Daniel and his sister Theresa grew up in this unruly household, wide-eyed, wondering spectators of daily storms, culminating in one tragic evening when the mother, face to face at last with the acknowledged proofs of her husband’s infidelity, had abandoned herself to such a tempest of blind rage that the two children, cowering against the wall, too frightened to do aught but to cling to each other, were forced to witness the frantic struggle of their father with the mother who, in her hysteria, was bent on self-destruction. The scene (it had taken place in the nursery) remained in the boy’s mind with the startling horror of a nightmare—the childish toys scattered on the floor, the words of hatred and anger which struck them cold, the frightful distortion on the face of their mother, the struggle for the possession of the knife, and then her exhaustion, the low moaning broken by hysterical gasps for breath. Then, weeks later had come the parting which he did not understand in the least, for which he could find no childish reason. The little sister and the stately, resplendent mother had gone out of his life, and loneliness and silence had crept through the great house.
The boy grew up in this abandonment, brooding over memories, his imagination precociously awakened, forced into a searching of himself; self-sufficient, wandering into long explorations of the realms of the fantastic, telling himself stories at night, the despair and terror of a succession of tutors. What he saw and dimly comprehended during this period was a curious awakening to the conflict of the greed and passions of the later world. Many a night, unsuspected, he had stolen from his bed and secreted himself in the little balcony that looked down on the great drawing-room, gazing down with a puzzled wonder on the tempestuous scenes of revel and license which hid the darker side of Dudley Garford’s mercurial, triumphant public career. He saw his father with critical eyes, with an unhealthy knowledge beyond the weight of his years, and this hidden critical spectatorship made life seem to him like some whirling theatric danse macabre of riotous emotions and vibrant colors.
Already, the exotic multiplied sensations had become translated into the bent of his imagination. He had begun to model in clay, untaught, following queer fancies; struggling to the use of childish paints, understanding nothing of mediums but delighting his eyes with odd blending and contrasts of colors, violent and barbaric in his instincts.
One night, in the weariness of his watching, he fell asleep in the balcony, was discovered, and the next week was bundled off to boarding school.
His career at school was cut abruptly at the age of sixteen by the discovery of his infatuation for the daughter of one of his teachers, a woman many years his senior with whom he had fallen violently, desperately in love, with all the unreason and blind adoration of a first passion. Brilliant, unruly, proud, delicate in health, and too absorbed in reading and the pursuit of his beloved painting, he had still about him a certain illuminating magnetism, a faith in his future, a trick of saying things others would never have said, of thinking strange thoughts that had even reached to the heart of the woman. To do her justice, she had never thought for a moment of taking advantage of the boy’s infatuation; yet the parting was difficult, and she herself suffered more than she showed.
For two years he was consigned to a ranch, to live in the open air, to harden to the weather and grow in muscle and sturdiness, roaming the great stretches, sleeping in the open, discovering that beyond the stone walls of the city, such miracles exist as the turning of the dawn, the riotous coming of the sun, the trackless map of stars, the restless stealing-in of the spring and the haunting majesty of the turning leaves. All these sensations sunk deep into his fertile imagination. An artist exiled in the fight for health gave him the first lessons, and put him through the hard grind of mechanical preparation. From the first he showed qualities which were to persist in his later work, an impatience with deliberate building and an impulse toward the dramatic interpretation of the instincts. His sketches were full of technical faults, and yet almost all held a certain charm, something quite out of the ordinary.
From this serene calm of the open plain and a life of simple moods, he was suddenly transplanted to college in the midst of a fast New York set, with possession of an allowance which was quite sufficient to send him headlong to his own destruction. The tendency to violent extremes which was instinctive in his character made him speedily the ring-leader in the company of those who burned the midnight oil—but not in the pursuit of knowledge. In six months Daniel had been twice warned by the faculty and had managed to run through the year’s allowance. He applied for further funds to his father, who laughed and acceded, rather pleased, in his worldly way, that his son was sowing his wild oats in princely fashion. In his second year, his disordered existence had become so notorious that, after a certain episode which had figured prominently in the newspapers, wherein he had driven a coach over the front lawns of suburban Boston in the wee hours of the morning, he was summarily called before the faculty and given an opportunity to resign. On top of which came a telegram from New York summoning him to his father’s death-bed.
A certain mystery surrounded the death of Dudley Garford, which was officially given out as the result of an aggravated case of appendicitis. It was whispered that he had come by a violent death, having been shot through the lungs by an outraged husband. Certainly the habits of his later life would not have made such a result an improbability.
Daniel had never known his father, conscious always in the rare moments of their intercourse of an insuperable barrier which lay between them in the memories of his boyhood. In the last months, they had even come to the verge of an open quarrel, when the father had discovered the strength of the son’s artistic inclinations and had violently forbidden him a career which he looked upon with contempt.
Daniel now found himself his own master, with every avenue opened to his wish. He went to Paris. His mother, after the early death of his sister, had remarried and become the Duchesse de Senbach. Into this curious intermingling of international society which flaunts its vanities and worn passions, he entered with all the ardor of a healthy body and a lively imagination, still genuinely blinded with illusions. The artist in him, which divides life into sensations, again brought him into notoriety. He gave dinners as a grand duke might give; he lived in apartments with a retinue of servants, the cost of which was faithfully chronicled in the colored Sunday editions of his home papers with printed references to the rake’s progress. He was surrounded by a crowd of sycophants, shoddy race-track majors, princes down at the heels, and Balkan aristocrats of the gaming-tables, who fattened on his prodigality and led him into fresh excesses. He fell violently in love with a favorite of the Café Chantants, Nina de Mauban, believed in her devotion to him, conceived the quixotic idea of lifting her out of the muddied existence she led and even announced their engagement.