THE END OF THE BEGINNING
By George A. Hibbard
City of New York,
April 10, 1887.
Dear Sir: It is with some hesitation that I venture to trespass upon your valuable time, knowing as I do that the demands of clients, of constituents, of friends, are so exacting. Still, as what I am about to ask relates to a matter lying very near my heart, I hope you will forgive me. A young man in whom, in spite of the usual extravagances and follies of youth, I discern some promise, and whom I hope, for his own sake and from my friendship for his excellent father, dead long ago, to see occupying a respectable position in the community, has, with the heedlessness peculiar to his age, involved himself in certain difficulties which, although at present of a sufficiently distressing nature, may, I hope, be satisfactorily overcome. Knowing so well your distinguished abilities, ripe judgment, and great experience, I can think of no one to whom I can, in this critical period of his life, more confidently send him for counsel, instruction, and aid, and I accordingly commend him to you, trusting to our old friendship to account for and excuse my somewhat unusual act. Though what I ask of you is something not usually required of a lawyer, I think you will understand my reason for thus troubling you. No one can have a more thorough knowledge of the world than an old practitioner like yourself, and what you may say must fall upon the ears of youth with weighty authority. Talk to him as you would to your son, if you had one, not as to a client, and I will be inexpressibly indebted to you, for I know you will lead him to appreciate the serious realities of life, which, at present, he is so disposed to disregard.
I need only add that he is a young man of some fortune, and, certainly, by birth worthy of much consideration. He will call upon you in person and himself explain his present embarrassments.
I remain, now as always,
Your obedient servant,
Richard Bevington.
The Hon. Jacob Maskelyne,
Counsellor at law,
Number — William Street,
City of New York.
This was the letter that the Honorable Jacob Maskelyne read, reread, and read yet again. Indeed, not content with its repeated perusal, he turned it this way and that, looked at it upside and down, and finally, laying it upon the table, he held up its envelope in curious study, as people so often do when thus perplexed. It bore the common, dull-red two-cent stamp and was post-marked the day before. Both it and the letter were apparently as much matters of the every-day world as a jostle on the sidewalk. Nevertheless, the old lawyer was more than puzzled—more than puzzled, although he, of all men in the great, wideawake city, would in popular opinion have been thought perhaps the very last to be thus at fault. If millstones were to be worn as monocles—if there was any seeing what the future might bring forth—the chances of a project, the risks of rise or fall in a stock, the hazards of a corner in a staple, the prospects of a party or of a partisan, Jacob Maskelyne would be regarded as the man of men for the work. But, under the circumstances, even to him this letter was more than perplexing. Here, on this spring morning, with floods of well-authenticated sunshine pouring into every nook and corner, dissipating every mystery of shadow and, it might seem, every shadow of mystery—here, in his office, bricked in by the unimaginative octavos of the law—those hide-bound volumes, heavy literature of all things most amazingly matter of fact; here, in the eighteen hundred and eighty-seventh year of the Christian era, in the one hundred and eleventh year of the Republic, he had received a letter from his old guardian, whom, when he himself was not more than twenty, he remembered walking about a feeble old man with many an almost Revolutionary peculiarity in speech and manner, and whose funeral he, with the heads and scions of most of the first families of the town, had attended full twenty-five years ago. It certainly was enough to bewilder anyone. He again took up the letter. It was unquestionably in old Bevington’s best style, courtly enough, but a trifle pompous. Had it not been for its true tone he would undoubtedly have thought the thing a hoax and immediately have dismissed it from his mind. He touched a hand-bell, and in response a young man—a very prosaic young man—over whose black clothes the gray of age had begun to gather, appeared.
“Bring me the letters received of the year eighteen sixty—letter B,” said the lawyer, sharply.
That was the year in which his father’s estate had been finally settled, and he knew that there would be many examples of his guardian’s handwriting in the correspondence of that time.
The clerk soon returned with a tin case, and laid it on the table. Mr. Maskelyne took one from among the many papers therein, and, striking it sharply against the arm of his chair, to scatter the dust that invests all things in the garment the outfitter Time warrants such a perfect fit, he spread it out beside the letter he had just read with such blank wonder.
“Identically the same,” he muttered. “No other man ever made an e like that.”
The clerk had vanished and the lawyer was again alone.
