The changes in Thessaly’s external appearance did not particularly
impress young Mr. Horace Boyce as he walked down the main street in the
direction of his father’s house. For one thing, he had been here for a
fortnight only a few months before, upon his return from Europe, and had
had pointed out to him all of novelty that his native village offered.
And again, nearly four years of acquaintance with the chief capitals
of the Old World had so dulled his vision, so to speak, that it was
no longer alert to detect the presence of new engine-houses and brick
stores in the place of earlier and less imposing structures. To be
accurate, he did not think much about Thessaly, one way or the other. So
long as his walk led him along the busier part of the thoroughfare, his
attention was fully occupied by encounters and the exchange of greetings
with old school-fellows and neighbors, who all seemed glad to see him
home again; and when he had passed the last store on the street, and
had of necessity exchanged the sidewalk for one of the two deep-beaten
tracks in the centre of the drifted road, his thoughts were still upon
a more engrossing subject than the growth and prosperity of any North
American town.
They were pleasant thoughts, though, as any one might read in a glance
at his smooth-shaven, handsome face, with its satisfied half smile and
its bold, confident expression of eyes. He stopped once in his rapid
walk and stood for a minute or two in silent contemplation, just before
he reached the open stretch of country which lay like a wedge between
the two halves of the village. The white surface in front of him was
strewn here with dry boughs and twigs, broken from the elms above by
the weight of the recent snowfall. Beyond the fence some boys with
comforters tied about their ears were skating on a pond in the fields.
Mr. Boyce looked over these to the darkened middle-distance of the
wintry picture, where rose the grimy bulk and tall smoke-belching
chimneys of the Minster iron-works. He seemed to find exhilaration in
his long, intent gaze at these solid evidences of activity and wealth,
for he filled his lungs with a deep, contented draught of the nipping
air when he finally turned and resumed his walk, swinging his shoulders
and lightly tapping the crusted snowbanks at his side with his stick as
he stepped briskly forward.
The Minster iron-works were undoubtedly worth thinking about, and all
the more so because they were not new. During all the dozen or more
years of their existence they had never once been out of blast. At
seasons of extreme depression in the market, when even Pennsylvania
was idle and the poor smelters of St. Louis and Chicago could scarcely
remember when they had been last employed, these chimneys upon which he
had just looked had never ceased for a day to hurl their black clouds
into the face of the sky. They had been built by one of the
cleverest and most daring of all the strong men whom that section had
produced--the late Stephen Minster. It was he who had seen in the hills
close about the choicest combination of ores to be found in the whole
North; it was he who had brought in the capital to erect and operate the
works, who had organized and controlled the enterprise by which a direct
road to the coal-fields was opened, and who, in affording employment
to thousands and good investments to scores, had not failed to himself
amass a colossal fortune. He had been dead now nearly three years, but
the amount of his wealth, left in its entirety to his family, was still
a matter of conjecture. Popular speculation upon this point had but a
solitary clew with which to work. In a contest which arose a year before
his death, over the control of the Northern Union Telegraph Company, he
had sent down proxies representing a clear six hundred thousand dollars’
worth of shares. With this as a basis for calculation, curious people
had arrived at a shrewd estimate of his total fortune as ranging
somewhere between two and three millions of dollars.
Stephen Minster had died very suddenly, and had been sincerely mourned
by a community which owed him nothing but good-will, and could remember
no single lapse from honesty or kindliness in his whole unostentatious,
useful career. It was true that the absence of public-spirited bequests
in his will created for the moment a sense of disappointment; but the
explanation quickly set afoot--that he had not foreseen an early death,
and had postponed to declining years, which, alas! never came, the task
of apportioning a moiety of his millions among deserving charities--was
plausible enough to be received everywhere. By virtue of a testament
executed two years before--immediately after the not altogether edifying
death of his only son--all his vast property devolved upon Mrs.
Minster, and her two daughters, Kate and Ethel. Every unmarried man in
Thessaly--and perhaps, with a certain vague repining, here and there one
of the married men too--remembered all these facts each time he passed
the home of the Minsters on the Seminary road, and looked over the low
wall of masonry at the close-trimmed lawn, the costly fountain, the
gravelled carriage-drive, and the great house standing back and aloof in
stately seclusion among the trees and the rose-bushes.
