The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Berselius was of mixed nationality. His father of Swedish descent, his mother of French.

Armand Berselius the elder was what is termed a lucky man. In other words, he had that keenness of intellect which enables the possessor to seize opportunities and to foresee events.

This art of looking into the future is the key to Aladdin’s Palace and to the Temple of Power. To know what will appreciate in value and what will depreciate, that is the art of success in life, and that was the art which made Armand Berselius a millionaire.

Berselius the younger grew up in an atmosphere of money. His mother died when he was quite young. He had neither brothers nor sisters; his father, a chilly-hearted sensualist, had a dislike to the boy; for some obscure reason, without any foundation in fact, he fancied that he was some other man’s son.

The basis of an evil mind is distrust. Beware of the man who is always fearful of being swindled. Who cannot trust, cannot be trusted.

Berselius treated his son like a brute, and the boy, with great power for love in his heart, conceived a hatred for the man who misused him that was hellish in intensity.

But not a sign of it did he show. That power of will and restraint so remarkable in the grown-up man was not less remarkable in the boy. He bound his hate with iron bands and prisoned it, and he did this from pride. When his father thrashed him for the slightest offence, he showed not a sign of pain or passion; when the old man committed that last outrage one can commit against the mind of a child, and sneered at him before grown-up people, young Berselius neither flushed nor moved an eyelid. He handed the insult to the beast feeding at his heart, and it devoured it and grew.

The spring was poisoned at its source.

That education of the heart which only love can give was utterly cut off from the boy and supplanted by the education of hate.

And the mind tainted thus from the beginning was an extraordinary mind, a spacious intellect, great for evil or great for good, never little, and fed by an unfailing flood of energy.