Masterman and Son Part 23

Well, let us come to business. There's something I want to say to you.

It's about your father. Now, did Mrs. Bundy ever tell you that your father once helped me when I was in difficulties?"

"Yes, she told me that."

"She did, eh? Well, I've never forgotten it. Of course I've paid the money back long ago, but you can't pay a debt like that with money.

I've always wanted to do more than that, and now the chance has come to me. I can't do anything for your father, but there's something I would like to do for you."

"You've already done a great deal, for which I am deeply grateful,"

said Arthur.

"Ah, that's a bagatelle! I mean something permanent. Now, how would it suit you if I made you secretary to my Dredging Company? You could draw five thousand dollars a year for a beginning, and I'd a.s.sign you shares in the company besides."

It was a splendid offer which might well dazzle a youth who a week ago had been acquainted with starvation. Had it come on that night when he shuddered at the bread-line, he would have s.n.a.t.c.hed it as a starving dog flies upon a bone. But he had had time to recapture his self-control. He had been fed with good meat, he had slept, and once more the physical machine ran sweetly. And he had also had a terrifying glimpse of what the l.u.s.t of gold meant, he had just heard Bundy's own expression of innocent regret, he had before him the man himself. Did he envy him? Something half-heroic in those Homeric labours he could recognise, but what about their object? And it came to him with the vividness of a revelation that there were elements in his own nature that responded all too eagerly to the bribe held out to him; that if he yielded now he would go the way of mult.i.tudes whose only G.o.d is wealth; that if he resisted now he might preserve those higher ideals of life so intimately dear and sacred to him, and only thus could they be retained. No, it must not be. The die was cast in silence, and the golden phantom vanished.

"Mr. Bundy," he said in a low and trembling voice, "you have made me a munificent offer. You have spoken to me your own intimate thoughts.

Will you now let me speak mine with equal frankness?"

"Surely."

"Don't think me ungrateful, but I must refuse your offer."

"Why?"

"For reasons, some of which you have supplied, some of which lie in my own character. To be quite frank, I am not strong enough to resist the fascination of wealth. Some men know how to set a boundary to their desires, to stop there, and say, 'I will go no farther.' I do not believe I am one of these. If I once took the road of wealth, I should push on to the utmost limit. I might not become avaricious, but the fascination of the game would absorb me, and G.o.d only knows whether I might not become cruel and hard in course of time. Well, I dare not risk it, and that is the truth, the humiliating truth, if you like.

The life I have always planned for myself is a life of quiet toil, simple, content--books, a garden, a home: I cannot let it go. My only anchorage in life lies there; without it I know not whither I might drift."

He ended. He had not noticed Bundy's face as he spoke; he had been too absorbed in his own confession. He saw that face now--pale, eager, and with tears upon the cheek. To his immense surprise, Bundy sprang up and flung his arms about his neck.

"My dear fellow," he cried, "I understand. Ah, you little know how you've torn the veil from my own heart! I once had all those thoughts.

I would have entered the Church; I don't know why I didn't. I took another road--the wrong road, I suppose, and here I am.... Well, well!

it can't be altered now.

"You're the best and kindest man I ever knew," cried Arthur. "And I know some one else who would say so too--Mrs. Bundy."

"Ah! that's because she loves me too much to see my faults. But I can see them. Well, well!" He turned his head away, his good honest face bowed in his hands. Then he recovered himself briskly, turned round, and said, "Well, that's done with. Now we'll start out afresh upon a new tack. I've _got_ to help you, don't you understand? And I'm going to. Let me think a moment."

Presently he said, "Now I think I've got it. Sit down and light a fresh cigar. That's right. Now I believe I know the kind of life you want. Shall I take it for granted you don't mean to return to England?"

"No; there is no place for me there, at present."

"Well, there's one point settled, and let me say I agree with you. Now for another point. You want an outdoor life?"

"Yes, I prefer it."

"Very good. Now, let me paint you a picture. A country of wooded hills and snow mountains, a lake, a log-house, and let us say a hundred acres of cleared land with seventy-five apple trees to the acre. Do you know what that means? I'll tell you. An apple tree in bearing means from five to ten dollars. An orchard of only fifty acres therefore means--here, hand me that paper-pad."

And straightway he fell to work, with all the recovered ardour of the speculator, adding and re-adding interminable lines of figures, until he announced the surprising result that the man who owned fifty acres of land in this most desirable of valleys might count upon a yearly income of $18,750, and in due time twice or thrice that sum.

"It's better than a gold-mine," he cried inconsistently. "And it's safe--it's absolutely safe!"

"But how am I to buy it?"

"You're not going to buy it. Don't you understand? It's already yours. Here, wait a moment."

