|In his bright little study at Lakeside, Lothrop Audouin had just laid
down a parchment-bound volume of Carlyle's 'French Revolution' and
turned to look out of the pretty bay-window, embowered in clematis and
Virginia creeper, that opened on to the placid tawny creek and the blue
expanse of more distant Ontario. 'How unawares the summer has crept upon
us,' he murmured to himself, half-audibly, as was his fashion. 'When I
first got back from Rome in early May, the trees were all but leafless;
and now July is far gone, and before many weeks we shall be beginning to
think of the melting tints of our golden autumn. That's the difference,
really, between revolution and evolution. The most truly important
events make no stir on their first taking place; they grow, surely but
silently. The changes to which all things conspire, and for which they
have prepared the way beforehand, produce no explosion, because they
are gradual, and the universe consents to them. A birth takes place in
silence, and sums up the result of endless generations; but a murder,
which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult
immediately. What a fracas over Camille at the Café Foy! and yet, with a
whiff of grapeshot, the whole fabric of liberty disappears bodily. What
a slow growth the democratic constitution of Massachusetts! and yet,
when a convulsion seizes on the entire continent, and north and
south tear one another to pieces for a grand idea, the democratic
constitutions float unhurt upon the sea of commotion, and come out
intact in the fulness of time with redoubled splendour! A good idea!
I'll enter it in my diary, elaborated a little into better English.'
For Audouin was a writer by instinct, and though he had never yet
perpetrated a printed book, he kept a dainty little journal in his
desk, in which he jotted down side by side his pretty thoughts, as they
occurred to him, and his observations, half-scientific, half-fanciful,
on the progress of nature all around him. This diary he regarded as his
chief literary testament; and he meant to leave it in his will to Hiram
Winthrop, with strict injunctions that it should be published after
his death, for private circulation only, among the select few who were
competent to understand it. Surely a good man and true may be permitted,
in the byways and background of his inner nature, to indulge in his
harmless little foibles and affectations.
He had risen to take out the diary, full of his little poetical conceit,
when the maid (Audouin wasn't such a recluse that he didn't like to keep
his hermitage well-appointed) brought in a note for him on a quaintly
chased Japanese salver. He took the note and glanced at it casually.
It hadn't come by post, but by hand--a rare event in the isolation of
Lakeside, where neighbours were none, and visitors few and distant.
He broke open the envelope, and read the few pencilled lines within
hastily:--
'Deacon Winthrop would be obliged if you would come over at once to
see him, as I am seriously ill, and the Lord is calling me. For Deacon
Winthrop, faithfully, Keziah H. Hoptree.'
Audouin put on his hat at once, and went to the porch, with its
clambering roses, to see the bearer, who sat in a high buggy, flipping
the flies off his horse's ear with his long whipcord.
'Wal,' the man said, 'I guess, Mr. Audouin, you'd better look alive if
you want to see the deacon comfortably afore the Lord's taken him.'
'All right,' Audouin answered, with Yankee irreverence, jumping up
hastily into the tall buggy. 'Drive right away, sir, and we'll run
a race to see which gets there first, ourselves, or Death, the Great
Deliverer.'
The man drove along the rough unmade roads as only an American farmer
can drive in a life-and-death hurry.
Geauga County hadn't altered greatly to the naked eye since the days
long, long ago, when Hiram Winthrop used to sulk and hide in the
blackberry bottom. The long straight road still stretched as of yore
evenly between its two limits, in a manner calculated to satisfy all the
strictest requirements of a definition in Euclid; and the parallel lines
of snake fence on either hand still ran along at equal distances till
they seemed to meet on the vanishing point of the horizon, somewhere a
good deal on the hither side of mathematical infinity. The farms were
still all bare, gaunt, dusty, and unlovable; the trees were somewhat
fewer even than of old (for this was now acknowledged to be an unusually
fine agricultural section), and the charred and blackened stumps that
once diversified the weedy meadows had long for the most part been
pulled up and demolished by the strenuous labours of men and horses. But
otherwise Audouin could notice little difference between the Muddy
Creek of fifteen years ago, and the Muddy Creek of that present moment.
Fifteen more crops of fall and spring wheat had been reaped and garnered
off the flat expanses; fifteen more generations of pigs (no, hogs)
had been duly converted into prime American pork, and thence by proper
rotation into human fat, bone, and muscle; fifteen winters had buried
with their innocent sheet of white the blank desolation of fifteen ugly
and utilitarian summers; but the farmers and farmhouses, though richer
and easier than before, had not yet wakened one whit the more than of
old to a rudimentary perception of the fact that the life of man may
possibly consist of some other elements than corn, and pork, and the
rigorous Calvinistic theology of Franklin P. Hopkins. Beauty was still
crying in the streets of Muddy Creek, and no man regarded her.
