CHAPTER XIX.
HENRY.
The principal event of the spring among the Ridgeleys, was the return home of Henry. He had closed his novitiate, and was awaiting his examination for admission to the bar. He had already, on the recommendation of his friend and instructor, Wade, formed a favorable business connection with the younger Hitchcock, at Painesville; and now, after a year's absence, he came back to his mother and brothers, for a few days of relaxation and visiting. Less strong than the Major, of grave, thoughtful, but cheerful face and mien, heavy-browed and deep-eyed, with plain, marked face, and finished manners, he was well calculated to impress favorably, and win confidence and respect. His mind was solid, but lacked the sparkle and vivacity of Bart's, and compensatingly was believed to be deep. He was the pride and hope of the family: around him gathered all its expectations of distinction, and no one shared all these more intensely than Bart, who had awaited his coming with hope and fear. He was accompanied by a fellow-student named Ranney, of about his own age, and like him, above the usual height, broad and heavy-shouldered, with a massive head and strong face, a high narrow forehead; rather shy in manner, and taciturn.
They came one night while Bart was in the sugar-camp, where he spent many nights, and he met them the next morning at the breakfast-table. No one could be gladder than he to meet his brother, but, like his mother, he was struck by his emaciated form and languor of manner.
Bart had heard of Ranney as a man of strong, profound, ingenious mind, with much power of sarcasm, and who had formed a partnership with Wade, on the retirement of Mr. Giddings from the bar. He stood a little in awe of him, whose good opinion he would have gladly secured, but who, he had a presentiment, would not understand him. Indeed, he was quite certain he did not understand himself.
The young men had been fellow-students for two years, had many things in common, and were strong friends.
Bart soon found that they had a slender view of his law reading, and spoke slightingly of Ford as a lawyer. They had both diligently studied to the lower depths of the law, had a fair appreciation of their acquisitions, and would not overestimate the few months of solitary reading of a boy in the country.
Bart did not mention his studies, and only answered modestly his brother's inquiries, who closed the subject for the time by saying that if he was serious in his desire to study law, "he would either arrange to take him to Painesville in the Fall, or have his friend Ranney take him in hand." Bart was pleased with the idea of being with either; and possibly he may have wondered whether whoever took him in hand would not have that hand full.
The young men strolled off to his sugar-camp during the forenoon, lounged learnedly about, evincing little interest in the camp and surroundings, although the deepening season had filled the woods with flowers and birds; and Bart wondered whether "Coke on Littleton," and executory devises, and contingent remainders, had produced in them their natural consequences. He watched to see whether new maple sugar was sweet to them, and on full reflection doubted if it was.
They did not interfere with his work, and sauntered back to an early dinner, and Bart saw no more of them until night.
He closed out his work early for the day, and spent the evening with them and his mother.
Henry naturally inquired about his old acquaintances, and Bart answered graphically. He was in a mood of reckless gayety. He took them up, one after another, and in a few happy strokes presented them in ludicrous caricature, irresistible for its hits of humor, and sometimes for wit, and sometimes sarcasm—a stream of sparkle and glitter, with queer quotations of history, poetry, and Scripture, always apt, and the latter not always irreverent. Ranney had a capacity to enjoy a medley, and both of the young men abandoned themselves to uncontrollable laughter; and even the good mother, who tried in vain to stop her reckless son, surprised herself with tears streaming down her cheeks. Bart, for the most part, remained grave, and occasionally Edward helped him out with a suggestion, or contributed a dry and pungent word of his own.
As the fit subsided, Henry, half serious and half laughing, turned to him: "Oh, Bart, I thought you had reformed, and become considerate and thoughtful, and I find that you are worse than ever."
"But, Henry, what's the use of having neighbors and acquaintances and friends, if one cannot serve them up to his guests; and only think, I've gone about for six months with the odds and ends of 'flat, stale and unprofitable' things accumulating in and about him—the said Bart—until, as a sanitary measure, I had to utter them."
"How do you feel after it?" inquired Henry.
"Rather depressed, though I hope to tone up again."
"Bart," said Henry, gravely, "I haven't seen much of you for two or three years; I used to get queer glimpses of you in your letters, and I must look through your mental and moral make-up some time."
"You will find me like the sterile, stony glebe, which, when the priest reached in his career of invocation and blessing—'Here,' said the holy father, 'prayers and supplications are of no avail. This must have manure.' Grace would, I fear, be wasted on me, and our good mother would willingly see me under your subsoiling and fertilizing hand."
"Do you ever seriously think?"
"I? oh yes! such thoughts as I can think. I think of the wondrously beautiful in nature, and am glad. I think of the wretched race of men, and am sad. I think of my shallow self, and am mad."
Henry, with unchanged gravity: "Do you believe in anything?"
"Yes, I believe fully in our mother; a good deal in you, though my faith is shaken a little just now; and am inclined to great faith in your friend Mr. Ranney."
