University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX
A WRONG-HEADED HERO.

Before we divulge what Edward Wetherel had to say to his cousin and
her friend, we must go back a little in his history and see how he had brought
about this interview, or rather how he had been led on to it.

He had parted from Nestoria on the Elm City, as we remember, without
bidding her good-by; and we will add that he had left her thus because when
he went to say his last word he found her already in the arms of Alice Dinneford;
and with the Dinnefords, his lucky rivals in the good-will of his uncle, it
was not possible for him to be cordial on instant notice.

Now Edward was a wilful, self-seeking, pleasure-loving youngster. He
liked his own way, and he was greedy after agreeable emotions, and he took
disappointments very unkindly. It annoyed him to lose the farewell scene
which he had meant to have with Nestoria; to be cheated out of a final pressure
of her soft hand and an investigating gaze into her blue eyes; to be gagged,
as it were, just as he was about to utter some sweet word which should compel
her not to forget him. Moreover, the mere sight of Alice was disheartening
and vexations, reminding him as it did of that inconvenient quarrel with
the Judge, which had been so hard on his feelings, and which threatened to
be ruinous to his purse. In a bitter mood he took a hack with his friend Wolverton
and drove to the New Haven House, very sadly disposed to call for
wine or other mightier drinks and make what he called a night of it. They
obtained adjoining rooms, and Wetherel presently threw the connecting door
open, being much in need of uplifting converse.

“Awfully depressing, this living alone in the world and doing nothing,” he
observed as he “curled and combed his comely head.” “I wonder if every
fellow finds it as heavy work as I do.”

“I have rounded that point,” said Wolverton. “I have broken myself
fairly in to an idle, useless, unfruitful bachelor life. I am serious in these
days, but never desperate.”

“You are confoundedly discouraging, Wolverton,” sulked the younger
pleasure-seeker. “Is that all a fellow gets by giving himself up to having a
good time?”

“If he gets any more, he is luckier than I am,” affirmed the elder man,

composedly but with sincerity. “On the whole I made a mistake in not marrying
and going to work. That is, so I think. My notion is that a wife and
children keep a man full of work and worry, and so cheer him up by relieving
him of himself. It is like putting on a blister to mitigate the rheumatism.
Both are bad enough, but the blister is the best.”

Wetherel, a hopeful young egotist, never quite content in his selfishness,
but always looking forward to a day when joy should be unconfined, was dismayed
by this unlooked-for confession.

“I have a great mind to turn a corner, and settle down to business, and
perhaps marry,” he said.

“Why don't you?” answered Wolverton, who was a kindly-hearted creature
enough, never doing mischief except when it was agreeable, and apt to
wish well to young men. “And let me advise you to begin by making up
that family quarrel. Go down to your uncle's villa and fall on his venerable
bosom and get hold of the fatted calf. You are just a little bit of an idiot,
youngster. A man who will quarrel with a million ought to have his organs
examined. I have had softening of the brain myself occasionally; but I never
yet was so far gone as to disagree with a million.”

“It isn't I who quarrel,” asserted Edward; and he was quite blindly serious
in so declaring. “It is the old one. He wants to govern me; wants to
govern me physically, morally, and intellectually; wants to say what I shall
eat, drink, think, and believe; wants to rule soul, body, inwards, and extremities.
He is down on everything that a young man naturally prefers. Opposed
to lager, opposed to dancing and whist, opposed to reading novels opposed
to fashionable churches and episcopacy, opposed to everything but Plymouth
Rock puritanism. How can a fellow submit to such prejudices and irrationality
and domineering? Quarrel? I live my natural life and say my honest
thought; and thereupon he exorcises me as if I were Apollyon. I only ask
leave to be human, and he insists upon my being a ghost. His very way of
talking makes his ideas forbidding. One word marches solemnly and grimly
after another, like bearers at a funeral. At the end of every sentence you
think he is dead and want to put up a gravestone. He makes religion disagreeable.
I don't hate religion; I am capable of admiring it; in such a shape as
Nestoria Bernard I can worship it.”

It is more or less instructive to hear both sides in a controversy. From
Edward's philippie, immoral and unreasonable as it was in the main, we can
gather the regrettable fact that the exterior of Judge Wetherel's noble probity
and sincere piety had some severe features which repelled instead of enticing,
and that, had he been less exacting and inflexible in the minor matters of his
moral law, he might more easily have led souls into his own circle of beliefs
and sentiments. It is furthermore worth considering that this same Nestoria,
whom the young man was so ready to accept as a model of attractive devoutness,
found no difficulty in appreciating, respecting, and loving the Plymouth
Rock puritan. One is tempted to query doubtfully whether two youthful people,
who could look at the same standard character from such diverse standpoints,
would be likely to join heart with heart for a journey through life, and
whether, if they should so join, the result would be happy.

Even that unenlightened worldling, Wolverton, a man little given to deep
moral philosophizings and spiritual insights, could see through his friend's second-hand
respect for religion in the form of a handsome girl, and smile at its
preposterous magnanimity.

