This was the way it happened. Like all beginnings of things, the roots
were in the dark. Ethelbert Daksha came of a family in which girls
counted for a big half of all that was bright and interesting.
The Dakshas were a delightful family every way, except, perhaps, in the
matter of money-wealth. That seemed constitutionally lacking, because
you will see yourself that people who take great interest in devising
ways of spending money, and very little in devising ways of getting it
to spend, in the constitution of things are lacking in money-wealth. But
they had everything else except money, and their chief thought in regard
to that lack was an amiable perplexity that it seemed to be such a
desideratum in affairs of society. There was a big but exhausted English
property on the mother’s side; and this strain of high English blood was
mixed with a dash of hard-headed German culture and a few drops from the
veins of a Spanish dame, lady-mother of the Hidalgos. So, you see, when,
ninety years before, a discontent with something in the Old World
society had set the elder Daksha down on American soil, various European
nationalities were transplanted to root as best might be in American
civilization. In addition to all this, as faith in all things high,
bounded brightly in the Daniel O’Connell blood which coursed through
Daniel Daksha’s veins, it was very natural that his daughter Ethelbert,
considering as she did that all nationalities were equally admirable for
different virtues, should be greatly astonished that there should be
quarrels between those of different countries, when the blood of four
nations coursed so amicably in her own veins. If ever there were a girl
who, in the nature of things was a typical American, it was Ethelbert
Daksha, with the race-drift of Europe, Asia and Africa in her individual
veins, as our nation carries it in its aggregated citizenship.
Mr. Daksha recognized all this. He was one of the dreamers who work, at
whose feet life lays its crown of success; although so far his many
admirable schemes for regenerating society had made him at once the most
serviceable and the most impecunious of mortals. He had abundant means,
but little money; and while it might be stretching a point to say the
Dakshas cultivated a life of beauty on a little oatmeal, yet it would
give a hint at the way in which beauty was cultivated in that simple
home, where oatmeal was the chief of their diet; that is, if you leave
out of the reckoning the best periodicals and old writings of all climes
and ages. These things were really the chief of their diet, and had much
to do with the fact that they, like the old lady who lived on the hill,
were scarce ever quiet concerning the topic of the ideal order of
society which is soon coming to our nation, and through us to the world.
Life among the Dakshas was like a bit of Greek art transplanted to the
robust civilization of this country, which is trying so hard to
assimilate its many diverse elements. The theory of the elegant Greeks
was: “What the spirit wills, the body must.” This theory had been
practicalized more or less fully by O’Connell, who knew no law stronger
than that of the _necessities_, which he deemed were laid on him as
liberator of his people. The same theory had been the impelling power of
the Spanish proverb which, translated, reads: “In his own soul, and not
in that of another, must the principle of one’s actions be established.”
While the German element, which fills the veins of England’s crowned
family, in quick response to the same idea, cried out: “Let every man
hear for himself, and hearing, then speak.”
So as you may well suppose, the theory that spirit is master and body is
only the good servant to do the spirit’s bidding, met some rebuffs as
the Dakshas lived it out midst that portion of the newly rich who devote
their energies to saving—not MAN, but money. And so much were the
Dakshas in love with their beautiful ideals that but for their good
common sense they would have become domineering dogmatists; and thus,
properly, would have made themselves greatly disliked, and therefore,
incapacitated for service.
About forty odd years before this episode the heads of the Daksha family
had settled themselves to the recognition that the inordinate frenzy for
money-making which was deluging its possessors, would insure many low
tragedies in high (?) life; and to the recognition that society was
becoming but like a witch’s caldron with its seethe and bubble of toil
and trouble, and with its inodorous stench of poison things, flung into
it by the witches and wizards, as they carry out their passion-dance on
the old Harry’s pavilion.
Of course the Dakshas had their opinion of this besotted high (?) life,
with its stimulation of that excitement which wrecks nerve and brain.
But they did not presume to force the virtues of self-culture on persons
whose highest dream of success was TO INCREASE THEIR CHANCES FOR THIS
INDULGENCE IN HIGH OLD TIMES, and who were more than willing to pay for
them, with the after years of that disease, remorse and reek of ill-fame
in which “the name of the wicked rots.”
