—there are no expensive clubs and other constant demands. Of course it is your duty to consider this, as well as the more complete freedom which it would give you. It is my private opinion that the great colleges are no place for a man who cannot spend money like a gentleman. If my father had lost his money earlier I should not have gone to Harvard.”

“Well, what should I get at this Western university that would send me straight from the log-cabin to Aladdin’s cave—it used to be the White House.”

“That is what you would decide after you had been there a year or two. The point is that you would find there special courses on electricity, mechanics, banking, transportation, agriculture, international relations, politics, all the industrial problems. Through some one of these great modern avenues you will make your way to wealth, and you will have the inestimable advantage of starting from the ground up—of mastering, for instance, all the details of a machine-shop, of an engine, of railway tracks, of the progressive development of that most mysterious of all forces, electricity, while your mind is still plastic. There is still another reason for making yourself familiar with all these things while you are young and enthusiastic—even if you happened to make your money in some field outside them all.” He hesitated again, but proceeded almost immediately, and in the tone of a man resolute to pursue any subject as far as analysis would take him. “Suppose, for instance, you should make a very great fortune, modern conditions would place you in the most complex relations with all the subjects which this university specializes. You would be elected upon the boards of companies without end, perhaps become president, vice-president, of others; and, as a rule, directors know next to nothing of the industries over which they preside; employers know too little of what is a b c to the men under them. Railroad presidents cannot know too much about mechanics and electricity if they want to pay heavier dividends than their rivals—in a word, it is the millionaire who knows most of those subjects of which most millionaires know nothing who rules all the other millionaires. You see, I have let my imagination run away with me—I already saw you aloft on a gold pedestal. Perhaps I am too sanguine for you—one dreams much when one lives the solitary life—”

“The millionaire proposition seems to me a good deal of a come-down after all my fine dreams and ambitions, but if it’s the short cut— I haven’t much patience— Is money really so easy to make?”

“There is nothing less easy to make. My argument is that you are one of the few who could make it if you would.”

“Well, the harder the better. I wouldn’t give a red cent for anything that could be had for the asking.”

Again Morris turned his head and stared into the fire. He heartily wished that Mr. Abbott had come up and done his own talking.

“Your life is likely to be strenuous enough,” he said, after a pause. “When you are rich—if you ever are—you will work as hard, if not harder, than before. Will you think over what I have said about this university, and write to your father? He told me once that he should leave the matter to you; but, of course, he must know soon, as you could enter any college this autumn.”

“I do not need to think it over. How long do you suppose it takes me to make up my mind? I shall go to the Western University.”

XII

He started early in September, accompanied by Morris, who now confessed that he had long pined for the orange groves, the perpetual sunshine of southern California; and as far as the station by the stoical but cheerless Jeff. Christina embarrassed him by a farewell embrace and a tear, while promising him a monthly box of good things. Morris requested him to take no clothes but those he was obliged to wear, but he stuffed his sweaters among his books; he could imagine himself permanently in no less elastic envelope. In spite of remonstrance he also packed his axe. He was quick and eager for the change, and, with the ingratitude of man, left even Pocahontas with little reluctance; his imagination pictured the great gates of the world at the foot of the Adirondacks; and at last he was to pass through them and into that infinite beyond where all dreams were realities.

Morris had chosen the night train for obvious reasons; and when they reached the station in New York he hurried his young mountaineer into a cab and drove to the best of the tailors, who met the immediate demand. The necessary autumn and winter wardrobe he bought for his charge called forth a vigorous remonstrance; Fessenden had never imagined such reckless extravagance; but when his mentor had reassured him, he further indulged himself in several sweaters. He was the proud possessor of a hundred dollars, made in sugar, and his fingers tingled with the new pleasure of spending.

From the shop they drove directly back to the station to catch the morning train for the West. Fessenden grumbled, for he wanted to see New York; every nerve had sprung to greet the great city, and he hung out of the cab in spite of remonstrances and to the amusement of passers-by.

“I know how you feel,” said Morris. “I should like it myself, but I dare not linger in New York an hour—its air is fatal to me—so near the Atlantic—you will see enough of New York in the future—I am sure you will not mind.” And Fessenden submitted with what grace he could muster. As they were standing in the station awaiting the announcement of their train, Fessenden, to the alarm of Morris, suddenly darted from his side and disappeared in the crowd. Morris suspected the cause and turned pale with anxiety. The color the mountains had given him came back as he saw his charge returning alone. Fessenden’s face, however, was flushed, his eyes were as bright as tears.

“I saw my father!” he exclaimed, with a complete disregard of the bystanders that was quite superb. “I know I saw him! Why does he act like this? I was sure he would come to meet me. Why should he look at me and go away?”

“It could not have been Mr. Abbott,” said Morris soothingly, and taking his arm he hurried him through open gates. “It is doubtful if he is in New York, and he is not the man to do anything so silly and sentimental. He is very busy working out some idea which requires all his energies—he dares venture upon no distraction—there, I have told you that much—your unerring instinct has kept you from doubting that he loves you.”

“Is he an inventor?” asked Fessenden eagerly. “Is that the mystery? Is that the reason he wants me to study all these new things—that I may be of use to him?”

“Well, he is something of an inventor, and you certainly can be of great use to him—more than anybody on earth can be.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before? Now I have a double object. I’ll work like a logger. What’s his line?”

Morris groaned; but as he disposed his hand-baggage neatly about him he had another inspiration. “All!” he announced. “That is to say, a combination of all this very modern university can teach you. The result may be extraordinary.”

Fessenden fell back on his seat and stared out of the window, seeing nothing. His imagination was fired with the vision of his lonely potential devoted father experimenting in obscurity with a revolutionizing idea, whose bare elementary threads—awaiting himself in the Northwest—filled him with such excitement and exhilaration that he wanted to get out and race the train. Fortunately his deep emotions always rendered him speechless, and Morris was permitted to sleep peacefully during the greater part of the journey.

XIII

Although Morris had never reached the heart-strings of his pupil, the youth was his one human interest—his father was dead long since; and as Fessenden fully realized his debt of gratitude to the capable and conscientious tutor, as well as being a person in whom habit struck long roots, the parting was unexpectedly affecting. As Fessenden returned from the station of the little town of Turbine, where he was to spend the greater part of the next four years, he suddenly conceived a violent antipathy for his new surroundings, and a desire to flee back to his mountains. This flat interminable prairie, this cheap town, not an elevation in sight, much less the mountains which had gone far into the modelling of his nature—there was nothing here resembling the great world of which he had dreamed. He longed for real solitude, feeling for the first time the miserable substitute the crowd offers; and suddenly understood how much closer to the great realities of life it brings a man than any actual juxtaposition.