There was another series of swift calculations, and then Bundy communicated this result: that the money Archibold Masterman had lent him years before had been really worth to him thrice its value, for it had set him on his feet; that morally therefore he owed 2,000 to Archibold Masterman; that the price of this excellent fruit ranch, by a strange coincidence, was exactly 2,000; and that finally it was his fixed determination to make the ranch over to Arthur, as an act of grat.i.tude.

"There's the life you want," he cried enthusiastically.

"But, Mr. Bundy----"

"Now don't object, for I won't hear of it. I'm only too glad you made me think of this. Why, if I were younger and hadn't got the Dredging Company on my hands, I'd go there myself, like a shot. There's no credit to me in giving it you. I'm rich; and besides, it's yours morally. G.o.d bless you, my boy! and if ever things go wrong with me, keep a room for poor old Bundy on the ranch. And now let us go to bed."

And, as if to prevent all further discussion, he swiftly switched the lights off, and incontinently vanished.

XVI

KOOTENAY

The train was climbing slowly to the summit of the Crow's Nest Pa.s.s.

To the northward rose an extraordinary mountain, deeply tinted at its base with greens and purples, and capped with a dazzling crown of snow and ice. Around the glowing base, like children gathered at the knees of a monstrous mother, rose seven inferior monoliths, pillars of rock which in the morning light flamed like torches. All around were mountains, some flat-topped and hooded, some broken spires as of a vast cathedral ruined; beneath them wild gullies yawned, intricate defiles, deep canyons to whose sides the pines clung in an agony of effort; and so far below that it appeared but a thread of silver ran a silent river. Into these defiles the train moved timorously; now hanging for an instant on a wall of precipice, now suspended on a groaning trestle-bridge over depths of air, but ever moving on, like a living creature animate with the unconquerable energy of man. How good this mountain air, chill and clear and bright; how welcome this irregularity of form, pa.s.sing through every grade from the exquisite to the magnificent, after the long, barren monotony of the plains! It was the transition from prose to poetry, from barbarian prose to lyric music.

It was with a sinking heart that Arthur had remarked the long unfolding of the plains. They oppressed the mind, they lay like a weight upon the eyes, they breathed a savage and a hostile spirit. The scattered towns had an air of dereliction; the very houses seemed frozen to the soil, and around them was a silence, like the silence of death. But here once more Nature became a living thing, a hospitable and kindly mother. And to Arthur, who had never seen a mountain, this sudden revelation of grandeur and magnificence came with a shock of exquisite pain. His eyes filled with happy tears, his nerves tingled with delight, he drank long draughts of crystal air, he could have sobbed and shouted. For the first time he knew the bliss of being alive.

On that long westward journey he had had time to reflect on many things. New York had already sunk into the past like a disordered dream. Legion and Horner were alike unsubstantial figures, shapes that had moved for an instant on a tinted cloud and had disappeared. But Bundy travelled with him; the spirit of the man still warmed his heart like a cordial. He saw his honest features wet with tears as he recalled his home; heard his reverberating eloquence in Parlour A.; was subdued and reverent before the generosity and ardour of the man. He had parted with him two days after that memorable midnight conversation. He was now upon his way to England--and Mrs. Bundy. If Arthur could have chosen, he would have wished to be the sole architect of his own fortunes. That had been his proud dream, and he had been slow to relinquish it. His pride had struggled to the last against Bundy's generosity, until remonstrance seemed ungracious and insulting.

He saw now that that pride was the least worthy thing about him. The refusal to accept generosity was scarcely less base than the refusal to confer it. G.o.d had not designed man to stand alone; He had surrounded him with a network of obligations and relationships; total independence was impossible in a world where all living creatures existed by a dependence on each other. He had been in peril of becoming an Ishmael by renunciation of the social bond; Bundy had re-created that social bond for him.

And, strangely enough, Bundy's generosity owed itself to a similar generosity in his father--the father whom he had deserted. There was plentiful food for irony in that thought. He had condemned his father's mode of life, applied to him unsparing judgments, fled from him; and here, six thousand miles away, he was travelling toward an opportunity that would not have existed but for a quality of goodness in Archibold Masterman. He had refused partnership with his father in London; here, in a strange and distant land, he was still the partner of his father's deeds. The thought sensibly softened his heart toward his father. He had long ago ceased to think of him with anger; enmity he had never felt; now there came to him a gush of tender recollection, and with it the power of truer comprehension. He saw that no man is either wholly good or wholly bad; that character cannot be limned in plain black and white; that a thousand delicate gradations separate yet unite the two extremes; and that the final verdict on any man lies beyond the human mind. Man must be taken as he is; he is at all times a contradiction, an enigma, a creature that exceeds his category. To see this is to become human; to miss this vision is to remain a Pharisee, whose cardinal defect is inhumanity. And it was this wider and more charitable temper that came to birth in him as he reflected on the new course his life had taken.