Whatever they might choose to _do_ with their knowledge, the fact
remained that the younger Dakshas _knew_ that they, by inheritance, were
rooted in different purposes and back-history than such as this, which
reveals itself in these forms of faith-breaking, love-outraging,
humanity-destroying bewilderments. So when this other kind of girls and
boys, with their mothers and fathers flying around in society’s
whirligig, flitted about them, the Dakshas thought steadily on the truth
as they knew it; and “hearing for themselves, then spoke,” thus giving
their companions a chance to catch on at any point of spiritual contact
which they found available.
So the roots of Ethelbert Daksha’s life had gathered force and fibre in
wisdom religions known in ancient America, Europe, Asia and Africa; and
the might of this force was now annealed in her nature, and was forming
into a unified strength of character, which to the ignorant seemed like
a thing of very different quality.
Reginald Grove altogether misunderstood Ethel when first they met; for
he did not so much as know that there were girls in the world with
character-roots so deep and far-reaching. There were two things he
recognized at sight, but character was not one. He knew money when he
saw it, and he thought he knew poverty, too. His father belonged to the
class of people who laugh at “blood,” and worship money. His blood was
made up of such things as a man who lays the reins on the neck of his
impulses can get into his veins, if in his early days his father strikes
a “money lead” and he “a society life”; but then he had a mother, too,
and there came in the difference.
Since he was seventeen years old Reginald had bought all the high-priced
things that our fast civilization has to offer in exchange for “soul,”
and now the ashes of that past were beginning to grit between his teeth;
for he had a sweet memory of peace, purity and of an harmonious-purpose
which glinted across his mind angelically as the remains of what had
been his baby guesses at real manhood. But this dream, and the sainted
mother who had inspired it, had both been devastated by the ignorant
animalism of the elder Grove. So when the mother-spirit was released
from earth’s control, little Regie’s waiting eyes turned to his father;
and watching, he perceived that his father’s shrewd bargaining instincts
resulted in increased wealth, which made it possible for him to sow a
big crop of gilded misery, and still to pay his son’s bills, while he
did likewise; and that doing all this he was yet flattered as a
millionaire. So you see, beloved as was his mother’s memory and distinct
as had been her teachings to his baby mind, they became but “woman’s
notions” when contradicted by his father’s practices, and by the
licensing laws of paternal government which assure young men they may
sin freely, and yet be wealthy and wise; and healthy, too, if nostrums
will make them so.
For a time Reginald believed this, seeing the nation’s fathers had by
license laws practically declared it. And as the wisdom of the nation’s
mothers had been placed under silence as deep as the grave, “no cause or
impediment being shown to forbid the banns” between his soul and
corruption, he rushed on in the paths prepared for feet like his. But
lately he did not feel very healthy; and as for his wealth, he feared
that was getting a bit rickety, and his wisdom was hardly at par.
So these were Reginald’s character “roots.” But it was the one little
radical, or true-life fibre, which vibrated with a thrill when he first
met Ethelbert Daksha. At the instant, it seemed to him as though the
mirage which ever floated up from the fens of his unrecorded life, was
swept away by a breath from over the jasper walls of the eternal city.
That curious look out of Ethelbert’s eyes, so all-comprehending, pitiful
and yet unmoved, held him, as his mother’s eyes had always done in the
past; and he had not a word to say. He felt as such men feel when
conscious of the moral distance between their private lives and the
lives of sweet girl acquaintances.
As usual he waited for Ethelbert to speak; but as is not usual she,
recognizing his moral state, did not come down and hunt round for
something to say on its level. “The great gulf fixed,” was fixed. She
did not try to cross it; so she escaped falling and floundering therein,
for her pains. Ethelbert believed not in self-abnegation, but in
self-expression. She believed it right to stand squarely on her own fair
heights; that from there, with the hand next her heart placed in
Jehovah’s, she could give her _brain_-inspired right hand to brother man
and then lift!
“An Englishman dares be silent,” they say, and Ethelbert’s English
quality was in the ascendant, when Reginald looked at her, wishing to
know if those mother-eyes were backed by a brain filled with mother wit
and wisdom. He met silence, and went away from that party with an
unsatisfied hunger in his soul, which proved that that abused thing was
not dead yet.
