honest labor into respectable artisans, upon an opposite entablature, in
garrulous amity plied their small, nest-making joinery. The sunlight
falling through a haze of wires, wrought into something bright with its
own glow a tuft of grass which clumped its spears in its fortalice,
taken in assault, on the opposite frieze. Of even these small things,
and of much more, Mr. Maskelyne was partially conscious. But the letter!
Clear-sighted as he was, he knew but little—so forthright was his look,
so fixed toward mere gain—of the wonderful country which lies beneath
every man’s nose, less even of the vanishing tracts which retrospection
sometimes sees over either shoulder. But the letter! It peopled his
vision with things long gone. It brought into view old Bevington—“Dick
Bevington,” as he was called to the last day of his life—and a nickname
at fifty indicates much of character; brought up before him Dick
Bevington as he was before age had stiffened his easy but dignified
carriage or taught his once polished but positive utterance to veer and
haul in sudden change; brought up old Bevington, as he himself, in
childhood, had seen him, stately but debonair, the perfection of
aristocratic exclusiveness, affable, however, in the genial kindliness
of a kind-hearted man secure in every position—a genuine Knickerbocker
in every practice and in every principle—a well-born, well-bred
gentleman. And that once active and once ebullient life had long ago
gone out! It almost seemed that such vitality, so held in self-contained
management, so wisely put forth, so well invested, so to speak, should
have lasted forever. But now there was nothing left to bring him to mind
but a portrait in the rooms of the Historical Society, or a name in the
list of directors when the history of some bank was given, or in the
pamphlet in which the story of some charitable institution was told from
the beginning—really there was nothing more than this to recall Dick
Bevington, foremost among the city’s fathers, the leader of the _ton_.
When he had last seen his guardian he had thought him of patriarchal
age. And was not he himself now nearly as old? In spite of the
blithesome aspects of the morning, Jacob Maskelyne turned away from the
window with an unwonted weight at his heart and a new wrinkle on his
brow. The whole world seemed to be going from him, losing charm and
significance in a sort of blurring dissatisfaction, as upon a globe,
when swiftly turned, lines of longitude and of latitude, and even
continents and seas, vanish from sight, and all because his own life
suddenly seemed but vexed nothingness. He had not even mellowed into age
as had Bevington. He was as sharp and as rough-edged as an Indian’s
flint arrow-head, and he knew it.
He seated himself at his table. Automatically he was about to take up
the first of several bundles of law-papers, when he was startled by the
entrance of the clerk. He leaned back in his chair, and his reawakened
wonder grew the more when a card was placed before him upon which was
written, in a dashing hand, “From Mr. Bevington.”
“A gentleman to see you,” said the clerk.
“What does he look like?” asked Mr. Maskelyne, suspiciously.
“Nobody I ever saw before,” answered the clerk; “and he seems rather
strange about his clothes,” he added, in a rather doubtful, tentative
manner.
“Let him come in,” said Mr. Maskelyne, after a moment’s pause.
[Illustration: [Man]]
The door had hardly closed upon the vanishing messenger when it again
swung upon its hinges, and a new figure stood in relief against the
clearer light from without. In his eagerness to see of what nature a
being so introduced might be, Mr. Maskelyne turned his chair completely
around, and silently gazed at the new-comer as he entered. His eyes fell
upon a slim, graceful young man dressed in the mode of at least
forty-five years ago—a mode not without its own good tone undoubtedly,
but with a tendency toward gorgeousness which an exquisite of these days
of assertive unobtrusiveness might think almost vulgar. His whole attire
was touched in every detail with that nameless something which really
makes the consummate result unattainable by any not born to such
excellence; but in the bright intelligence shining in his dark eyes and
the clear intellectual lines of his face, even Maskelyne could see that
if he had given much thought to his dress it was only from a proper
self-respect, and not because dress was the ultimate or the best
expression of what he was. Few could look into the luminous countenance
and not feel a glow of sudden sympathy with the high aspirations, the
pure disinterestedness, the clear intellect, that lit up and
strengthened his features. Even the old lawyer, disciplined as he was by
years of hard experience to disregard all such misleading impulses, felt
his heart warm toward the young man.
“I hope,” said the new-comer, with a smile so pleasant, so ingenuous, so
confiding, that all Maskelyne’s ideas of deception—had he had time to
recognize them in the moment before a strange, unquestioning
acquiescence took complete possession of him—were at once dissipated,
“that I do not intrude too greatly on your time.”
