The jurymen might have been dream-men, vague creations of an autumn afternoon’s doze. It was hard to connect them with a world of life and business. Yet, gazing closer, you might have seen that one looked as if he were thinking of his dinner, and another as if he were thinking of the lost love of his youth; and that the expression on the faces of the others ranged from the vacant to the inscrutable. The oldest juror, at the end of the second row, was sound asleep. Everyone in the court-room, except himself, knew it. No one cared.
Gillespie, J., was writing his acceptance of an invitation to a dinner set for that evening at Delmonico’s. He was doing this in such a way that he appeared to be taking copious and conscientious notes. Long years on the bench had whitened Judge Gillespie’s hair, and taught him how to do this. His seeming attentiveness much encouraged the counsel for the defence, whose high-pitched tone rasped the air like the buzzing of a bee that has found its way through the slats of the blind into some darkened room, of a summer noon, and that, as it seeks angrily for egress, raises its shrill scandalized protest against the idleness and the pleasant gloom.
“We r’quest y’r Honor t’ charge: First, ’t forcible entry does not const’oot tresp’ss, ’nless intent’s proved. Thus, ’f a man rolls down a bank”—
But the judge’s thoughts were in the private supper-room at Delmonico’s. He had no interest in the sad fate of the hero of the suppositious case, who had been obliged, by a strange and ingenious combination of accidents, to make violent entrance, incidentally damaging the persons and property of others, into the lands and tenements of his neighbor.
And further away yet the droning lawyer had set a-travelling the thoughts of Horace Walpole, clerk for Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather; for the young man sat with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, a sad half-smile on his lips, and his brown eyes looking through vacancy to St. Lawrence County, New York.
He saw a great, shabby old house, shabby with the awful shabbiness of a sham grandeur laid bare by time and mocked of the pitiless weather. There was a great sham Grecian portico at one end; the white paint was well-nigh washed away, and the rain-streaked wooden pillars seemed to be weeping tears of penitence for having lied about themselves and pretended to be marble.
The battened walls were cracked and blistered. The Grecian temple on the hillock near looked much like a tomb, and not at all like a summer-house. The flower-garden was so rank and ragged, so overgrown with weed and vine, that it was spared the mortification of revealing its neglected maze, the wonder of the county in 1820. All was sham, save the decay. That was real; and by virtue of its decrepitude the old house seemed to protest against modern contempt, as though it said: “I have had my day. I was built when people thought this sort of thing was the right sort of thing; when we had our own little pseudo-classic renaissance in America. I lie between the towns of Aristotle and Sabine Farms. I am a gentleman’s residence, and my name is Montevista. I was built by a prominent citizen. You need not laugh through your lattices, you smug new Queen Anne cottage, down there in the valley! What will become of you when the falsehood is found out of your imitation bricks and your tiled roof of shingles, and your stained glass that is only a sheet of transparent paper pasted on a pane? You are a young sham; I am an old one. Have some respect for age!”
Its age was the crowning glory of the estate of Montevista. There was nothing new on the place except a third mortgage. Yet had Montevista villa put forth a juster claim to respect, it would have said: “I have had my day. Where all is desolate and silent now, there was once light and life. Along these halls and corridors, the arteries of my being, pulsed a hot blood of joyous humanity, fed with delicate fare, kindled with generous wine. Every corner under my roof was alive with love and hope and ambition. Great men and dear women were here; and the host was great and the hostess was gracious among them all. The laughter of children thrilled my gaudily decked stucco. To-day an old man walks up and down my lonely drawing-rooms, with bent head, murmuring to himself odds and ends of tawdry old eloquence, wandering in a dead land of memory, waiting till Death shall take him by the hand and lead him out of his ruinous house, out of his ruinous life.”
Death had indeed come between Horace and the creation of his spiritual vision. Never again should the old man walk, as to the boy’s eyes he walked now, over the creaking floors, from where the Nine Muses simpered on the walls of the south parlor to where Homer and Plutarch, equally simpering, yet simpering with a difference,—severely simpering,—faced each other across the north room. Horace saw his father stalking on his accustomed round, a sad, familiar figure, tall and bent. The hands were clasped behind the back, the chin was bowed on the black stock; but every now and then the thin form drew itself straight, the fine, clean-shaven, aquiline face was raised, beaming with the ghost of an old enthusiasm, and the long right arm was lifted high in the air as he began, his sonorous tones a little tremulous in spite of the restraint of old-time pomposity and deliberation,—