He continued to think of this young girl as he rode. One of the reasons
for this probably was the indifference with which she regarded him, now
that her first curiosity had been satisfied; her manner was always
pleasant, but Manuel evidently amused her more, and even Adolfo Torres;
while to be with Margaret Harold she would turn her back upon him
without ceremony, she had repeatedly done it. Winthrop asked himself
whether it could be possible that he was becoming annoyed by this
indifference, or that he was surprised by it? Certainly he had never
considered himself especially attractive, personally; if therefore, in
the face of this fact, he was guilty of surprise, it must be that he had
breathed so long that atmosphere of approbation which surrounded him at
the North, that he had learned, though unconsciously, to rely upon it,
had ended by becoming complacent, smug and complacent, expectant of
attention and deference.
The advantages which had caused this approving northern atmosphere were
now known in Gracias. And Garda remained untouched by them. But that he
should be surprised, or annoyed, by her indifference--this possibility
was the more distasteful to him because he had always been so sure that
he disliked the atmosphere, greatly. He had never been at all pleased by
the knowledge that he inspired a general purring from good mammas,
whenever his name was mentioned; he had no ambition to attract so much
domestic and pussy-like praise. Most of all he did not enjoy being set
down as so extremely safe; if he were safe, it was his own affair; he
certainly was not cultivating the quality for the sake of the many
excellent matrons who happened to form part of his acquaintance.
But, viewed from any maternal stand-point, Evert Winthrop was, and in
spite of himself, almost ideally safe. He was thirty-five years old, and
therefore past the uncertainties, the vague hazards and dangers, that
cling about youth. His record of personal conduct had no marked flaws.
He had a large fortune, a quarter of which he had inherited, and the
other three-quarters gained by his own foresight and talent. He had no
taste for speculation, he was prudent and cool; he would therefore be
sure to take excellent care of his wealth, it would not be evanescent,
as so many American fortunes had a way of becoming. He had perfect
health; and an excellent family descent on both sides of the house; for
what could be better than the Puritan Winthrops on one hand, and the
careful, comfortable old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, from whom his
mother came, on the other? He had a fair amount of good looks--one did
not have to forgive him anything, physically; he had sufficient personal
presence to escape the danger of being merely the cup, as it were, for
the rich wine of his own good-luck. Though quiet in manner, rather
silent, and not handsome, he was a man whom everybody remembered. Those
who were not aware of his advantages remembered him as clearly as those
who knew them all; his individuality was distinct. He had been a good
son, he was now a good nephew; these facts were definitely known and
proved; American mothers are not mercenary, and it is but just to add
that this good sonship and good nephewship, as well as his good record
in other directions, had had as much to do with the high appreciation
that many of them had of him, as the amount of his income. He was, in
short, a bright example of a person without drawbacks, he was a rare
instance whose good points it was a pleasure to sum up; they summed him
up, therefore, joyfully; they proclaimed the total; they said everything
that was delightful about him. Going deeper, they were sure that he had
broken none of the commandments. There had been times when Winthrop had
almost felt like breaking them all, in order to get rid of this rampart
of approval, which surrounded him too closely, like a wall of down. But
there again--he could not be vicious simply to oblige these ladies, or
rather to disoblige them; he must be what it seemed good to him to be.
But he respectfully wished that they could realize how indifferent he
was to their estimation of him, good or bad.
