When Braine returned to his bare little room after his suicide, he was
in a strange, paradoxical mood. His thought was intensely introspective,
and yet, with a whimsical perversity, his mind seemed specially alert to
external objects, and full of fantastic imaginings concerning them.
The bareness of the room impressed him, and he likened it to a cell in
some prison.
"Never mind," he said to himself, "I may have to sleep in a cell some
time, and the habit of living here will come handy."
Then, with a little laugh, in which there was no trace of amusement, he
stood before his desk, and added:
"But I believe they don't put strips of worn out carpet by the prison
beds; and I never heard of a cell having a desk in it surmounted by
empty collar-boxes for pigeon holes. Let me see--six times five are
thirty. What an extravagant fellow I have been, to use up thirty boxes
of paper collars in a year! Ten in a box, that's three hundred--almost
one a day! I might have done with half the number by turning them, as I
had to do at college before paper collars came in. Psha!" and he seemed
to spurn the trivial reverie from him as a larger recollection surged up
in his mind, and he began to pace the little room again with the
purposeless tramp of a caged wild beast, whose memory of the forest is
only a pained consciousness that it is his no more.
The June twilight faded into darkness, and the evening gave place to
midnight, but the ghost-walk went ceaselessly on.
In those hours of agonizing thought, the young man--to be young no more
henceforth--recalled every detail of his life with a vividness which
tortured him. He was engaged, unwillingly, in obedience to a resistless
impulse, in searching out the roots of his own character, and finding
out what forces had made him such as he knew himself to be.
In the process he learned, for the first time, precisely what sort of
man he really was. He saw his own soul undressed, and contemplated its
nakedness. One's soul is an unusual thing to see _en deshabille_, and
not always a pleasing one.
He remembered a letter his mother had written him at college--that
mother of half Scotch descent, and touched with Scottish second-sight,
who had silently studied his character from infancy, and learned to
comprehend it not without fear. He could repeat the letter word for
word. It had given him his first hint that he had a character, and a
duty to do with respect to it. He had cherished the missive for years,
and had read it a thousand times for admonition. Alas! how poor a thing
is admonition after all!
"There is one danger point in your character, my son"--he recalled the
very look of the cramped words on the page of blue-ruled letter
paper--"where I have kept watch since you lay in my arms as a baby, and
where you must keep watch hereafter. You have high aims and strong
convictions, and you mean to do right. You will never be led astray by
others--you are too obstinate for that. If you ever go astray, you must
take all the blame on your own head.
"You are generous, and I never knew you to do a meanly selfish thing in
your life. And yet your point of danger is selfishness of a kind. I have
observed you from infancy, and this is what I have seen. Your desire to
accomplish your purposes is too strong. You are not held back by any
difficulty. You make any sacrifice in pursuit of your ends. You use any
means you can find to carry your plans through, and you are quick at
finding means, or making them when you want them.
"I was proud of the pluck you showed in doing almost a slave's work for
two years, because you had made up your mind to go through college. But
I shuddered at the thought of what such determination might lead to.
"Oh! my son, you will succeed in life. I have no fear of that. But how?
Beware the time when your purpose is strong, your desire to succeed
great, _and the only means at command are dishonest and degrading_. That
time will come to you, be sure. When it comes you must make a hard
choice--harder for you than for another. You will then sacrifice a
purpose that it will seem like death to surrender--or you will commit
moral suicide! I shall not live to see you so tried; but if I see you
practise giving up a little and trying to keep guard at this weak place,
I may learn before I die to think of that hour of your trial without the
foreboding it gives me now."
That letter was the last his mother ever sent him. It had been a
consolation to him that before death summoned her, she had at least
read his reply, assuring her of his determination to maintain his
integrity in all circumstances.
"You say truly," he wrote, "that I never surrender a purpose or fail to
carry it out. Reflect, mother dear, that the strongest purpose I ever
had is this--to preserve my character. I will not fail to find means for
that when the time comes, as I never fail to accomplish objects of less
moment."
"The prophecy of the dear old mother is fulfilled," he muttered, while
his nails buried themselves in his unconscious palms. "The time she
foresaw has come, and I have committed suicide. Thank God the mother did
not live to see! Thank God her vision was no clearer! She had hope for
me at least. She did not _know_."