“Gracious youngster!” he grinned. “How much you can put up with
if it's only pleasant enough and pretty enough! Perhaps you could faney St.
Cecilia, now, or the Sistine Madonna. However, I must put something to
your credit; there are stupider sinners than you; there are men who wouldn't
like the girl at all. Well, how much and how long are you going to worship
the Final Good in her shape? I am interested in the child, and should like
to know what is going to be done for her.”

Wetherel made no reply; his face was agreeably pensive and his eyes
softer than usual; he was pondering whether it would be well to fall in love
with Nestoria.

“Would you want to marry a staid little puritan, with a conscience and all
that sort of thing?” asked Wolverton.

“I don't object to piety in a wife,” responded the young man, with a liberality
for which the Christian world surely ought to be grateful. “Indeed, I
would rather have it. Do you suppose that I want one of the wild girls that
I flirt with and everybody flirts with, and that have got all the down of innocent
simplicity rubbed off them, and that know so much too much of pretty
much everything?”

“Well, it isn't nice; but plenty of fellows do marry just that sort; and
somehow or other they make over as good as new. Our American girls are
a queer lot; they seem to have an inexhaustible reserve of innocence laid up
somewhere; when the first supply is out, they absorb more. However, I like
this little seraph better than the other sort. She is such a replica of the one I
knew! Why not keep her in mind? Such a match might bring you around
with the Judge. I hate to see you lose that fortune.”

“I don't know,” muttered Wetherel, with the vagueness of a man who is
lost in troublous meditation. “It is all a muddle. Life is a confounded muddle.”

The wilful and impulsive youngster, who had taken his own way so stubbornly
and got himself into difficulties thereby, was not quite certain that he had
better do just what he wanted to do in the immediate future. He liked Nestoria
much, and believed that he should easily learn to love her, and found it
very pleasant to think of marrying her. But there was a great risk in the
roseate adventure; there was a chance of dropping from the horns of the
matrimonial altar into the trials of poverty; somewhat as the sacrificial infants
of the Sidonians rolled out of the arms of the god into the blazing furnace
beneath.

He feared lest the Judge had already disinherited him; and he was quite
sure that he had spent the last penny of his paternal fortune. Indeed, he was
in debt; creditors had driven him from New York and other creditors from
Saratoga; at this very moment he was subsisting on money borrowed from
Wolverton. Fifty thousand dollars had danced through the gateways of
pleasure, and only left him a craving for delights which he could no longer
purchase. He had been one of those thoroughly headstrong and reckless
youths who are so common in Europe and so rare in America. Strong emotions,
thoughtless generosity, and an ostentatious love of expense had bankrupted
him. In the last four years their malign magic had degraded him from
the position of a youth of fair fortune, and made of him that wretched and
ridiculous personage whom slang has christened a “dead beat.”

Marry? Marry without a profession, without habits of labor, without a
dollar to fee the parson? And suppose his uncle should be unrelenting, and

give him nothing, and even decline to recommend him for a position in the
custom-house? He knew that, from the staid and severe old man's point of
view, he was untrustworthy and unendorsable and little less than abominable.
He had disputed rules of conduct and articles of belief which the Judge held
to be inexorably binding and tremendously important. There had been wild
orgies in his life in Paris and painful scandals in his life in New York; and a
sufficiently accurate report of these excesses had reached the horrified ears of
his relative. Finally (and here was another terrible charge against him in the
eyes of a prudent business man), he had been not only unwise in regard to the
concerns of the other world, but reckless in the affairs of this, investing recklessly
and utterly wasting his substance.

For these things he had been sternly reproved, and warned that severe
punishment would follow on continuance in evil, and all to no purpose. He
had argued with lofty flippancy in defence of his ways, and had irritated his
grave and conscientious adviser to the utmost. There had been a quarrel;
the uncle had ceased to invite the nephew to his house; then he had sent for
his more distant relatives, the Dinnefords; finally it was supposed that he had
altered his will. This last story Edward did not credit, until, having spent or
lost his ultimate dollar, he fell into that depression of spirit which poverty
brings to those whom it visits for the first time.

Now, living on borrowed money, he did fear seriously that he had sold his
birthright for departed messes of pottage. As he mechanically continued his
light labor of personal adornment he meditated on the pit into which he had
stumbled, and on the chances of getting out of it. If he should reform, or
pretend reformation; if he should humble himself before the Judge and lead a
quiet life; if he should marry this daughter of a missionary, no doubt a pet
with the devout master of Sea Lodge, would the riches which had taken wings
fly back to him? The “dead beat” was far from certain of it, and no wonder
that his fine eyes were gloomy.

“Well, Wolverton, we will see,” he said at last, trying to puff away his
sorrows with a sigh. “I have a great mind to turn a corner, I don't like it.
Be good, and you will be happy, but you won't have a good time. Now I
want a good time. Still, it seems to be advisable to turn a corner and try the
next street. Only we won't do it this evening. Let's get up some fellows and
be jolly.”

“There are no fellows here, I suppose,” replied Wolverton. “None of
our fellows.”

“I saw the Count in the reading-room as we came up stairs.”

“What Count? There are so many counts!”

“Poloski, as he calls himself,” said Edward, ringing the bell. “I'll have
him up.”