Won really in spite of himself by the appearance of his visitor, the
famous counsellor waved his hand toward a chair.
“I suppose,” continued the stranger, with an almost boyish sweetness, as
he seated himself, “that Mr. Bevington has already told you why I am
here.”
Mr. Maskelyne might very well have answered that Mr. Bevington was
hardly to be looked to for any information on any subject, but he did
not—the wonderful circumstances of the interview had been so driven from
his mind by the potent charm of the young man’s personality.
“Mr.”—and he paused as if waiting for enlightenment as to the name of
the stranger.
“I’m in a devil of a scrape,” continued the young man, apparently
imagining that the letter had made all necessary explanations, and
mentioning the devil as though he was an every-day acquaintance, a
pleasant fellow whom he had just left at the door awaiting his return.
“Ah!” murmured the lawyer.
“I did not wish to see you,” continued the other, his singularly
trustful smile breaking again over lip and cheek.
“Indeed,” said Maskelyne, his wits and perceptions in most confusing
entanglement.
“No,” went on the unaccountable visitor. “I supposed that you would give
me what the world calls good advice. But I don’t want that. I want to
hear something better.”
He laughed aloud in such a joyous, cheery fashion that the old lawyer
even smiled.
“You don’t think I am a good man to come to for bad advice?” he said.
“The last in the world. I don’t suppose that you ever did a foolish
thing in your life.”
“And therefore am perhaps less competent to advise others who have,”
replied Maskelyne, half heedlessly, for his thoughts were slowly turning
in a new direction. The more he looked the more the eager, spirited face
seemed familiar. He had certainly seen the young fellow before, but
where? It seemed to him that he could certainly remember in a moment, if
he only had time to think.
“Mr. Bevington——”
“Pardon me,” interrupted Maskelyne, in a significant tone, “you said Mr.
Bevington?”
“Certainly,” said the stranger, suddenly looking up in evident surprise.
“Didn’t he write?”
“I have received a letter,” said the old lawyer, cautiously.
He was on the point of making some further inquiries, but the impulse
came to nothing. The former feeling of acquiescent but expectant apathy
again possessed him; indeed, he had never been much in the habit of
asking questions. He knew that he often learned more than was suspected
even, by letting people talk on in their own way.
“In the first place,” and he paused a moment—“I am very much in debt.”
The young man spoke as he might of taking a cold asleep in the open
air—as if he had been exposed to debt and had caught it.
The first look of sadness rose and deepened over his face as he shook
his head dejectedly.
“But I’ll get over it—‘Time and I.’ Don’t you rather like the astute old
king after all, Mr. Maskelyne?”
“By your own exertions?” asked the lawyer, dryly, and evading the
question.
“I write a little,” replied the impenitent, modestly. “I have even heard
of people who admired some of my verses.”
“You have no other occupation?”
Old Maskelyne was asking enough questions now. Indeed, under the magic
of the stranger’s manner he had quite forgotten himself, his usual
caution, and even the exceptional manner in which his companion had been
introduced to him.
“Yes,” the other admitted, “I am a lawyer.”
“Don’t you think,” said the older man, answering almost instinctively,
“that on the whole you might find the employments of the law more
remunerative than the calling of a—poet?”
[Illustration: [Algebra]]
“Mr. Maskelyne, I sometimes think that the world really believes in the
sort of thing underlying your question—that there is wisdom in what it
so complacently repeats as indisputable. And I am sent here
phrase-gathering—to carry off small packages of words put up in little
flat, portable sentences, alternatives ready for daily use. But there
are gains you cannot invest in lands and stocks—columns with statues at
the top as well as columns whose sums are at the bottom. Wasn’t ‘Le
Barbier’ a better investment than any in Roderigue Hortales et Cie., and
what could John Ballantyne & Co. show beside ‘Guy Mannering?’ If the
world says what it does, it mustn’t do as it does. It’s inconsistent.
Who will undertake to strike the balance between fame and fortune; what
mathematician will undertake to say that _x_, the unknown quantity of
fame, does not equal the dollar-mark?” Then he added, after a moment’s
pause, “Mr. Maskelyne, don’t you think it is true that
“‘One crowded hour of glorious life,
Is worth a world without a name,’—
don’t you really?”