From his pocket he took a bundle of letters, and re-read them slowly.

The latest in date was from Elizabeth, and it closed with a phrase that had clamoured in his memory through all that week of journeying--"Well I know my true knight will not fail me." No emotional utterance could have moved his so deeply. It was the affirmation of a vow which he knew would endure as long as time, and after. It braced his spirit to repeat it; he accepted with a swelling heart its brave implication, and wore it like a badge of honour.

The longest letter was from Vickars. It was the last letter he had received before he left New York, and he had read it so often that he almost knew it by heart. "I have shot my arrow in the air," he wrote, "and G.o.d alone knows where it may fall. My book is out, and there are some signs that it may succeed. You know what I mean by that. The only success I crave is to influence other minds in right directions.

Men have called me a dreamer, perhaps you yourself have thought so too; but I know, and I think you know, that I have dreamed true. We are moving toward a revolution. It is impossible that the present system can endure much longer. My message is for the day after the revolution is accomplished. Then will begin the reconstruction of life again from the base upward, a simpler and an ampler life. It is for that day I write, and my bones will thrill to it even in the grave. As for me, I am like Balaam; I shall see it, but not now; I shall behold it, but not nigh. Even so, I am content." There followed a fuller expression of his social ideals, and the whole closed with this paragraph--"Your mother came to see us last week. It was a great but very happy surprise. Can you guess what we talked of? Of you, Arthur. For we three know you as no others do, and we love you, and believe in you.

She kissed Elizabeth at parting, and said, 'Some day----' and then stopped; but we knew what she meant. Well, you must work on toward that some day. Poor lady! Deal tenderly with her. I think she has sore wounds in her heart, and remember it was harder for her to part from you than for you to go. By so much her quiet sacrifice is greater than yours. She is the tarrier by the stuff, a harder lot, I think, than his that goes down into the battle."

Tears filled his eyes as he read the words. There came to him a sudden vision of the London he had left--the vast tribes of toiling men, the blind pain and suffering of so many millions, the silent agonies that hid beneath those gray skies and congregated roofs. And then, looking from the windows, the eye dwelt again upon this magnificent heritage that bore the flag of England, and he marvelled why men fought for bare life in cities when an empty empire called for them. Surely some day the wizard's spell would break, and London would pour its wasted tribes into this land of fertility and beauty. To reconstruct life from the base upward, that could never be done there; it might be done here.

Here the simpler, ampler life was possible. Ah! if he could not fight by Vickars' side in London, he was still fighting for him here, and was it not better to create the new than to rebuild the old?

The mountain peaks were gradually receding. The train crawled slowly round the walls of precipice, hung suspended for a giddy instant, and then, with a tumult of squealing brakes and hissing steam, plunged into the abyss, doubling on itself a score of times, till it reached the valley and the roaring river. It was past noon when the train stopped beside a placid lake. Immense forests rose on every side; an immemorial silence lay on all things, broken only by the gentle ripple of the waters. A steamer lay beside the landing-stage; an hour later he was afloat.

There were not many pa.s.sengers, and what there were seemed uncommunicative. They were for the most part long-limbed, st.u.r.dy men, ranchers, traders, lumber-jacks, their faces bronzed with outdoor life.

They eyed him narrowly and critically. He knew quite well what their criticism implied. He was a greenhorn, and no doubt looked like one.

As long as the light lasted he took no notice of them; he was too absorbed in the unfolding beauty of the lake, and in curiosity as to what it would reveal for him. Somewhere on the lake lay his small estate, and he found himself studying with eager interest the wooded sh.o.r.es, in the hope of discovering something that gave a hint of human habitation. There was very little to reward his gaze. Twice he saw a blue curl of smoke rising from the forest; once a rude hut, whose one window glittered like a gem in the setting sun; beyond this nothing met the eye but a sh.o.r.e of snow, the black bare poles of charred trees rising above the living pines, and the solitary sky. The scene was sombre; the silence so profound that the churning stern-wheel sounded like the pa.s.sage of an army. Night fell swiftly. It was seven o'clock when a lighted hillside met the eye, and he was told that it was Nelson.

He slept that night at a small hotel near the sh.o.r.e, and rising early next morning was quite unprepared for the beauty of the scene that awaited him. The distant hills of snow were touched with rosy fire, the lake was like a turquoise, and the town surprised him by its sober aspect of prosperity. He scarce knew what he had expected in this remote outpost of the Empire, but certainly not what he saw--broad streets, buildings of hewn stone, substantial shops and warehouses, all gathered round a curve of lake so exquisite that few places could surpa.s.s it in its natural loveliness. The hotel was kept by an Englishman, who made haste to cultivate his acquaintance. He was a lightly built, bearded fellow, with a shrewd eye and a perpetual smile, one of the numerous family of Smith.

"So you're going up the lake?" he inquired.