THE HONOURABLE HILARY VANE SITS FOR HIS PORTRAIT
I may as well begin this story with Mr. Hilary Vane, more frequently
addressed as the Honourable Hilary Vane, although it was the gentleman's
proud boast that he had never held an office in his life. He belonged to
the Vanes of Camden Street,--a beautiful village in the hills near
Ripton,--and was, in common with some other great men who had made a
noise in New York and the nation, a graduate of Camden Wentworth Academy.
But Mr. Vane, when he was at home, lived on a wide, maple-shaded street
in the city of Ripton, cared for by an elderly housekeeper who had more
edges than a new-fangled mowing machine. The house was a porticoed one
which had belonged to the Austens for a hundred years or more, for Hilary
Vane had married, towards middle age, Miss Sarah Austen. In two years he
was a widower, and he never tried it again; he had the Austens' house,
and that many-edged woman, Euphrasia Cotton, the Austens' housekeeper.
The house was of wood, and was painted white as regularly as leap year.
From the street front to the vegetable garden in the extreme rear it was
exceedingly long, and perhaps for propriety's sake--Hilary Vane lived at
one end of it and Euphrasia at the other. Hilary was sixty-five,
Euphrasia seventy, which is not old for frugal people, though it is just
as well to add that there had never been a breath of scandal about either
of them, in Ripton or elsewhere. For the Honourable Hilary's modest needs
one room sufficed, and the front parlour had not been used since poor
Sarah Austen's demise, thirty years before this story opens.
In those thirty years, by a sane and steady growth, Hilary Vane had
achieved his present eminent position in the State. He was trustee for I
know not how many people and institutions, a deacon in the first church,
a lawyer of such ability that he sometimes was accorded the
courtesy-title of "Judge." His only vice--if it could be called such--was
in occasionally placing a piece, the size of a pea, of a particular kind
of plug tobacco under his tongue,--and this was not known to many people.
Euphrasia could not be called a wasteful person, and Hilary had
accumulated no small portion of this world's goods, and placed them as
propriety demanded, where they were not visible to the naked eye: and be
it added in his favour that he gave as secretly, to institutions and
hospitals the finances and methods of which were known to him.
As concrete evidence of the Honourable Hilary Vane's importance, when he
travelled he had only to withdraw from his hip-pocket a book in which
many coloured cards were neatly inserted, an open-sesame which permitted
him to sit without payment even in those wheeled palaces of luxury known
as Pullman cars. Within the limits of the State he did not even have to
open the book, but merely say, with a twinkle of his eyes to the
conductor, "Good morning, John," and John would reply with a bow and a
genial and usually witty remark, and point him out to a nobody who sat in
the back of the car. So far had Mr. Hilary Vane's talents carried him.
The beginning of this eminence dated back to the days before the Empire,
when there were many little principalities of railroads fighting among
themselves. For we are come to a changed America. There was a time, in
the days of the sixth Edward of England, when the great landowners found
it more profitable to consolidate the farms, seize the common lands, and
acquire riches hitherto undreamed of. Hence the rising of tailor Ket and
others, and the leveling of fences and barriers, and the eating of many
sheep. It may have been that Mr. Vane had come across this passage in
English history, but he drew no parallels. His first position of trust
had been as counsel for that principality known in the old days as the
Central Railroad, of which a certain Mr. Duncan had been president, and
Hilary Vane had fought the Central's battles with such telling effect
that when it was merged into the one Imperial Railroad, its stockholders
--to the admiration of financiers--were guaranteed ten per cent. It was,
indeed, rumoured that Hilary drew the Act of Consolidation itself. At any
rate, he was too valuable an opponent to neglect, and after a certain
interval of time Mr. Vane became chief counsel in the State for the
Imperial Railroad, on which dizzy height we now behold him. And he found,
by degrees, that he had no longer time for private practice.
