That Fortune

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THAT FORTUNE

By Charles Dudley Warner


On a summer day, long gone among the summer days that come but to go, a
lad of twelve years was idly and recklessly swinging in the top of a tall
hickory, the advance picket of a mountain forest. The tree was on the
edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly down to
the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in the narrow
valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose loud,
unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the voice of
some tradition of nature that he could not understand.

He had climbed to the topmost branch of the lithe and tough tree in order
to take the full swing of this free creature in its sport with the
western wind. There was something exhilarating in this elemental battle
of the forces that urge and the forces that resist, and the harder the
wind blew, and the wider circles he took in the free air, the more
stirred the boy was in the spring of his life. Nature was taking him by
the hand, and it might be that in that moment ambition was born to
achieve for himself, to conquer.

If you had asked him why he was there, he would very likely have said,
"To see the world." It was a world worth seeing. The prospect might be
limited to a dull eye, but not to this lad, who loved to climb this
height, in order to be with himself and indulge the dreams of youth.
Any pretense would suffice for taking this hour of freedom: to hunt for
the spicy checker-berries and the pungent sassafras; to aggravate the
woodchucks, who made their homes in mysterious passages in this gravelly
hillside; to get a nosegay of columbine for the girl who spelled against
him in school and was his gentle comrade morning and evening along the
river road where grew the sweet-flag and the snap-dragon and the barberry
bush; to make friends with the elegant gray squirrel and the lively red
squirrel and the comical chipmunk, who were not much afraid of this
unarmed naturalist. They may have recognized their kinship to him,
for he could climb like any squirrel, and not one of them could have
clung more securely to this bough where he was swinging, rejoicing in the
strength of his lithe, compact little body. When he shouted in pure
enjoyment of life, they chattered in reply, and eyed him with a primeval
curiosity that had no fear in it. This lad in short trousers, torn
shirt, and a frayed straw hat above his mobile and cheerful face, might
be only another sort of animal, a lover like themselves of the beech-nut
and the hickory-nut.

It was a gay world up here among the tossing branches. Across the river,
on the first terrace of the hill, were weather-beaten farmhouses, amid
apple orchards and cornfields. Above these rose the wooded dome of Mount
Peak, a thousand feet above the river, and beyond that to the left the
road wound up, through the scriptural land of Bozrah, to high and
lonesome towns on a plateau stretching to unknown regions in the south.
There was no bar to the imagination in that direction. What a gracious
valley, what graceful slopes, what a mass of color bathing this lovely
summer landscape! Down from the west, through hills that crowded on
either side to divert it from its course, ran the sparkling Deerfield,
from among the springs and trout streams of the Hoosac, merrily going on
to the great Connecticut. Along the stream was the ancient highway, or
lowway, where in days before the railway came the stage-coach and the big
transport-wagons used to sway and rattle along on their adventurous
voyage from the gate of the Sea at Boston to the gate of the West at
Albany.

Below, where the river spread wide among the rocks in shallows, or eddies
in deep, dark pools, was the ancient, long, covered, wooden bridge,
striding diagonally from rock to rock on stone columns, a dusky tunnel
through the air, a passage of gloom flecked with glints of sunlight, that
struggled in crosscurrents through the interstices of the boards, and set
dancing the motes and the dust in a golden haze, a stuffy passage with
odors a century old--who does not know the pungent smell of an old
bridge?--a structure that groaned in all its big timbers when a wagon
invaded it. And then below the bridge the lad could see the historic
meadow, which was a cornfield in the eighteenth century, where Captain
Moses Rice and Phineas Arms came suddenly one summer day to the end of
their planting and hoeing. The house at the foot of the hill where the
boy was cultivating his imagination had been built by Captain Rice, and
in the family burying-ground in the orchard above it lay the body of this
mighty militia-man, and beside him that of Phineas Arms, and on the
headstone of each the legend familiar at that period of our national
life, "Killed by the Indians." Happy Phineas Arms, at the age of
seventeen to exchange in a moment the tedium of the cornfield for
immortality.