After that they met casually often; and Ethelbert, who “pondered all
these things in her heart,” which are brought by “ministering spirits to
those who are _heirs_ of salvation,” knew Reginald better than as if
they for years had talked much self-disguising trash together.
One summer afternoon when she was sitting on the balcony of the Daksha
home he passed and raised his hat, and she bowed in return, with the
thought in mind and eyes, “that man is inherently a good man.” And he
saw it, and halted, and then with direct purpose, crossed the street and
seated himself on the step, asking no permission.
“Miss Ethelbert, you always make me wish I were a boy five years old,”
he said.
“I wish you were,” said Ethelbert.
This was sudden for Reginald; for though he was willing to recognize the
failure he had made of manhood, Ethelbert’s businesslike way of
accepting the idea was not flattering, and he was used to flattery.
“Why do you wish it?” he said after knocking his teeth, not agreeably,
with the head of his cane and gazing at her combatively.
“So that you could cleave to the right. You are so old in your habits
now, so undeveloped in the practice of judgment, and—oh, there is
Bertha! Come right up here, Bertha. I was sitting here looking for you.
Yes, you can have the newly cut lawn grass for your rabbits; but I want
to see you first. I have saved the papers for you. Now, Mr. Grove, this
is one of my friends, Bertha Gemacht; and Bertha, this is one of my
friends, Reginald Grove.”
Reginald had risen to his feet under this speech, the words of which are
only recorded. The cool, helpful look which she turned on him in view of
his moral mismanagement, and which was not in the least altered as she
looked from him to Bertha, and from Bertha to him again, was as new to
him as it was irritating and fascinating. For Bertha was to him a
hard-looking woman as she laid her sack for holding the grass, down, and
turned on him a look cowed, yet angry, and with another mixed expression
indescribable.
There was a little odor of whiskey about Bertha, and so there was about
Reginald; and Ethelbert’s senses were as keen in one case as they were
in the other; but she noticed that while Bertha seemed not in the least
surprised that such a man as Reginald was found in a nice lady’s
company, he was plainly indignant at seeing Bertha there; and that he
watched them with disapprobation while they leaned over an illustrated
paper together.
“Now I would like you to read an account of the two women who took a
homestead of one hundred and sixty acres; and for seven years worked it
so well and wisely that they now have a delightful, valuable home, and
have since added three other women to the household: women who had lost
hope of happiness and honor, but are now becoming healthy and
self-sustained by work,—honest, skillful work. Of course one has to have
health in order to have nice clear brains.”
“O Bertha, did you read and understand the health journal I loaned you?
And did you think, after all the facts I told you, that you would better
still sometimes use whiskey and—”
“Indeed, Miss Daksha, I have not taken more than—”
“Bertha,” Ethelbert interrupted. “Of course you will drink whiskey all
you choose. I was only wishing you would choose not to drink it at all.
Do you think rum drinking makes people healthy, wealthy and wise?”
Bertha’s face had lighted up under the idea which had lately been
brought to her by this friend, whose unvarying recognition of Bertha’s
individuality, and of the fact that she could make of herself just such
a woman as she chose to make, had opened a world of dignified
possibilities before her. Her large eyes, which often had the look of an
angry animal brought to bay, had now in them a puzzled, wondering look,
full of startled expectancy.
“Do you think I am healthier than you are?” said Ethelbert. Bertha
nodded eagerly. “Would you wish to be like me?”
“O Gott in Himmel! Would I not!” said Bertha, and she threw her old
apron over her head; and the wild conflict within broke forth in a
tempest of sobs.
Reginald sat down on the steps with his back to them both, and looked
out on the evening clouds; and Ethelbert, in that sharp fellowship with
suffering which is part of the price paid by those whose soul-sight
gives them redemptive power with the tempted and fallen, steadied
herself under the pangs of the sudden remorse that had struck the heart
of the man and of the woman anear.
“There Bertha, now listen,” said she presently. “Let us, you and I, not
do anything which will in the least harm the pure river of life, which,
flowing through our veins, comes first from Jehovah, the fount of all
life. See, Bertha!”
