The Best Short Stories of 1915 Part 45

James Thorold wheeled around until he faced him. "Peter," he said huskily, "there's something you'll have to know before I go to Forsland--if ever I go to Forsland. You'll have to decide." The boy shrank from the ominous cadence of the words. "Why, I can't judge for you, dad," he said awkwardly. "Our children are always our ultimate judges," James Thorold said.

"I have sometimes wondered," he went on, speaking to himself rather than to the puzzled boy, "how the disciples who met Christ but who did not go his way with him to the end felt when they heard he had died. I knew a great man once, Peter. I went his way for a little while, then I took my own. I saw them bring him, dead, over the way they have brought that boy to-day. I came down to the court-house that night, and there, just where that boy lies, Peter, I made a promise that I have not kept."

Again he resumed his pacing, speaking as he went, sometimes in low tones, sometimes with tensity of voice, always as if urged by some force that was driving him from silence. The boy, leaning forward at the edge of the chair, watched his father through the first part of the story.

Before the end came he turned away.

"You remember," James Thorold began, his voice pleading patience, "that I've told you I came to Chicago from Ohio before the war? I was older than you then, Peter, but I was something of a hero-wors.h.i.+pper, too. Judge Adams was my hero in those troublous times of the fifties.

I knew him only by sight for a long time, watching him go in and out of the big white house where he lived. After a time I came to know him. I was clerking in a coffee-importing house during the day and studying law at night. Judge Adams took me into his office. He took me among his friends. Abraham Lincoln was one of them.

"I remember the night I met Lincoln. Judge Adams had talked of him often. He had been talking of him that day. 'Greatness,' he had said, 'is the holding of a great dream, not for yourself, but for others.

Abraham Lincoln has the dream. He has heard the voice, and seen the vision, and he is climbing up to Sinai. You must meet him, James.'

That night I met him in the old white house.

"We were in the front parlor of the old house," James Thorold continued, resetting the scene until his only listener knew that it was more real to him than the room through which he paced, "when some one said, 'Mr.

Lincoln.' I looked up to see a tall, awkward man standing in the arched doorway. Other men have said that they had to know Lincoln a long time to feel his greatness. My shame is the greater that I felt his greatness on the instant when I met his eyes.

"There was talk of war that night. Lincoln did not join in it, I remember, although I do not recall what he said. But when he rose to go I went with him. We walked down the street past dooryards where lilacs were blooming, keeping together till we crossed the river. There our ways parted. I told him a little of what Judge Adams had said of him.

He laughed at the praise, waving it away from himself. 'It's a good thought, though,' he said, 'a great dream for others. But we need more than the dreaming, my friend. When the time comes, will you be ready?'

"I held out my hand to him in pledge.

"My way home that night took me past the armory where the Zouaves, the boys whom Ellsworth trained, were drilling. You remember Ellsworth's story, Peter? He was the first officer to die in the war." The boy nodded solemnly, and the man went on. "With Abraham Lincoln's voice ringing in my ears I enlisted.

"Years afterward, when Abraham Lincoln was President, war came. I'd seen Lincoln often in the years between." James Thorold stopped his restless pacing and stood at the end of the table away from Peter, leaning over it slightly, as he seemed to keep up his story with difficulty. "He came often to Judge Adams's house. There were evenings when the three of us sat in the parlor with the dusk drifting in from the lake, and spoke of the future of the nation. Judge Adams thought war inevitable. Abraham Lincoln thought it could be averted. They both dreaded it. I was young, and I hoped for it. 'What'll you do, Jim, if war should come?' they asked me once. 'I'd go as a private,' I told them.

"If the war had come then I should have gone with the first regiment out. But when the call sounded Ellsworth had gone to New York and the Zouaves had merged with another regiment. I didn't go with them in the beginning because I told myself that I wanted to be with the first troop that went from Illinois to the front. I didn't join until after Lincoln had sent out his call for volunteers.

"You see," he explained to the silent boy, "I had left Judge Adams's office and struck out for myself. Chicago was showing me golden opportunities. Before me, if I stayed, stretched a wide road of success."

"And you didn't go?" Peter interrupted his father for the first time.

"I thought--" His voice broke.

"I went," James Thorold said. "The regiment, the Nineteenth, was at the border when Lincoln gave the call. There was a bounty being offered to join it. I would have gone anyhow, but I thought that I might just as well take the money. I was giving up so much to go, I reasoned. And so I took the bounty. The provost marshal gave me the money in the office right across the square from the old court-house. I put it in the bank before I started south.

"I left Chicago that night with a great thrill. I was going to fight for a great cause, for Abraham Lincoln's great dream, for the country my father had died for in Mexico, that my grandfather had fought for at Lundy's Lane. I think," he said, "that if I might have gone right down to the fighting, I'd have stood the test. But when I came to Tennessee the regiment had gone stale. We waited, and waited. Every day I lost a little interest. Every day the routine dragged a little harder. I had time to see what opportunities I had left back here in Chicago. I wasn't afraid of the fighting. But the sheer hatred of what I came to call the uselessness of war gnawed at my soul. I kept thinking of the ways in which I might shape my destiny if only I were free. I kept thinking of the thousand roads to wealth, to personal success, that Chicago held for me. One night I took my chance. I slipped past the lines."

"Father!" The boy's voice throbbed with pain. His eyes, dilated with horror at the realization of the older man's admission, fixed their gaze accusingly on James Thorold. "You weren't a--a deserter?" He breathed the word fearfully.

"I was a bounty-jumper."

"Oh!" Peter Thorold's shoulders drooped as if under the force of a vital blow. Vaguely as he knew the term, the boy knew only too well the burden of disgrace that it carried. Once, in school, he had heard an old tutor apply it to some character of history whom he had especially despised.

Again, in a home where he had visited, he had heard another old man use the phrase in contempt for some local personage who had attempted to seek public office. Bounty-jumper! Its province expressed to the lad's mind a layer of the inferno beneath the one reserved for the Benedict Arnolds and the Aaron Burrs. Vainly he bugled to his own troops of self-control; but they, too, were deserters in the calamity. He flung his arms across the table, surrendering to his sobs.

Almost impa.s.sively James Thorold watched him, as if he himself had gone so far back into his thought of the past that he could not bridge the gap to Peter now. With some thought of crossing the chasm he took up his tale of dishonor. Punctuated by the boy's sobs it went on.

"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 emba.s.sy--"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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed the portals of confession into an empire of expiation mightier than the Court of St. Jerome.