He glanced once more at the mysterious missive, and then, with the purposelessness of abstraction, he rose and went to the window. Nothing caught his eye but the sign-bedecked front of the opposite building and one small patch of blue sky—near, gritty, limestone fact and a faraway something without confine. Still, amazed as he was the contagious joy of the time sensibly affected him.
The sparrows, quarrelsome gamins of the air, for the time reformed by honest labor into respectable artisans, upon an opposite entablature, in garrulous amity plied their small, nest-making joinery. The sunlight falling through a haze of wires, wrought into something bright with its own glow a tuft of grass which clumped its spears in its fortalice, taken in assault, on the opposite frieze. Of even these small things, and of much more, Mr. Maskelyne was partially conscious. But the letter! Clear-sighted as he was, he knew but little—so forthright was his look, so fixed toward mere gain—of the wonderful country which lies beneath every man’s nose, less even of the vanishing tracts which retrospection sometimes sees over either shoulder. But the letter! It peopled his vision with things long gone. It brought into view old Bevington—“Dick Bevington,” as he was called to the last day of his life—and a nickname at fifty indicates much of character; brought up before him Dick Bevington as he was before age had stiffened his easy but dignified carriage or taught his once polished but positive utterance to veer and haul in sudden change; brought up old Bevington, as he himself, in childhood, had seen him, stately but debonair, the perfection of aristocratic exclusiveness, affable, however, in the genial kindliness of a kind-hearted man secure in every position—a genuine Knickerbocker in every practice and in every principle—a well-born, well-bred gentleman. And that once active and once ebullient life had long ago gone out! It almost seemed that such vitality, so held in self-contained management, so wisely put forth, so well invested, so to speak, should have lasted forever. But now there was nothing left to bring him to mind but a portrait in the rooms of the Historical Society, or a name in the list of directors when the history of some bank was given, or in the pamphlet in which the story of some charitable institution was told from the beginning—really there was nothing more than this to recall Dick Bevington, foremost among the city’s fathers, the leader of the ton. When he had last seen his guardian he had thought him of patriarchal age. And was not he himself now nearly as old? In spite of the blithesome aspects of the morning, Jacob Maskelyne turned away from the window with an unwonted weight at his heart and a new wrinkle on his brow. The whole world seemed to be going from him, losing charm and significance in a sort of blurring dissatisfaction, as upon a globe, when swiftly turned, lines of longitude and of latitude, and even continents and seas, vanish from sight, and all because his own life suddenly seemed but vexed nothingness. He had not even mellowed into age as had Bevington. He was as sharp and as rough-edged as an Indian’s flint arrow-head, and he knew it.
He seated himself at his table. Automatically he was about to take up the first of several bundles of law-papers, when he was startled by the entrance of the clerk. He leaned back in his chair, and his reawakened wonder grew the more when a card was placed before him upon which was written, in a dashing hand, “From Mr. Bevington.”
“A gentleman to see you,” said the clerk.
“What does he look like?” asked Mr. Maskelyne, suspiciously.
“Nobody I ever saw before,” answered the clerk; “and he seems rather strange about his clothes,” he added, in a rather doubtful, tentative manner.
“Let him come in,” said Mr. Maskelyne, after a moment’s pause.
The door had hardly closed upon the vanishing messenger when it again swung upon its hinges, and a new figure stood in relief against the clearer light from without. In his eagerness to see of what nature a being so introduced might be, Mr. Maskelyne turned his chair completely around, and silently gazed at the new-comer as he entered. His eyes fell upon a slim, graceful young man dressed in the mode of at least forty-five years ago—a mode not without its own good tone undoubtedly, but with a tendency toward gorgeousness which an exquisite of these days of assertive unobtrusiveness might think almost vulgar. His whole attire was touched in every detail with that nameless something which really makes the consummate result unattainable by any not born to such excellence; but in the bright intelligence shining in his dark eyes and the clear intellectual lines of his face, even Maskelyne could see that if he had given much thought to his dress it was only from a proper self-respect, and not because dress was the ultimate or the best expression of what he was. Few could look into the luminous countenance and not feel a glow of sudden sympathy with the high aspirations, the pure disinterestedness, the clear intellect, that lit up and strengthened his features. Even the old lawyer, disciplined as he was by years of hard experience to disregard all such misleading impulses, felt his heart warm toward the young man.
