Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, November, 1878

Mr. Floyd sent for me at once when he had read the news. I found him lying on a sofa in his great dingy parlor, with its heavily-moulded ceilings frescoed into dusky richness, its sides hung with heavy crimson draperies and decaying canvases, out of whose once splendid pigments color and meaning had faded long ago.

"Think of it, my boy," said he softly: "my father-in-law is dead. Mr. Raymond died the twenty-second of April."

"Poor little Helen!" I exclaimed: "is she all alone?"

"I fancy your mother is with her," he returned, glancing back at the letter. "She says she shall send for Mrs. Randolph. She and I are executors of the old man's will. I try to feel solemn over the death," he went on gravely. "With all our belief in immortality, death is a terrible thing to regard closely. But yet he was an old, old man: am I wrong that I cannot mourn for him?"

We went about our preparations for return at once. Vanished were our plans for Venice and the Alps. I had looked forward with pleasure to spending my summer with Dart. No man in the world is so good a comrade as an enthusiastic painter, and Harry was keen of eye, with an exquisite pleasure in form and color: nothing came amiss to him between earth and sky. It had been a pleasant dream with us to go together about Venice, rowed by some sweet-voiced Luigi or Antonio from one stretch of sea-kissed marble palace-steps to another—to spend our mornings in dim basilicas, our afternoons away across the widening lagoons, and finish the day in the square of San Marco listening to Bellini's and Verdi's airs. But now that this sweet idleness of Italy must be put by, I was glad that we were to come back home again. I was a little surprised to find myself almost as eager as Mr. Floyd in making preparations for return. In a week we were on the ocean.

Mr. Floyd had seemed to enjoy our travels. He was always in good spirits, always a brilliant and engaging talker, a pleased observer and clever analyst. Harry and I had made the usual display of unlimited fastidiousness which youth delights in, but our elder had taken everything more kindly. He could not fatigue himself, and rarely looked at more than two or three pictures at a time.

"I used to feel," he would say, "if I went away from a gallery without a crick in my back and a blinding headache that I had no realization of my æsthetic privileges. Now-a-days I am willing to confess that I find too much of everything. Besides, all these pictures have been so overpraised! Let us find some pleasure that is not in the guide-books."

This was his tone, and I discovered in it at times, despite all his cheerfulness, a strange fatigue of spirit. But now that he was on his way home he had suddenly become exuberantly joyful.

"It is so delightful," he would remark to me, "to realize once more that the chief end of man is not, after all, to have fluent meditations upon wrecks of lost empires—to discover beauty in hideousness because somebody else pretends to do so—to mumble praises about frescoes which are frightful to look at, and break your neck besides—to have profound emotions in Jerusalem and experience awe before pyramids and sphinxes. This fictitious life we have been leading is very elegant, no doubt, and gives one material for just criticisms, but, strictly between us, I think it dreadfully tiresome. I shall never go into it again. I suppose my little girl will want to go abroad now that she can do what she chooses, but I shall let you take care of her, Floyd."

I laughed. "You will find Helen a magnificent young lady by this time," I returned. "She is seventeen, is she not? A good many men will fight for the pleasure of showing her about, and likely as not she will not look at me."

"She is as old as her mother was when I married her," said Mr. Floyd thoughtfully. "Can it be that people will want to be marrying my little girl? I want her all to myself for a time. Who knows how long? I have been a lonely man, and now I want close, intimate human companionship. I am tired of doing, I am tired of thinking. I am out of politics: I am ready for enjoyment. It seems to me I can be very happy with Helen and your mother close at hand. We shall not be a dreary family. Your mother and I can sit together and talk: you and Helen can have your little amusements. Now that she is to be quite unrestricted, I hope and expect a little nonsense from her."

"But, sir—" I began hesitatingly.

"But what, pray?"

"You cannot believe that we are all to live together. It is time for me to make a beginning in life, and my mother must be with me."

"You have made a very handsome beginning," returned Mr. Floyd dryly. "Once for all, Floyd, I will have no nonsense of independence and pride from you. You are to me as my own son. I may talk much of Helen, because our love for women is of the kind that gives us the impulse to proclaim it, but she is scarcely more dear to me than you are. You are part of my life now: don't fret me and make me miserable by deserting me. Be as free as air and follow out every wish of your heart, yet, all the same, feel that your home is where my home is, your interests where mine are."