At last the long dreary drive was over--a drive, Audouin thought to
himself with a sigh, which couldn't be equalled anywhere in the
world for naked ugliness, outside this great, free, enlightened, and
absolutely materialised republic--and the buggy drew up at the gate of
Deacon Zephaniah Winthrop's homestead, in the exact central spot of that
wide and barren desert of utter fruitfulness. Audouin leaped from the
buggy hastily, and went on through the weedy front yard to the door of
the bare white farmhouse.
'Wal, I'm glad you've kem, anyhow,' the hired help (presumably Keziah
H. Hoptree) exclaimed in her shrill loud voice as she opened the door
to him; 'for deacon's jest tearin' mad tew see you afore the Lord takes
him; he says he wants tew give you a message fur Hiram, an' he can't die
in peace until he's given it.'
'Is he very ill?' Audouin asked.
'Not so sick tew talk to,' the girl answered, harshly; 'but Dr. Eselman,
he says he ain't goin' to live a week longer. He's bin doctoring
himself, that's whar it is, with Chief Tecumseh's Paregoric Elixir; an'
now he's gone so fur that Dr. Eselman reckons he can't never git that
thar Elixir out of his con-stitooshun nohow. Jest you step right in
here, judge, an' see him.'
Audouin followed her into the sick room, where the old deacon, thinner,
bonier, and more sallow than ever, lay vacantly on his propped-up
pillows.
'You set you down thar, mister,' he began feebly, as soon as he was
aware of Audouin's presence, 'an' make yourself right comfortable. I
wanted to see you, you may calkilate, to give you a message for
Hiram.' He paused a little between each sentence, as if he spoke with
difficulty; and Audouin waited patiently to hear what it might be, with
some misgiving.
'You tell him,' the deacon went on in his slow jerky manner, 'when you
see him or correspond to him, that I forgive him.'
It was with some effort that Audouin managed to answer seriously, 'I
will, Mr. Winthrop, you may rely upon it.'
'Yes,' the deacon continued with as much Christian magnanimity as his
enfeebled condition would permit him to express; 'I forgive him. Freely
and on-reservedly, I forgive him. Hiram ain't bin a son to me as I
might hev anticipated. Thar was too much of his mother's family in him
altogether, I reckon. The Winthrops was never a wild lot, an' wouldn't
hev gone off paintin' pictures and goin' to Italy as that thar boy's
done, anyhow. I might hev expected that Hiram would hev stopped to home
to help me with the farm, and git things comfortable some; but thar, he
was allus one o' the idlest, sulkiest, onaccountablest boys I ever met
with, nowhar. He's gone off, foolin' around with them thar pictures, an'
I don't suppose he'll never come to any good, nohow. But I forgive him,
mister; I freely forgive him.'Tain't what one might hev looked fur
from a young man who was raised in the Hopkinsite confession, an' whose
parents were both of 'em believers; but these things do come out most
onaccountably, that they might all be damned who believed not the truth
but had pleasure in on-righteousness.'
Audouin merely bowed his head in solemn silence. The picture of the
gaunt, hard-faced old man, sitting up in bed upon his pillows in his
loneliness, and speaking thus, after his kind, of the son whom he had
alienated from him by his unsympathetic harshness, was one too dreary
for him to look at without an almost visible shudder.
'It's a mercy,' the deacon meandered on, after a short pause, gasping
for breath, 'that his poor mother didn't never live to see the worst of
it. Hiram might hev kem home, and helped me look after the farm and the
cattle; instead of which, I've had to git in hired helps, since Mis'
Winthrop died, while he was off somewhere or other painting pictures.
He's in Italy now, learnin' still, he says, when he wrote to me last; I
should hev expected he'd hev learnt the trade completely afore this,
an' be practisin' it for a livin', as anybody might expect at his age,
nat'rally. But he'll hev to come home, now, anyhow, and take to the
farm; fur of course it goes to him, mister, an' I hope now he'll give up
them thar racketty ways he's got into, and begin to settle down a bit at
last, into a decent farmer. He's no boy now, Hiram ain't, an' he ought
to be gettin' steady. I don't say I hev any complaint against you
personally, mister, on that score,' the deacon went on, shaking his head
magnanimously. 'You've led him into it, I know; but I understand you
meant it for the best, though it's turned out oncommon bad; an' I'm a
Christian man, I hope, an' I bear you no grudge for it. But what I
want you to write an' tell him's jest this. You write an' say that his
father, afore he died, freely forgave him, an' left him the farm and
fixins. In time to come, mister, I dessay that thar boy'll often regret
an' think to himself, “While my father was here, I might have made more
of him.” But it'll be a comfort to him anyhow to know that I forgave
him; an' you jest take an' write it to him, an' I'll be obliged to you.'