But in a few days he was too busy and interested for either homesickness or dreams. Morris had drilled him so thoroughly in English, the dead languages, German, French, in history and mathematics, that he could have entered Yale or Harvard with sails spread, and in the younger university he took a rank at once which gave him the more time for the course known as “Training for Business.” Almost immediately it seemed to him that sleeping things rose in his brain, things whose existence he had never suspected, and strove to put themselves in touch with inspiring forces without. Fessenden, who had made up his mind to place himself in a neutral receptive state, to give no more thought to the future and to ambition until he had learned all that the university could teach him, was some time recognizing that these new-comers were talents, and that they responded to all that was inventive and practical in his initial course.

He recognized them in time, however, as day by day he grew more absorbed in the mysteries of the engine and electricity; and the glimpses he had, in his first year, of finance and political economy stirred him like old love-letters. His imagination idealized and personified the engine he worked upon as it had his canoe; and on the day when he finally mastered the difficult art of taking it to pieces and putting it together again without help or hitch, he challenged the strong man of the college to combat, and polished him off with such enthusiasm that once more he occupied the proud position of champion. This satisfied his masculine vanity, besides delivering him from the chaffing and petty persecutions provoked by his mountain hues; he was henceforth permitted to indulge his passion for sweaters and old hats, even on Sundays, unchallenged, while his remarkable abilities were as frankly acknowledged.

The military drill did not give him enough exercise, and he had promised his father he would waste no time on sport. “Your passion to excel,” Mr. Abbott had written, “would make you neglect your studies; so be wise and get your exercise some other way.” Fessenden was feeling nervous and somewhat confused one Friday afternoon when he suddenly bethought himself of his axe. He brought it forth, fingered it lovingly in a rush of memories, then shouldered it and started for the open country. He was not long finding a farmer who was willing to have his wood cut for nothing, and thereafter Fessenden spent an hour every evening and half of Saturday, either felling Mr. Lunt’s trees or sawing his logs; and the exercise relieved his brain and kept his muscles hard.

The military drill not only dismissed his mountain slouch and gave him a free and upright carriage, but inspired him with dreams of war and glory. The martial music quickened his blood, and secretly he fancied himself very much in his uniform. It was not long before he became restless in the ranks and announced to the West Point officer in charge his desire to become captain. The officer stared, laughed, then reminded him that military rank was—as a rule—or should be (he was a victim of politics himself), the result of superior accomplishments and talents, to say naught of hard work. Thereafter, three times a week during two of the afternoon hours, Fessenden dismissed books and machinery from his brain and concentrated that energetic instrument upon military drill alone.

But he spent the greater part of his time and thought in the shops and yards. Aside from the ambition and the superabundant energy which prompted him to excel in all he undertook, his imagination was absorbed in the rapture of unravelling certain mysteries of science—was at work on far-distant but great and picturesque results. He was in no hurry to invent, but even while signalling and switching at night he saw trains of unimaginable beauty and grace and lightness skim by in the dark, and great fleets of ships, invincible and terrible in war, forcing the Monroe Doctrine down the throat of Europe, perhaps annexing the rotten old monarchies altogether. That the red hair of a daughter of the Cæsars would one day entangle itself in his wondrous electrical stores, and jerk them far afield, he did not forebode then, poor Fessenden; he was happy in his dreams and ideals.

XIV

As the college year was drawing to its close he received the following letter from his father:

“My dear Boy,—I am sorry to be obliged to inform you that you must manage somehow to pay your own expenses during the remaining three years at the university. Five hundred dollars a year are a good deal, and you are younger than I am, remember. I can let you have a hundred, but that is all, and I have every confidence that you will be able to make the rest for yourself. Perhaps you may imagine what it means to me to reflect that I have such a son to lean on in my old age! I know of no man living that I envy. I am informed of your progress, and I am proud of you beyond the power of any poor words of mine to express.

Your affectionate Father.”

For the moment Fessenden was shocked and bewildered; but not only did the subtlety of Mr. Abbott’s letter begin its work at once, but his mettle flew to its opportunity. He promptly turned to with that absolute lack of doubt which, in a man well equipped, compels success. There were a number of relatively wealthy men in the university whose patriotism for the West and contempt for the effete East had led them, or their fathers, to patronize the home institution. Fessenden imperiously persuaded these men that they needed a course of practical lessons in forestry and longed for a summer in camp in the Adirondacks not far from the cooking of Christina. The summer was pleasant and profitable for all, but particularly for Fessenden, who found many hours to dream alone among his mountains and into the sympathetic ear of Pocahontas. She was haughty and evasive for several days after his enthusiastic arrival, turned him over twice, and took advantage of every abstraction to make for submerged stumps and shore. But having made him sufficiently miserable, she gradually restored him to favor, and the old happy bond was re-established. But although he was glad of the long hours of rest and of pondering over the world of science into which he had been precipitated by the intuition and foresight of his father, he was soon eager to get back to the practical application. He returned to the university with half the money he needed, and he could easily make up the remainder by coaching. The day after his return he walked out to Mr. Lunt’s and announced his intention of living with him and paying for his board with his axe, or in any other reasonable manner. The farmer was taken aback, and somewhat displeased at the idea of paying for what he had grown accustomed to accept as his right; but finally admitted the justice of Fessenden’s argument, especially as he had no such enthusiast for hard labor on his farm. Shortly after, Fessenden, in a burst of adolescent pride, returned his father’s contribution, having persuaded his forestry class that they needed private lessons in German, which in truth they did, although they enjoyed the study of Fessenden more. They never connected him with the author of his being, but they thought him unique and perennially interesting. Occasionally they marvelled at his sublime audacity, a quality as a rule born of the easy assurance of wealth and social position, particularly when well-bred and unconscious; but they never got beyond the conclusion that it was the result of an unusual brain and a gift for leadership. That he should become the captain of his company before the end of his first year, and prove an ardent disciplinarian, did not so much surprise them; but his talents were less easy to account for, and those interested in heredity approached him on the subject. Fessenden was determined to keep his father’s secret, whatever it might be; and as he could be diplomatic when diplomacy seemed more advisable than throwing an impertinent man out of the window, he sent the curious away with the impression that he came of plain mountain people.

