I
When Fessenden Abbott heard that he was to inherit four hundred
millions of dollars he experienced the profoundest discouragement he
was ever to know, except on that midnight ten years later when he stood
on a moonlit balcony in Hungary, alone with the daughter of an Emperor,
and opened his contemptuous American mind to the deeper problems of
Europe.
His ambition had been immeasurable, yet almost defined. His hopes had
been the confident imperious extravagances of a youth in whom narrow
circumstances and a high indomitable spirit had developed that ardent
personal force which equips man to conquer life. His ideals had soared
in stellar spaces--ideals created by passionate brooding on the careers
of Washington, Hamilton, Napoleon, Nelson, Cromwell, Kossuth, the great
Hunyadis, Alexander, Cæsar, Rudolph the First of Austria. How he had
pored over the lives of this catholic assortment of heroes while his
fingers froze and the winds roared through the Adirondack wilderness;
on hot summer afternoons as he trudged behind his plough, the reins
wound about one arm, his book in the bend of the other, vaguely
wondering sometimes why his manifest delinquencies were never noticed.
As he looked back he marvelled at the bluntness of his observation.
His difference from the other young men of that high gallery of the
continent must have been obvious, and whenever he thought of his
dead mother it was to associate her with a magnificence of personal
environment which in time he grew to believe he had borrowed from
the _Arabian Nights_ for the more loyal framing of a created memory;
certainly in real life, even in those huge cities where men made money,
even in the vast cold palaces of Europe, of which he had read, there
could be nothing to-day like those splendors which haunted his young
mind.
He had just investigated the interiors of the toys of his third
Christmas when he was made to keep so quiet for four days that he
became a miserable and obstreperous baby; on the fifth he forgot the
troubles of his past in a twelve-hours’ journey with his doting father.
His indulgent nurse had been dismissed, and a woman with a white cap
and a firm admonishing eye formed the rear of his body-guard, and
held him to the window when his restless legs sent his father to the
smoking compartment. He could remember still his bewildered sensation
as the train climbed slowly through dark forests, as hard black peaks
travelled across his blinking vision. Of the night ride through
the woods in a springless wagon he recalled little but the sharp
accentuations of the “bull’s-eye” and the deep sighs of his nurse.
After that, life for several years was too monotonous for memories.
He lived in a farm-house without toys and sweets--which he quickly
forgot--and after the departure of his nurse at the end of three months
his was the life of any mountain-boy; out of doors in the wildest
weather, out of bed at six o’clock, cuffed, spanked, roughly petted by
the farmer’s mother, beside whose bed he slept during the remaining
years of his childhood. Twice a year his father came and spent a day
on the Nettlebeck farm. In summer Fessenden led him through the
woods, and exhibited his many treasures, expounded the forest lore to
which he had instinctively applied himself as soon as he could run
alone--unanticipative of the lore to which it would be the golden key
in more difficult years. In winter they sat in the best parlor, close
to a red stove, which made the boy, little used to the luxury of fires,
sleepy and almost ill. Neither woods nor fire inspired Mr. Abbott to
many words. He examined the boy in his studies, and took his physical
measurements, comparing them with previous entries in a little red
book. Then, after an interval of sound fatherly advice, and another of
tender interest, he usually went to sleep; or remained motionless for
hours, his weary eyes fixed and rapt, his lips and nostrils quivering
occasionally, but stern, immobile, relentless, the lower lip raised,
the upper drawn down and under. His little son fidgeted, coughed
respectfully, yawned shamelessly, and finally stole away. Mr. Abbott,
upon his arrival, always presented Fessenden with a box of books,
several red sweaters, and, as soon as he was old enough, a new pair of
trousers--for his Sunday use; the boy wore overalls on other days. Mr.
Abbott forbade him to clothe his more conspicuous part in anything but
red, that he might be found in briefer time if lost, and avoided with
less effort in the hunting season.
The books were selected with a careful regard for his succeeding
years, and under their insidious gardening his imagination developed
and his horizon receded. He received his elementary schooling from a
young woman on a neighboring farm. At the same time his body grew tall
and strong and his temper fierce. He took as easily to fighting as to
books; he was sometimes ignominiously whipped by hulking mountain-boys,
sometimes he won against heavy odds, for he had an instinct for
the scientific rules of the game, a long wind, hard muscles, and
the primitive delight of the small boy in war. The fights were not
uncommonly for the favor of some baby minx, but oftener for the pure
lust of battle. He was frequently mangled and battered when his father
arrived, but Mr. Abbott merely laughed, and, on the whole, seemed to
approve his appearance. So passed the uneventful years until his tenth
birthday, when life began to ring its changes.