“Father!” Peter’s eyes flashed back from the cortège to meet James Thorold’s. “I never knew that you knew Abraham Lincoln.” His tone betokened an impression of having been cheated of some joy the older man had been hoarding. But James Thorold’s voice held no joy. “Yes,” he said. “I knew him.”
The gates, sliding back, opened the way for the officers who led the procession with which Isador Framberg came back to the city of his adoption. The crowd yawned to give space to the guard of honor, walking erectly beside the flag-draped coffin, to the mourners, men and women alien as if they had come from Kiev but yesterday, to the little group of men, public officials and rabbis, who trailed in their wake, and to James Thorold and Peter, reverently following. Then it closed in upon the cortège, urging it silently down the broad stairways and out into the street where other crowds fell in with the strange procession. Surging away after the shabby hearse, drawn by its listless horses and attended by the marines, the crowd left the Thorolds, father and son, on the pavement beside the station. “Don’t you want to go?” There was a wistfulness in Peter’s voice that told his father that the boy had sensed some lack of responsiveness in him. “He’s going to lie in state to-day at the city hall. Don’t you think we should go, dad?” Not Peter’s query but Peter’s eyes won his father’s answer. “After a while,” he promised. “Then let’s find a breakfast,” the boy laughed. “I spent my last dollar sending you that telegram.”
All the way over to his father’s club on Michigan Avenue, and all through the breakfast that he ordered with lusty young appetite, Peter kept up a running fire of reminiscence of his European adventures. That the fire held grapeshot for his father when he talked of the latter’s worthiness for the ambassadorship to Forsland he could not guess; but he found that he was pouring salt in a wound when he went back to comment upon Isador Framberg’s death. “Why make so much of a boy who happened to be at Vera Cruz?” the older man said at last, nettled that even his son found greater occasion for commendation in the circumstance of the Forquier Street hero than in his father’s selection to the most important diplomatic post in the gift of the government. Peter’s brows rose swiftly at his father’s annoyance. He opened his lips for argument, then swiftly changed his intention. “Tell me about Judge Adams, dad,” he said, bungling over his desire to change the topic, “the fellow who knew his Pericles.”
“It’s too long a story,” James Thorold said. He watched Peter closely in the fashion of an advocate studying the characteristics of a judge. The boy’s idealism, his vivid young patriotism, his eager championship of those elements of the new America that his father contemned, had fired his personality with a glaze that left James Thorold’s smoothly diplomatic fingers wandering over its surface, unable to hold it within his grasp. He had a story to tell Peter—some time—a story of Judge Adams, of the house among the lilacs, of days of war, of Abraham Lincoln; but the time for its telling must wait upon circumstance that would make Peter Thorold more ready to understand weakness and failure than he now seemed. Consciously James Thorold took a change of venue from Peter Thorold of the visions to Peter Thorold of the inevitable disillusions. But to the former he made concession. “Shall we go to the city hall now?” he asked as they rose from the table.
The city hall, a massive white granite pile covering half of the square east of La Salle Street and north of Washington and meeting its twin of the county building to form a solid mass of masonry, flaunted black drapings over the doorways through which James Thorold and his son entered. Through a wide corridor of bronze and marble they found their way, passing a few stragglers from the great crowd that had filled the lower floors of the huge structures when Isador Framberg’s body had been brought from its hearse and carried to the centre of the aisles, the place where the intersecting thoroughfares met. Under a great bronze lamp stood the catafalque, covered with the Stars and Stripes and guarded by the men of the fleet.
Peter Thorold, pressing forward, took his place, his cap thrust under his arm, at the foot of the bier, giving his tribute of silence to the boy who had died for his country. But James Thorold went aside to stand beside an elevator-shaft. Had his son watched him as he was watching Peter, he would have seen the swift emotions that took their way across his father’s face. He would have seen the older man’s look dilate with the strained horror of one who gazed back through the dimming years to see a ghost. He would have seen sorrow, and grief, and a great remorse rising to James Thorold’s eyes. He might even have seen the shadow of another bier cast upon the retina of his father’s sight. He might have seen through his father’s watching the memory of another man who had once lain on the very spot where Isador Framberg was lying, a man who had died for his country after he had lived to set his country among the free nations of the earth. But Peter Thorold saw only the boy who had gone from a Forquier Street tenement to the Mexican sands that he might prove by his dying that, with Irish, and Germans, and French, he too, the lad who had been born in Kiev of the massacres, was an American.
With the surge of strange emotions flooding his heart, Peter Thorold crossed to where his father stood apart. The tide of his thought overflowed the shore of prose and landed his expression high on a cliff of poetry. No chance, but the urging of his own exalted mood, brought him the last lines of Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation”:
“Then on your guiltier head
Shall our intolerable self-disdain
Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;
For manifest in that disastrous light
We shall discern the right
And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead,
Take heed!
Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite.”
But to the older man, seeing as he stood the picture of that other catafalque to which he had crept one night in the lilac time of a year nearly a half century agone, the words flung anathema. He leaned back against the bronze grating of the shaft with a sudden look of age that brought Peter’s protective arm to his shoulder. Then, with Peter following, he went out to the sun-bright street.
Like a man in a daze he dismissed his car, crossing pavements under Peter’s guiding until he came to the building where the fortunes of the great Thorold mercantile business were administered. Through the outer room, where clerks looked up in surprise at the appearance which their chief presented on the morning when they had learned of the Forsland embassy, he led Peter until they came to the room where he had reigned for twenty years. It was a room that had always mirrored James Thorold to his son. Tall bookcases, stiff, old-fashioned, held long rows of legal works, books on history, essays on ethical topics, and bound volumes of periodicals. Except for its maps, it was a lawyer’s room, although James Thorold never claimed either legal ability or legal standing. Peter seldom entered it without interest in its possibilities of entertainment, but to-day his father’s strange and sudden preoccupation of manner ingulfed all the boy’s thought. “What is it, dad?” he asked, a tightening fear screwing down upon his brain as he noted the change that had come over the mask that James Thorold’s face held to the world.