He was a man by no means easily pleased. He could not, therefore, always
believe that other people were sincere when they were so unlike
himself--so much more readily pleased, for instance, with him, than he
was with them. For he was essentially modest at heart; though obstinate
in many of his ideas, he had not that assured opinion of himself, that
solidly installed self-approbation, which men in his position in America
(possessed of large fortunes which they have gained for the most part by
their own talent) are apt, though often unconsciously, to cherish. As he
was fastidious, it was no pleasure to him to taste the open advantages
of his position; they were too open, he did not care for things so
easily gained. And when these advantages were presented to him in
feminine eyes and smiles, or a feminine handwriting, he could not even
take a jocular view of it. For though he was a man of the world, he was
not (this was another of his secrets) in the least blase; he had his
ideal of what the best of life should be, and he kept it like a Madonna
in its shrine. When, therefore, this ideal was pulled by force from its
niche, or, worse still, stepped down of its own accord, he was immensely
disgusted, he felt a sense of personal injury, as if the most precious
feelings of life had been profaned. He had believed in this woman,
perhaps, to the extent of supposing her sweet and womanly; yet here she
was thinking--yes, without doubt thinking (either for herself or for
some one else) of the benefits which his position could confer. That the
little advances she had made had been microscopically small, only made
the matter worse; if she had enough of refinement to make them so
delicate, she should have had enough to not make them at all. It was
characteristic of this man that he never at such times thought that the
offender might be actuated by a real liking for himself--himself apart
from this millstone of his excellent reputation and wealth; this was a
feature of the personal modesty that belonged to him. A man less modest
(that is, the great majority of men), placed in a position similar to
his, would have been troubled by no such poverty of imagination.
It must, however, be added that this modesty of Winthrop's was strictly
one of his inner feelings, not revealed to the world at large. The world
never suspected it, and had no reason for suspecting it; it had, indeed,
nothing to do with the world, it was a private attribute. To the world
he was a cool, quiet man, equally without pretensions and without
awkwardnesses. One could not have told whether he thought well of
himself--especially well--or not.
Why this man, so fully belonging to this busy, self-asserting nineteenth
century, should have preserved so much humility in the face of his
successes--success of fortune, of equilibrium, of knowledge, of
accomplishment of purpose, of self-control--this would have been,
perhaps, a question for the student of heredity. Was it a trait
inherited from Puritan ancestors, some Goodman Winthrop of gentle
disposition, a man not severe in creed or demeanor, nor firm in
exterminating Indians, and therefore of small consequence in his day and
community, and knowing it? Or was it a tendency inherited from some
Dutch ancestress on the maternal side, some sweet little flaxen-haired
great-grandmother, who had received in her maiden breast one of those
deadly though unseen shafts--the shaft of slight--from which a woman's
heart never wholly recovers?
But mental organizations are full of contradictions; looked at in
another way, this deep, unexpressed personal humility in Evert
Winthrop's nature, underneath his rather cold exterior, his keen mind
and strong will, might almost have been called a pride, so high a demand
did it make upon life. For if one has not attractive powers, love, when
it does come, when it is at last believed in, has a peculiarly rich
quality: it is so absolutely one's own!
The father of Evert Winthrop, Andrew Winthrop, was called eccentric
during all his life. But it was an eccentricity which carried with it
none of the slighting estimations which usually accompany the term.
Andrew Winthrop, in truth, had been eccentric only in being more learned
and more original than his neighbors; perhaps, also, more severe. He was
a fair classical scholar, but a still better mathematician, and had
occupied himself at various times with astronomy; he had even built a
small observatory in the garden behind his house. But most of all was he
interested in the rapid advance of science in general, the advance all
along the line, which he had lived to see; he enjoyed this so much that
it was to him, during his later years, what a daily draught of the
finest wine is to an old connoisseur in vintages, whose strength is
beginning to fail him. He once said to his son: "The world is at last
getting into an intelligible condition. My only regret is that I could
not have lived in the century which is coming, instead of in the one
which is passing; but I ought not to complain, I have at least seen the
first rays. What should I have done if my lot had been cast among the
millions who lived before Darwin! I should either have become a
bacchanalian character, drowning in stupid drinking the memory of the
enigmas that oppressed me, or I should have fled to the opposite extreme
and taken refuge in superstition--given up my intellect, bound hand and
foot, to the care of the priests. The world has been in the wilderness,
Evert, through all the ages of which we have record; now a clearer
atmosphere is at hand. I shall not enter this promised land, but I can
see its shining afar off. You, my son, will enter in; prize your
advantages, they are greater than those enjoyed by the greatest kings,
the greatest philosophers, one hundred years ago."