As soon as we landed we had news of my mother having joined Helen at The Headlands shortly after Mr. Raymond's death. Mr. Floyd wasted not an hour in New York, but went on to his daughter at once. I lingered behind him, detained in part by some delays at the custom-house. I longed to see my mother, but felt, though with but little of the old jealousy, that Mr. Floyd had almost the best right to see her first, because, now-a-days, I was always looking the truth square in the face, and realizing that it could not be long before cruel and irremediable loss was to encompass us, and that the rest of our lives we should have not substance, but shadowy memories only, in place of this dear friend of ours. So I let him speed on to The Headlands, and dreamed of the love-flush on the cheeks of the two women who met him there.

I knew comparatively little of my old set of friends, and of late Jack Holt had almost slipped out of my circle of correspondents. I was aware that his marriage had been delayed the previous year and the time fixed for Christmas, but neither Harry nor I had been advised of it, and my mother had only written that she heard there were fresh delays, and that the elder Holt had involved his firm in difficulties. I determined, therefore, to stop at Belfield on my way to The Headlands and see Jack and all the old friends I might still have remaining there. Of late years my passing associations had become so diffused with their endless transitions that every memory of my old home was becoming more and more fixed and permanent, the nucleus of my recollection distinct and unchangeable.

I reached Belfield early one morning late in May. The season was perhaps a little late, for the apple trees were still in bloom, and the village looked fair and virginal as a bride on her wedding-day. I walked along the wide pleasant streets with a curious pain. The years that lay between me and the last day I had paced these broad walks under the pale greenery of the elms seemed legendary and dreamlike. There was the schoolhouse on the hill, and the well-worn playground about it. Beyond lay the woods, half colored now with clear pellucid green, gleams of silver and shades of scarlet here and there. My mind reverted with clearness to the little nooks and dingles of the hills and meadows thereabouts: I remembered a woodland spring boiling up in a hollow of the greenest grass I ever saw, and in the copse beside it grew the most beautiful rose-tinted anemones. I could have gone to the foot of a great oak and found the root of white violets which had been one of my earliest and dearest secrets; and I wondered—with a longing inexpressibly strong to go and seek it—if there were still a nest in a little hollow I knew of, where in my time I had watched scores of yellow-beaked nestlings.

I went past the house where my mother and I had lived so many years. It was so changed I should not have recognized it, repainted and modernized with much show of glass and bow-windows. There were few people to be seen along the white walks until I met the stream from the post-office. Old men and boys, shy girls and children, came out with their letters and papers just as in the old time. Some of the men, grown corpulent and gray, I recognized with the old feeling of reverence and love, and stopped to speak with them. But Belfield life, slow and stagnant though it was, was busy enough to have filled their minds with fresher memories, and I was so nearly forgotten that there was small pleasure in reminding them of the lad who had grown from babyhood into a tall stripling among them. My sentiment passed. I looked about more coldly even at the street that led to the cottage where Georgy Lenox lived, and went on briskly to the great stone house of the Holts. Georgy would be there of course: impossible that another Easter could have passed without her being a bride. I wondered as I entered the open iron gate what she would say to me.

The place had seemed splendid to me as a boy, and I well remembered how all the beautiful wonders of the spring blossomed here as nowhere else. But now these grounds too seemed to have suffered a change: there was an air of neglect about the unpruned hedges, with straggling blossoms running riotously over fence and shrubbery; the beds of hyacinths and tulips were trampled, and as I neared the house I saw that the blinds swung carelessly and the old look of thrift and prosperity was quite absent. Still, I observed all this dreamily, wondering, as returned travellers are apt to do, if the change were in the things themselves or in my own eyes.

"Perhaps," thought I, "Jack and his wife live in New York," when, suddenly answering my doubt, Jack himself came down the avenue in his light wagon.

