I
George Raymond's father had been a rich man, rich in those days
before the word millionaire had been invented, and when a modest
hundred thousand, lent out at an interest varying from ten to
fifteen per cent, brought in an income that placed its possessor
on the lower steps of affluence. He was the banker of a small New
Jersey town, a man of portentous respectability, who proffered two
fingers to his poorer clients and spoke about the weather as
though it belonged to him. When the school-children read of
Croesus in their mythology, it was Jacob Raymond they saw in their
mind's eye; such expressions as "rich beyond the dreams of
avarice" suggested him as inevitably as pumpkin did pie; they
wondered doubtfully about him in church when that unfortunate
matter of the camel was brought up with its attendant difficulties
for the wealthy. Even Captain Kidd's treasure, in those times so
actively sought for along the whole stretch of the New England
coast, conjured up a small brick building with "Jacob Raymond,
Banker" in gilt letters above the lintel of the door.
But there came a day when that door stayed locked and a hundred
white faces gathered about it, blocking the village street and
talking in whispers though the noonday sun was shining. Raymond's
bank was insolvent, and the banker himself, a fugitive in tarry
sea clothes, was hauling ropes on a vessel outward bound for
Callao. He might have stayed in Middleborough and braved it out,
for he had robbed no man and his personal honour was untarnished,
having succumbed without dishonesty to primitive methods and lack
of capital. But he chose instead the meaner course of flight. Of
all the reproachful faces he left behind him his wife's was the
one he felt himself the least able to confront; and thus,
abandoning everything, with hardly a dozen dollars in his pocket,
he slipped away to sea, never to be seen or heard of again.
Mrs. Raymond was a woman of forty-five, a New Englander to her
finger-tips, proud, arrogant, and fiercely honest; a woman who
never forgot, never forgave, and who practised her narrow
Christianity with the unrelentingness of an Indian. She lived up
to an austere standard herself, and woe betide those who fell one
whit behind her. She was one of those just persons who would have
cast the first stone at the dictates of conscience and with a sort
of holy joy in her own fitness to do so. For years she had been
the richest woman in Middleborough, the head of everything
charitable and religious, the mainstay of ministers, the court of
final appeal in the case of sinners and backsliders. Now, in a
moment, through no fault of her own, the whole fabric of her life
had crumbled. Again had the mighty fallen.
She had not a spark of pity for her husband. To owe what you could
not pay was to her the height of dishonour. It was theft, and she
had no compunction in giving it the name, however it might be
disguised or palliated. She could see no mitigating circumstances
in Raymond's disgrace, and the fact that she was innocently
involved in his downfall filled her with exasperation. The big old
corner house was her own. She had been born in it. It had been her
marriage portion from her father. She put it straightway under the
hammer; her canal stock with it; her furniture and linen; a row of
five little cottages on the outskirts of the town where five poor
families had found not only that their bodies, but the welfare of
their souls, had been confided to her grim keeping. She stripped
herself of everything, and when all had been made over to the
creditors there still remained a deficit of seventeen hundred
dollars. This debt which was not a debt, for she was under no
legal compulsion to pay a penny of it, would willingly have been
condoned by men already grateful for her generosity; but she would
hear of no such compromise, not even that her notes be free of
interest, and she gave them at five per cent, resolute that in
time she would redeem them to the uttermost farthing.
Under these sudden changes of fortune it is seldom that the
sufferer remains amid the ruins of past prosperity. The human
instinct is to fly and hide. The wound heals more readily amongst
strangers. The material evils of life are never so intolerable as
the public loss of caste. It may be said that it is people, not
things, which cause most of the world's unhappiness. Mrs. Raymond
came to New York, where she had not a friend except the son she
brought with her, there to set herself with an undaunted heart to
earn the seventeen hundred dollars she had voluntarily taken on
her shoulders to repay.