XV

During this year he took up modern history, the development of railway intercourse in Europe and America, and pursued his studies and experiments of the previous year with unabated ardor. He likewise became violently interested in politics, and let off a good deal of steam in public speaking. He also took up the cudgels for the East, partly because his father was a New-Yorker, partly because in this attitude he stood practically alone. Privately he thought the West had cause for grievance in the absurd and ignorant attitude of the East; but it was impossible for him to run with the majority, and there certainly was much to be said for the older civilization. The question of strikes and all the manifestations of the antagonism between capital and labor did not engage his attention until the following year; and when it did his sympathies were entirely with the poor man, as he informed his father in long and impassioned letters. In answer, Mr. Abbott invariably reminded him that as yet he knew nothing of the rich, and advised him to suspend judgment. But although Fessenden by this time was an intolerant democrat, wore his oldest sweaters, and even persuaded Miss Lunt to patch his trousers, there was something curiously aristocratic in his attitude and personality, which his associates felt rather than analyzed. There was not a man in the college who would have dared to emulate his utter disregard of appearance, his indifference to comment on the streets of Turbine, the catholicity of his acquaintance, the manner in which he ignored the very existence of those he did not like, the recklessness with which he thought out loud, apparently unconscious that anything could affect his standing, popularity, and reputation, and the indefinable touch of patronage in his most extreme democracy. And although even at that period, when he was full of vanity, he did not swagger, still it was noticeable that he carried himself as if the world were his. He made enemies, but he either fought them or accepted them with philosophy, and he had an army of disciples, who followed his imaginative flights and his most radical theories to the bitter end.

But his fellow-men interested Fessenden less at this period than the wonderful excursions he was making daily into the new realms of thought and research. It was during the middle of the third year that he gave himself up more particularly to the study of finance, the development of banking, and political economy. He pursued these studies with a curious sense of reviving old memories; he surprised himself at his love of dry details—that even here his imagination saw picturesqueness in the possibilities of concentrating vast sums of money and yet filling the veins of a great country with a life-blood of liquid gold. During his democratic madness he had seriously doubted whether his conscience would permit him to be a rich man; but now, with a chastened yet no less sincere democracy, he made up his mind that for a man of the people to acquire millions and then use them for the amelioration of his less-gifted fellows, to say nothing of glorifying his country, was both wise and poetical. Having satisfied his mind on this point, he astonished the university and Turbine by appearing at church in a suit of clothes not only of harmoniously assorted pieces, but manifestly made to order. He sustained the balance by looking worse than usual during the week.

In the vacation preceding Fessenden’s fourth year the university received, from a source which was to remain unknown to all but the president, a large bequest for the departments of banking and finance. The bequest was accompanied by the condition that during the ensuing year certain eminent authorities were to be asked to lecture. Somewhat to the surprise but greatly to the satisfaction of the faculty, invitations to lecture were promptly accepted by the Secretary of the Treasury, the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the owner of a great department store, and three leading bank presidents. These gentlemen did not confine themselves to generalities; they described the practical workings of their respective systems, enriched by a wealth of comparison with corresponding systems in other countries; they pointed out the defects and disadvantages of both sides, and analyzed the causes of the remarkable progress of so young a country as the United States; they emphasized the necessity of a sleepless alertness, and the demand for new ideas which should be bold without recklessness and safe without conservatism. Fessenden listened with tingling nerves and legs moving restlessly. He wrote to his father that he regarded this timely benefaction as a direct interposition of Providence in his behalf, and that although he certainly had to work harder than any one in the world, he believed that he had been born under a star of remarkable magnitude. His ambitions had revived long since. He had in his imagination a union of steel and electricity so madly romantic that he dared not confide even in his father. He must make a large sum of money first, for he would trust no one with his secret. He believed that he could make his country invincible, the ruler, if she chose, of two hemispheres, and he looked back somewhat patronizingly upon his old heroes. Other times, other gods! The pendulum in him was still swinging wildly, the balance was not yet; but the depth and tenacity of purpose, the clear creative intellect, quick and versatile in grasp, and of an extraordinary energy; the high enthusiasm and real capacity for the passion of patriotism were all modelling and biding their time within the exterior made up of their defects.

So passed the four years, with their intervals of mountain-life, when, in spite of his ever-increasing classes, he drew renewed strength and courage from solitude and the invigorating air of high altitudes. Hard work told little on him, for his body was full of red mountain-blood and clamped with magnificent muscles.

He hoped that his father would come and witness his triumphs of Commencement Day, but he received this letter instead:

“My dear Boy,—It is a matter of very great regret to me that I cannot be with you at this time, but I will explain my absence to your entire satisfaction when we meet. Thank God that will be almost immediately. At a very bitter price to myself I have relentlessly pursued a plan conceived the day after your mother’s death; and my compensation so far has been its entire success. Will you come to New York on Monday? It had been my intention to meet you in the Adirondacks and tell my story there, for I dislike anything savoring of drama, but business imperatively commands me to stay here, and I must ask you to come to me. I have sent for Pocahontas. I enclose a postal order for a hundred dollars. May I ask you not to arrive in a sweater? New York is not Turbine. Moreover, a natural weakness makes me wish to see you, after so many years, at the best possible advantage.

“Your very affectionate
“Father.”

Fessenden pondered over this letter. It was enigmatic, and Mr. Abbott’s brief communications were usually remarkable for their clarity. He had made up his mind four years ago that his father was an inventor, and denuded him of all mystery. It also occurred to him with startling abruptness that he had never seen his father’s signature. As he stood staring at the paper, shadowy images, impressions, chance words, blurred pictures rose from some forgotten well in his mind, endeavored to sharpen, to cohere; but they faded away impotently; the vital interests of the morrow rushed in and claimed place; he shrugged his shoulders and sent his father a telegram.

