When Crichton had about fifteen hundred inhabitants, a stranger came there one day, as a passenger on board a bark returning from a distant city. This bark was the chief vessel, and was owned by the three chief men of Crichton. It had gone away laden with laths, and it brought back tea, coffee, sugar, and other foreign groceries; and, more than all, it brought Mr. Seth Carpenter. He was not, apparently, a very remarkable man in any way, except as all strangers were remarkable in this young town. He was plain-looking, rather freckled, and had a pair of small and very bright eyes which he almost closed, in a near-sighted way, when he wished to see well. Behind those eyes was a good deal of will and wit, and the will to put the wit into immediate practice. Moreover, he knew how to hold his tongue very cleverly, and baffle the curious without offending them. Nothing but his name transpired. He might be a mountebank, a detective, a king’s son—how were these people to know?
In fact, he was nothing more mysterious than a respectable young man twenty-five years of age, who, having his fortune to make, had thought best to leave his prim, sober, native town, where nothing was being done, and where the people were mummies, and seek what, in modern parlance, is called a “live” place. In his pockets he had nothing but his hands; in his valise was a single change of linen.
The very morning of his arrival at Crichton, Mr. Seth Carpenter went to the highest hill-top, and from it viewed the town, the river, and the receding forests. He then strolled down to the river, and looked through the mills, and from there sauntered to the ship-yard, where he found a ship on the stocks, almost ready to be launched. He walked round the yard, whistling softly, with an air of critical indifference. He paused near two other men who were viewing the ship, and, since their conference was not private, listened to it.
One of these men, a sailor, rather thought he might make up his mind to buy that ship. Did his companion know what was likely to be asked for it? The other reckoned, and calculated, and guessed, and expected, and finally owned that he did not know.
Mr. Carpenter, his eyes winking fast with the sparks that came into them, and his fingers working nervously, walked out of the yard, and found the owner of the ship, and, still with nothing in his pockets but his hands, made his bargain with all the coolness of a millionaire. Before sunset, the ship was nominally his; and, before sunrise, it had changed owners again, and the young adventurer had made five hundred dollars by the bargain.
“I will yet rule the town!” he said exultingly, when he found himself alone; and he kept his word. Everything prospered with him, and in a short time even rivalry ceased. Men who had been proud to add dollar to dollar shrank and bowed before this man who added thousand to unit. Half the men in town, after ten years, were in his employment, and business prospered as he prospered. In another ten years, Crichton was a city, with all barriers down between her and the great world; but a raw, unkempt city; jealous, superficially educated, quarrelsome, pretentious, and rapidly crystallizing into that mould. Only a person of supreme position and character could now change it. Mr. Carpenter had the position, but not the character. He thought only of money-making, and of the excitement of enterprise and power; the rest he viewed with a pleasant indifference not without contempt. At forty-five he was still a bachelor.
We have mentioned the first piano with respect, because others followed in its train, rendering a music-teacher necessary; so that, after a succession of tyros, Miss Agnes Weston came, bringing the very spirit of harmony with her into the town she was to conquer.
She did not come as a conqueror, however; nor probably did she anticipate the part she was to play any more than the Crichtonians did. She came to earn her bread, and, while doing so, was anything but popular. Nothing but her brilliant musical abilities, and the fact that she had been educated at Leipsic, saved her from utter failure. People did not fancy this self-possessed, unpretending young person, who could sometimes show such a haughty front to the presuming, and who was, moreover, so frightfully dark and sallow. They did not understand her, and preferred to leave her very much to herself.
One person only found her not a puzzle. To Mr. Carpenter she was simply a refined woman among uncongenial associates; becoming discontented and unhappy there, too, before many months had passed. He did not choose that she should go away. He had become pleasantly accustomed to seeing her, had sometimes met her on her long walks out of town; and once, when he had politely offered to drive her home—an offer which any other lady in Crichton would have accepted beamingly, without the preliminary of an introduction—had been refreshed by receiving a cold refusal, and a surprised stare from a pair of large black eyes. The great man, surfeited with smiles and flatteries, was immensely pleased by this superciliousness.