This Puritan without a creed, this student of science who used more
readily than any other the language of the Bible, brought up his only
child with studied simplicity; in all that related to his education,
with severity. The little boy's mother had died soon after his birth,
and Andrew Winthrop had mourned for her, the young wife who had loved
him, all the rest of his life. But in silence, almost in sternness; he
did not welcome sympathy even when it came from his wife's only sister,
Mrs. Rutherford. And he would not give up the child, though the aunt had
begged that the poor baby might be intrusted to her for at least the
first year of his motherless life; the only concession he made was in
allowing the old Episcopal clergyman who had baptized Gertrude to
baptize Gertrude's child, and in tacitly promising that the boy should
attend, if he pleased, the Episcopal Church when he grew older, his
mother having been a devoted Churchwoman. He kept the child with him in
the large, lonely New England house which even Gertrude Winthrop's
sweetness had not been able to make fully home-like and warm. For it had
been lived in too long, the old house, by a succession of Miss
Winthrops, conscientious old maids with narrow chests, thin throats, and
scanty little knobs of gray-streaked hair behind--the sort of good women
with whom the sense of duty is far keener than that of comfort, and in
whose minds character is apt to be gauged by the hour of getting up in
the morning. There had always been three or four Miss Winthrops of this
pattern in each generation; they began as daughters, passed into aunts,
and then into grandaunts, as nieces, growing up, took their first
positions from them. Andrew Winthrop himself had spent his childhood
among a number of these aunts--aunts both simple and "grand." But the
custom of the family had begun to change in his day; the aunts had taken
to leaving this earthly sphere much earlier than formerly (perhaps
because they had discovered that they could no longer attribute late
breakfasts to total depravity), so that when, his own youth past, he
brought his Gertrude home, there was not one left there; they were
alone.
The poor young mother, when death so soon came to her, begged that the
little son she was leaving behind might be called Evert, after her only
and dearly loved brother, Evert Beekman, who had died not long before.
Andrew Winthrop had consented. But he was resolved, at the same time,
that no Beekman, but only Winthrop, methods should be used in the
education of the child. The Winthrop methods were used; and with good
effect. But the boy learned something of the Beekman ways, after all, in
the delightful indulgence and petting he received from his aunt Katrina
when he went to visit her at vacation times, either at her city home or
at her old country-house on the Sound; he learned it in her affectionate
words, in the smiling freedom from rules and punishments which prevailed
at both places, in the wonderful toys, and, later, the dogs and gun,
saddle-horse and skiff, possessed by his fortunate cousin Lanse.
Andrew Winthrop was not that almost universal thing in his day for a man
in his position in New England, a lawyer; he owned and carried on an
iron-foundery, as his father had done before him. He had begun with some
money, and he had made more; he knew that he was rich (rich for his day
and neighborhood); but save for his good horses and his observatory, he
lived as though he were poor. He gave his son Evert, however, the best
education (according to his idea of what the best education consisted
in), which money and careful attention could procure; but he did not
send him to college, and at sixteen the boy was put regularly to work
for a part of the day in the iron-foundery, being required to begin at
the beginning and learn the whole business practically, from the keeping
of books to the proper mixture of ores for the furnaces--those furnaces
which had seemed to the child almost as much a part of nature as the
sunshine itself, since he had seen their red light against the sky at
night ever since he was born. In the mean time his education in books
went steadily forward also, under his father's eye--a severe one.
Fortunately the lad had sturdy health and nerves which were seldom
shaken, so that these double tasks did not break him down. For one
thing, Andrew Winthrop never required, or even desired, rapid progress;
Evert might be as slow as he pleased, if he would but be thorough. And
thorough he was. Even if he had not been naturally inclined towards it,
he would have acquired it from the system which his father had pursued
with him from babyhood; but he was naturally inclined towards it; his
knowledge, therefore, as far as it went, was very complete.
In four years he had made some progress in the secrets of several sorts
of iron and several ancient languages. In six, he could manage the
foundery and the observatory tolerably well. In the ninth year his part
of the foundery went of itself, or seemed to, under his clear-headed
superintendence, while he ardently gave all his free hours to the
studies in science, in which his father now joined, instead of
directing, as heretofore. And then, in the tenth year of this busy,
studious life, Andrew Winthrop had died, and the son of twenty-six had
found himself suddenly free, and alone.