XVI

“Fess,” said Jeremiah Keene, on the night of Commencement Day, “what are you going to do with yourself? You are the most expansive—nay, sentimental and emotional creature on one side of you, and on the other the most secretive! I’ve turned myself inside out to you over and over again. You know all my hopes, aspirations, plans—who doesn’t? What have I been digging away at this school of mines for? But you’ve gone in for everything, distinguished yourself in pretty nearly everything—and we are none the wiser. In these days you’ve got to be one thing—one thing—there’s no chance for any but the specialist, and you are as well aware of that as any one else. So I know, we all know, that you must have made up your mind—that you know what you are about. It isn’t only curiosity that prompts me to ask for your secret—there is no necessity for maunderings on my part. I’d like to know; we may not meet again for years—you go East, I go West—I’ve never taken a liberty with you before; forgive me this.”

Fessenden made no reply for a moment. He was spending his last night in Turbine in the rooms of his chum. The day had been crowded with triumphs. He was dazzled, elated, a trifle bewildered. Compliments and flattering predictions had fallen thick upon him. The president had congratulated him publicly, invited him to dinner to meet the distinguished guests, and he had been the only student so honored. Among the guests were several of the eminent men who had condescended to illuminate the university during the past year, and they had singled out Fessenden and paid him such marked attentions, besides interrogating him so closely as to his interest in his more important studies, that both faculty and students, highly as they thought of their star, were astonished: the successful self-made American takes very little interest in unmade futures. It was a great and notable tribute to personality, and Fessenden’s chest had risen and his head bulged more than once. He was feeling his strength at every nerve-point, he knew himself to be ready to go out and conquer the world at once; his mind had flashed back during the exciting day to the long course of training, from his babyhood until this last week of his twenty-first year, which had modelled his inherited forces in brain and character, slowly and safely, given him the physical endurance to keep pace with the restless energies of his mind. He was filled with gratitude for his father, but he also thought very well of himself. The self-made American was his type, the ideal he had set on high; whether born in a log-cabin, on a Virginia plantation, or a romantic British isle, was immaterial. All the great men of his country had started with a reasonable amount of poverty, and certainly the youthful record of none was more brilliant than his. He had had his disappointments, his disillusionments, even in Turbine; he had been deceived and tricked and tripped and hurt like all men; but he lived too much in imagination, in the future, and his application to study had been too severe for brooding on the shortcomings of the world. He still thought well of it, and his consistent admiration for his friend Keene had gone far to nurse his optimism. Life never did a kinder thing for him than in bestowing so abundant a measure of contentment in these last hours of his boyhood.

He stood up in a moment, turning over his chair. Keene was lying on a divan, smoking. The lamp was low. The windows were open, but to silence only. It was very late.

“Well—well—well—” said Fessenden. “I don’t know. I should have to tell you so much—and my ambitions are defined and at the same time rather nebulous. You see, I have to find out just what my father wants of me first—what he is—”

“What he is? There is a mystery, then? You’ve bluffed us pretty well.”

“I’m no maker of mysteries. I don’t know, myself—but—and you’re the only person living I’d say this to, and I’d break even your head if you gave a hint before he was ready—I think he is a great inventor and wanted me to have this training that I might help him.”

It was on the tip of Keene’s tongue to remark upon the uselessness of Mr. Abbott’s secrecy so far as his son was concerned, but congratulated himself a few moments later that Fessenden had given him no time for comment.

“I have not seen him for years, but not through lack of affection—he asked me to trust him and I have done so. I had a curious letter from him on Tuesday—I have thought a good deal about it since—and now that I am to see him and know all so soon, I may permit myself to indulge in curiosity. I’ll read it to you if you like.”

He held Mr. Abbott’s last letter to the lamp and read it aloud; then plunged his hands into his pockets, planted himself squarely on his feet, and told Keene of his peculiar relations with his father since his mother’s death. He made it all very vivid; the brief visits of Mr. Abbott, the concise pregnant conversations, the firm careful finger always modelling at the foundations of his character, the cleverness and foresight with which his father had secured the services of Stanley Morris, who through seven monotonous years had pined for California. Much of this was revealed unconsciously in the narrative of his mountain-life. While he was in the midst of his story Keene sat up suddenly; a moment later interrupted him to ask for a description of Mr. Abbott. Fessenden had answered: “Small, thin, but with an immense lot of presence—even up there where one man is exactly the same as another, where there is real equality and no bluff about it—they all bowed down to him instinctively—even Morris, who is a deep scholar and thinker and belongs to one of the best families in the country—if you care for that sort of American rot. Even when I was a little chap and he used to pet and fondle me, I could feel the power come out of him, and I told Morris once that if he wasn’t a rich man it must be his own fault—he made you feel he could be anything he chose. His face is beautiful to me, perhaps because I love him, for Morris remarked rather nastily once that he was not generally considered a beauty; but he has eyes that can light up, and his face always changed for me anyhow, if it did look rather cold—perhaps hard—at other times. Nettlebeck swore once that it was hard, but I never could see it. His features are well cut, too, his nose looks as if it could go through a stone wall, and there is not an indefinite curve in his mouth—there you have him, as well as I can describe anybody.”

But Keene, long since, had rolled over and buried his face in the sofa cushions.

The next day, as the two men parted at Chicago, Keene, who was far more mature than Fessenden, having less of the eternal boy in him, put his arm about his friend’s shoulder and said hesitatingly: “Remember—there are terrible disappointments awaiting you out here in the great world—as for all of us. Take everything that comes along as philosophically as you can—everything is for the best, I suppose. Above all, don’t let any shock embitter you. I am sure, I am sure that your father is all that you imagine him to be—that whatever he does in regard to you—has done—is right.... I wish he were not so poor, however; I wish he were the Abbott.”

“Who is the Abbott?”

“Of course you never read the newspapers, and it is odd how he manages to keep out of the illustrated magazines—I should think he must pay them. The Abbott, my dear boy, is richer than the whole Rothschild outfit condensed into the singular.”

“Well, I’m glad he’s not that sort of Abbott,” said Fessenden indifferently. “Thank God I can show my mettle and start from the ground up.”

The words left no trail in Fessenden’s mind; the parting which followed affected him deeply, and he was too excited at the prospect of seeing his father again to recall what had impressed him as a mere chance remark.

XVII

As Fessenden left the train on Monday morning and walked down the long crowded platform to the gates, he was nervous and happy and sentimental, but full of vanity. Not as the prodigal son was he returning to his father after these long years of disunion. Had not a telegram from the president of his university acquainted Mr. Abbott with his son’s brilliant climax? Was he not about to relieve his parent of all further worries and responsibilities, to say naught of shedding lustre upon the family name? He was sure that his father, if he had chosen obscurity for his own portion, must still be in a position to give him advice and immediate suggestion, of more value than gold.