It is perhaps gratuitous to add that the Honourable Hilary Vane was a man
of convictions. In politics he would have told you--with some vehemence,
if you seemed to doubt--that he was a Republican. Treason to party he
regarded with a deep-seated abhorrence, as an act for which a man should
be justly outlawed. If he were in a mellow mood, with the right quantity
of Honey Dew tobacco under his tongue, he would perhaps tell you why he
was a Republican, if he thought you worthy of his confidence. He believed
in the gold standard, for one thing; in the tariff (left unimpaired in
its glory) for another, and with a wave of his hand would indicate the
prosperity of the nation which surrounded him,--a prosperity too sacred
to tamper with.
One article of his belief, and in reality the chief article, Mr. Vane
would not mention to you. It was perhaps because he had never formulated
the article for himself. It might be called a faith in the divine right
of Imperial Railroads to rule, but it was left out of the verbal creed.
This is far from implying hypocrisy to Mr. Vane. It was his
foundation-rock and too sacred for light conversation. When he allowed
himself to be bitter against various "young men with missions" who had
sprung up in various States of the Union, so-called purifiers of
politics, he would call them the unsuccessful with a grievance, and
recommend to them the practice of charity, forbearance, and other
Christian virtues. Thank God, his State was not troubled with such.
In person Mr. Hilary Vane was tall, with a slight stoop to his shoulders,
and he wore the conventional double-breasted black coat, which reached to
his knees, and square-toed congress boots. He had a Puritan beard, the
hawk-like Vane nose, and a twinkling eye that spoke of a sense of humour
and a knowledge of the world. In short, he was no man's fool, and on
occasions had been more than a match for certain New York lawyers with
national reputations.
It is rare, in this world of trouble, that such an apparently ideal and
happy state of existence is without a canker. And I have left the
revelation of the canker to the last. Ripton knew it was there, Camden
Street knew it, and Mr. Vane's acquaintances throughout the State; but
nobody ever spoke of it. Euphrasia shed over it the only tears she had
known since Sarah Austen died, and some of these blotted the only letters
she wrote. Hilary Vane did not shed tears, but his friends suspected that
his heart-strings were torn, and pitied him. Hilary Vane fiercely
resented pity, and that was why they did not speak of it. This trouble of
his was the common point on which he and Euphrasia touched, and they
touched only to quarrel. Let us out with it--Hilary Vane had a wild son,
whose name was Austen.
Euphrasia knew that in his secret soul Mr. Vane attributed this wildness,
and what he was pleased to designate as profligacy, to the Austen blood.
And Euphrasia resented it bitterly. Sarah Austen had been a young, elfish
thing when he married her,--a dryad, the elderly and learned Mrs. Tredway
had called her. Mr Vane had understood her about as well as he would have
understood Mary, Queen of Scots, if he had been married to that lady.
Sarah Austen had a wild, shy beauty, startled, alert eyes like an animal,
and rebellious black hair that curled about her ears and gave her a
faun-like appearance. With a pipe and the costume of Rosalind she would
have been perfect. She had had a habit of running off for the day into
the hills with her son, and the conventions of Ripton had been to her as
so many defunct blue laws. During her brief married life there had been
periods of defiance from her lasting a week, when she would not speak to
Hilary or look at him, and these periods would be followed by violent
spells of weeping in Euphrasia's arms, when the house was no place for
Hilary. He possessed by matrimony and intricate mechanism of which his
really admirable brain could not grasp the first principles; he felt for
her a real if uncomfortable affection, but when she died he heaved a sigh
of relief, at which he was immediately horrified.
Austen he understood little better, but his affection for the child may
be likened to the force of a great river rushing through a narrow gorge,
and he vied with Euphrasia in spoiling him. Neither knew what they were
doing, and the spoiling process was interspersed with occasional and (to
Austen) unmeaning intervals of severe discipline. The boy loved the
streets and the woods and his fellow-beings; his punishments were a
series of afternoons in the house, during one of which he wrecked the
bedroom where he was confined, and was soundly whaled with an old slipper
that broke under the process. Euphrasia kept the slipper, and once showed
it to Hilary during a quarrel they had when the boy was grown up and gone
and the house was silent, and Hilary had turned away, choking, and left
the room. Such was his cross.