“I hope,” said the new-comer, with a smile so pleasant, so ingenuous, so confiding, that all Maskelyne’s ideas of deception—had he had time to recognize them in the moment before a strange, unquestioning acquiescence took complete possession of him—were at once dissipated, “that I do not intrude too greatly on your time.”
Won really in spite of himself by the appearance of his visitor, the famous counsellor waved his hand toward a chair.
“I suppose,” continued the stranger, with an almost boyish sweetness, as he seated himself, “that Mr. Bevington has already told you why I am here.”
Mr. Maskelyne might very well have answered that Mr. Bevington was hardly to be looked to for any information on any subject, but he did not—the wonderful circumstances of the interview had been so driven from his mind by the potent charm of the young man’s personality.
“Mr.”—and he paused as if waiting for enlightenment as to the name of the stranger.
“I’m in a devil of a scrape,” continued the young man, apparently imagining that the letter had made all necessary explanations, and mentioning the devil as though he was an every-day acquaintance, a pleasant fellow whom he had just left at the door awaiting his return.
“Ah!” murmured the lawyer.
“I did not wish to see you,” continued the other, his singularly trustful smile breaking again over lip and cheek.
“Indeed,” said Maskelyne, his wits and perceptions in most confusing entanglement.
“No,” went on the unaccountable visitor. “I supposed that you would give me what the world calls good advice. But I don’t want that. I want to hear something better.”
He laughed aloud in such a joyous, cheery fashion that the old lawyer even smiled.
“You don’t think I am a good man to come to for bad advice?” he said.
“The last in the world. I don’t suppose that you ever did a foolish thing in your life.”
“And therefore am perhaps less competent to advise others who have,” replied Maskelyne, half heedlessly, for his thoughts were slowly turning in a new direction. The more he looked the more the eager, spirited face seemed familiar. He had certainly seen the young fellow before, but where? It seemed to him that he could certainly remember in a moment, if he only had time to think.
“Mr. Bevington——”
“Pardon me,” interrupted Maskelyne, in a significant tone, “you said Mr. Bevington?”
“Certainly,” said the stranger, suddenly looking up in evident surprise. “Didn’t he write?”
“I have received a letter,” said the old lawyer, cautiously.
He was on the point of making some further inquiries, but the impulse came to nothing. The former feeling of acquiescent but expectant apathy again possessed him; indeed, he had never been much in the habit of asking questions. He knew that he often learned more than was suspected even, by letting people talk on in their own way.
“In the first place,” and he paused a moment—“I am very much in debt.” The young man spoke as he might of taking a cold asleep in the open air—as if he had been exposed to debt and had caught it.
The first look of sadness rose and deepened over his face as he shook his head dejectedly.
“But I’ll get over it—‘Time and I.’ Don’t you rather like the astute old king after all, Mr. Maskelyne?”
“By your own exertions?” asked the lawyer, dryly, and evading the question.
“I write a little,” replied the impenitent, modestly. “I have even heard of people who admired some of my verses.”
“You have no other occupation?”
Old Maskelyne was asking enough questions now. Indeed, under the magic of the stranger’s manner he had quite forgotten himself, his usual caution, and even the exceptional manner in which his companion had been introduced to him.
“Yes,” the other admitted, “I am a lawyer.”
“Don’t you think,” said the older man, answering almost instinctively, “that on the whole you might find the employments of the law more remunerative than the calling of a—poet?”
“Mr. Maskelyne, I sometimes think that the world really believes in the sort of thing underlying your question—that there is wisdom in what it so complacently repeats as indisputable. And I am sent here phrase-gathering—to carry off small packages of words put up in little flat, portable sentences, alternatives ready for daily use. But there are gains you cannot invest in lands and stocks—columns with statues at the top as well as columns whose sums are at the bottom. Wasn’t ‘Le Barbier’ a better investment than any in Roderigue Hortales et Cie., and what could John Ballantyne & Co. show beside ‘Guy Mannering?’ If the world says what it does, it mustn’t do as it does. It’s inconsistent. Who will undertake to strike the balance between fame and fortune; what mathematician will undertake to say that x, the unknown quantity of fame, does not equal the dollar-mark?” Then he added, after a moment’s pause, “Mr. Maskelyne, don’t you think it is true that
“‘One crowded hour of glorious life,
Is worth a world without a name,’—
don’t you really?”