He had arrayed himself in a new suit of summer gray, and with considerable satisfaction, for he had spasms of personal vanity, although only death could separate him permanently from the reprobates of his wardrobe. His long body was still very slight, but it was muscular and lithe. When his eyes were not hard or dreamy with concentrated thought they were ready to laugh their response into any friendly eyes they chanced to meet. Although as a rule he would have scorned to admit that he knew whether he was good-looking or not, he was in so gay a mood this fine summer morning that he frankly accepted admiring glances for what they were worth, and was glad to add such attractions as his ancestors had given him to the sum he was about to present to one doting parent. Not that Fessenden was a handsome boy; his present attractiveness lay for the most part in his youthful armory of glancing and glinting expressions; but his hair was brown and bright, his eyes were blue and dark, and his features cut by race, not by chance. In his most disreputable alliances with old clothes he never lacked distinction, and to-day, in spite of the eager restlessness of his muscles—he was seldom in repose—he was very naturally mistaken by the calculating feminine mind for a fledgling of the privileged class.

His progress in the dense crowd was slow, and his stride was naturally long. It was not in him to submit to impeded progress, and he jumped back into the train and made his way rapidly to the front car. As he sprang to the ground near the gates he saw his father’s pale eager face, and he stiffened suddenly lest he utter a mountain whoop or imperil his dignity in the feminine manner. When he had forced his way beyond the barriers, he nearly crushed Mr. Abbott’s firm bony hand, then pulled it through his arm and—started for Forty-second Street.

“Come on! Come on!” he said through his teeth, “we can’t say anything here.”

His father managed to steer him to the cab-stand, and, as they drove down Madison Avenue, talked rapidly and somewhat at random. It was evident that he was as nervous as his son, but equally manifest that he was full of paternal pride and delight. Fessenden gripped his hand two or three times, incoherent, but happy in the light of approval and the warmth of an affection so long withheld.

The hansom stopped before an immense brown-stone house on a corner, and Mr. Abbott descended, dismissing the cab. Fessenden wondered, but assumed that his father lived in a private hotel. It was his last moment of density. As the door was opened by an elderly butler, behind whom stood four footmen in livery, a band of ghosts seemed to race past his inner vision; as he entered the wide hall hung with tapestries, doors on the right and the left showing the splendor of delicate brocade and historic furnishing, his brain experienced a sharp and clarifying shock. He had a dizzying vision of a little boy, in the pride of his first trousers, flying down those massive banisters and followed by a soft protesting shriek. For a moment every part of the house seemed to be pervaded by that small child and the minor almost querulous chords of a long-forgotten voice. His hand shook as he gave his hat to a footman of preternatural dignity, as he met the stolid but recognizing eye of the butler. He had not the courage to think, and he was white and almost weak as he followed his father to the library at the back of the house. It was a great room, lifted bodily from a ducal castle—books, pictures, busts, weapons—in the devouring American fashion. Fessenden, after one glance, fell into a chair and covered his face with his hands. He had torn up the papers on that table more than once, tobogganed his father in the deep chair opposite.

Mr. Abbott seated himself in the chair and grasped the arms firmly. His face was more sallow than usual, but his glance was unwavering. “I see that you are already beginning to suspect—to know,” he said. “I will not insult you by circumlocution, but make my confession at once—”

Fessenden emerged suddenly from his lethargy, sprang to his feet, and glared down upon his father. His eyes were almost black, his nostrils were jerking, and the pallor under his tan made him look quite ferocious. “What is there to say?” he almost shouted. “I can see the cursed truth plainly enough. You are a rich man.”

His father met his glare steadily. “I am the richest man in the world,” he said.

Again Fessenden was inarticulate, and under this merciless assault even his anger fell. He stared at his father with paling eyes and coloring face.

“Sit down, will you not? I have a great deal to say.”

Fessenden, bewildered with the knowledge that he stood on the threshold of an unknown world which even now mocked his years of strenuous endeavor, resumed his chair mechanically and fixed his eyes on his father’s face that he might make sure he was hearing facts at least. The flattering attentions of the university guests suddenly arose in his memory, and he writhed in self-abasement. He felt the floor with the heel of his boot to ascertain if it were secure beneath his feet.

“I suppose I had better begin at the beginning,” said Mr. Abbott. “I saw little of your mother after the first year of our marriage. She was born in the world of fashion, was a natural and determined leader; and shortly after your birth she entered upon a career of extravagance which has seldom been equalled even in this town. It was a matter of indifference to me how much money she spent so long as she was contented—she was badly spoiled—and as she was a beautiful and clever creature I was very proud of her; moreover, too busy to regret that she had so little time for me. Perhaps I should go back a step further here and tell you that my father was also a man of large wealth—for his day—and of great importance in the banking world. I was trained as his successor from my earliest years, and fortunately took to it naturally. In those days the sons of rich men were more serious than they are now; but I sowed a few wild oats before I settled down, and, being of a delicate constitution, they permanently impaired my health. This fact will enable you more readily to understand my course in regard to you.

“But to return to your mother. Naturally she spoiled you—badly! You were never permitted to draw a breath of fresh air except in fine weather; you had whatever you cried for. There was every prospect that you would grow up—if you survived childhood—the average nervous dyspeptic American—worse still, the average worthless rich man’s son. The day after her death, as I sat alone here in this room, with you playing on the hearth-rug, I had an inspiration, and determined at once to act upon it. I had known the Nettlebecks for many years; I was in the habit of going into camp with several of my friends not far from their farm. Only Fritz, who acted as our guide, knew that I was a rich man, and I knew his capacity for silence. I had a sudden vision of all you might become in that magnificent air, raised by frugal but well-living Germans, who would obey my orders to the letter—removed from all the debilitating influences and the temptations of wealth—well! I did not wait to communicate with Nettlebeck. I whisked you off the day after the funeral, and without warning to grandmothers and aunts. I made Nettlebeck an offer which he accepted promptly, swore him to secrecy, and left you in that wilderness as elated as if I had scooped up Wall Street, hard as it was to leave you. Later came the fortunate episode of my conversation with Stanley Morris’s father—”

Fessenden interrupted him with a sharp exclamation. “He, too, was in the plot! You chose your tools well. I never received a hint.”