To make it worse, the boy had love his father. Nay, still loved him. As a
little fellow, after a scolding for some wayward prank, he would throw
himself into Hilary's arms and cling to him, and would never know how
near he came to unmanning him. As Austen grew up, they saw the world in
different colours: blue to Hilary was red to Austen, and white, black;
essentials to one were non-essentials to the other; boys and girls, men
and women, abhorred by one were boon companions to the other.
Austen made fun of the minister, and was compelled to go church twice on
Sundays and to prayer-meeting on Wednesdays. Then he went to Camden
Street, to live with his grandparents in the old Vane house and attend
Camden Wentworth Academy. His letters, such as they were, were inimitable
if crude, but contained not the kind of humour Hilary Vane knew. Camden
Wentworth, principal and teachers, was painted to the life; and the lad
could hardly wait for vacation time to see his father, only to begin
quarreling with him again.
I pass over escapades in Ripton that shocked one half of the population
and convulsed the other half. Austen went to the college which his father
had attended,--a college of splendid American traditions,--and his career
there might well have puzzled a father of far greater tolerance and
catholicity. Hilary Vane was a trustee, and journeyed more than once to
talk the matter over with the president, who had been his classmate
there.
"I love that boy, Hilary," the president had said at length, when pressed
for a frank opinion,--"there isn't a soul in the place, I believe, that
doesn't,--undergraduates and faculty,--but he has given me more anxious
thought than any scholar I have ever had."
"Trouble," corrected Mr. Vane, sententiously.
"Well, yes, trouble," answered the president, smiling, "but upon my soul,
I think it is all animal spirits."
"A euphemism for the devil," said Hilary, grimly; "he is the animal part
of us, I have been brought up to believe."
The president was a wise man, and took another tack.
"He has a really remarkable mind, when he chooses to use it. Every once
in a while he takes your breath away--but he has to become interested. A
few weeks ago Hays came to me direct from his lecture room to tell me
about a discussion of Austen's in constitutional law. Hays, you know, is
not easily enthused, but he declares your son has as fine a legal brain
as he has come across in his experience. But since then, I am bound to
admit," added the president, sadly, "Austen seems not to have looked at a
lesson."
"'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,'" replied Hilary.
"He'll sober down," said the president, stretching his conviction a
little, "he has two great handicaps: he learns too easily, and he is too
popular." The president looked out of his study window across the common,
surrounded by the great elms which had been planted when Indian lads
played among the stumps and the red flag of England had flown from the
tall pine staff. The green was covered now with students of a conquering
race, skylarking to and fro as they looked on at a desultory baseball
game. "I verily believe," said the president, "at a word from your son,
most of them would put on their coats and follow him on any mad
expedition that came into his mind."
Hilary Vane groaned more than once in the train back to Ripton. It meant
nothing to him to be the father of the most popular man in college.
"The mad expedition" came at length in the shape of a fight with the
townspeople, in which Austen, of course, was the ringleader. If he had
inherited his mother's eccentricities, he had height and physique from
the Vanes, and one result was a week in bed for the son of the local
plumber and a damage suit against the Honourable Hilary. Another result
was that Austen and a Tom Gaylord came back to Ripton on a long
suspension, which, rumour said, would have been expulsion if Hilary were
not a trustee. Tom Gaylord was proud of suspension in such company. More
of him later. He was the son of old Tom Gaylord, who owned more lumber
than any man in the State, and whom Hilary Vane believed to be the
receptacle of all the vices.