He had never longed for his freedom, he had never thought about it; he
had never realized that his life was austere. He had been fond of his
father, though his father had been more intellectually interested in him
as a boy who would see in all probability the fulness of the new
revelation of Science, than fond of him in return. Andrew Winthrop's
greatest ambition had been to equip his son so thoroughly that he would
be able to take advantage of this new light immediately, without any
time lost in bewilderment or hesitation; the 'prentice-work would all
have been done. And Evert, interested and busy, leading an active life
as well as a studious one, had never felt discontent.
The evening after the funeral he was alone in the old house. Everything
had been set in order again, that painful order which strikes first upon
the hearts of the mourners when they return to their desolate home, an
order which seems to say: "All is over; he is gone and will return to
you no more. You must now take up the burdens of life again, and go
forward." The silent room was lonely, Evert read a while, but could not
fix his attention; he rose, walked about aimlessly, then went to the
window and looked out. It was bitterly cold, there was deep snow
outside; an icy wind swayed the boughs of a naked elm which stood near
the window. Against the dark sky to-night the familiar light was not
visible; the furnaces had been shut down out of respect for the dead.
For the first time there stirred in Evert Winthrop's mind the feeling
that the cold was cruel, inhuman; that there was a conscious element in
it; that it hated man, and was savage to him; would kill him, and did
kill him when it could. The house seemed in league with this enemy; in
spite of the bright fire the chill kept creeping in, and for the life of
him he could not rid himself of the idea that he ought to go out and
cover his poor old father, lying there helpless under the snow, with
something thick and warm. He roused himself with an effort, he knew that
these were unhealthy fancies; he made up his mind that he would go away
for a while, the under-superintendent could see to the foundery during
his absence, which would not, of course, be long. But the next day he
learned that he could remain away for as long a time as he pleased--he
had inherited nearly a million.
It was a great surprise. Andrew Winthrop had so successfully concealed
the amount of his fortune that Evert had supposed that the foundery, and
the income that came from it, a moderate one, together with the old
house to live in, would be all. Andrew Winthrop's intention in this
concealment had been to bestow upon his son, so far as he could, during
his youth, a personal knowledge of life as seen from the side of earning
one's own living--a knowledge which can never be acquired at
second-hand, and which he considered inestimable, giving to a man juster
views of himself and his fellow-men than anything else can.
In the nine years that had passed since his father's death Evert had, as
has been stated, quadrupled the fortune he had inherited.
It was said--by the less successful--that Chance, Luck, and Opportunity
had all favored him. It was perhaps Chance that had led the elder
Winthrop in the beginning to invest some hundreds of dollars in wild
lands on the shore of Lake Superior--though even that was probably
foresight. But as for Luck, she is generally nothing but
clear-headedness. And Opportunity offers herself, sooner or later, to
almost all; it is only that so few of us recognize her, and seize the
advantages she brings. Winthrop had been aided by two things; one was
capital to begin with; the other a perfectly untrammelled position. He
had no one to think of but himself.
Early in the spring after his father's death he journeyed westward,
looking after some property, and decided to go to Lake Superior and see
that land also. He always remembered his arrival; the steamer left him
on a rough pier jutting out into the dark gray lake; on the shore,
stretching east and west, was pine forest, unbroken save where in the
raw clearing, dotted with stumps, rose a few unpainted wooden houses,
and the rough buildings of the stamping-mills, their great wooden legs
stamping ponderously on iron ore. His land was in the so-called town;
after looking at it, he went out to the mine from which the ore came; he
knew something of ores, and had a fancy to see the place. He went on
horseback, following a wagon track through the wild forest. The snow
still lay in the hollows, there was scarcely a sign of spring; the mine
was at some distance, and the road very bad; but at last he reached it.
The buildings and machinery of the struggling little company were poor
and insufficient; but few men were employed, the superintendent had a
discouraged expression. But far above this puny little scratching at its
base rose "the mountain," as it was called; and it was a cliff-like
hill of iron ore. One could touch it, feel it; it was veritable, real.
