“I came back to Chicago and drew the money from the bank. I knew I couldn’t go back to the practise of law. I changed my name to Thorold and started in business as an army contractor. I made money. The money that’s made us rich, the money that’s sending me to Forsland”—a bitterness not in his voice before edged his mention of the embassy—“came from that bounty that the provost marshal gave me.”
He turned his back upon the sobbing boy, walking over to the window and staring outward upon the April brightness of the noonday ere he spoke again. “You know of the Nineteenth’s record? They were at Nashville, and they were at Chattanooga after my colonel came back, dead. I went out of Chicago when his body was brought in. Then Turchin took command of the brigade. The Nineteenth went into the big fights. They were at Chickamauga. Benton fell there. He’d been in Judge Adams’s office with me. After I’d come back he’d joined the regiment. The day the news of Chickamauga came I met Judge Adams on Washington Street. He knew me. He looked at me as Peter might have looked at Judas.”
Slowly Peter Thorold raised his head from his arms, staring at the man beside the window. James Thorold met his look with sombre sorrow. “Don’t think I’ve had no punishment,” he said. “Remember that I loved Judge Adams. And I loved Abraham Lincoln.”
“Oh, no, no!” The boy’s choked utterance came in protest. “If you’d really cared for them you wouldn’t have failed them.”
“I have prayed,” his father said, “that you may never know the grief of having failed the men you have loved. There’s no heavier woe, Peter.” Again his gaze went from the boy, from the room, from the present. “I did not see Abraham Lincoln again until he was dead,” he said. “They brought him back and set his bier in the old court-house. The night he lay there I went in past the guards and looked long upon the face of him who had been my friend. I saw the sadness and the sorrow, the greatness and the glory, that life and death had sculptured there. He had dreamed and he had done. When the time had come he had been ready. I knelt beside his coffin; and I promised God and Abraham Lincoln that I would, before I died, make atonement for the faith I had broken.”
Peter’s sobbing had died down to husky flutterings of breath, but he kept his face averted from the man at the other side of the table. “I meant to make some sort of reparation,” James Thorold explained, listlessness falling like twilight on his mood as if the sun had gone down on his power, “but I was always so busy, so busy. And there seemed no real occasion for sacrifice. I never sought public office or public honors till I thought you wanted me to have them, Peter.” He turned directly to the boy, but the boy did not move. “I was so glad of Forsland—yesterday. Through all these years I have told myself that, after all, I had done no great wrong. But sometimes, when the bands were playing and the flags were flying, I knew that I had turned away from the Grail after I had looked upon it. I knew it to-day when I stood beside that boy’s coffin. I had said that times change. I know now that only the time changes. The spirit does not die, but it’s a stream that goes underground to come up, a clear spring, in unexpected places. My father died in Mexico. I failed my country. And Isador Framberg dies at Vera Cruz.”
“For our country,” the boy said bitterly.
“And his own,” his father added. “For him, for his people, for all these who walk in darkness Abraham Lincoln died. The gleam of his torch shone far down their lands. His message brought them here. They have known him even as I, who walked with him in life, did not know him until to-day. And they are paying him. That dead boy is their offering to him, their message that they are the Americans.”
Into Peter Thorold’s eyes, as he looked upon his father, leaped a flash of blue fire. Searchingly he stared into the face of the older man as Galahad might have gazed upon a sorrowing Percival. “You’re going to give up Forsland?” he breathed, touching the paper on the table. “I gave up Forsland,” James Thorold said, “when I saw you at Isador Framberg’s side. I knew that I was not worthy to represent your America—and his.” He held out his hands to Peter longingly. The boy’s strong one closed over them. Peter Thorold, sighting the mansion of his father’s soul, saw that the other man had passed the portals of confession into an empire of expiation mightier than the Court of St. Jerome.
[20] Copyright, 1915, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright, 1916, by Mary Synon.