“Morris knew all. It is quite true, however, that he was the son of an old college friend, suddenly impoverished, and that it was necessary for him to live in a peculiar atmosphere. He was bent upon California, but I offered him five thousand a year to live at the Nettlebecks’ and prepare you for college; also twenty-five thousand dollars the day you entered. He did not hesitate; moreover, I gave him carte blanche at the best bookshops of New York and Boston, and offered to send to Europe for anything which was not imported through the regular channels—”

“In other words, you bought him body and soul! Well, he was not much of a man, anyhow. And no wonder he was so well fitted to impress me with the value of money!”

“I have bought bigger men than Morris,” said Mr. Abbott dryly. “I own twenty-eight members of Congress, seven of the most imposing figure-heads of the British aristocracy, one sovereign, and several minor presidents. But to proceed. So far, I have given you only my paternal reasons for your bringing-up. I will say little now of what the separation meant to me. I had never been too busy to play with you, had haunted the nursery or had you brought down here during every hour I could snatch for home. As I saw you improve up there in the mountains, from a charming but sickly baby into such a sturdy, bright, manly little chap, it took all the will I possessed to leave you behind me when I returned. At last the effort cost too much, and I dreaded failure. I took the drastic course and saw you no more. The day you left New York for the West I stole a glimpse of you at the station. Since then I have not seen you until to-day. During this last year others have shared my secret besides Morris and Nettlebeck—the president of your university and the close personal friends whom you know only as prominent men who agreed to lecture on the subjects which happened to absorb you. They were tremendously interested in my experiment, and, as they are men who owe their success in life as much to their talent for keeping their mouths shut as to anything else, I had no fear that they would betray me. As for the president, of course I knew I could trust him fully. But enough of this personal side. I had another object in preserving you from the pitfalls, the physically and mentally debilitating influences of wealth, which I should have pursued had I been twenty times less a father. You were my only son, you must carry on the traditions of our house, become the custodian of millions, of the vast power they entailed—”

“And suppose your method has done its work too well,” cried Fessenden, setting his jaw exactly as his father did while he listened to his angry son. “You know something of the results of your—your intrigue, but not all. You know that I have developed strength, power, but not how much. You see only the obstacles I have conquered; you know nothing of the ambition that discipline of yours has developed in me—the inspirations of lives of men of not dissimilar—so far as I knew—beginnings. And now! Good God, I feel like a mountebank!”

“Answer this question, and not too hastily: Have I done you an injustice? Nothing could alter the fact that I was a rich man. Do you regret that I did not run the risk first of your becoming a sickly spoiled brat, then a dissipated fool? A few, a very few sons of rich men in this country have turned out passably well—never what their fathers were: circumstances did not compel them to or go to the wall; and I dared not tell you—the risk was too great. I could see no other way; and, looking back, I see none now.”

Fessenden rose and mechanically started for the log in the grate, but it was June, and he kicked a stool instead. He was still seething; but even so, his sense of justice dominated his desire to indulge to the full his bitter indignation and disappointment. “No,” he said, after a moment, “you were right enough. Doubtless in time I shall be duly grateful to you. But that premonition does not mitigate in the faintest degree what I feel now.” His eyes met his father’s, which were full of affection and pride, and he suddenly descended a peg or two. “I don’t mind telling you, sir—I believe you will not laugh at me—but I felt—conceited ass that I was—that I was destined to become a great man. I felt it was in me to accomplish anything, be anything I set my brains upon. Of course it was all red blood—the result of precocious development in solitude, of the little successes which your watchful care enabled me to win; but the result was the same as if it had been the real thing. I feel like a peacock with its tail pulled out. And now please tell me what it has all been for. You say you need a strong man—is that necessary for the custody of millions? An ordinary sober honest hard-working agent could do as well, I should think; you must have some estimable relatives.”

Mr. Abbott laughed. “Not suitable for my purpose,” he said. “Sit down. I have still much to say. I never blinded myself to the fact that I was running a great risk, my dear boy; that you might get far beyond me, refuse to conform to my ultimate plans—especially after you realized that I not only had been obliged to act a lie but to utter more than one. One source of my great power is that my word has never been questioned, and I can manipulate Wall Street by a simple statement. I may add that my word is as unchallenged in Europe. I have bitter enemies, and they have called me every opprobrious epithet except liar. But for once I determined to play the Jesuit; and as you have as truthful and honest a nature as one meets here below, I will add that the man who cannot lie when some great issue is at stake is too big an ass for this world. Well, to proceed. It does not so much matter about the destiny of the average millionaire’s wealth; it is usually cut up among relatives and benefactions—bids for immortality in the third degree. At the worst it can be left in trust. But when I follow my father, only ten millions will go to—to—relatives. You must be the custodian of the bulk; and when I give you its present figure—reminding you that such wealth rolls up wealth unceasingly, by the mere force of momentum—it may dawn upon you that you still have it in your power to become as great and as mighty as ever your boyish imaginings dictated, and that you will need all the character you have put in storage. What is your idea of a great fortune—an American fortune?”

“I have thought very little about it. A million seems to me a huge sum. I have heard of fortunes of fifty or sixty millions—I have scarcely believed in them, although I perfectly comprehend the wealth of nations. I am now prepared to hear you say you are worth anything.”

“I am worth four hundred millions.”

Fessenden gasped. The distant rumble of the streets came to his sensitive ears like the sound of crashing worlds. In a moment he laughed. “Go on,” he said. “I anxiously await the dawn, the arrival of hope. I am utterly incapable of grasping such a sum. Have you got it in gold coin in the bank? If you could show it to me in that concrete form I might realize it—not otherwise.”

“You will realize it when you have spent several months examining my papers; and when this natural bewilderment has passed you will recall all you have recently mastered of banking and finance. You can lay your hands on several millions in gold coin if you desire—and transfer them to your own account, for that matter; no wish of yours will ever again be ungratified by me. But the greater part represents the controlling interests in the leading corporations, industries, and railroads in this country, to say nothing of real estate, government bonds—of which I have the largest share of any man or combination of men—and the bank of which I am the president and principal shareholder. That is the skeleton; the details require weeks of explanation on my part and close application on yours. I have told you enough to demonstrate to you that the day approaches when you may be the most powerful man in the world if you choose. You will have heard that the Rothschilds dictate to Europe—that a nation may be unable to go to war if they refuse to advance the money. What the Rothschilds are as a family I am as an individual—and doubly so, for I can act on the moment; I am obliged to consult no one. When the coffers of the United States Treasury are low I can fill them; if I refused, and lifted my warning finger to others, they would remain empty. I can reduce the President of this great country to a mere figure-head. When the right moment comes I can push the United States into the front of nations, or force it to continue to play a third-rate part. In time I can—and shall—make her the most powerful, the most feared, the most hated of all the countries on the globe—through such a concentration of capital as no one at the present moment has had more than a tantalizing dream of. Fifteen years from now this country will not only be the clearinghouse of the world, but the autocrat of commerce. Do you begin to see light?”