The girl uncovered her eyes, and awe-struck, looked at Ethelbert as she
bared her arm and showed the blue tracery there, and on her hand,
adding: “See, the beautiful stream in the little river-beds here, flows
on, and up through this big artery in my throat, over my brain. And
Bertha,” she paused, and with a dramatic but perfectly unaffected
gesture full of regnant poise, and with a light in her eyes never seen
on sea or land, she said again, slowly: “And, Bertha, brain rules here!
What the spirit wills, this body must. So my brain has commanded that
nothing shall be put into my blood which shall send poisonous elements
maddeningly up to the throne of reason. But Bertha, if you think it is
wise to do as you do, you may have some good cause for it, that I know
nothing about. Tell me, am I mistaken in my ideas? Shall I go with you
where you went this afternoon, and put into my veins all that you did
into yours?”
“Gott bewahr! Oh, don’t say, don’t think of such things of your veins!”
cried Bertha, almost throwing her arms round Ethelbert.
Reginald sprang to his feet and looked at poor Bertha with a loathful
vindictiveness hard to describe.
“Is it too bad for me? Oh, then, it must be too bad for you,” said
Ethelbert, with a pain intense in her tone. “You cut me to the heart
just so when you violate your blood with things of horror. It is good
German blood, and part of it flows in my veins, and all of it came from
the great Fountain of Life who ‘made of one blood all nations of the
earth,’ and who, in this, our beloved country, is gathering up all the
nations of the earth into the life of this Republic’s inheritance. It is
for women to secure to our nation a heritage better than golden crowns.”
Ethelbert’s grey eyes were fixed on a floating cloud, and, absorbing
into herself the doings of the beautiful world above, she broke up her
reverie; and turning, looked at Bertha, saying explainingly: “You see
yourself, Bertha, I mean that my parents and grandparents might have
forgotten that I was coming to inherit their blood and their brains, and
might have carelessly filled the fountain of their life with
poison-loving elements. Now, if they had done so, what do you suppose I
would now do about it myself?”
“I’ll tell you what you would do about it,” interrupted Reginald. “You
would have thought it the best blood in the land, madame, and would have
scorned that girl as much as you scorn me, to whom you are reading this
lesson over her shoulders. She don’t understand a word you’ve said; but
do you think I am a fool?”
“No,” said Ethelbert simply.
Bertha looked after him as he walked off a few steps.
“Is that man your friend?” she said sharply. “I understand not all your
speaking words, but full well I know your wisdom in the thought of it,
and well I know that the body is as a beast if the spirit shall not
command what it will do. He thinks me a fool—too much fool to talk your
wisdom-words. I are not fool. I choose this day. This head shall say,
‘No more of beer and oder tings to my body. It has said so before this
time, many days, but now, _the body must_!’ Now then, I, Bertha, ask
you: Do you think I am a fool?”
“No,” said Ethelbert.
“Well, I shall be a fool if I steals away my brains some more.”
“I think you will never do that any more. Brain force can be lost and
wasted; or it can be treasured up, englobed delightsomely. Now, Bertha,
take this rosebud and try to live as healthfully and sweet as roses do.
Bertha, gather up your grass for the rabbits, and make the little things
clean and happy, and then you can read your papers tonight, and come and
get some more. Here is a pencil, so you can mark any little place you
don’t quite understand, and I will tell you about it. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Miss Daksha,” said Bertha, looking back enviously at
Reginald, who stood striking the rosebush with his cane, and not yet
dismissed.
“You can’t put that rose together again,” said Ethelbert.
“Who cares?” said he roughly. For, as Ethelbert would not flatter him,
he unconsciously proposed not to flatter her. You see he had felt full
of the ashes of the past; and those ashes, like a volatile alkali,
needed only an acid admixture to ensure a sudden fermentation of soul.
The truths which had seemed so sweet to Bertha had been acid to him, and
a foam of wrath was choking him as he sputtered: “Who cares?”
“That is the question,” said Ethelbert, gathering up the shattered rose:
“Who cares?”