I stepped aside, standing still, and he regarded me at first absently, then with startled curiosity, and sharply drew his skittish mare back on her haunches. "Good God, Floyd!" said he, "how glad I am to see you!" We looked straight in each other's face for a time, and his features worked, as he regarded me, with some emotion. "You were going to the house?" said he. "Nobody could see you. I have been driving father to the factories to-day, and he is not so well after it, and my mother is with him. I have to be back at twelve, so jump in and come out with me."

I obeyed him. It was but two years since we had parted, but he had aged and seemed quite different from the Jack Holt of former times. He was roughly dressed, and, though scrupulously neat and shaven, looked, I am sure, fifteen years my senior. He touched his whip, and the mare plunged down the avenue at a pace too disconcerting to allow either of us to speak for a few moments, and we were at least a mile away before her swinging canter subsided into a trot.

"What is her name?" I asked, laughing. "It ought to be Mary Magdalen, for she has seven devils in her this morning."

"Don't you remember the Duchess?" he inquired with a flicker of something like a smile crossing his heavy face. "You christened her yourself."

I remembered the Duchess. The yearling colt had been given to him on his sixteenth birthday. He wanted to call her Georgy, but his mother forbade it: so we named her after that duchess of Devonshire who had made the name famous.

"You'll find I have forgotten nothing," I replied, "but my thoughts are such a medley that I can't settle them at once."

"When did you return?"

"Only four days ago: I have not seen my mother yet."

"And you have come to look me up? Floyd, that is kind."

Something in his cool, pleasant tones touched me powerfully. "I knew nothing about you," I blurted out. "Why, Jack, at this minute I'm not sure if you are married or not."

"I am not married," he said softly. He was not used to reply so quickly, and I waited for him to speak before I questioned him further. "I am well," he said presently, "and mother is in her usual health. Have you heard about my father?"

"Nothing. Both Harry and I have famished for news of you."

I could see a little trouble in his face: he would have preferred that somebody else should have broken his news to me. But he sighed, and went on without flinching. "My father had a paralytic stroke in December," he explained in his deliberate, gentle voice. "When once our eyes were opened we could easily comprehend that for months his mind had been failing. When the bad news came the accumulation of trouble was too much for him. We thought at first nothing could save him, but he rallied physically. His mind has quite gone, however," Jack added, his voice trembling: "his brain has softened."

I stared at him speechlessly: I knew by instinct that I had not heard the worst.

"The moment I saw you," pursued Jack, "my first thought was, 'I hope he knows the whole story.' You heard nothing of our failure?"

"Not a word."

"The firm of Holt & Strong suspended payment last December," said he with a deep flush rising to his temples. "There were two companies, you know: I was only in Holt & Co. Strong was in Europe. My poor father's weakness did not display itself openly, but took the form of mad secret speculations. It is a long story, Floyd. There were no bounds to his schemes, in which he involved not only himself, but others. He was president of the savings bank too, you may remember. The troubles began with the failure of a house in New York to which we owed something. He was pressed: there was a whisper of something wrong, and of course there came a run on the bank. I was not here. My father sent for me: when I came I found a riotous mob outside the closed doors, and he lay insensible in the bank parlor. He never recovered any real consciousness, and for weeks we worked in the dark. There was much to bear. I could have endured every loss without a murmur, had it not been for the cruelty of some of his smallest creditors."

He stopped for a few minutes, but when I would have spoken he motioned me to be silent, and presently went on: "There are men to-day who pretend to believe that my father's mental state is as perfect as ever—that he is merely shielding himself from punishment by shamming imbecility. Ah, well! let me continue. Just at this juncture one of our buildings was destroyed by fire. The insurance policy had lapsed, and he had failed to renew it. The factory was packed with goods ready for shipment. The loss to Holt & Strong was a quarter of a million of dollars." He stopped again, and I saw him moisten his dry lips. "The chief creditors," he resumed, "were honorable men. By the first of March we had agreed upon terms of adjustment. My mother gave up all she had. My sisters are angry with me that I allowed her to strip the house of everything that had possessed a moneyed value, and think it shameful that I despoiled her of her jewels. But such things did not count with my mother and me. I kept the Duchess—nothing else." He smiled sombrely as he pulled out his watch. It was the little silver one he had used when we played marbles together. "We paid fifty cents on the dollar," he said presently, "and by and by shall manage something of a dividend at the bank. It will give me plenty to do for years yet," he added with a peculiar smile.