Eventually Austen went back and graduated--not summa cum laude, honesty
compels me to add. Then came the inevitable discussion, and to please his
father he went to the Harvard Law School for two years. At the end of
that time, instead of returning to Ripton, a letter had come from him
with the postmark of a Western State, where he had fled with a classmate
who owned ranch. Evidently the worldly consideration to be derived from
conformity counted little with Austen Vane. Money was a medium only--not
an end. He was in the saddle all day, with nothing but the horizon to
limit him; he loved his father, and did not doubt his father's love for
him, and he loved Euphrasia. He could support himself, but he must see
life. The succeeding years brought letters and quaint, useless presents
to both the occupants of the lonely house,--Navajo blankets and Indian
jeweler and basket-work,--and Austen little knew how carefully these were
packed away and surreptitiously gazed at from time to time. But to Hilary
the Western career was a disgrace, and such meagre reports of it as came
from other sources than Austen tended only to confirm him in this
opinion.
It was commonly said of Mr. Paul Pardriff that not a newspaper fell from
the press that he did not have a knowledge of its contents. Certain it
was that Mr. Pardriff made a specialty of many kinds of knowledge,
political and otherwise, and, the information he could give--if he chose
--about State and national affairs was of a recondite and cynical nature
that made one wish to forget about the American flag. Mr. Pardriff was
under forty, and with these gifts many innocent citizens of Ripton
naturally wondered why the columns of his newspaper, the Ripton Record,
did not more closely resemble the spiciness of his talk in the office of
Gales' Hotel. The columns contained, instead, such efforts as essays on a
national flower and the abnormal size of the hats of certain great men,
notably Andrew Jackson; yes, and the gold standard; and in times of
political stress they were devoted to a somewhat fulsome praise of
regular and orthodox Republican candidates,--and praise of any one was
not in character with the editor. Ill-natured people said that the matter
in his paper might possibly be accounted for by the gratitude of the
candidates, and the fact that Mr. Pardriff and his wife and his
maid-servant and his hired man travelled on pink mileage books, which
could only be had for love--not money. On the other hand, reputable
witnesses had had it often from Mr. Pardriff that he was a reformer, and
not at all in sympathy with certain practices which undoubtedly existed.
Some years before--to be exact, the year Austen Vane left the law school
--Mr. Pardriff had proposed to exchange the Ripton Record with the editor
of the Pepper County Plainsman in afar Western State. The exchange was
effected, and Mr. Pardriff glanced over the Plainsman regularly once a
week, though I doubt whether the Western editor ever read the Record
after the first copy. One day in June Mr. Pardriff was seated in his
sanctum above Merrill's drug store when his keen green eyes fell upon the
following:--"The Plainsman considers it safe to say that the sympathy of
the people of Pepper County at large is with Mr. Austen Vane, whose
personal difficulty with Jim Blodgett resulted so disastrously for Mr.
Blodgett. The latter gentleman has long made himself obnoxious to local
ranch owners by his persistent disregard of property lines and property,
and it will be recalled that he is at present in hot water with the
energetic Secretary of the Interior for fencing government lands. Vane,
who was recently made manager of Ready Money Ranch, is one of the most
popular young men in the county. He was unwillingly assisted over the
State line by his friends. Although he has never been a citizen of the
State, the Plainsman trusts that he may soon be back and become one of
us. At last report Mr. Blodgett was resting easily."
This article obtained circulation in Ripton, although it was not copied
into the Record out of deference to the feelings of the Honourable Hilary
Vane. In addition to the personal regard Mr. Pardriff professed to have
for the Honourable Hilary, it maybe well to remember that Austen's father
was, among other, things, chairman of the State Committee. Mr. Tredway
(largest railroad stockholder in Ripton) pursed his lips that were
already pursed. Tom Gaylord roared with laughter. Two or three days later
the Honourable Hilary, still in blissful ignorance, received a letter
that agitated him sorely.
"DEAR FATHER: I hope you don't object to receiving a little visit from a
prodigal, wayward son. To tell the truth, I have found it convenient to
leave the Ready Money Ranch for a while, although Bob Tyner is good
enough to say I may have the place when I come back. You know I often
think of you and Phrasie back in Ripton, and I long to see the dear old
town again. Expect me when you see me.
"Your aff. son,
"AUSTEN."