George Raymond, her son, was then a boy of fifteen. High-strung,
high-spirited, with all the seriousness of a youngster who had
prematurely learned to think for himself, he had arrived at the
age when ineffaceable impressions are made and the tendencies of a
lifetime decided. Passionately attached to his father, he had lost
him in a way that would have made death seem preferable. He saw
his mother, so shortly before the great lady of a little town,
working out like a servant in other people's houses. The tragedy
of it all ate into his soul and overcame him with a sense of
hopelessness and despair. It would not have been so hard could he
have helped, even in a small way, towards the recovery of their
fortunes; but his mother, faithful even in direst poverty to her
New England blood, sent him to school, determined that at any
sacrifice he should finish his education. But by degrees Mrs.
Raymond drifted into another class of work. She became a nurse,
and, in a situation where her conscientiousness was invaluable,
slowly established a connection that in time kept her constantly
busy. She won the regard of an important physician, and not only
won it but kept it, and thus little by little found her way into
good houses, where she was highly paid and treated with
consideration.
Had it not been for the seventeen hundred dollars and the five per
cent interest upon it, she could have earned enough to keep
herself and her son very comfortable in the three rooms they
occupied on Seventh Street. But this debt, ever present in the
minds of both mother and son, hung over them like a cloud and took
every penny there was to spare. Those two years from fifteen to
seventeen were the most terrible in Raymond's life. At an age when
he possessed neither philosophy nor knowledge and yet the fullest
capacity to suffer, he had to bear, with what courage he could
muster, the crudest buffets of an adverse fate.
Raymond drudged at his books, passed from class to class and
returned at night to the empty rooms he called home, where he
cooked his own meals and sat solitary beside the candle until it
was the hour for bed. His mother was seldom there to greet him. As
a nurse she was kept prisoner, for weeks at a time, in the houses
where she was engaged. It meant much to the boy to find a note
from her lying on the table when he returned at night; more still
to wait at street corners in his shabby overcoat for those
appointments she often made with him. When she took infectious
cases and dared neither write nor speak to him, they had an hour
planned beforehand when she would smile at him from an open window
and wave her hand.
But she was not invariably busy. There were intervals between her
engagements when she remained at home; when those rooms,
ordinarily so lonely and still, took on a wonderful brightness
with her presence; when Raymond, coming back from school late in
the afternoon, ran along the streets singing, as he thought of his
mother awaiting him. This stern woman, the harsh daughter of a
harsh race, had but a single streak of tenderness in her withered
heart. To her son she gave transcendent love, and the whole of her
starved nature went out to him in immeasurable devotion. Their
poverty, the absence of all friends, the burden of debt, the
unacknowledged disgrace, and (harder still to bear) the long and
enforced separations from each other, all served to draw the pair
into the closest intimacy. Raymond grew towards manhood without
ever having met a girl of his own age; without ever having had a
chum; without knowing the least thing of youth save much of its
green-sickness and longing.
When the great debt had been paid off and the last of the notes
cancelled there came no corresponding alleviation of their
straitened circumstances. Raymond had graduated from the High
School and was taking the medical course at Columbia University.
Every penny was put by for the unavoidable expenses of his
tuition. The mother, shrewd, ambitious, and far-seeing, was
staking everything against the future, and was wise enough to
sacrifice the present in order to launch her son into a
profession. In those days fresh air had not been discovered.
Athletics, then in their infancy, were regarded much as we now do
prize-fighting. The ideal student was a pale individual who wore
out the night with cold towels around his head, and who had a
bigger appetite for books than for meat. Docile, unquestioning,
knowing no law but his mother's wish; eager to earn her
commendation and to repay with usury the immense sacrifices she
had made for him, Raymond worked himself to a shadow with study,
and at nineteen was a tall, thin, narrow-shouldered young man with
sunken cheeks and a preternatural whiteness of complexion.