All smile but Henry. "Yes, all that of course, but abstract propositions. Have you faith, in anything?"
"Well, I believe in genius, I believe in poetry—though not much in poets—music—though that is not for men. I believe in love—for those who may have it. I believe in woman and in God. When I draw myself close to Him, I am overcome with a great awe, and dare not pray. It is only when I seem to push Him off, and coop Him up in a little crystal-domed palace beyond the stars, and out of hearing, that I dare tell Him how huge He is, and pipe little serenades of psalmody to Him."
"Oh, Barton, you are profane!"
"No, mother, men are profane in their gorgeous egotism. We are the braggarts, and ascribe egotism to God Himself; while we are the sole objects of interest in the universe. God was and is on our account only; and when men fancy that they have found a way of running things without Him, they shove Him out entirely. I put it plainly, and it sounds bad."
"This is a compendious confession of faith," said Henry; and, pausing, "why do you put genius first?"
"As the most doubtful, and, at the same time, an interesting article. I am at the age when a young man queries anxiously about it. Has he any of it—the least bit?"
"Well, what is your conclusion?"
"Sometimes I fancy I feel faintly its stir and spur and inspiration."
"When it may be only dyspepsia," said Henry.
"It may be. I haven't ranked myself among geniuses."
"Yet you believe in it. What is it?"
"I can't tell. Can you tell what is electricity or life?"
"That is not logical. You answer one question by asking another."
"I am not sure but that is allowable," interrupted Ranney. "You pose your opponent with an unanswerable question, and he in turn proposes several, thereby suggesting that there are things unknown, and that if you will push him to that realm you are equally involved. It may not be logical, but it usually silences."
"Not quite, in this instance," said Henry, "for we know by their manifestations that life and electricity are; they manifest themselves to us."
"And by the same rule genius manifests itself to your brother, although it may not to you."
"Thank you, Mr. Ranney," said Bart.
"Now I do not suppose," he went on, "that genius is a beneficent little imp, or genie, lodged in the brain of the fortunate or unfortunate, who is all-powerful, and always at hand to give strength, emit a flash of light, or pour inspiration into the faculties, nor does it consist in anything that answers to that idea. But there are men endowed with quick, strong intellects, with warm, ardent, intense temperaments, and with strong imaginations; where these, or their equivalents, are found happily blended, the result is genius. There is a working power that can do anything, and with apparent ease. If it plunges down, it need not remain long; if it mounts up, it alights again without effort or injury."
"And such a 'working power,' you suppose, would, of itself, be a constant self-supply, and always equal to emergencies, and of its own unaided spontaneous inspirations and energies, I suppose," said Henry, "and has nothing to do but float and plunge about, diving and soaring, in the amplitude of nature?"
"Well, Henry, you can't get out of a man what isn't in him. You need not draw on a water-bottle for nectar, or hope to carve marble columns from empty air; genius can't do that. An unformed, undeveloped mind never threw out great things spontaneously, as the cloud throws out lightning. Men are not great without achievement, nor wise without study and reflection. Nor was there ever a genius, however strong and brilliant in the rough, that would not have been stronger and more brilliant by cutting," said Bart, with vehemence. "All I contend for is, that genius, as I have supposed, can make the most and best of things, often doing with them what other and commoner minds cannot do at all."
"This is not the school-boy's idea of genius," said Ranney.
"And," said Bart, a little assertively, "I am not a school-boy."
"So I perceive," said Ranney, coolly.
"The fault I find with you geniuses—"
"We geniuses!!—"
"Is," said Henry, "you perpetually fly and caracol about, and just because you can, apparently, and for the fun of the thing."
"Eagles fly," said Bart.
"And so do butterflies, and other gilded insects."
"Therefore, flying should be dispensed with, I suppose," said Bart. "Because things of mere painted wings, all wing and nothing else, can float in the lower atmosphere, are all winged things to be despised? Birds of strong flight can light and build on or near the ground, but your barn-yard fowl can hardly soar to the top of the fence for his crow."
"But your geniuses, Bart, will not work, will not strip to the long, patient, delving drudgery necessary to unravel, separate, analyze, weigh, measure, estimate and count, and come to like work for work's sake, and so grow to do the best and most work. They deal a few heavy blows, scatter things, pick up a few glittering pebbles, and—"
"Leave to dullards the riches of the mines they never would have found," broke in Bart.
"And fly away into upper air," pursued Henry.
"Oh, I know that some chaps rise for want of weight, as you would say; but mere weight will keep a man always at the surface. Your men who are always plunging into things, digging and turning up the earth—who believe with the ancients that truth is in a well—often lose themselves, and are smothered in their own dirt-holes, and call on men to see how deep they are. God coins with His image on the outside, as men mint money, and your deep lookers can't see it; they are for rushing into the bowels of things."