Most of these facts were familiar as well to Mr. Horace Boyce. As he
strode along, filliping the snow with his cane and humming to himself,
he mentally embellished them with certain deductions drawn from
information gathered during the journey by rail from New York. The Miss
Kate Minster whom he had met was the central figure in his meditations,
as indeed she was the important personage in her family. The mother had
impressed him as an amiable and somewhat limited woman, without much
force of character; the younger daughter, Ethel, he remembered dimly, as
a delicate and under-sized girl who was generally kept home from school
by reason of ill-health, and it was evident from such remarks as the two
ladies dropped that she was still something of an invalid. But it was
clear that Miss Kate lacked neither moral nor bodily strength.
He was quite frank with himself in thinking that, apart from all
questions of money, she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever
seen. It was an added charm that her beauty fitted so perfectly the
idea of great wealth. She might have been the daughter of the millions
themselves, so tall and self-contained and regal a creature was she,
with the firm, dark face of her father reproduced in feminine grace
and delicacy of outline; with a skin as of an Oriental queen, softly
luxuriant in texture and in its melting of creamy and damask and
deepening olive hues; and with large, richly brown, deep-fringed eyes
which looked proudly and steadily on all the world, young men included.
These fine orbs were her most obvious physical inheritance from her
father. The expression “the Minster eyes,” would convey as distinct an
impression to the brain of the average Thessalian as if one had said
“the Minster iron-works.” The great founder of the millions, Stephen
Minster, had had them, and they were the notable feature of even his
impressive face. The son who was dead, Stephen junior, had also had
them, as Horace now recalled to mind; but set in his weak head they had
seemed to lose significance, and had been, in truth, very generally in
his latter years dimmed and opacated by the effects of dissipation. The
pale, sweet-faced little Ethel Minster, as he remembered her, had them
as well, although with her they were almost hazel in color, and produced
a timid, mournful effect. But to no other face in the entire family
gallery did they seem to so wholly belong of right as to the countenance
of Miss Kate.
Young Mr. Boyce’s thoughts wandered easily from the image of the
heiress to the less tangible question of her disposition, and, more
particularly, of her attitude toward him. There were obscurities here
over which a less sanguine young man might have bitten his lips. He had
ventured upon recalling himself to mother and daughter very soon after
the train left New York, and they had not shown any shadow of annoyance
when he took a vacant chair opposite them and began a conversation which
lasted, such as it was, through all the long journey. But now that he
came to think of it, his share in that conversation had been not only
the proverbial lion’s, but more nearly that of a whole zoological
garden. Mrs. Minster had not affected any especial reserve; it was
probable that she was by nature a listener rather than a talker, for she
had asked him numerous questions about himself and about Europe. As for
Miss Minster, he could scarcely recall anything she had said, what time
she was looking at him instead of at her book. And he had not always
been strictly comfortable under this look. There had been nothing
unfriendly in it, it was true, nor could it occur to anybody to suspect
in it a lack of comprehension or of interest. In fact, he said to
himself, it was eloquent with both. The trouble was, as he uneasily
attempted to define it, that she seemed to comprehend too much. Still,
after all, he had said nothing to which she could take the faintest
exception, and, if she was the intelligent woman he took her to be,
there must have been a good deal in his talk to entertain her.
Even a less felicitous phrase-maker than Horace Boyce could have
manufactured pleasant small-talk out of such experiences as his had
been. The only son of a well-to-do and important man in Thessaly, he
had had the further advantage of inheriting some twenty thousand dollars
upon attaining his majority, and after finishing his course at college
had betaken himself to Europe to pursue more recondite studies there,
both in and out of his chosen profession of the law. The fact that he
had devoted most of his attention to the gleaning of knowledge
lying beyond the technical pale of the law did not detract from the
interesting quality of his observations. Besides listening to lectures
at Heidelberg, he had listened to the orchestra swaying in unison under
the baton of Strauss at Vienna, and to a good many other things in Pesth
and Paris and Brussels and London, a large number of which could with
propriety be described in polite conversation. And he flattered himself
that he had discoursed upon these things rather cleverly, skirting
delicate points with neatness, and bringing in effective little
descriptions and humorous characterizations in quite a natural way.