It was hard to resist such enthusiasm, such unquestioning certainty. The
old lawyer did not even smile as he lay back in his chair, a new life
shooting through every nerve, his gaze fixed on the flushing face of the
young man.
“And the consciousness of best employing the best that is in you,” he
continued. “Who dare shorten the reach or blunt the nicety of man’s wit,
make purblind the imagination, stiffen the cunning hand? Tell men that
in some Indian sea, fathoms deep, lie hid forever Spanish galleons in
which doubloons and moidores, as when honey more than fills the comb,
almost drip from their sacks, and you will see in their sudden
thoughtfulness how quickly they appreciate such loss; tell them, if you
can, what, through poverty, erring endeavor, uncongenial occupation, the
world with each year loses in intellectual riches, and they will stand
heedless.”
Speaking with the incomparable confidence of youth, its own glorious
nonsense, the young man’s voice sent old Maskelyne’s blood hastening
through his veins in almost audible pulsations.
“What if I do not wish great wealth,” the speaker continued, “must I be
made to have it? I want but little. Give me food, clothing, habitation,
sufficient that my eyes may see the delights this world has to show,
that my ears may catch the whispered harmonies of all things beautiful,
gladden me with the radiance of common joy, and that’s all I want. Who
is unreasonable when what he wants is all he wants? Are the worldly so
insecure that, as the frightened kings sought to still beneath their
tread the first throb of the French Revolution, they must stamp out the
first symptom of revolt against the almighty dollar?
“‘Chi si diverte di poco, è ricco di molto.’
Mr. Maskelyne, must I eat when I am only thirsty, drink when I am only
hungry?”
He paused, and glanced triumphantly at the old man. He felt in some
secret, instinctive way that he was gaining ground. A squadron of fauns
had charged from amid the vine-leaves, and the legion upon the highway
was in rout. Fine sense was victorious for the moment over common sense.
“I think,” said Maskelyne, at last, and with a strange, sad, patient
air, unwearied, however, by the young man’s dithyrambic, sometimes
almost incoherent speech, “I think I cannot attempt to advise you.
Having discarded the wisdom of ages, what heed will you give the wisdom
of age?”
A cloud seemed to cast its shadow over the other’s face. Could it be
that, lost in himself, he had spoken almost in presumptuous disrespect
to a man so distinguished, to a man whom he honored and whom he felt
that he could even like?
“If I speak strongly,” he said, “it is because I feel strongly. If I did
not feel strongly I would not attempt to withstand the amount of
testimony against me.”
“Might I ask,” said Maskelyne, gently, in his inexplicable sympathy with
the young fellow, “why, if you feel such confidence in all you say, you
do not, without hesitation, enter on a life in accordance with your
convictions?”
At last there was hesitation in the young stranger’s manner. He turned
his hat nervously in his hand, and sat silent for a moment.
“You see,” he began, paused, and began again—“You see, if I were alone
it would be one thing. But I’m not—not at all alone,” he added,
evidently gaining confidence.
“Ah!” exclaimed the old lawyer, a sudden gleam of new intelligence
shining in his dull, weary old eyes.
“And how am I to get married, Mr. Maskelyne?”
“The lady does not approve of your—poetic aspirations?”
“Not approve!” cried the young fellow, eagerly; “she has made me promise
that I will give nothing up, that I will refuse all Mr. Bevington has
arranged for me. You can’t tell how inspiring our misery is. And our
courage,—a young Froissart must be our chronicler, sir. We take our
sorrows gladly.”
“And may I ask——”
“Anything, anything,” interrupted the young man, gayly. “I’m sent here
to be talked out of what they may call my folly. You see I can’t be
talked out of it. Don’t that prove that it is no folly?”
“You seem,” said Maskelyne, dryly, “to have settled it between you—you
and she.”
“Settled it! We did not need help about that. It’s the unsettling. There
comes a time when friends are the worst enemies. You know that, Mr.
Maskelyne?”
The old lawyer paused. “Indeed I do,” he said at last, and the sneer
stealing over the outlines of his face slunk away before the look of
regret that came swiftly on. Almost in embarrassment, with nervous hand,
he shuffled the papers on his table.