"There is force in that, Bart. Men may see God in His works, if they will; but men don't so stamp their works. At his best, man is weak; unknowing truth, he puts false brands on his goods, mixes and mingles, snarls and confuses, covers up, hides and effaces, so far as he can, God's works, and palms off as His the works of the other. And it is with these that the lawyer has to do: a work in which your mere genius would make little headway. He would go to it without preparation; he would grow weary of the hopelessness of the task, and fly away to some pleasant perch, and plume his wing for another flight, I fear."
"Might not his lamp of genius aid him somewhat?" put in Bart.
"It might," said Ranney, "and he might be misled by its flare. He would do better to use the old lights of the law. Some are a little lurid, and some a little blue, but always the same in tempest or calm. The law, as you have doubtless discovered, is founded in a few principles of obvious right. Their application to cases is artificial. The law, for its own wise purposes, takes care of itself; of its own force, it embraces everything, investigates everything, construes itself, and enforces itself, as the sole power in the premises. Its rules in the text-books read plain enough, and are not difficult of apprehension. The uncertainty of the law arises in the doubt and uncertainty of the facts; and hence the doubt about which, of many rules, ought to govern. A man of genius, as you describe him, ought to become a good lawyer; he would excel in the investigation and presentation of facts; but none but a lawyer saturated with the spirit of the law until he comes to have a legal instinct, can with accuracy apply it."
This was clear and strong to Barton, and profitable to him.
"Now Barton," said Henry, turning to Ranney, as if Bart were absent, "went through with Blackstone in a month, and probably would go through it every month in the year, and then he might be profitably put to read Blackstone. If I were to shut him up with the 'Institutes,' in four days there might be nothing of poor Coke left but covers and cords."
"And what would become of Bart?" asked Ranney.
"Go mad—but not from much learning," answered the youth for himself; "or you would find him like a dried geranium-leaf hid in the leaves of the year-books,—
'Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead.'"
There was a touch of sarcasm in his mocking voice; and flashing out with his old sparkle, "Be patient with me, boys, the future works miracles. There
Are mountains ungrown,
And fountains unflown,
And flowers unblown,
And seed never strown,
And meadows unmown,
And maids all alone,
And lots of things to you unknown,
And every mother's son of us must
Always blow his own—nose, you know."
And while the young men were a little astonished at the run of his lines, the practical and unexpected climax threw them into another laugh.
Soon Henry took a candle, and the two young men retired. They paused a moment in the little parlor.
"Was there ever such a singular and brilliant compound?" said Ranney. "What a power of expression he has! and I see that he generally knows where he is going to hit. If you can hold him till he masters the law, he will be a power before juries."
"I think so too," said Henry; "but he must be a good lawyer before he can be a good advocate,—though that isn't the popular idea."
"Let him work," said Ranney. "He will shed his flightier notions as a young bird moults its down."
How kind to have said this to Bart! Oh, what a mistake, that just praise is injurious! How many weary, fainting, doubting young hearts have famished and died for a kind word of encouragement!
When Bart returned to the sitting-room, his mother and younger brothers had retired.
"I am scorned of women and misunderstood of men—even by my own brother," he said bitterly to himself. "Let me live to change this, and then let me die."
The old melancholy chords vibrated, and he went to his little attic, remembering with anguish the stream of nonsense and folly he had poured forth, and thought of the laughter he had provoked as so much deserved rebuke; and he determined never to utter another word that should provoke a smile. He would feed and sleep, and grow stupid and stolid, heavy and dull, and bring forth emptiness and nothings with solemn effort and dignified sweatings.
Early on the morrow he was away to the camp, to renew the fires under his sugar-kettles. The cool, fresh air of the woods refreshed and restored his spirits somewhat. He placed on the breakfast-table two bouquets of wood-flowers, and met his guests with the easy grace and courtesy of an accomplished host; and both felt for the first time the charm of his manner, and recognized that it sprung from a superior nature.
As they were about to rise from the breakfast-table, "Gentlemen," said he, "Miss Kate Fisher gives, this afternoon, a little sugar party, out at her father's camp. Henry, she sent over an invitation specially for you two, with one to me, for courtesy. I cannot go; but you must. You will meet, Mr. Ranney, several young ladies, any one of whom will convert you to my creed of love and poetry, and two or three young, men stupid enough to master the law,"—with a bright smile. "I promised you would both go. The walk is not more than a mile, the day a marvel right out of Paradise, and you both need the exercise, and to feel that it is spring."
"And why don't you go, Barton?" asked Henry.
"Well, you are not a stranger to any whom you will meet, and don't need me. In the first place, I must remain and gather the sap, and can't go; in the second, I don't want to go, and won't; and in the third, I have several good reasons for not going,"—all very bright, and in good humor.
"What do you say, Ranney?"
"Well, I would like to go, and I would like to have Barton go with us."
"Would you, though?"—brightening. "No, I can't go; though I would be glad to go with you anywhere."