It was hard to resist such enthusiasm, such unquestioning certainty. The old lawyer did not even smile as he lay back in his chair, a new life shooting through every nerve, his gaze fixed on the flushing face of the young man.
“And the consciousness of best employing the best that is in you,” he continued. “Who dare shorten the reach or blunt the nicety of man’s wit, make purblind the imagination, stiffen the cunning hand? Tell men that in some Indian sea, fathoms deep, lie hid forever Spanish galleons in which doubloons and moidores, as when honey more than fills the comb, almost drip from their sacks, and you will see in their sudden thoughtfulness how quickly they appreciate such loss; tell them, if you can, what, through poverty, erring endeavor, uncongenial occupation, the world with each year loses in intellectual riches, and they will stand heedless.”
Speaking with the incomparable confidence of youth, its own glorious nonsense, the young man’s voice sent old Maskelyne’s blood hastening through his veins in almost audible pulsations.
“What if I do not wish great wealth,” the speaker continued, “must I be made to have it? I want but little. Give me food, clothing, habitation, sufficient that my eyes may see the delights this world has to show, that my ears may catch the whispered harmonies of all things beautiful, gladden me with the radiance of common joy, and that’s all I want. Who is unreasonable when what he wants is all he wants? Are the worldly so insecure that, as the frightened kings sought to still beneath their tread the first throb of the French Revolution, they must stamp out the first symptom of revolt against the almighty dollar?
“‘Chi si diverte di poco, è ricco di molto.’
Mr. Maskelyne, must I eat when I am only thirsty, drink when I am only hungry?”
He paused, and glanced triumphantly at the old man. He felt in some secret, instinctive way that he was gaining ground. A squadron of fauns had charged from amid the vine-leaves, and the legion upon the highway was in rout. Fine sense was victorious for the moment over common sense.
“I think,” said Maskelyne, at last, and with a strange, sad, patient air, unwearied, however, by the young man’s dithyrambic, sometimes almost incoherent speech, “I think I cannot attempt to advise you. Having discarded the wisdom of ages, what heed will you give the wisdom of age?”
A cloud seemed to cast its shadow over the other’s face. Could it be that, lost in himself, he had spoken almost in presumptuous disrespect to a man so distinguished, to a man whom he honored and whom he felt that he could even like?
“If I speak strongly,” he said, “it is because I feel strongly. If I did not feel strongly I would not attempt to withstand the amount of testimony against me.”
“Might I ask,” said Maskelyne, gently, in his inexplicable sympathy with the young fellow, “why, if you feel such confidence in all you say, you do not, without hesitation, enter on a life in accordance with your convictions?”
At last there was hesitation in the young stranger’s manner. He turned his hat nervously in his hand, and sat silent for a moment.
“You see,” he began, paused, and began again—“You see, if I were alone it would be one thing. But I’m not—not at all alone,” he added, evidently gaining confidence.
“Ah!” exclaimed the old lawyer, a sudden gleam of new intelligence shining in his dull, weary old eyes.
“And how am I to get married, Mr. Maskelyne?”
“The lady does not approve of your—poetic aspirations?”
“Not approve!” cried the young fellow, eagerly; “she has made me promise that I will give nothing up, that I will refuse all Mr. Bevington has arranged for me. You can’t tell how inspiring our misery is. And our courage,—a young Froissart must be our chronicler, sir. We take our sorrows gladly.”
“And may I ask——”
“Anything, anything,” interrupted the young man, gayly. “I’m sent here to be talked out of what they may call my folly. You see I can’t be talked out of it. Don’t that prove that it is no folly?”
“You seem,” said Maskelyne, dryly, “to have settled it between you—you and she.”
“Settled it! We did not need help about that. It’s the unsettling. There comes a time when friends are the worst enemies. You know that, Mr. Maskelyne?”
The old lawyer paused. “Indeed I do,” he said at last, and the sneer stealing over the outlines of his face slunk away before the look of regret that came swiftly on. Almost in embarrassment, with nervous hand, he shuffled the papers on his table.
