Many Kingdoms

by Elizabeth Garver Jordan

"He insists on burning a candle before it," she wrote, "evidently from some dim association with tapers and altars and the rest. As it is all a new manifestation of his character, we are indulging him freely. Certainly it can do him no harm to love and admire a brave man. Besides, to have a candle burned for you! Is not that a new flutter of glory?"

Hamilton, still in the grasp of a dumb depression he would voice to no one, was a little amused and more touched. In his hideous loneliness and terror the pretty incident, one he would have smiled at and forgotten a year ago, took on an interest out of all proportion to its importance. He felt a sudden, unaccountable sense of pleasant companionship. The child became a loved personality—the one human, close, vital thing in a world over which there seemed to hang a thick black fog through which Hamilton vaguely, wretchedly groped. He himself did not know why the child interested him so keenly, nor did he try to analyze the fact. He was merely grateful for it, and for the other fact that he cherished no sentimental feeling for the boy's mother. That had passed out of his life as everything else had seemingly passed which belonged to the old order of things. He had always been a calm, reserved, self-absorbed, unemotional type of man, glorying a little, perhaps, in his lack of dependence on human kind. In his need he had turned to his fellows and turned in vain. Now that a precious thing had come to him unsought, he did not intend to lose it.

Through his physicians he pulled various journalistic wires, resulting in the suppression, in the newspapers, of the hopeless facts of his case. He did not intend, he decided, to have his boy think of him as tied to an invalid's couch. Then, knowing something of human nature, and of the evanescent character of childish fancies, he ordered shipped to Russia a variety of American mechanical toys, calculated to swell the proud bosom of the small boy who received them. This shameless bid for continued favor met with immediate success. An ecstatic, incoherent little shriek of delight came from the land of the czar in the form of another letter; and the candle, which quite possibly would have burned low or even gone out, blazed up cheerily again.

That was the beginning of an intercourse which interested and diverted Hamilton for months. He spared no pains to adapt his letters to the interest and comprehension of his small correspondent, and he derived a quite incredible amount of satisfaction from the childish scrawls which came to him in reply. They were wholly babyish documents, about the donkey, the nurse, the toys, and games of the small boy's daily life. Usually they were written in his own printed letters. Sometimes they were dictated to his mother, who faithfully reported every weighty word that fell from the infant's lips. But always they were full of the hero-worship of the little child for the big, strong, American fighting-man; and in every letter, sometimes in the beginning, sometimes at the end, occasionally in both places, as the enthusiasm of the writer waxed, was the satisfying assurance, "I am your boy." Hamilton's eyes raced over the little pages till he found that line, and there rested contentedly.

As the months passed, the healing influence of time wrought its effects. Hamilton, shut in though he was, adapted himself to the narrow world of an invalid's room and its few interests. With the wealth he had fortunately inherited he brought to his side leading specialists who might possibly help him, and went through alternate ecstatic hopes and abysmal fears as the great men came and departed. Very quietly, too, he helped others less fortunate, financially, than himself. The nurses and physicians in the hospital where he lay learned to like and admire him, and other patients, convalescents or newcomers who were able to move about, sought his cheerful rooms and brought into them a whiff of the outside world. Through it all, winding in and out of the neutral-colored weeks like a scarlet thread of life and hope, came the childish letters from Russia, and each week a thick letter went back, artfully designed to keep alive the love and interest of an imaginative little boy.

At the end of six months young Charles fell from his donkey and broke his left arm, but this trivial incident was not allowed to interfere with the gratifying regularity with which his letters arrived. It was, however, interesting, as throwing a high light on the place his American hero held in the child's fancy. His mother touched on this in her letter describing the accident.

"The arm had to be set at once," she wrote, "and of course it was very painful. But I told Charlie you would be greatly disappointed if your boy were not brave and did not obey the doctor. He saw the force of this immediately, and did not shed a tear, though his dear little face was white and drawn with pain."

Master Charlie himself discussed the same pleasant incident in the first letter he dictated after the episode.

"I did not cry," he mentioned, with natural satisfaction. "Mamma cried, and Sonya cried. Men do not cry. Do they? You did not cry when you were hurt, did you? I am going to be just like you."

Hamilton laughed over the letter, his pale cheek flushing a little at the same time. He had cried, once or twice; he recalled it now with shame. He must try to do better, remembering that he loomed large as a heroic model for the young.