He gave the bush another cut with his cane; for the fermentation of
ideas within was quite unendurable. He had always supposed that women
were made on purpose to flatter men, and he had always had so much of it
that he was sick of it; but now when he cared a good deal to be thought
well of, he felt it was a bit hard to be made to think of himself as he
had been made to think all that morning. He had until now thought
Ethelbert particularly attractive, because she was so bright; but now he
thought her brightness was so overmuch of a good thing as to be
perfectly detestable. The same hand that in wanton cruelty was whacking
to pieces those exquisite moss rosebuds, would willingly have whacked
out of existence all the high human tests of character which had
stripped his soul bare before his gaze. Something of this, but not very
clearly defined, made him hit the bush again as he looked at Ethelbert,
who, free from a suggestion of reproof or sentiment of any kind,
repeated: “Who cares?”
“I don’t,” said Reginald; and after a pause: “Do you?”
“Do I care that I can’t put the rose together again? I don’t aspire to
do that; yet I do very much care to have all the power I can possibly
obtain with which to arrest the destruction of beautiful life and
orderly happiness.”
“Oh, yes, much you care to make a fellow happy,” said Reginald sullenly.
“Look at the cold-blooded way you sat there and talked to that miserable
thing about me.” And after waiting again, he said with the combativeness
of a man opposed by silence, when instead he longed for a quarrel: “Now
this is all very well, Miss Daksha, but you know that if you
noticed—noticed—well, as you might say—if you smelt whiskey on her (now
you’ve got it), if you smelt whiskey on her, you could—you are sharp
enough to notice—anything, in fact,” said he, stumbling on under her
steady uplifted eyes, “Aren’t you?”
“I notice many things,” said Ethelbert, like a little truthful child.
He hit the rosebush again. “You are a queer girl,” he said. “You have no
respect for a man’s feelings.”
“What are those things?”
“What things?”
“A man’s feelings, I believe you called them,” said Ethelbert.
He came near her, with red passion-flushes patching his face like
Satan’s finger-prints; and stood angrily looking at her. And then he
slashed the air close to her with his cane; but he might as well have
shot glances of rage at a lily-cup, in the hope of arresting the sweet
aura it exhaled. He turned angrily away. “Well, I can just believe you,”
he said. “You neither know nor care what feelings are. You care more
about that old rose.”
“That depends,” said Ethelbert. “I care for the rose because it is
sweet, orderly life. If a man’s feelings are the same, I care just as
much for them. But character is not a question of feeling. It is a
question of wise action.”
He muttered a passionate oath, and hit the bush again. For the devils
were “rending him,” and “that kind goeth not out, except by prayer and
fasting.” He was not much of a praying man; and as for fasting, his
habitual diet and incessant brandy quaffing did not come under that
head, nor produce those calming results. Added to this, three months had
passed since Ethelbert Daksha had seemed to him as no woman had ever
seemed to him before; and in those three months he had been afraid to
approach acquaintanceship, because of the infinite distance between
them. This distance he, with all his unpublished record of
demoralization, had decency enough to recognize. And now he had a
feeling akin to hatred toward Ethelbert, that she should have the
impudence to know anything of him except what his “good clothes,” not
bad-featured face, and his hitherto very silent tongue might have told.
He forgot that he was living in this new age in which something like
occult powers are given to the “pure in heart,” who, seeing God, who is
All, and in all, necessarily must see the truth as to the conditions
which fill society. His spiritual and intuitional faculties were not
dead, but sealed up, and enswathed in cerements of flesh. And so, as he
now himself realized, he had nothing but a man’s feelings, hot, blind
and passionate, to oppose to the percipient intelligence, that, cool and
pure, looked steadily into the seething caldron of his heart.
“If a man’s feelings are orderly, beautiful life, I care just as much
for them,” she said again slowly. And as he stood before the Virgin
Mother grace in her, an ineffable longing for purity and new creation
took possession of him. He covered his eyes and sat down on the steps.
“Mine were beautiful when I was three years old,” he said, “orderly,
beautiful life. O good God, yes, they were!” It was a cry of remorse to
his Creator, and Ethelbert understood it so.
“I believe that readily, Reginald,” she said, simply; “and I have
limitless reverence for them; they were as sweet as this bud.” He took
from her hand the exquisite moss-covered wonder, and sat looking at it,
while Ethelbert laid the mutilated rose, with its upgathered petals, on
a book in her lap.
“You mean that is about what my life is worth now,” said he, pointing at
the leaves and torn blossom.
“You choose to do it yourself,” said Ethelbert.