Far back in the past, when his eyes were not yet dimmed by the dust blown from law-books, nor his ears deadened by the stridulent clamor of litigation, before his life had gone in attempts at
“Mastering the lawless science of our law,”
or he had lost himself in
“That codeless myriad of precedent,
That wilderness of single instances;”
when he, too, dwelt in that other-world of the young, forgotten by everyone but himself, but, although hardly ever remembered, never forgotten by him—not one grain of its golden sand, not one drop of its honey-dew, not one tremor of its slightest thrill—then even he had had his romance. The freshness of the early spring morning, the airy brightness of his young visitor, himself no bad exponent of the day, the awe-footed shadow which, with almost unrecognized obtrusion, skirts the border where the ripened grain fills the field of life and nods to the ready sickle—was it something of such kind, or was it the simple story of which he had had such telling intimation, that brought it all up in memory’s half-tender glow? He, too, had once been in love. He, too, had written verses to his inamorata. He remembered it all now, with a smile of mingled pity and contempt. It needed no ransacking of the brain now to quicken into full view his own “It might have been”—to people once more the mystic world whose first paradise is rich in the slight garniture of glances and sighs and smiles and tears. Lost in himself, the old man forgot his visitor.
“You are very young,” he said at last, absently.
“Twenty-three,” was the answer.
“And she?”
“Eighteen.”
It was strange, but he, too, had been twenty-three and she eighteen when the end came in that glimmering, gleaming past. He remembered, and how strange the recollection seemed, taking her some flowers and some slight silver gift—a poor, inexpensive thing; she would let him give no more because he, too, was in debt—on her birthday. And now, with strange revulsion, he hardened almost into his habitual self, and grimly thought that it all was youthful nonsense, and that all such follies were very much alike. Had he spoken, he would have been guilty of one of those faults often packed with error, an apothegm—he would have said that we only become original, even in our folly, as age gives us character.
“We could be so happy with so little,” said the youthful lover.
The old man started. These were his own words many, many years ago; his very words to his guardian when the final appeal was made by old Bevington to what he called his better judgment so very, very long ago, in the dark, stately house upon Second Avenue.
“So very little,” repeated the young man. “I have always said,” he continued, as pleased with the conceit as if it had never before glittered in the song of finches of his feather, “that we should have gold enough in her hair.”
“And is her hair golden?” asked Maskelyne, and, startled by the sound of such words dropped from the lips of the distinguished counsel for many a soulless corporation and many as soulless a man, he added, hurriedly, “light.” And then the old lawyer remembered that he too, had a lock of hair that he had not sent back when he returned her letters and her picture. How bright it was! What had become of it? Where was it? In what pigeon-hole, what secret drawer? He could not for the moment remember. He looked out of the window. How bright the sunshine was! How empty the world! It seemed to build up its vacancy around him as a wall.
“And she, of course, has no money?” he said, turning again.
“None.”
He had been sure of it. He rose and went to the window. The joyful attributes of the morning were there, but they were no longer joyful to him. The light fell in the same broad flood, still promising the glory of summer, the ripened harvest, but there was no promise for him. The sparrows preluded still the full-voiced singers of the year, when leaves are heavy with the dust and brooks run dry, but he heard only a quick, petulant twitter. A sort of dull despondency suddenly settled upon him. He forgot his visitor, and even time and place. Amid the glimmering lights and shaking shadows of the past he sought a vision, as at twilight one seeks in some deserted corridor a statue which would seem to have so taken into its grain the last rays of the already sunken sun that the marble glows in the gathering darkness with a radiance not its own.
The young man grew impatient as the revery was prolonged. He stirred uneasily. The old lawyer turned and looked curiously at him. Of course, of course! Was a man to be changed, the bone of what he was to have its marrow drawn, the fibre of every muscle to be untwisted, by this nonsense of a boy? Of course old Bevington was right—and for the moment he did not remember that Bevington was dead—in sending the young fool to such a cool old hand as himself. But if Bevington had known what a turbulence of disappointment, discontent, and revolt had risen, and poured in strength-gathering torrent, even at that instant, through his heart, would he not have kept his young charge away? He would talk to him—certainly he would—pave his way for him, perhaps, as with flagstones of wisdom. Perhaps—and then he thought with grim satisfaction of what Bevington might think should he learn that he recognized that there were other paths than those edged by a curbstone.