Far back in the past, when his eyes were not yet dimmed by the dust
blown from law-books, nor his ears deadened by the stridulent clamor of
litigation, before his life had gone in attempts at
“Mastering the lawless science of our law,”
or he had lost himself in
“That codeless myriad of precedent,
That wilderness of single instances;”
when he, too, dwelt in that other-world of the young, forgotten by
everyone but himself, but, although hardly ever remembered, never
forgotten by him—not one grain of its golden sand, not one drop of its
honey-dew, not one tremor of its slightest thrill—then even he had had
his romance. The freshness of the early spring morning, the airy
brightness of his young visitor, himself no bad exponent of the day, the
awe-footed shadow which, with almost unrecognized obtrusion, skirts the
border where the ripened grain fills the field of life and nods to the
ready sickle—was it something of such kind, or was it the simple story
of which he had had such telling intimation, that brought it all up in
memory’s half-tender glow? He, too, had once been in love. He, too, had
written verses to his inamorata. He remembered it all now, with a smile
of mingled pity and contempt. It needed no ransacking of the brain now
to quicken into full view his own “It might have been”—to people once
more the mystic world whose first paradise is rich in the slight
garniture of glances and sighs and smiles and tears. Lost in himself,
the old man forgot his visitor.
“You are very young,” he said at last, absently.
“Twenty-three,” was the answer.
“And she?”
“Eighteen.”
It was strange, but he, too, had been twenty-three and she eighteen when
the end came in that glimmering, gleaming past. He remembered, and how
strange the recollection seemed, taking her some flowers and some slight
silver gift—a poor, inexpensive thing; she would let him give no more
because he, too, was in debt—on her birthday. And now, with strange
revulsion, he hardened almost into his habitual self, and grimly thought
that it all was youthful nonsense, and that all such follies were very
much alike. Had he spoken, he would have been guilty of one of those
faults often packed with error, an apothegm—he would have said that we
only become original, even in our folly, as age gives us character.
“We could be so happy with so little,” said the youthful lover.
The old man started. These were his own words many, many years ago; his
very words to his guardian when the final appeal was made by old
Bevington to what he called his better judgment so very, very long ago,
in the dark, stately house upon Second Avenue.
“So very little,” repeated the young man. “I have always said,” he
continued, as pleased with the conceit as if it had never before
glittered in the song of finches of his feather, “that we should have
gold enough in her hair.”
[Illustration: [Woman]]
“And is her hair golden?” asked Maskelyne, and, startled by the sound of
such words dropped from the lips of the distinguished counsel for many a
soulless corporation and many as soulless a man, he added, hurriedly,
“light.” And then the old lawyer remembered that he too, had a lock of
hair that he had not sent back when he returned her letters and her
picture. How bright it was! What had become of it? Where was it? In what
pigeon-hole, what secret drawer? He could not for the moment remember.
He looked out of the window. How bright the sunshine was! How empty the
world! It seemed to build up its vacancy around him as a wall.
“And she, of course, has no money?” he said, turning again.
“None.”
He had been sure of it. He rose and went to the window. The joyful
attributes of the morning were there, but they were no longer joyful to
him. The light fell in the same broad flood, still promising the glory
of summer, the ripened harvest, but there was no promise for him. The
sparrows preluded still the full-voiced singers of the year, when leaves
are heavy with the dust and brooks run dry, but he heard only a quick,
petulant twitter. A sort of dull despondency suddenly settled upon him.
He forgot his visitor, and even time and place. Amid the glimmering
lights and shaking shadows of the past he sought a vision, as at
twilight one seeks in some deserted corridor a statue which would seem
to have so taken into its grain the last rays of the already sunken sun
that the marble glows in the gathering darkness with a radiance not its
own.
The young man grew impatient as the revery was prolonged. He stirred
uneasily. The old lawyer turned and looked curiously at him. Of course,
of course! Was a man to be changed, the bone of what he was to have its
marrow drawn, the fibre of every muscle to be untwisted, by this
nonsense of a boy? Of course old Bevington was right—and for the moment
he did not remember that Bevington was dead—in sending the young fool to
such a cool old hand as himself. But if Bevington had known what a
turbulence of disappointment, discontent, and revolt had risen, and
poured in strength-gathering torrent, even at that instant, through his
heart, would he not have kept his young charge away? He would talk to
him—certainly he would—pave his way for him, perhaps, as with flagstones
of wisdom. Perhaps—and then he thought with grim satisfaction of what
Bevington might think should he learn that he recognized that there were
other paths than those edged by a curbstone.