“Who cares?” was the angry response, for he had often sentimentalized
with girls over his ruined hopes, and had so led up to sweet
flirtations; but Ethelbert’s remark and the level look of her eyes,
nipped that sort of a thing in the bud; and his “ugly” was rising at
about the rate of ten degrees a second, when she said: “I do.”
“On your honor, do you?” he asked huskily.
“On honor, yes, I care,” she said. He looked white and kept the bud in
his hand. She wished to help him, but she did not wish to preach nor
sentimentalize.
“You have abused this rosebud fearfully,” rising and examining one on
the bush. “You have shattered the rose and the leaves. Here is a bud
which you have marred, but—” she stooped to examine it more closely;
“but I see it is not beyond the power of performing good uses still and
of opening to mature life.”
These kind of analogies were not exactly in his line of thought, but
somehow as with her he looked at this bud, with one side of the moss
stripped off and the wound on the outer leaf, he became very sorry for
the little Reginald Grove who buried his mother, and afterwards so badly
mismanaged himself. For the moment he felt that all he had ever
possessed which was worth caring about, was what he had had when,
environed by mother-love, he grew up in her smiles. It was a presence
about Ethelbert which made that time seem so valuable. He looked up at
the simple house, and then at Ethelbert’s dainty but inexpensive dress.
The fragrance of the rose seemed intoxicating with its story of possible
redemption. Yet every instinct of his better nature told him it was
impossible that his life could ever blend with Ethelbert’s, while also
his best instincts, with an exigency of strong desire, demanded just
that union. He was in a torture of soul, comparable with nothing he had
ever before experienced. Suddenly he remembered his wealth, but it
seemed only an abject thing. Yet presently, for some reason, he said:
“Do you care for wealth?”
“Immensely,” said Ethelbert.
He looked up at her as though he could not believe his ears; but in his
heart there was a hope, broken by doubt and darkened by disappointment;
a hope that all-conquering wealth could win even her, but a
disappointment in her if this could so be. After a moment he stumbled
on, saying: “I—I somehow don’t see much good in it. After you have eaten
all you can, and have drunken more than—than you ought, and made a
fashion-block of yourself, and so on; in fact, you know money can’t give
you back whatever there was in those old days,” said Reginald, motioning
toward the rose; “it can’t make the now impossible possible.”
“That depends,” said Ethelbert. “Money could make the now impossible
possible to many people.”
He looked at her with that same compound expression on his countenance;
for you know this man, who had never grown to real manhood, being much
bigger outside than he was in,—this man had for years stood on guard
against the many girls whom he fancied wished to marry his money. So he
said, with a dash of the Grove suspicious shrewdness: “Is there anything
now impossible to you that it could make possible?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her with lowering lights in his eyes.
“Do you want that thing very much?”
“I have set myself to obtain it.”
“How much would you give?” said he, his heart beating thickly, and yet
he could not look at her because of the mingled sense of victory and
disappointment.
“I shall give my life for it,” she said quietly. “I have settled that.”
And while he was looking at her, utterly dazed as to her meaning, Judge
Elkhorn threw himself from his horse and eagerly came up to Ethelbert,
who received him with more alacrity than her still manner usually
exhibited.
Now Judge Elkhorn was a man head and shoulders above his fellows in much
that makes average manhood. He was very wealthy, too; and Reginald
thought of both these facts as he watched Ethelbert and the judge; and
forty thousand fiends took hold of him within.
The judge, intent on the object of his visit, had at first given that
casual bow and glance with which one habitually recognizes the presence
of a fellow-being; but the look on Reginald’s countenance arrested his
notice, so that the two men for a moment faced each other with a
well-defined stare; and during this moment Reginald’s countenance
perceptibly grew more red, lowering, and akin to the bulldog character
of expression, and Judge Elkhorn’s more self-poised.
The next moment Reginald arose with an impulse to get away; but as
Ethelbert had at the very same moment set forward two cane chairs, he
seated himself composedly with a set to his jaw that was not lost to the
notice of his hostess.
The judge preserved silence with the air of a man who recognizes the
fact that it was perfectly in order that the first visitor should take
his departure; and an air that reminded one that he was suppressing all
knowledge of the fact that this man’s presence was a very questionable
advantage to the lady favored with it.
