The Wetherel affair :: :: University of Virginia Library

The youthfulness of Edward Wetherel was certainly not ballasted with
sufficing wisdom. A patient escaped from a lunatic asylum could hardly do
worse than waste all his money, spurn an easy chance of obtaining a gratuitous
million, and then offer himself to a girl without a penny. So much, we
may monitorially add in passing, for indulging a headstrong will and a greedy
taste for pleasures. Excellent characteristics are the impulses, when intelligently
directed—capable of making a man nobly virile in himself and a benefactor
of his fellows; but, while praiseworthily useful as servants, ruinous as
masters.

Notwithstanding all his obvious blunders and the calamities which had so
frankly issued out of them, Edward still could not learn to put a bridle upon
his impetuous and obstinate disposition. He left his uncle's house as pugnacious,
as determined to have his own will, and as eager to gratify his emotions,
as if he had always been the luckiest of mortals. As he put back across the
harbor to his lodging-place, he kept all sail up in defiance of a stiff breeze and
heavy sea, taking a desperate satisfaction in running the risk of drowning. The
plunge of his light boat into the curling heads of foam gratified him; it seemed
to him as if he were striking opponents and enemies in the face. Landing in
a half-soaked condition, he joined his two fellow-lodgers in a smoke, and refused
to change his clothes.

“Byronic,” scoffed Wolverton, with kindly intentions. “You will out-grow
that sort of thing some of these days.”

“I believe that I am a real man enough, as far as I go,” answered Edward.

“That is very true,” admitted Wolverton, who liked the youngster, and
thought him on the whole a superior fellow. “I don't mean that you habitually
exult in sorrow, and don't charge you at all with putting on a fancy-ball
melancholy. But for all your sincerity, you had better dry yourself. Rheumatism
doesn't help matters.”

“Oh, let me alone awhile,” sulked Edward.

“We must not laugh at the world-sorrow,” put in the Count, who had
heard the above conversation with disapproval, both as a philosopher and as a
literary critic. “You practical Anglo-Saxons delight to laugh at it; you call
great Byron humbug because he felt it and sang it. But you are wrong. The
world-sorrow is a true and beautiful emotion. I cannot boast of it; but I respect
it. The illimitable Shakespeare divined and described it. The melancholy
of Hamlet comes not altogether from his troubles; it is partly world-sorrow.
When we behold that great drama from this one of its many sides,
we see that Hamlet was in part a prophecy of Rousseau and Byron. There is
nothing great in the sentimental cosmos that the illimitable Shakespeare has
not foretold or recounted. He knew the past and the future, the fact and the
possibility of the man-soul; and he, the all-enfolding, the highest known intellect,
speaks not contemptuously of the world-sorrow.”

The Count was neither talking to show off his erudition, nor to hear the
sound of his own voice. He had risen to his feet to make his remarks, and he
uttered them in a manner of unmistakable earnestness, gesturing the while
with his lighted cigar, and glancing from face to face of his auditors. Meantime
the two Americans stared at him with what they considered a suitable
mixture of candid contempt and wonder.

“Poloski, you puzzle me,” said Wolverton fraukly. “You are a flâneur
like myself, and yet you are a philosopher and a linguist. I don't see how
you mix such opposite fancies.”

The Count's lip curled slightly, and, notwithstanding his habitual civility,
he had an air for one moment of despising his companions.

“Why should not a flâneur be also a great man?” he asked. “Cæsar was
a dandy. You Americans are not many-sided enough. It is not that you
have not brains individually. It is the defect of your intellectual atmosphere.
There is in it no variety of culture. It is not so in Europe. Look at
me—what you call a dandy—I know seven languages, and have written
brochures on them all, and now I am preparing a great work on the Origins
of Speech.”

“Honest?” asked Wetherel, looking up from his brooding, and thinking in
a practical way that if he knew as much as Poloski, he too would write a great
work and make money (as learned men always do), and so have funds to marry
on.

