"Who was the man?" Bobby asked idly.
"Lorimer. Sidney Lorimer."
CHAPTER THREE
Of course, as Bobby Dane had said, with such a name, Thayer's family tree had sprouted in Massachusetts. His Puritanism was hereditary and strong; it tempered the artistic side of his nature, but it could not destroy it. In the musical sense of the word, Cotton Mather Thayer possessed Temperament; but his Temperament was the battle-field where two warring temperaments were at constant strife.
In the year of grace sixteen hundred and thirty-five, Richard Thayer, freeman, landed in America. From Plymouth Rock, he strode straight towards a position of colonial fame. His children and his children's children kept up the family tradition and name until one of them, of a more theological bent than his cousins had been, annulled the custom of his ancestors and named his oldest son for the grim divine, Cotton Mather Thayer, and during the next one hundred and fifty years, Cotton Mathers and Richards had flourished side by side among the Thayers of eastern Massachusetts. They were strong men, one and all, quiet and self-contained in years of peace, grim fighters in seasons of war, and prominent citizens at all times, a godly, gritty, and prosperous race. Of such is the greatness of New England.
Their records, like the records of all good things, were slightly monotonous. They were born into orderly nurseries; they were graduated from the vicissitudes of teething and mumps into orderly, peaceful adolescence. They invariably married the most suitable damsel of their own class, and they passed from an orderly old age through an orderly churchyard into a heaven which the imagination of their surviving kin peopled with orderly ranks of angels, playing gilt harps in perfect accord. Their artistic ideals were bounded by Coronation and the pictures in The New England Primer and Godey. Blackberry shrub, to their minds, was the medium of riotous dissipation.
Under such fostering conditions, ancestral traits strengthened from generation to generation, until the race of Puritan Thayers culminated in one Cotton Mather who was born in the early decades of the last century, a grim deacon, a shrewd lawyer, and the owner of two or three ships which sailed from his own seaport town. Shrewd as he was, however, his logic failed him at one point. When his first child, Cotton Mather Thayer, was a tiny boy, the youngster was allowed and even invited to toddle about the wharves, clinging to the paternal thumb. On the other hand, when the boy Cotton was fourteen, he received a round dozen of canings for lounging about among the shipping. The thirteenth caning was one too many. It was more severe than the others, and it cracked the long-strained situation. The caning occurred in his father's office, after hours, one June night. The Thankful was booked to sail, the next morning at eight. When, at eight-ten, it slipped down the harbor, it bore away as cabin-boy and general drudge the stiff and sore, but unrepentant sinner, Cotton Mather Thayer, age fourteen.
His later adventures have little concern with the story of his son's life. He sailed over many seas, he visited many lands, mellowing by contact with many peoples the unyielding temper of his race. The possibility of failure never once entered into his mind. The Thayers always had succeeded, for they always had worked. In consequence, he took it quite as a matter of course that, at twenty-three, he should be commander of the Presidenta, stationed in the Baltic for a year of chilly inaction. St. Petersburg was near, and St. Petersburg, as the young commander found, held for him the focal point of the world, in the person of the pretty daughter of one of the court musicians. Twelve years later, while the Presidenta was stationed in the Mediterranean, its young captain died, leaving behind him in Russia a fragile wife and a little son who had inherited the name and character of the Thayers, curiously mingled with the artistic, emotional temperament and the rare musical ability of his mother's race.