Hardly more than three seconds between the raising and the lowering of the eyes. Not a sound in the room. And yet between the meeting of that look and the losing of it, Nathaniel Mar passed through the most painful crisis of a life made well acquainted with pain.
There is a special sting in the skepticism of the young. They should be full of faith, inclined even to credulity. Fit task for their elders, the checking of too generous ardor. But for the elder to detect the junior in thinking him foolishly enthusiastic, childishly gullible—there is, in that conjuncture, something to the older mind quite specially wounding. It passes the limit of mere personal humiliation. It takes on the air of an affront against the seemliness of nature. The elder has betrayed his class and kind—has laid open to callow derision the dignity of the riper years.
Mar waited. And little as he looked like it he was praying. “Oh, my boy, believe me! Have faith that what I say is so. And then I’ll have faith that all the loss will be won back, through you, Trenn. I’ll take heart again. It all depends on you. We’ll do great things together, Trenn—you and I—oh, believe, believe!”
But Trennor Mar sat there on the narrow ledge of the window-sill absolutely silent, with his brown eyes on his shining boots.
“I was wrong,” said his father, humbly. “I have put you off the track by using the word imagination. It has no place here. I speak to you of fact.”
Trenn got up with the brisk air of one who remembers he has business to transact, then pausing for a moment with an eye flown already to find his hat, “I might,” he said obligingly, “I might try to get up there some vacation, and have a look round.”
He “might.” He might try. During some idle interval in the real business of life. Once on the spot he would condescend to “look round.”
Even his own son could not take the thing seriously.
Well, it began to look as if, after all, they might be right—his wife, Charlie and Harrington Trennor, Elihu Cox, and now Trenn. Mar, the man who believed he had a gold mine in the arctic regions, was a sort of harmless monomaniac. Sitting there in a sudden darkness that was dashed with self-derision (much was clear in those scorching flashes), Nathaniel Mar met the grim moment when to his own mind he first admitted doubt.
Groping by and by for comfort, he touched the heart of sorrow with “Nothing like this can ever happen to me again.”