Ethelbert, instead of running to the rescue and disguising these men’s
characters from one another and herself by a flood of small talk, sat
thinking faithfully on Reginald’s very best qualities, and looking at
the moss rosebud which he held by the stem in such a way as to conceal
from the eye the flower which was under his half-closed hand. And when
she seated herself a trifle nearer him than to the judge, Reginald
recognized the gentle influence, and with an impulse of some kind,
pinned the bud on his coat lapel.
The judge seemed absolutely entranced with the sunset clouds opposite
him. His gaze was extremely abstracted, and when he turned it toward
Ethelbert, Reginald really felt that his presence was honestly
forgotten, as the judge, evidently taking up his last conversation with
Ethelbert, said: “Miss Daksha, you are supported in your ingenious
theory by Augustin, as well as others. Augustin says: ‘A knowledge of
the truth is equal to the task both of discerning and confuting all
false assertions and erroneous arguments, though never before met with,
if only they may be freely brought forward.’ I have reconsidered my
attempt to dissuade you from the (as I thought) quixotic undertaking on
which you have set your heart. I was astonished at the self-confidence
with which you virtually promise to give help to the struggling, counsel
to the doubtful, light to the blind, hope to the despondent, and
refreshment to the weary. But I perceive you propose to do this, not by
dictating to others, but by simply setting forth the law of your own
mind, and leaving it to the reasonableness or lack of reasonableness of
those about you to act upon it for themselves. There! Have I stated this
as you explained your plan to me in our delightful conversation?” said
the judge, turning his eyes, with their hard will-power, upon Ethelbert.
“Admirably,” said Ethelbert.
“Do you read Petrarch?”
“Why, really, no, I do not,” said Ethelbert in surprise at herself. “I
suppose I have not yet gotten to it.”
“I wondered whether it was your memory of that great author, or whether
it were the wonderful reception of profoundest truth which blesses pure
souls in all ages, bringing ever to the intelligent worker those few
_fundamentals_ which relate to our moral natures. See, I copied this for
you, that you might perceive not only that I was wrong in being against
you, but that you have Petrarch on your side.”
And he passed her a bit copied from “De Vita Solitaria,” which is
substantially as quoted from Ethelbert’s own expression.
“You remember,” said the judge, “you had said it was your own purpose to
accumulate wisdom and employ all your acquirements and understanding in
just the manner which would best ensure benefit to the people of this
now nearly twenty-first century, and would help to solve the especial
problems of our conglomerate American society. Petrarch substantially
says the same of his efforts for his people in his epoch.”
Reginald was turning over in his mind something which echoed down from
babydom. He remembered a little book among his mother’s choice few, with
letters on the back. Did he not in childhood spell out the letters there
P-E-T-R-A-R-C-H? And what else was it he “knew about the old fellow”?
Oh, he had an idea now. He dimly remembered many talks with his mother;
but he thought he would let these people talk on with their high themes,
while he sat pulling out his mustache and getting a word or two together
in such good form as would show this snob whom he was.
“All I have to say then, is,” commenced the little Captain Grove coolly,
“Petrarch is rather coming up in reputation when he finds himself able
to keep up with the thoughts of Miss Daksha. I knew old Pete; he was one
of my mother’s favorites. You know he was mashed on a girl called
‘Laura.’”
A merry peal from Ethelbert quite cleared the atmosphere; but, in the
sharp, bright handling of the subject that followed, Reginald felt
himself completely stranded again. So he had shrewdness enough to retire
on his laurels, and to take his departure at a moment when a pretty
little sentiment as to his arrested development along very nice lines of
life, had quite taken possession of Mrs. Daksha, as well as of the rest.
He walked direct from this visit to a bookstore and inquired for
Petrarch’s works, much to the amazement of the man who had hitherto
supplied him with another style of literature. And then in his room in
his hotel he recommenced an acquaintance with that author, or his
mother, or with the moss rosebud which he had placed at his elbow, in a
vase, or with Miss Ethelbert, or with himself. With which, or with how
many of these he recommenced an acquaintance that evening, it would have
been hard for him to say. But when he arose from the long half-reverie
he was in a new frame of mind; and, too, he fancied he had stolen a
march on Miss Daksha in regard to at least one book.