To Winthrop it seemed a striking picture--the great hill of metal,
thinly veiled with a few trees, rising towards the sky, the primitive
forest at its feet, the snow, the silence, and beyond, the sullen lake
without a sail. The cliff was waiting--it had waited for ages; the lake
was waiting too.
Winthrop took a large portion of his fortune and put it into this mine.
A new company was formed, but he himself remained the principal owner,
and took the direction into his own hands. It was the right moment; in
addition, his direction was brilliant. For a time he worked excessively
hard, but all his expectations were fulfilled; by means of this, and one
or two other enterprises in which he embarked with the same mixture of
bold foresight and the most careful attention to details, his fortune
was largely increased.
When the war broke out he was abroad--his first complete vacation; he
was indulging that love for pictures which he was rather astonished to
find that he possessed. He came home, took a captain's place in a
company of volunteers, went to the front, and served throughout the war.
Immediately after the restoration of peace, he had gone abroad again.
And he had come back this second time principally to disentangle from a
web of embarrassments the affairs of a cousin of his father's, David
Winthrop by name, whom he had left in charge of the foundery which he
had once had charge of, himself. Having some knowledge of founderies,
David was to superintend this one, and have a sufficient share of the
profits to help him maintain his family of seven sweet, gentle,
inefficient daughters, of all ages from two to eighteen, each with the
same abundant flaxen hair and pretty blue eyes, the same pale oval
cheeks and stooping shoulders, and a mother over them more inefficient
and gentle and stooping-shouldered still--the very sort of a quiverful,
as ill-natured (and richer) neighbors were apt to remark, that such an
incompetent creature as David Winthrop would be sure to possess. This
cousin had been a trial to Andrew Winthrop all his life. David was a
well-educated man, and he had a most lovable disposition; but he had the
incurable habit of postponing (with the best intentions) until another
time anything important which lay before him; the unimportant things he
did quite cheerily. If it were but reading the morning's paper, David
would be sure to not quite get to the one article which was of
consequence, but to read all the others first in his slow way, deferring
that one to a more convenient season when he could give to it his best
attention; of course the more convenient season never came. Mixed with
this constant procrastination there was a personal activity which was
amusingly misleading. Leaving the house in the morning, David would walk
to his foundery, a distance of a mile, with the most rapid step possible
which was not a run; the swing of his long arms, the slight frown of
preoccupation from business cares (it must have been that), would have
led any one to believe that, once his office reached, this man would
devote himself to his work with the greatest energy, would make every
moment tell. But once his office reached, this man devoted himself to
nothing, that is, to nothing of importance; he arrived breathless, and
hung up his hat; he rubbed his hands, and walked about the room; he
glanced over the letters, and made plans for answering them, pleasing
himself with the idea of the vigorous things he should say, and changing
the form of his proposed sentences in his own mind more than once; for
David wrote a very good letter, and was proud of it. Then he sharpened
all the pencils industriously, taking pains to give each one a very fine
point. He jotted down in neat figures with one of them, little
sums--sums which had no connection with the foundery, however, but
concerned themselves with something he had read the night before,
perhaps, as the probable population of London in A.D. 1966, or the
estimated value of a ton of coal in the year 3000. Then he would do a
little work on his plan (David made beautiful plans) for the house which
he hoped some day to build. And he would stare out of the window by the
hour, seeing nothing in particular, but having the vague idea that as he
was in his office, and at his desk, he was attending to business as
other men attended to it; what else was an office for?