“Honest!” repeated the Count in high dudgeon. “Have you thought me
a humbug? I could show you all my brochures, only for my misfortunes. A
robber of a hotel-keeper seized my baggage and sold it to pay his rascally little
bill. All my writings were lost!” he sighed with indisputable grief. “My
Origins of Speech is only begun. But I will show you some day—I will show
you!”

Can we believe the Count? Yes, we must in some measure credit his
statements; he was really a linguist, and, to a certain extent, a scholar. A
native of Posen (it is supposed), Polish and German were mother tongues to
him, and he had acquired more or less knowledge of several other languages.
As to the various queer essays of which he boasted, we have no report concerning
them but his own; and as to his having read them before royal and
imperial societies, respectful doubt is at least permissible. His work, however,
on the Origins of Speech was not a myth; and fragments of it did eventually
astonish and delude superficial pundits.

“Well, you are too deep for us,” confessed Wolverton, with lazy modesty

“I can't discuss philology with you. And here is Wetherel going uncomforted.”

“Let him study the science of language, and he will be comforted,” de
clared the Count. “What is the matter with Wetherel?”

“I am the victim of rich relatives,” said Edward, with a bitter attempt at
defiant gayety. “My uncle has robbed me of his fortune.”

“Is he rich, your uncle?” asked Poloski, deeply interested, as he always
was at the mention of wealth.

“Worth a million,” sulkily responded Edward, remembering that he would
have none of it.

“What!” exclaimed the Count. “And lives in that little house? He
should have a castle. Of course he is not imprudent enough to keep much
money in that coop.”

“Rolls in a bin of it every night,” asserted Edward. “Don't you wish he
played poker?”

“Why have you not taken me there again?” asked Poloski. “I wanted
once more—with your permission—to see the charming Miss Alice.”

“I have piloted you over twice, my Leander.”

“True. I am under infinite obligations. But the second time we found
not the young ladies, and you would not introduce me to the house.”

“Never mind, Count. No disrespect intended. I have scarcely been allowed
to introduce myself.”

“And have you been really disinherited?”

“Yes,” laughed Edward, with what joy in the merriment we can imagine.

“The monster!” said the Count. “It is a case far worse than world-sorrow.”

After remaining for some time in meditation, he added, “Then you will
not go there more?”

“No,” returned Edward.

That very day the noble Poloski took his departure, explaining that he had
urgent affairs in New York.

“You won't play with him,” suggested Edward to Wolverton; “and he
takes it for granted that I haven't much more to lose.”

“I don't think that is the whole of it,” returned Wolverton. “The dead-beat
was after your cousin Alice; but of course, if you are not going over
there, he has lost his chance of getting a footing in the family; and he isn't
the fellow to waste his time in sighing across a harbor. We shall hear of him
courting some other girl's bank account. I'm glad he's gone. Hadn't we
better go too?”

“I will go on to New Haven with you,” said Wetherel.

“Why not to Newport?”

“I can't afford it. I must save my money—or rather your money. Can't
I make you understand that I am dished and must study a profession?” he
added irritably. “I'll go to New Haven and pick out my boarding-house
there and get used to it. I must be a sawbones. It is the only business that
I take the least fancy to. And I may as well study in New Haven as anywhere
else.”

“Better,” added Wolverton. “You will be near your uncle, and luck may
bring the old man around, if he sees you now and then. New Haven is just
the place for you,” he declared, viewing Wetherel's gloomy prospects cheerfully,
as the kindest of us are apt to view the burdens of our fellows. “Well,

suppose we quit here on Saturday. I'll stop over with you a day or two in
New Haven, and see you settled. Any money that you want, you know, just
call on me. I can't help thinking that this affair will come around all right
yet.”

“Perhaps so,” grumbled Edward. “I can't feel so confident as you can.
Perhaps because the troubles are mine, instead of yours. However, I'm greatly
obliged to you. We will start when you say.”

Thus it was that the young man came to be still in the neighborhood of
Sea Lodge when the bloody footstep of the “Wetherel Mystery” appeared on
its threshold.