Audouin sat a long time by the old man's bed, wondering whether any word
of regret or penitence would come from him for his own grievous error
in making his son's young life a burden and a misery to him (for Hiram,
with all his reticence, had let his friend see by stray side hints how
sad his days had been in Geauga County); but no word came, nor was
the possibility of it within the deacon's narrow self-righteous
self-satisfied soul. The hours wore away, and Audouin watched and
waited, but still the deacon went on at intervals, all about his own
goodness to Hiram, and Hiram's natural unregenerate liking for painting
pictures. At last, Keziah came in, and warned Audouin that the deacon
mustn't be allowed any longer to excite himself. So Audouin went away,
sad and disheartened. 'Great heavens!' he said to himself, as he jumped
up again into the buggy, which was waiting to take him back to Lakeside;
'in spite of our common schools, and our ten thousand newspapers, and
all our glib American buncombe about enlightenment, and education, and
our noble privileges, is there any country in the world, I wonder, where
the gap between those who think and feel and know, and those who wallow
in their own conceited ignorance and narrowness and brutality, yawns
wider and deeper than in these United States of ours, at the latter end
of this emancipated nineteenth century? Look at the great gulf fixed
between Boston, or even Chicago, and Geauga County! Why, the Florentines
of the middle ages, the old Etruscans, the naked Egyptian, the Chinaman,
the Hindoo coolie, are all of them a whole spiritual world ahead of
Deacon Winthrop! They at least know, or knew, that the human heart has
in it some higher need than corn, or pork, or rice, or millet; that man
shall not live by bread alone; that of all the gifts God gave to man, He
gave none better than the knowledge of beauty! Ay, even the monkey that
plays among the mango trees considers the feathers in the parrot's tail
as worthy of his passing attention as the biggest cocoanut.
'And yet, not higher, after all, those Chinamen, when one comes to think
of it; for is there not mysteriously inherent somehow, in the loins of
that utterly sensual materialised clod, the potentiality of begetting
Hiram Winthrop?
'I wonder what sort of people my own eight great-grandparents would be,
if I could only get them into the little sitting-room at Lakeside, and
compare notes with them about heaven and earth, and Herbert Spencer, and
the Apollo Belvedere!'
A week later, Audouin had to write to Hiram, and tell him that the
deacon had passed away, and had forgiven him. 'How, my dear Hiram,'
Audouin wrote, towards the end of his letter, 'your father leaves the
farm at Muddy Creek to you; and if you take my advice, you will sell
it at once, for what it'll fetch (not much, I doubt me) and apply the
principal to paying your expenses for a year or two more at Seguin's
studio. You hold your pictorial talents in trust for the American
nation, which even now sadly needs them; and you mustn't throw away your
chances of the highest self-improvement for the sake of a little filthy
lucre, which, even if invested, would really bring you in next to
nothing. Nay, rather, to use it in studying at Rome is really to invest
it in the best possible manner; for, merely judging the result as a Wall
Street speculator would judge it, by the actual return in dollars and
cents, United States currency, your pictures will bring you in tenfold
in the end of what you spend in preparing to paint them. Though not for
money, I hope, Hiram, not for money, but for art's sake, and for the
highest final development of this our poor groping humanity, which is
still so base, take it for all in all, that I sometimes almost wonder
whether it can be really worth our while to try to do anything to
improve it.'
Yet so strangely compounded is this human nature of ours for all that,
that when Hiram Winthrop read that letter to himself in his own small
room beneath the roof of the Roman attic, he lay down upon his bed, and
cried passionately in the dusk for the poor narrow-minded old deacon;
and thought with a sort of regretful tenderness of the dim old days in
the blackberry bottom; and murmured to himself that when he was a boy he
was no doubt terribly obstinate and perverse and provoking. And now that
he was a man, must he not strive to do as Audouin told him? the one true
friend he had yet met with. And then he undressed and lay awake a long
time, with the sense of utter loneliness pressing upon his poor solitary
head more drearily than ever.