Evert, as a boy, had always felt an interest in this whimsical cousin,
who came every now and then to see his father, with some new enterprise
(David was strong in enterprises) to consult him about--an enterprise
which was infallibly to bring in this time a large amount of money. But
this time was never David's time. And in the mean while his daughters
continued to appear and grow. Evert, left master, had had more faith in
David than his father had had; or perhaps it was more charity; for his
cousin had always been a source of refreshment to him--this humorous,
sweet-tempered man, who, with his gray-sprinkled hair and thin temples,
his well-known incompetency, and his helpless family behind him, had yet
no more care on his face than a child has, not half so much as Evert
himself, with his youth and health, his success and his fortune, to aid
him. But, curiously enough, David was quite well aware of his own
faults; his appreciation of them, indeed, had given him a manner of
walking slightly sidewise, his right shoulder and right leg a little
behind, as though conscious of their master's inefficiency and ashamed
of it. For the same reason he chronically hung his head a little as he
walked, and, if addressed, looked off at a distance mildly instead of at
the person who was speaking to him. But though thus conscious generally
of his failings, David was never beyond a sly joke about them and
himself. It was the way in which he laughed over these jokes (they were
always good ones) which had endeared him to his younger cousin: there
was such a delightful want of worldly wisdom about the man.
Having disentangled David, refunded his losses, and set him going again
in a small way, Evert had come southward. He would have preferred to go
back to Europe for a tour in Spain; but he felt sure that David would
entangle himself afresh before long (David had the most inscrutable ways
of entangling himself), and that, unless he were willing to continually
refund, he should do better to remain within call, at least for the
present. In the early spring another relative on his father's side, a
third cousin, was to add himself to the partnership, and this young man,
Evert hoped, would not only manage the foundery, but manage David as
well; when once this arrangement had been effected, the owner of the
foundery would be free.
All this was very characteristic of Evert Winthrop. He could easily have
given up all business enterprises; he could have invested his money
safely and washed his hands of that sort of care. To a certain extent he
had done this; but he wished to help David, and so he kept the foundery,
he wished to help two or three other persons, and so he retained other
interests. This, at least, was what he said to himself, and it was true;
yet the foundations lay deeper--lay in the fact that he had been born
into the world with a heavy endowment of energy; quiet as he appeared,
he had more than he knew what to do with, and was obliged to find
occupation for it. During boyhood this energy had gone into the double
tasks of education in books and in iron which his father had imposed
upon him; in young manhood it had gone into the scientific studies in
which his father had shared. Later had come the brilliant crowded years
of the far-seeing conception and vigorous execution which had given him
his largely increased wealth. Then the war occupied him; it occupied
fifty millions of people as well. After it was over, and he had gone
abroad a second time, he had not been an idle traveller, though always a
tranquil one.
The truth was, he could not lead a purely contemplative life. It was not
that he desired to lead such a life, or that he admired it; it was
simply that he knew he should never be able to do it, even if he should
try, and the impossibility, as usual, tempted him. There must be
something very charming in it (that is, if one had no duties which
forbade it), this full, passive, receptive enjoyment of anything
delightful, a fine picture, for instance, or a beautiful view, the
sunshine, the sea; even the angler's contented quiescence on a green
bank was part of it. These pleasures he knew he could never have in
their full sweetness, though he could imagine them perfectly, even
acutely. It was not that he was restless; he was the reverse. It was not
that he liked violent exercise, violent action; he liked nothing
violent. But, instead of sitting in the sunshine, his instinct was to
get a good horse and ride in it; instead of lounging beside a blue sea,
he liked better to be sailing a yacht over it; instead of sitting
contemplatively on a green bank, holding a fishing-rod, he would be more
apt to shoulder a gun and walk, contemplatively too, perhaps, for long
miles, in pursuit of game. In all this he was thoroughly American.
He had a great love for art, and a strong love for beauty, which his
studies in mathematics and science had never in the least deadened. As
regarded determination, he was a very strong man; but he was so quiet
and calm that it was only when one came in conflict with him that his
strength was perceived; and there were not many occasions for coming in
conflict with him now, he was no longer directing large enterprises. In
private life, he was not in the habit of advancing opinions for the rest
of the world to accept; he left that to the people of one idea.
On the present occasion he rode over the pine barrens for miles, every
now and then enjoying a brisk gallop. After a while he saw a phaeton at
a distance, moving apparently at random over the green waste; but he had
learned enough of the barrens by this time to know that it was following
a road--a road which he could not see. There was only one phaeton in
Gracias, the one he himself had sent for; he rode across, therefore, to
speak to his aunt.