“Yes, the dawn breaks; but by your leave I will go to my own room for a while. My brain must have a brief respite. Where am I to hang out?”

“The corner suite on the third floor. I have had a swimming-tank put in, a Russian bath, and a gymnasium. What you don’t like you will change, of course.”

“Thanks. I shall probably put a cot in the gymnasium.”

“Don’t fear that I am stifling you with luxury. I have my idea of what a man’s rooms should be, and I doubt if you find that it differs from your own.”

As Fessenden opened the door he turned with a sudden flash in his eyes. “Where is my sister?” he asked.

“She is visiting the Archduchess Ranata Theresia, daughter of the Emperor—”

But Fessenden had closed the door with force and was bounding up the stair. “Good God!” he thought, “is the world I am to live in made up of superlatives? I feel like Gulliver fallen upon Brobdingnag.”

XVIII

He found no fault with his rooms. They were not those of a poor student with a great future, but they were severe, masculine, and entirely adequate. When he had taken a cold swim in his marble tank, and exercised for half an hour in his gymnasium, the blood which his father’s millions had shocked to his brain receded and left it clear and logical again. But he was by no means reconciled to his lot; he feared the stifling influences of wealth, of which he had read in so many books. To make a great fortune in constant warfare with all the difficulties, acquiring a painful knowledge of the value of every dollar, was an achievement which might easily lead to greater accomplishment still, but to fling a man on his back without warning and pour gold over him by the ton—

He left his room abruptly and walked slowly downstairs. “What’s the use of thinking about it? or about what was to have been?—my absurd impossible past, which I shall put away in lavender and cherish like a dead love. There is nothing to be done but to make the best of a bad business, re-adapt myself—mortals are always doing that, anyhow. I shall ask for a respite before settling down to it, however.”

When he reached the main floor he turned into the reception-room and strolled through the several large and lofty rooms which ended in a music-room of immense proportions. He inferred that it was the largest in New York; and, still feeling sore and satirical, returned to a more appreciative inspection of the other rooms. That their harmonies were exquisite he needed no telling, and he thought the pale soft tints, as faded and elusive as charming old memories, a pleasant contrast to his beloved Nature. That the few pictures were as great in art as they must be in price he also knew instinctively, and found consolation in the reflection that his father did not belong to the class of millionaires who furnished with a single check and leaned upon the agent and the decorator. The rich worn oddly built furniture looked as if brooding in cold aloofness upon an historic past, yet not wholly dissatisfied with its present. Where there were no pictures, bits of brocade, which looked as if a breath might waft them in search of their makers, had been inserted with such skill that they were a part of the background of tarnished gold. Not a chair, not a table, not a cabinet, was formed like anything Fessenden had ever seen, and there were numberless objects for which he had no name; but he approved of everything; indeed, they gave him a distinct pleasure—caressed the raw edges of his resentment, and inclined his mind more philosophically to his new condition.

When his eye had mastered the general effect, it took note of the exceeding repetition of one object, the photograph of a girl. There were perhaps twenty of these large photographs in the different rooms, framed in silver, in gold, in brilliants, in semi-precious stones, on tables, on easels, on shelves. One massive gold frame, incrusted with jewels, bore aloft the double eagle of the House of Hapsburg. Across all these pictures was dashed, rather than written, the name Ranata, followed by an inscription in German, French, English, or in another language for which Fessenden had no name. The girl herself was taken in full, in profile, on horseback, sitting in throne-like chairs, leaning on balustrades, at any age from ten to eighteen, and in as many different costumes as there were photographs. Fessenden sniffed at the vanity of woman, but concluded that he had never seen such a seat in the saddle, and that she certainly looked as if she knew her own mind. Whether he admired her or not he was unable to determine. She had an antique profile, and her eyes were as American as his own—shrewd, alert, eager, powerful. One of the photographs was colored, and the hair blazed, but the eyes were gray. Fessenden thought it romantic to have a princess in the family, and examined the pictures with much interest. The greater number had been given to her much-loved Alexandra, but one was apparently the property of his father, and another of a Mrs. Abbott, of whom he knew nothing. He was not the youth to fall in love with a photograph, however, and as he walked towards the library the Archduchess Ranata Theresia made way in his mind for other matters which at that stage concerned him far more deeply.

XIX

His father was standing on the hearth-rug, awaiting his return with some uneasiness. Fessenden gave his hand a mighty grip. “It’s all right,” he said. “I was born into this family, and that is the end of it. I’d never go back on you, anyhow. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to go up to the mountains for a while. I’d like it awfully if you would come, too, of course—it’s only that I can think better there than anywhere else—and it occurs to me for the first time that I am rather tired—the examinations were very stiff, and I went in for an unusual amount.”

“The Adirondacks, by all means, if you prefer them; and I am badly in need of a holiday; but how would you like a yachting cruise for a change? I have a new steam-yacht of 7000 tons that I think would interest—”

“A steam-yacht of 7000 tons!” cried Fessenden, his terrible responsibilities forgotten. “I can think of nothing on earth—what sort of machinery has she got? How fast can she go? Can I run her?”

While Mr. Abbott was answering questions, luncheon was announced, and he passed his hand through his son’s arm. “We are lunching earlier than usual on your account, and the time has run away,” he said haltingly. “I don’t wish to give you too many shocks in one day, but I must make another confession. You have—I married again some years ago.”

“My dear father,” replied his son dryly, “if you told me that you had married Queen Victoria and annexed the British realm—in fact I expect it. Are there—have I any more brothers and sisters scattered about among the palaces of Europe?”

