Transcribed from the 1914 Gay & Hancock Ltd. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Book cover]
AN
AMBITIOUS MAN
BY
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
LONDON
GAY & HANCOCK LTD.
12 AND 13 HENRIETTA STREET, STRAND
1914
[_All Rights Reserved_]
* * * * *
_First Edition 1908_
_Popular Edition 1914_
CHAPTER I
PRESTON CHENEY turned as he ran down the steps of a handsome house on
“The Boulevard,” waving a second adieu to a young woman framed between
the lace curtains of the window. Then he hurried down the street and out
of view. The young woman watched him with a gleam of satisfaction in her
pale blue eyes. A fine-looking young fellow, whose Roman nose and strong
jaw belied the softly curved mouth with its sensitive darts at the
corners; it was strange that something warmer than satisfaction did not
shine upon the face of the woman whom he had just asked to be his wife.
But Mabel Lawrence was one of those women who are never swayed by any
passion stronger than worldly ambition, never burned by any fires other
than those of jealousy or anger. Her meagre nature was truly depicted in
her meagre face. Nature is ofttimes a great lair and a cruel jester,
giving to the cold and vapid woman the face and form of a sensuous siren,
and concealing a heart of volcanic fires, or the soul of a Phryne, under
the exterior of a spinster. But the old dame had been wholly frank in
forming Miss Lawrence. The thin, flat chest and narrow shoulders, the
angular elbows and prominent shoulder-blades, the sallow skin and sharp
features, the deeply set, pale blue eyes, and the lustreless, ashen hair,
were all truthful exponents of the unfurnished rooms in her vacant heart
and soul places.
Miss Lawrence turned from the window, and trailed her long silken train
across the rich carpet, seating herself before the open fireplace. It
was an appropriate time and situation for a maiden’s tender dreams; only
a few hours had passed since the handsomest and most brilliant young man
in that thriving eastern town had asked her to be his wife, and placed
the kiss of betrothal upon her virgin lips. Yet it was with a sense of
triumph and relief, rather than with tenderness and rapture, that the
young woman meditated upon the situation—triumph over other women who had
shown a decided interest in Mr Cheney, since his arrival in the place
more than eighteen months ago, and relief that the dreaded rôle of
spinster was not to be her part in life’s drama.
Miss Lawrence was twenty-six—one year older than her fiancé; and she had
never received a proposal of marriage or listened to a word of love in
her life before. Let me transpose that phrase—she had never before
received a proposal of marriage, and had never in her life listened to a
word of love; for Preston had not spoken of love. She knew that he did
not love her. She knew that he had sought her hand wholly from ambitious
motives. She was the daughter of the Hon. Sylvester Lawrence, lawyer,
judge, state senator, and proposed candidate for lieutenant-governor in
the coming campaign. She was the only heir to his large fortune.
Preston Cheney was a penniless young man from the West. A self-made
youth, with an unusual brain and an overwhelming ambition, he had risen
from chore boy on a western farm to printer’s apprentice in a small town,
thence to reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent, and after two or
three years of travel gained in this manner he had come to Beryngford and
bought out a struggling morning paper, which was making a mad effort to
keep alive, changed its political tendencies, infused it with western
activity and filled it with cosmopolitan news, and now, after eighteen
months, the young man found himself coming abreast of his two long
established rivals in the editorial field. This success was but an
incentive to his overwhelming ambition for place, power and riches. He
had seen just enough of life and of the world to estimate these things at
double their value; and he was, beside, looking at life through the
magnifying glass of youth. The Creator intended us to gaze on worldly
possessions and selfish ambitions through the small end of the lorgnette,
but youth invariably inverts the glass.
To the young editor, the brief years behind him seemed like a long hard
pull up a steep and rocky cliff. From the point to which he had
attained, the summit of his desires looked very far away, much farther
than the level from which he had arisen. To rise to that summit
single-handed and alone would require unremitting effort through the very
best years of his manhood. His brain, his strength, his ability, his
ambitions, what were they all in the strife after place and power,
compared to the money of some commonplace adversary? Preston Cheney, the
native-born American directly descended from a Revolutionary soldier,
would be handicapped in the race with some Michael Murphy whose father
had made a fortune in the saloon business, or who had himself acquired a
competency as a police officer.
America was not the same country which gave men like Benjamin Franklin,
Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley a chance to rise from the lower ranks
to the highest places before they reached middle life. It was no longer
a land where merit strove with merit, and the prize fell to the most
earnest and the most gifted. The tremendous influx of foreign population
since the war of the Rebellion and the right of franchise given
unreservedly to the illiterate and the vicious rendered the ambitious
American youth now a toy in the hands of aliens, and position a thing to
be bought at the price set by un-American masses.
Thoughts like these had more and more with each year filled the mind of
Preston Cheney, until, like the falling of stones and earth into a river
bed, they changed the naturally direct current of his impulses into
another channel. Why not further his life purpose by an ambitious
marriage? The first time the thought entered his mind he had cast it out
as something unclean and unworthy of his manhood. Marriage was a holy
estate, he said to himself, a sacrament to be entered into with
reverence, and sanctified by love. He must love the woman who was to be
the companion of his life, the mother of his children.
Then he looked about among his early friends who had married, as nearly
all the young men of the middle classes in America do marry, for love, or
what they believed to be love. There was Tom Somers—a splendid lad, full
of life, hope and ambition when he married Carrie Towne, the prettiest
girl in Vandalia. Well, what was he now, after seven years? A
broken-spirited man, with a sickly, complaining wife and a brood of
ill-clad children. Harry Walters, the most infatuated lover he had ever
seen, was divorced after five years of discordant marriage.
Charlie St Clair was flagrantly unfaithful to the girl he had pursued
three years with his ardent wooings before she yielded to his suit.
Certainly none of these love marriages were examples for him to follow.
And in the midst of these reveries and reflections, Preston Cheney came
to Beryngford, and met Sylvester Lawrence and his daughter Mabel. He met
also Berene Dumont. Had he not met the latter woman he would not have
succumbed—so soon at least—to the temptation held out by the former to
advance his ambitious aims.
He would have hesitated, considered, and reconsidered, and without doubt
his better nature and his good taste would have prevailed. But when fate
threw Berene Dumont in his way, and circumstances brought about his close
associations with her for many months, there seemed but one way of escape
from the Scylla of his desires, and that was to the Charybdis of a
marriage with Miss Lawrence.
Miss Lawrence was not aware of the part Berene Dumont had played in her
engagement, but she knew perfectly the part her father’s influence and
wealth had played; but she was quite content with affairs as they were,
and it mattered little to her what had brought them about. To be
married, rather than to be loved, had been her ambition since she left
school; being incapable of loving, she was incapable of appreciating the
passion in any of its phases. It had always seemed to her that a great
deal of nonsense was written and talked about love. She thought
demonstrative people very vulgar, and believed kissing a means of
conveying germs of disease.
But to be a married woman, with an establishment of her own, and a
husband to exhibit to her friends, was necessary to the maintenance of
her pride.
When Miss Lawrence’s mother, a nervous invalid, was informed of her
daughter’s engagement, she burst into tears, as over a lamb offered on
the altar of sacrifice; and Judge Lawrence pressed a kiss on the lobe of
Mabel’s left ear which she offered him, and told her she had won a prize
in the market. But as he sat alone over his cigar that night, he sighed
heavily, and said to himself, “Poor fellow, I wish Mabel were not so much
like her mother.”