There was a tradition that years after, when the Indians had disappeared
through a gradual process of intoxication and pauperism, a red man had
been seen skulking along the brow of this very hill and peering down
through the bushes where the boy was now perched on a tree, shaking his
fist at the hated civilization, and vengefully, some said pathetically,
looking down into this valley where his race had been so happy in the
natural pursuits of fishing, hunting, and war. On the opposite side of
the river was still to be traced an Indian trail, running to the western
mountains, which the boy intended some time to follow; for this highway
of warlike forays, of messengers of defiance, along which white maidens
had been led captive to Canada, appealed greatly to his imagination.

The boy lived in these traditions quite as much as in those of the
Revolutionary War into which they invariably glided in his perspective of
history, the redskins and the redcoats being both enemies of his
ancestors. There was the grave of the envied Phineas Arms--that ancient
boy not much older than he--and there were hanging in the kitchen the
musket and powder-horn that his great-grandfather had carried at Bunker
Hill, and did he not know by heart the story of his great-grandmother,
who used to tell his father that she heard when she was a slip of a girl
in Plymouth the cannonading on that awful day when Gage met his
victorious defeat?

In fact, according to his history-book there had been little but wars in
this peaceful nation: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the incessant
frontier wars with the Indians, the Kansas War, the Mormon War, the War
for the Union. The echoes of the latter had not yet died away. What a
career he might have had if he had not been born so late in the world!
Swinging in this tree-top, with a vivid consciousness of life, of his own
capacity for action, it seemed a pity that he could not follow the drum
and the flag into such contests as he read about so eagerly.

And yet this was only a corner of the boy's imagination. He had many
worlds and he lived in each by turn. There was the world of the Old
Testament, of David and Samson, and of those dim figures in the dawn of
history, called the Patriarchs. There was the world of Julius Caesar and
the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the Old
Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a necessity of
his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth declension were made to
be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part of his education. He had
not been told that they were really a part of the other world which
occupied his mind so much of the time, the world of the Arabian Nights
and Robinson Crusoe, and Coleridge and Shelley and Longfellow, and
Washington Irving and Scott and Thackeray, and Pope's Iliad and
Plutarch's Lives. That this was a living world to the boy was scarcely
his fault, for it must be confessed that those were very antiquated
book-shelves in the old farmhouse to which he had access, and the news
had not been apprehended in this remote valley that the classics of
literature were all as good as dead and buried, and that the human mind
had not really created anything worth modern notice before about the
middle of the nineteenth century. It was not exactly an ignorant valley,
for the daily newspapers were there, and the monthly magazine, and the
fashion-plate of Paris, and the illuminating sunshine of new science, and
enough of the uneasy throb of modern life. Yet somehow the books that
were still books had not been sent to the garret, to make room for the
illustrated papers and the profound physiological studies of sin and
suffering that were produced by touching a scientific button. No, the boy
was conscious in a way of the mighty pulsation of American life, and he
had also a dim notion that his dreams in his various worlds would come to
a brilliant fulfillment when he was big enough to go out and win a name
and fame. But somehow the old books, and the family life, and the sedate
ways of the community he knew, had given him a fundamental and not
unarmed faith in the things that were and had been.

Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and
corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this
splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of
pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating as
it was wicked. The preacher said the world was wicked and vain. It did
not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he knew.
Of course the boy had no experience. He had never heard of Juvenal nor
of Max Nordau. He had no philosophy of life. He did not even know that
when he became very old the world would seem to him good or bad according
to the degree in which he had become a good or a bad man.

In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but of
trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite
opportunities. His name--Philip Burnett--with which the world, at least
the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to
write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks,
did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been
confronted with it as something apart from himself. But the Philip that
he was he felt sure would do something in the world. What that something
should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the
history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be difficult
to write a poem like "Thanatopsis" if he took time enough, building up a
line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could
use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform. This was a pleasing
imagination. Surely his aunt and his cousins in the farmhouse would have
more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and treat him with more
consideration, and perhaps they would be very anxious about him when he
was away in battles, and very proud of him when he came home between
battles, and went quite modestly with the family into the village church,
and felt rather than saw the slight flutter in the pews as he walked down
the aisle, and knew that the young ladies, the girl comrades of the
district school, were watching him from the organ gallery, curious to see
Phil, who had gone into the army. Perhaps the preacher would have a
sermon against war, and the preacher should see how soldierlike he would
take this attack on him. Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a
reasonable ambition? Perhaps his town would be proud of him if he were a
lawyer, a Representative in Congress, come back to deliver the annual
oration at the Agricultural Fair. He could see the audience of familiar
faces, and hear the applause at his witty satires and his praise of the
nobility of the farmer's life, and it would be sweet indeed to have the
country people grasp him by the hand and call him Phil, just as they used
to before he was famous. What he would say, he was not thinking of, but
the position he would occupy before the audience. There were no
misgivings in any of these dreams of youth.