Mr. Abbott laughed. “No, I did not marry another young wife. Your step-mother is ornamental in her way; but I selected her partly for companionship—I had known her always—partly because I wanted some one to bring up your sister with common-sense and care. I am perfectly satisfied with her; and, as she is a woman of infinite tact, I am sure you will get on with her whether you like her or not. She will probably be a little late for luncheon—she has so many morning engagements—charities—”

But this was not the occasion for Mrs. Abbott’s tact to fail her. She had given the father and son their uninterrupted morning; but to hasten home and preside at luncheon at the unseemly hour of half-past twelve, to make such a performance appear both natural and a compliment, was an occasion for subtlety too rare to be missed. She was standing in the dining-room as they entered, one hand resting on the table, her eyes fixed in pleasant anticipation on the Gobelin which hung before the door. She still wore her hat, she was slightly flushed, her wrap was half removed—her whole appearance was stamped with delicate haste. As she shook hands warmly with Fessenden, smiling and talking rapidly in a very cultivated voice, her step-son wondered at her extreme unlikeness to any woman of her probable age that he had ever seen. She was tall, slender, as willowy as youth; her hair was as black as her eyes, her skin, although sallow, was without wrinkle or line, and her features were mobile. She wore a gown of light summer silk and a large hat, yet both were made and worn with such tact that the painful affectation of lost youth was not suggested: she looked what she was, a woman of the ever-receding middle age, fashionably dressed. Whatever use she might make of modern science to avert age, she employed no art to simulate youth, and as her year was various and crowded, both mind and face were plastic. Whatever her temperament may have been originally, she had made it equable long since; and while she escaped the stigma of amiability, her self-control carried her evenly through the smooth waters of her life. No one ever knew whether she were a really intellectual woman or a brilliantly superficial one, for she had a delicately masterful habit of changing the conversation, as if the end of living were to avert the monotonies. Even in the soft vagueness of chiffon and lace she looked well groomed, and on the promenade and in her carriage no one outshone her in distinction. Distinction, indeed, was the keynote of her personality; and it is doubtful if she would not have sacrificed all other possible gifts to this. An efficient housekeeper managed her twenty servants, her pin-money would have kept an ambitious family of the middle class in affluence, her life was far more luxurious than royalty’s; she was the leader of the most exclusive old set in New York, presided over the most important charities, and yet found time to read the foreign news and play with intellect. With it all she had the rare good sense to be content with her lot and to keep her health.

But in spite of this charming personage who diffused ease as with unseen wings, discontent had assailed Fessenden again. The immense dim baronial room, the automatic butler, the catlike footmen, absurdly tall in their livery, the gold and crystal and floral splendor of the table, made him long gloomily for Pocahontas and a “hunk” of Christina’s bread. He was grateful, however, that Mrs. Abbott talked constantly, in her sprightly abrupt manner. She had been educated as thoroughly as an Englishwoman, trained in a deportment which was a nice mixture of reserve and graciousness—Fessenden inferred that she would treat a servant with the utmost consideration, and never permit a liberty from a friend—and she had cultivated the art of conversation, of appearing spontaneous—rarely finishing a long sentence—and of adapting herself to all men, from a reforming drunkard in the slums straight up to royalty. She presently divined her step-son’s mental state, and diverted him by talking of his sister.

“Alexandra spends her winters with the Archduchess, with whom she was brought up, you know. She hates New York, but is fond of our home on the Hudson, and will go with me this summer to Newport—makes her début, you know—she is just eighteen, but went to court functions during the year preceding Rudolf’s death. The Archduchess—they are the same age—came out at sixteen—the Empress being so much away made a difference. Alexandra has rather Americanized her, although in her way she is as much of an individual as the German Emperor—if she only becomes American enough, I believe Europe will hear of her—do you observe your father smile? It’s too bad, really—if you rush off yachting like this, you won’t see Alexandra for months; she has remained later than usual this year, for the Archduchess is still in terrible distress over the death of her brother—a greater tragedy for Europe than for her, however! I wonder how you and Alexandra will like each other? How odd for you to meet for the first time at your age! She is most brilliantly educated, very clever, and a really remarkable linguist; speaks even Hungarian with fluency, and already has quite a knowledge of the world—foreign men are such an education; but I don’t think she will marry early. She is a handsome girl—looks like your mother, but less beautiful; not in the least susceptible—has a remarkably level head; is singularly like your father in many respects. We hardly fancy she will marry a foreigner. If she does, her choice is sure to be a wise one; her head is very cool, and she is in a position to take any step with her eyes open.”

Fessenden had all the young, or the untravelled, American’s contempt for the foreigner. As his step-mother paused for breath, he elevated the nose that England had given him. “I should hope she wouldn’t,” he said emphatically. “Aren’t there enough men in America? Why don’t you make her live over here? I think hobnobbing with royalty is ridiculous for an American.”

Mrs. Abbott laughed pleasantly. “If you could only be an American woman for five minutes! But don’t worry; your sister is as good an American as you are—we have seen to that—and, as I have said, remarkably level-headed; Europe has merely improved, not changed her. I am positive you will be delighted with her, and what she can’t tell you of la haute politique!— She is tremendously interested in you—but I must run! I have an engagement with the housekeeper, and she has the vice of promptness. She is moving us to The Abbey, and we are late this year—I love New York; and as your father was going abroad, and Alex is so far behind time—you will excuse me, I know; and mind you come to tea with me in my own little room at half-past five. You are included in that invitation, my lord.” And, nodding brightly, she left the room with an elastic step that in no way detracted from the light dignity of her carriage.

Fessenden drew a long breath.

“It is not always so,” said Mr. Abbott, with a smile. “As I remarked before, she has great tact. She saw that you were bored, and was determined to entertain you; but when another wants the floor, I do not know any one who can yield it more gracefully. But of course she lives in an atmosphere of flattery—you must expect to find her rather spoiled; but if you really are a good American, you won’t mind that. Alexandra is far less so; she has been educated in a severer school, and she has a far juster sense of proportion—knows exactly what the flattery of the courtier amounts to. That is one reason I have permitted her to be over there so much—one of many reasons.”

He lapsed into the dreamy condition his son remembered so well; but he emerged in a few moments, and waved his hand. The servants disappeared. Mr. Abbott concentrated his gaze on his son. “Fessenden,” he said slowly, “I will tell you my programme for the next year; and please remember, as you listen, that if you do not like it you are at liberty to follow one of your own. I shall never do more than suggest again; for I admit that I have had my day, and that it is your turn now. To prove my entire sincerity in this respect, I shall deposit a million dollars to your credit to-morrow. That will make you your own master—”