Moreover, he said to himself, it had been his privilege to see America
in perspective--to stand upon a distant eminence, as it were, and look
the whole country over, by and large, at a glance. This had enabled him
on his return to discover the whimsical aspect of a good many things
which the stay-at-home natives took with all seriousness. He had
indicated some of these to the two ladies with a light and amiably
bantering touch, and with a consciousness that he was opening up novel
ground to both his hearers.
Still--he wondered if Miss Minster had really liked it. Could it be
possible that she belonged to that thin-skinned class of Americans who
cannot brook any comment upon anything in or of their country that is
not wholly eulogistic--who resent even the most harmless and obvious
pleasantry pointed at a cis-Atlantic institution? He decided this
promptly in the negative. He had met such people, but he could not
associate them in his mind with the idea of great wealth. And Miss
Minster was rich--incredibly rich. No doubt she was thinking, even while
she listened to him, of the time when she too should go to Europe, and
dazzle its golden youth with her beauty and her millions. Now that he
thought of it, he had seen much that same look before on the face of
an American heiress, on her return from a London “five-o’clock tea,” at
which she had met an eligible marquis.
Could it be that her thoughts ran, instead, upon an eligible somebody
nearer home? He devoted himself at this to canvassing the chances of her
fancy being already fixed. It was of little importance that nothing in
their conversation suggested this, because it was a subject to which
they naturally would not have alluded. Yet he recalled that Mrs. Minster
had spoken of their great seclusion more than once. He had gathered,
moreover, that they knew very few people in New York City, and that
they had little acquaintance with the section of its population which
is colloquially known as “society.” This looked mightily like a clear
field.
Young Mr. Boyce stopped to thrust his cane under a twisted branch which
lay on the snow, and toss it high over the fence, when he reached this
stage of his meditations. His squared, erect shoulders took on a more
buoyant swing than ever as he resumed his walk. A clear field, indeed!
And now as to the problem of proceeding to occupy that field. Where was
there a gap in the wall? Millions were not to be approached and gained
by simple and primitive methods, as one knocks apples off an overhanging
bough with a fence-rail. Strategy and finesse of the first order were
required. Without doubt there was an elaborate system of defences reared
around this girl of girls. Mrs. Minster’s reference to seclusion might
have itself been a warning that they lived inside a fort, and were as
ready to train a gun on him as on anybody else. Battlements of this sort
had been stormed time and time again, no doubt; human history was
full of such instances. But Mr. Boyce’s tastes were not for violent or
desperate adventures. To go over a parapet with one’s sword in one’s
teeth, in deadly peril and tempestuous triumph, might suit his father
the General: for his own part, it seemed more sagacious and indubitably
safer to tunnel under the works, and emerge on the inside at the proper
psychological moment to be welcomed as a friend and adviser.
Adviser! Who was their lawyer? The young man cast up in his mind the
list of Thessaly’s legal practitioners, as far as he could
remember them. It seemed most probable that Benoni Clarke, the
ex-district-attorney, would have the Minster business, if for no other
reason than that he needed it less than the rest did. But Mr. Clarke was
getting old, and was in feeble health as well. Perhaps he would be glad
to have a young, active, and able partner, who had had the advantage of
European study. Or it might be--who could tell?--that the young man
with the European education could go in on his own account, and by sheer
weight of cleverness, energy, and superior social address win over the
Minster business. What unlimited opportunities such a post would afford
him! Not only would he be the only young man in Thessaly who had been
outside of his own country, the best talker, the best-informed man,
the best-mannered man of the place--but he would be able to exhibit
all these excellences from the favored vantage-ground of an intimate,
confidential relation. The very thought was intoxicating.
Mr. Horace Boyce was so pre-occupied with these pleasing meditations
that he overtook a man walking in the other track, and had nearly passed
him, before something familiar in the figure arrested his attention. He
turned, and recognized an old schoolmate whom he had not seen for years,
and had not expected to find in Thessaly.
“Why--Reuben Tracy, as I live!” he exclaimed, cordially. “So you’re back
again, eh? On a visit to your folks?”
The other shook hands with him. “No,” he made answer. “I’ve had an
office here for nearly a year. You are looking well. I’m glad to see you
again. Have you come back for good?”
“Yes. That’s all settled,” replied Mr. Horace, without a moment’s
hesitation.