“You have been sent to me,” he said, very seriously, coming from the window and leaning with both hands on the table, “for advice and admonition. I will give my lesson in sternest characters. I will teach by example, but I may not teach what you were sent here to learn. When I was young as you—do not start, I was young once,” and he spoke with infinite sadness, “I loved as you love, and, as with you, love was returned. They who called themselves my friends strove, with what they called reason, to tear me from what they called my folly. My folly! It was the wisdom that it takes all that is blent into humanity, at supremest moments, to attain; their reason, the fatuous folly only enough to give habitual stir to an earth-beclotted brain! I yielded, as you have not yielded. I killed out even the natural impulses of my nature. Gradually almost new instincts came, desire for delight sank into appetite for gain, hope for the joy of higher existence was lost in the ambition for mere advancement. I wrought out in myself that fearful piece of handiwork whose every effort is but to grasp the worthless handful man can only wrest from the mere world. I lost, and I have not won. I was a man and I am only a lawyer, and to him you have been sent for advice. I can find no precedent better, no authority more weighty for your guidance than my own life. Such strength as enabled me to work such a change will also enable you to make yourself a new being, to accomplish self-overthrow, to bring you to what I am—a man rich, successful, courted, revered—most miserable. He who has so won, so lost, stands alone or he would not so win. Choose rather the close companionship of worldly defeat, if it must be, and I say to you in the rapture of your youth, clay plastic to the moment’s touch, hold to yourself, and believe that no fame, no power, no wealth, can compensate for a contentious life, an empty heart, a desolate old age. If I were you——”
He did not finish. Slowly the young stranger rose to his full height, every lineament of his face clear in cold light. His whole aspect was one of steadfast command.
“Stop!” he cried, in a stern tone. “I am yourself. No ghost walks save that which is what a man might have been. We throng the world. Beside everyone through life moves the image of a past potentiality, the thing he could have become had he held along another course. I am what you were, the promise of what you might have been. For forty years I have walked by your side. I have touched you and you have shuddered, I have chilled you and you have shrunk from me. Your nature has so grown athwart, all impulse has been so long gone, all that softens or ennobles so thrown off that, in almost final self-assertion, what you really were or might have been stands by your side and bids you measure stature with itself. Your life has entered upon its wintry days, but sunlight is sunshine even in December and in youth.”
The old lawyer, almost shuddering, stepped back with repelling gesture. He passed his hand quickly across his eyes, and then, as if his heart had beat recall, summoning back every retreating force in quick rally, compelled but not unwilling, he turned in combative instinct to meet the stranger face to face, nature to nature, turned—and found himself alone.
Once more the clerk opened the door.
“Eleven o’clock, sir,” he said, “and you know the General Term this morning——”
“You saw the gentleman who just went out?” asked the lawyer.
“I, sir,” answered the man; “I saw no one go out.”
“No one?”
“No one.”
“You certainly brought me a card and showed a young gentleman in a few minutes ago?”
“I, sir!” repeated the clerk. “I brought in a card and showed a young gentleman in! Aren’t you well this morning, sir?”
“That will do,” said Maskelyne, sternly.
As soon as he was again alone he stepped to the table. The card and the letter were gone. And still he knew he had not been dreaming. A man swung high in the air was busy painting a sign upon a building not far away, and he was conscious that all through the strange interview he had watched him at work. He had seen him finish one letter and then another, and now if he found him adding the final consonant he would be assured that he could not have been asleep. He looked up and found that he was right. The man had just made the heavy shaded side and was busy putting the little finishing line at the bottom of the letter.
Two men—one of rotund middle age, the other younger but yet not young—came down the steps of the Union Club one day a few weeks later. They met an old man rounding the corner of the Avenue.
“See what you would come to if you had your own way,” said the elder of the two. “There’s old Maskelyne. He’s got everything you’re making yourself wretched to get. Do you want to be like him?”
“No,” said the other. “Then you haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“He’s a changed man, all within a month.”
“Has his brain or his heart softened?”
“As you look at life,” said the younger. “He has sent for that clever, improvident, gracefully graceless good-fellow of a good-for-nothing, his nephew, him and his pretty-handed, big-eyed wife—he hadn’t seen either of them since they ran away and were married—sent for them and put them in his great, old house and—didn’t you hear Maceration growling about the luck some people have just before we left? He says the nephew will have all the old man’s property.”
“What’s the world coming to?” said the senior, “or what is coming to the world?”