II

The musings of this dreamer in a tree-top were interrupted by the
peremptory notes of a tin horn from the farmhouse below. The boy
recognized this not only as a signal of declining day and the withdrawal
of the sun behind the mountains, but as a personal and urgent
notification to him that a certain amount of disenchanting drudgery
called chores lay between him and supper and the lamp-illumined pages of
The Last of the Mohicans. It was difficult, even in his own estimation,
to continue to be a hero at the summons of a tin horn--a silver clarion
and castle walls would have been so different--and Phil slid swiftly down
from his perch, envying the squirrels who were under no such bondage of
duty.

Recalled to the world that now is, the lad hastily gathered a bouquet of
columbine and a bunch of the tender leaves and the red berries of the
wintergreen, called to "Turk," who had been all these hours watching a
woodchuck hole, and ran down the hill by leaps and circuits as fast as
his little legs could carry him, and, with every appearance of a lad who
puts duty before pleasure, arrived breathless at the kitchen door, where
Alice stood waiting for him. Alice, the somewhat feeble performer on the
horn, who had been watching for the boy with her hand shading her eyes,
called out upon his approach:

"Why, Phil, what in the world--"

"Oh, Alice!" cried the boy, eagerly, having in a moment changed in his
mind the destination of the flowers; "I've found a place where the
checker-berries are thick as spatter." And Phil put the flowers and the
berries in his cousin's hand. Alice looked very much pleased with this
simple tribute, but, as she admired it, unfortunately asked--women always
ask such questions:

"And you picked them for me?"

This was a cruel dilemma. Phil was more devoted to his sweet cousin than
to any one else in the world, and he didn't want to hurt her feelings,
and he hated to tell a lie. So he only looked a lie, out of his
affectionate, truthful eyes, and said:

"I love to bring you flowers. Has uncle come home yet?"

"Yes, long ago. He called and looked all around for you to unharness the
horse, and he wanted you to go an errand over the river to Gibson's.
I guess he was put out."

"Did he say anything?"

"He asked if you had weeded the beets. And he said that you were the
master boy to dream and moon around he ever saw." And she added, with a
confidential and mischievous smile: "I think you'd better brought a
switch along; it would save time."

Phil had a great respect for his uncle Maitland, but he feared him almost
more than he feared the remote God of Abraham and Isaac. Mr. Maitland
was not only the most prosperous man in all that region, but the man of
the finest appearance, and a bearing that was equity itself. He was the
first selectman of the town, and a deacon in the church, and however much
he prized mercy in the next world he did not intend to have that quality
interfere with justice in this world. Phil knew indeed that he was a man
of God, that fact was impressed upon him at least twice a day, but he
sometimes used to think it must be a severe God to have that sort of man.
And he didn't like the curt way he pronounced the holy name--he might as
well have called Job "job."