[Illustration: [Man]]
“You have been sent to me,” he said, very seriously, coming from the
window and leaning with both hands on the table, “for advice and
admonition. I will give my lesson in sternest characters. I will teach
by example, but I may not teach what you were sent here to learn. When I
was young as you—do not start, I was young once,” and he spoke with
infinite sadness, “I loved as you love, and, as with you, love was
returned. They who called themselves my friends strove, with what they
called reason, to tear me from what they called my folly. My folly! It
was the wisdom that it takes all that is blent into humanity, at
supremest moments, to attain; their reason, the fatuous folly only
enough to give habitual stir to an earth-beclotted brain! I yielded, as
you have not yielded. I killed out even the natural impulses of my
nature. Gradually almost new instincts came, desire for delight sank
into appetite for gain, hope for the joy of higher existence was lost in
the ambition for mere advancement. I wrought out in myself that fearful
piece of handiwork whose every effort is but to grasp the worthless
handful man can only wrest from the mere world. I lost, and I have not
won. I was a man and I am only a lawyer, and to him you have been sent
for advice. I can find no precedent better, no authority more weighty
for your guidance than my own life. Such strength as enabled me to work
such a change will also enable you to make yourself a new being, to
accomplish self-overthrow, to bring you to what I am—a man rich,
successful, courted, revered—most miserable. He who has so won, so lost,
stands alone or he would not so win. Choose rather the close
companionship of worldly defeat, if it must be, and I say to you in the
rapture of your youth, clay plastic to the moment’s touch, hold to
yourself, and believe that no fame, no power, no wealth, can compensate
for a contentious life, an empty heart, a desolate old age. If I were
you——”
He did not finish. Slowly the young stranger rose to his full height,
every lineament of his face clear in cold light. His whole aspect was
one of steadfast command.
“Stop!” he cried, in a stern tone. “I am yourself. No ghost walks save
that which is what a man might have been. We throng the world. Beside
everyone through life moves the image of a past potentiality, the thing
he could have become had he held along another course. I am what you
were, the promise of what you might have been. For forty years I have
walked by your side. I have touched you and you have shuddered, I have
chilled you and you have shrunk from me. Your nature has so grown
athwart, all impulse has been so long gone, all that softens or ennobles
so thrown off that, in almost final self-assertion, what you really were
or might have been stands by your side and bids you measure stature with
itself. Your life has entered upon its wintry days, but sunlight is
sunshine even in December and in youth.”
The old lawyer, almost shuddering, stepped back with repelling gesture.
He passed his hand quickly across his eyes, and then, as if his heart
had beat recall, summoning back every retreating force in quick rally,
compelled but not unwilling, he turned in combative instinct to meet the
stranger face to face, nature to nature, turned—and found himself alone.
Once more the clerk opened the door.
“Eleven o’clock, sir,” he said, “and you know the General Term this
morning——”
“You saw the gentleman who just went out?” asked the lawyer.
“I, sir,” answered the man; “I saw no one go out.”
“No one?”
“No one.”
“You certainly brought me a card and showed a young gentleman in a few
minutes ago?”
“I, sir!” repeated the clerk. “I brought in a card and showed a young
gentleman in! Aren’t you well this morning, sir?”
“That will do,” said Maskelyne, sternly.
As soon as he was again alone he stepped to the table. The card and the
letter were gone. And still he knew he had not been dreaming. A man
swung high in the air was busy painting a sign upon a building not far
away, and he was conscious that all through the strange interview he had
watched him at work. He had seen him finish one letter and then another,
and now if he found him adding the final consonant he would be assured
that he could not have been asleep. He looked up and found that he was
right. The man had just made the heavy shaded side and was busy putting
the little finishing line at the bottom of the letter.
Two men—one of rotund middle age, the other younger but yet not
young—came down the steps of the Union Club one day a few weeks later.
They met an old man rounding the corner of the Avenue.
“See what you would come to if you had your own way,” said the elder of
the two. “There’s old Maskelyne. He’s got everything you’re making
yourself wretched to get. Do you want to be like him?”
“No,” said the other. “Then you haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“He’s a changed man, all within a month.”
“Has his brain or his heart softened?”