He was far from being a bad-looking fellow, however. He had
beautiful blue eyes, more like a girl's than a man's, and there
was something earnest and winning in his face that often got him a
shy glance on the street from passing women. His acquaintance in
this direction went no further. Many times when a college
acquaintance would have included him in some little party, his
mother had peremptorily refused to let him go. Her face would
darken with jealousy and anger, nor was she backward with a string
of reasons for her refusal. It would unsettle him; he had no money
to waste on girls; he would be shamed by his shabby clothes and
ungloved hands; they would laugh at him behind his back; was he
tired, then, of his old mother who had worked so hard to bring him
up decently? And so on and so on, until, without knowing exactly
why, Raymond would feel himself terribly in the wrong, and was
glad enough at last to be forgiven on the understanding that he
would never propose such a reprehensible thing again.
In any other young man, brought up in the ordinary way, with the
ordinary advantages, such submission would have seemed mean-
spirited; but the bond between these two was riveted with memories
of penury and privation; any appeal to those black days brought
Raymond on his knees; it was intolerable to him that he should
ever cause a pang in his dear mother's breast. Thus, at the age
when the heart is hungriest for companionship; when for the first
time a young man seems to discover the existence of a hitherto
unknown and unimportant sex; when an inner voice urges him to take
his place in the ranks and keep step with the mighty army of his
generation, Raymond was doomed to walk alone, a wistful outcast,
regarding his enviable companions from afar.
He was in his second year at college when his studies were broken
off by his mother's illness. He was suddenly called home to find
her delirious in bed, struck down in the full tide of strength by
the disease she had taken from a patient. It was scarlet fever,
and when it had run its course the doctor took him to one side and
told him that his mother's nursing days were over. During her
tedious convalescence, as Raymond would sit beside her bed and
read aloud to her, their eyes were constantly meeting in unspoken
apprehension. They saw the ground, so solid a month before, now
crumbling beneath their feet; their struggles, their makeshifts,
their starved and meagre life had all been in vain. Their little
savings were gone; the breadwinner, tempting fate once too often,
had received what was to her worse than a mortal wound, for the
means of livelihood had been taken from her.
"Could I have but died," she repeated to herself. "Oh, could I
have but died!"
Raymond laid his head against the coverlet and sobbed. He needed
no words to tell him what was in her mind; that her illness had
used up the little money there was to spare; that she, so long the
support of both, was now a helpless burden on his hands. Pity for
her outweighed every other consideration. His own loss seemed but
little in comparison to hers. It was the concluding tragedy of
those five tragic years. The battle, through no fault of theirs,
had gone against them. The dream of a professional career was
over.
His mother grew better. The doctor ceased his visits. She was able
to get on her feet again. She took over their pinched
housekeeping. But her step was heavy; the gaunt, grim straight-
backed woman, with her thin grey hair and set mouth, was no more
than a spectre of her former self. The doctor was right. There was
nothing before her but lifelong invalidism.
Raymond found work; a place in the auditing department of a
railroad, with a salary to begin with of sixty dollars a month; in
ten years he might hope to get a hundred. But he was one of those
whose back bent easily to misfortune. Heaven knew, he had been
schooled long enough to take its blows with fortitude. His mother
and he could manage comfortably on sixty dollars a month; and when
he laid his first earnings in her hand he even smiled with
satisfaction. She took the money in silence, her heart too full to
ask him whence it came. She had hoped against hope until that
moment; and the bills, as she looked at them, seemed to sting her
shrivelled hand.
One day, as she was cleaning her son's room, she opened a box that
stood in the corner, and was surprised to find it contain a
package done up in wrapping paper. She opened it with curiosity
and the tears sprang to her eyes as she saw the second-hand
medical books George had used at college. Here they were, in neat
wrappers, laid by for ever. Too precious to throw away, too
articulate of unfulfilled ambitions to stand exposed on shelves,
they had been laid away in the grave of her son's hopes. She did
them up again with trembling fingers, and that night when George
returned to supper, he found his mother in the dark, crying.