Alice was as unlike her father, except in certain race qualities of
integrity and common-sense, as if she were of different blood. She was
the youngest of five maiden sisters, and had arrived at the mature age of
eighteen. Slender in figure, with a grace that was half shyness, soft
brown hair, gray eyes that changed color and could as easily be sad as
merry, a face marked with a moving dimple that every one said was lovely,
retiring in manner and yet not lacking spirit nor a sly wit of her own.
Now and then, yes, very often, out of some paradise, no doubt, strays
into New England conditions of reticence and self-denial such a sweet
spirit, to diffuse a breath of heaven in its atmosphere, and to wither
like a rose ungathered. These are the New England nuns, not taking any
vows, not self-consciously virtuous, apparently untouched by the vanities
of the world. Marriage? It is not in any girl's nature not to think of
that, not to be in a flutter of pleasure or apprehension at the
attentions of the other sex. Who has been able truly to read the
thoughts of a shrinking maiden in the passing days of her youth and
beauty? In this harmonious and unselfish household, each with decided
individual character, no one ever intruded upon the inner life of the
other. No confidences were given in the deep matters of the heart, no
sign except a blush over a sly allusion to some one who had been
"attentive." If you had stolen a look into the workbasket or the secret
bureau-drawer, you might have found a treasured note, a bit of ribbon, a
rosebud, some token of tenderness or of friendship that was growing old
with the priestess who cherished it. Did they not love flowers, and
pets, and had they not a passion for children? Were there not moonlight
evenings when they sat silent and musing on the stone steps, watching the
shadows and the dancing gleams on the swift river, when the air was
fragrant with the pink and the lilac? Not melancholy this, nor
poignantly sad, but having in it nevertheless something of the pathos of
life unfulfilled. And was there not sometimes, not yet habitually,
coming upon these faces, faces plain and faces attractive, the shade of
renunciation?

Phil loved Alice devotedly. She was his confidante, his defender, but he
feared more the disapproval of her sweet eyes when he had done wrong than
the threatened punishment of his uncle.

"I only meant to be gone just a little while," Phil went on to say.

"And you were away the whole afternoon. It is a pity the days are so
short. And you don't know what you lost."

"No great, I guess."

"Celia and her mother were here. They stayed all the afternoon."

"Celia Howard? Did she wonder where I was?"

"I don't know. She didn't say anything about it. What a dear little
thing she is!"

"And she can say pretty cutting things."

"Oh, can she? Perhaps you'd better run down to the village before dark
and take her these flowers."

"I'm not going. I'd rather you should have the flowers." And Phil spoke
the truth this time.

Celia, who was altogether too young to occupy seriously the mind of a lad
of twelve, had nevertheless gained an ascendancy over him because of her
willful, perverse, and sometimes scornful ways, and because she was
different from the other girls of the school. She had read many more
books than Phil, for she had access to a library, and she could tell him
much of a world that he only heard of through books and newspapers, which
latter he had no habit of reading. He liked, therefore, to be with
Celia, not withstanding her little airs of superiority, and if she
patronized him, as she certainly did, probably the simple-minded young
gentleman, who was unconsciously bred in the belief that he and his own
kin had no superiors anywhere, never noticed it. To be sure they
quarreled a good deal, but truth to say Phil was never more fascinated
with the little witch, whom he felt himself strong enough to protect,
than when she showed a pretty temper. He rather liked to be ordered
about by the little tyrant. And sometimes he wished that Murad Ault, the
big boy of the school, would be rude to the small damsel, so that he
could show her how a knight would act under such circumstances. Murad
Ault stood to Phil for the satanic element in his peaceful world. He was
not only big and strong of limb and broad of chest, but he was very
swarthy, and had closely curled black hair. He feared nothing, not even
the teacher, and was always doing some dare-devil thing to frighten the
children. And because he was dark, morose, and made no friends, and
wished none, but went solitary his own dark way, Phil fancied that he
must have Spanish blood in his veins, and would no doubt grow up to be a
pirate. No other boy in the winter could skate like Murad Ault, with
such strength and grace and recklessness--thin ice and thick ice were all
one to him, but he skated along, dashing in and out, and sweeping away up
and down the river in a whirl of vigor and daring, like a black marauder.
Yet he was best and most awesome in the swimming pond in summer--though
it was believed that he dared go in in the bitter winter, either by
breaking the ice or through an air-hole, and there was a story that he
had ventured under the ice as fearless as a cold fish. No one could dive
from such a height as he, or stay so long under water; he liked to stay
under long enough to scare the spectators, and then appear at a distance,
thrashing about in the water as if he were rescuing himself from
drowning, sputtering out at the same time the most diabolical noises
--curses, no doubt, for he had been heard to swear. But as he skated alone
he swam alone, appearing and disappearing at the swimming-place silently,
with never a salutation to any one. And he was as skillful a fisher as
he was a swimmer. No one knew much about him. He lived with his mother
in a little cabin up among the hills, that had about it scant patches of
potatoes and corn and beans, a garden fenced in by stumproots, as
ill-cared for as the shanty. Where they came from no one knew. How they
lived was a matter of conjecture, though the mother gathered herbs and
berries and bartered them at the village store, and Murad occasionally
took a hand in some neighbor's hay-field, or got a job of chopping wood
in the winter. The mother was old and small and withered, and they said
evil-eyed. Probably she was no more evil-eyed than any old woman who had
such a hard struggle for existence as she had. An old widow with an only
son who looked like a Spaniard and acted like an imp! Here was another
sort of exotic in the New England life.