"You have assumed your father's debts?" I exclaimed. "That seems a needless penalty, Jack."

"My father and I are as one," said he gently. "It was fortunate for me in every way that I was not my father's partner. When I entered Holt & Co. he gave up everything to me. I have the entire business now, and it leaves me little unoccupied time."

"You are doing well, I trust."

"Reasonably well." I knew the look on his heavy, sombre face—a patient but combative look, powerful as Fate itself.

"Do you mind telling me the rest, Jack?" I asked after a time. "If it hurts you don't open your lips."

The veins in his forehead swelled a little, yet he neither flinched nor reddened. "I suppose," he answered, his voice a little less clear and distinct, "you allude to my engagement to Miss Lenox. It was broken off when these troubles came. We were to have been married a year ago in June, but I was not quite free to take her travelling, and it seemed her wish to wait. The wedding-day was quite fixed for a fortnight after the date of my poor father's sickness. Of course I offered her her freedom at once when I realized my scanty prospects of ensuring her a luxurious future. Naturally, everything was broken off. I am hampered by circumstances. I shall never feel myself free to live even in ordinary comfort until my father's debts are paid to the last penny. My first duty is to my father and mother. My sisters are all married, have large families, and, above all, have lost the home feeling. We three are alone in the world in our reverses. When you see our home, Floyd, you won't wonder that I could not ask Georgy to come to it."

"But would she have come, Jack?" I stammered. "Was she faithful to you? would she not wait for you?"

"Georgy is not romantic," he said kindly, "and has not been brought up in a school which inspires the tenderest feelings. I should never have expected that sort of devotion from her, nor am I one to inspire it. I knew at once when the dark days came that everything was over. Blow after blow had struck me: just at that time that she should desert me was but one blow the more."

I threw my arm about him in the old way, but he did not turn now and smile into my face as when we were boys. This gloom was not so easily dispelled.

He himself ended the silence that I could not bring myself to break. "I have heard of a divided duty, but I can have no doubts, no dilemmas, as to mine. I believe that I am not fanciful—that I see realities just as they are. If ever man found work lying close to his hands, I have found it. If ever an entire and undivided responsibility rested upon human creature, it is mine. Every instinct of my heart, every decision of my intellect, alike shows me that my duty lies in the path which I am treading. Nobody on earth, nobody but God, knows just exactly what I have felt the few past months. I couldn't write to you and Harry. Life had always been a pleasant thing to me. My father was not a lovable man, nor was he in his home all that a son longs for in a father. Still, he was rich and respected; he represented a beneficent financial power; he controlled many interests, developed resources, carried out schemes which were useful alike to poor and rich. I used to be proud to hear it said, 'That is young Holt, son of Adam Holt of the – Mills.' Now I am obliged to bear with meekness, when he is called dishonest, when he is classed with those who have suffered the punishment of convicted felons, when his pitiful infirmity of body and mind is sneered at. We are living in our house as transient guests: as soon as it can be sold we shall seek some humbler shelter. The pleasant household ways are all gone: everything that used to gladden our eyes has been carried away. My mother's eyes rest nowhere save on my father's face or mine: she cannot look at the bare places in the house, for she thinks too much then of her great calamity. All these are troubles which cut me deep: you don't know, Floyd, how disgrace burns into the soul—worse than bereavement, worse than death. I have been bereaved of all, and I seem to have tasted the bitterness of a thousand deaths. Still"—he turned abruptly and looked me in the eyes with a stiff white face—"there are times when I feel but one loss. There is strength in me, and, please God, by and by I shall shape things to their right ends again; but this other loss! I don't need to tell you," he went on huskily, "how above and beyond all other objects on earth Georgy Lenox has been to me. At times, retrievement, success, unsullied honor, all seem to me as nothing, since she is not to be at the end of them."

We had reached the factories now, and he resumed his usual calmness, and I could see in a moment that he was a business-man again. He asked me to stay and drive back with him, and dine and spend the night, urging it on the plea that his mother would like to see me—that she had so few pleasures. I consented against my wish, almost against my will.