The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

And the next moment she was no longer there. The fog had closed over the spot of the vision.

CHAPTER VII
CONCERNING ALEXANDER EMIL ST. IVES

In the make-up of this Alexander Emil St. Ives, who carried his name like a flaunting feather, his father played small part. During the life of the elder St. Ives, the family had lived on a farm in Rhode Island and the father, a dour, narrow man, had laid his commands upon the soil and had tilled it with his will as with an agricultural implement; in bad seasons often he had been the one farmer in the neighbourhood who harvested crops.

There were two sons. The elder boy, Edgar, resembled the father, though built on smaller, neater lines, with a face shaped like an egg. He had much of the father's obstinate force united to a faculty for grasping and retaining what seemed to him worth while. The younger son resembled the mother.

Mrs. St. Ives, timid, valiant creature, was incapable of not loving. For her first-born she entertained an affection purely maternal; for Emil, however, she harboured a feeling almost worshipful. The fact that she had borne him was to her a miracle ever new. He woke heaven in her heart and his love opened her soul as the sun's ray opens the flower. Neither husband nor elder son ever suspected the exquisite quality of her nature.

Edgar was a lad of fifteen when Emil was born. From the first he turned a cold face on the mite, and as time went on grew jealous of him up to the eyes. There was something august about Emil even in his ugly, defenceless childhood. He was of a singularly inquiring turn of mind and years afterward his mother delighted to relate how, when he was two years old, he had crawled a mile and a half from home, lured forward by the curiosity that later became his salient characteristic. His energies spent, he had rested on a flat rock. While his tiny body grew warm in the sun, his infant mind had lost itself in inarticulate reverie. If he could go on quite to the end of everything, even to that hazy, far-away point where blue met green, what should he find? It was this speculative tendency that gave his hair its wild aspect; that kindled in his eyes their roving, searching glance; that already, young as he was, made him look at life with an air of keen astonishment.

When he was eleven years old, his father died and the reins of management fell into Edgar's hands. That young man, being in no sense a typical farmer, immediately exchanged the farm, which the elder St. Ives had bequeathed him, for a large country store. By dint of shrewd management, he soon became a successful merchant. So rapidly did he rise that by the end of the second year, he had built himself a house and installed in it a shrewish wife who lost no time in presenting him with a swarm of children. He also placed in the house his mother, and the poor lady dwelt there under the lash of the wife's tongue, like a servant in constant fear of dismissal. In righteous mood, Edgar even went so far as to extend the protection of his roof to his young brother. In a tiny chamber over the kitchen the lad's first tentative inventions saw the light.

But between these two natures a gulf was fixed. If truth were told, they had not a trait in common. Edgar was provident and saving, Emil the reverse. Long ere he had obtained his majority, he had wheedled from his mother the little money she held in trust for him from his grudging and disapproving father. To be sure, the sum was very meagre and could not be stretched, by any calculation, to cover the technical training the lad coveted; therefore he had expended a part of it for scientific books and the rest had gone little by little into materials for his constant experimenting.

For the precious little inventions which cluttered Emil's chamber and sometimes found their unwelcome way into other parts of the house, Edgar had a withering contempt. He never missed an opportunity to have a fling at them and his scornful words entered the mother's heart like barbed arrows. However, in his nineteenth year Emil produced an apparatus for freshening sea water which it seemed must prove of inestimable value to all sea-faring folk. The mother in a flutter of excitement and even with tears, besought him to take his brother into his confidence. In fact this was necessary, if he wished to secure the use of an abandoned and much coveted granary for a shop. But the lad held back. The apparatus, despite its undoubted usefulness, seemed to him of trifling importance. The mother, however, foreseeing fortune ahead of him, urged the step and at length the boy consented. True to her prediction, after his first scornful inspection of the contrivance, Edgar admitted that it might have possibilities. Like most of the boy's experiments, this device was beyond his comprehension, but he could grasp the fact that sailors and fishermen, with the chance of shipwreck forever staring them in the face, might have use for it. He therefore offered to get it patented, then took steps to secure the patent—in his own name. As it chanced, the papers, bearing his signature but otherwise carefully copied from those which Emil had submitted for his inspection fell under the boy's eye.