Celia had been brought to Rivervale by her mother about a year before
this time, and the two occupied a neat little cottage in the village,
distinguished only by its neatness and a plot of syringas, and pinks, and
marigolds, and roses, and bachelor's-buttons, and boxes of the tough
little exotics, called "hen-and-chickens," in the door-yard, and a
vigorous fragrant honeysuckle over the front porch. She only dimly
remembered her father, who had been a merchant in a small way in the
city, and dying left to his widow and only child a very moderate fortune.
The girl showed early an active and ingenious mind, and an equal love for
books and for having her own way; but she was delicate, and Mrs. Howard
wisely judged that a few years in a country village would improve her
health and broaden her view of life beyond that of cockney provincialism.
For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement than strength of mind, and
passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive little woman, she did not
lack a certain true perception of values, due doubtless to the fact that
she had been a New England girl, and, before her marriage and emigration
to the great city, had passed her life among unexciting realities, and
among people who had leisure to think out things in a slow way. But the
girl's energy and self-confidence had no doubt been acquired from her
father, who was cut off in mid-career of his struggle for place in the
metropolis, or from some remote ancestor. Before she was eleven years
old her mother had listened with some wonder and more apprehension to the
eager forecast of what this child intended to do when she became a woman,
and already shrank from a vision of Celia on a public platform, or the
leader of some metempsychosis club. Through her affections only was the
child manageable, but in opposition to her spirit her mother was
practically powerless. Indeed, this little sprout of the New Age always
spoke of her to Philip and to the Maitlands as "little mother."

The epithet seemed peculiarly tender to Philip, who had lost his father
before he was six years old, and he was more attracted to the timid and
gentle little widow than to his equable but more robust Aunt Eusebia,
Mrs. Maitland, his father's elder sister, whom Philip fancied not a bit
like his father except in sincerity, a quality common to the Maitlands
and Burnetts. Yet there was a family likeness between his aunt and a
portrait of his father, painted by a Boston artist of some celebrity,
which his mother, who survived her husband only three years, had saved
for her boy. His father was a farmer, but a man of considerable
cultivation, though not college-bred--his last request on his death-bed
was that Phil should be sent to college--a man who made experiments in
improving agriculture and the breed of cattle and horses, read papers now
and then on topics of social and political reform, and was the only
farmer in all the hill towns who had what might be called a library.

It was all scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate,
and the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated copy
of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Young's Travels in France, a copy of
The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe Harold. Probably
these odd volumes had not been considered worth any considerable bid at
the auction. From his mother, who was fond of books, and had on more
than one occasion, of the failure of teachers, taught in the village
school in her native town before her marriage, Philip inherited his love
of poetry, and he well remembered how she used to try to inspire him with
patriotism by reading the orations of Daniel Webster (she was very fond
of orations), and telling him war stories about Grant and Sherman and
Sheridan and Farragut and Lincoln. He distinctly remembered also
standing at her knees and trying, at intervals, to commit to memory the
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He had learned it all since, because he
thought it would please his mother, and because there was something in it
that appealed to his coming sense of the mystery of life. When he
repeated it to Celia, who had never heard of it, and remarked that it was
all made up, and that she never tried to learn a long thing like that
that wasn't so, Philip could see that her respect for him increased a
little. He did not know that the child got it out of the library the
next day and never rested till she knew it by heart. Philip could repeat
also the books of the Bible in order, just as glibly as the
multiplication-table, and the little minx, who could not brook that a
country boy should be superior to her in anything, had surprised her
mother by rattling them all off to her one Sunday evening, just as if she
had been born in New England instead of in New York. As to the other
fine things his mother read him, out of Ruskin and the like; Philip
chiefly remembered what a pretty glow there was in his mother's face when
she read them, and that recollection was a valuable part of the boy's
education.