want of sympathy, must have been a positive relief after the aggressive cruelty of your younger days.”
“And what have you been doing, Richard?”
“Everything that Yankees do, — digging last.”
“That has been my business, too, as well as polishing.”
“The old work, I suppose, to root out lies and plant in truth.”
“That same slow task. Tunnelling too, to find my way out of the prison of doubt into the freedom of faith.”
“You are out, then, at last. Happy and at peace, I hope.”
“At peace, hardly happy. How can such a lonely fellow be happy?”
“We are peers in bereavement now. My family are all gone, except two little children of my sister.”
“Not quite peers. You remember your relatives tenderly. I have no such comfort.”
Odd talk this may seem, to hold with an old friend. Ten years apart! We ought to have met in merrier mood. We might, if we had parted with happy memories. But it was not so. Youth had been a harsh season to Brent. If Fate destines a man to teach, she compels him to learn, — bitter lessons, too, whether he will or no. Brent was a man of genius. All experience, therefore, piled itself upon him. He must learn the immortal consolations by probing all suffering himself.
Brent’s story is a short one or a long one. It can be told in a page, or in a score of volumes. We had met fourteen years before in the same pew of Berkeley College Chapel, grammars by our side and tutors before us, two well-crammed candidates for the Freshman Class. Brent was a delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy. My counterpart. I was plain prose, and needed the poetic element. We became friends. I was steady; he was erratic. I was calm; he was passionate. I was reasonably happy; he was totally miserable. For good cause.
The cause was this; and it has broken weaker hearts than Brent’s. His heart was made of stuff that does not know how to break.
Dr. Swerger was the cause of Brent’s misery. The Reverend Dr. Swerger was a brutal man. One who believes that God is vengeance naturally imitates his God, and does not better his model.
Swerger was Brent’s step-father. Mrs. Brent was pretty, silly, rich, and a widow. Swerger wanted his wife pretty, and not too wise; and that she was rich balanced, perhaps a little more than balanced, the slight objection of widowhood.
Swerger naturally hated his step-son. One intuition of Brent’s was worth all the thoughts of Swerger’ s life-time. A clergyman who starts with believing in hells, devils, original sin, and such crudities, can never be anything in the nineteenth century but a tyrant or a nuisance, if he has any logic, as fortunately few of such misbelievers have. Swerger had logic. So had the boy Brent, — the logic of a true, pure, loving heart. He could not stand Swerger’s coming into his dead father’s house and deluding his mother with a black fanaticism.
So Swerger gave him to understand that he was a child of hell. He won his wife to shrink from her son. Between them they lacerated the boy. He was a brilliant fellow, quite the king of us all. But he worked under a cloud. He could not get at any better religion than Swerger’s; and perhaps there was none better — or much better — to be had at that time.
One day matters came to a quarrel. Swerger cursed his step-son; of course not in the same terms the sailors used on Long Wharf, but with no better spirit. The mother, cowed by her husband, backed him, and abandoned the boy. They drove him out of the house, to go where he would. He came to me. I gave him half my quarters, and tried to cheer him. No use. This bitter wrong to his love to God and to man almost crushed him. He brooded and despaired. He began to fancy himself the lost soul Swerger had called him. I saw that he would die or go mad; or, if he had strength enough to react, it would be toward a hapless rebellion against conventional laws, and so make his blight ruin. I hurried him off to Europe, for change of scene. That was ten years ago, and I had not seen him since. I knew, however, that his mother was visited by compunctions; that she wished to be reconciled to her son; that Swerger refused, and renewed his anathemas; that he bullied the poor little woman to death; that Brent had to wring the property out of him by a long lawsuit, which the Swergerites considered an unconstitutional and devilish proceeding, another proof of total depravity. Miserable business! It went near to crush all the innocence, faith, hope, and religion out of my friend’s life.
Of course this experience had a tendency to drive Brent out of the common paths, to make him a seer instead of a doer. The vulgar cannot comprehend that, when a man is selected by character and circumstance, acting together under the name of destiny, to be a seer, he must see to the end before he begins to say what he sees, to be a guide, a monitor, and a helper. The vulgar, therefore, called Brent a wasted life, a man of genius manqué, a pointless investigator, a purposeless dreamer. The vulgar loves to make up its mind prematurely. The vulgar cannot abide a man who lives a blameless life so far as personal conduct goes, and yet declines to accept worldly tests of success, worldly principles of action. If a man rebels against laws, and takes the side of vice, that the vulgar can comprehend; but rebellion on the side of virtue is revolutionary, destroys all the old landmarks, must be crucified.
Brent, therefore, boy and man, had had tough experience. I knew of his career, though we had not met. He had wished and attempted, perhaps prematurely, to make his fine genius of definite use. He wanted to make the nation’s prayers; but the Swergerites pronounced his prayers Paganism. He wanted to put the nation’s holiest thoughts into poetry; they called his poetry impious. He wanted to stir up the young men of his day to a franker stand on the side of genuine liberty, and a keener hatred of all slavery, and so to uphold chivalry and heroism; the cynical people scoffed, they said he would get over his boyish folly, that he ought to have lived before Bayard, or half-way through the millennium, but that the kind of stuff he preached and wrote with such unnecessary fervor did not suit the nineteenth century, a practical country and a practical age.
So Brent paused in his work. The boyhood’s unquestioning ardor went out of him. The interregnum between youth and complete manhood came. He gave up his unripe attempt to be a doer, and turned seer again. Observation is the proper business of a man’s third decade; the less a spokesman has to say about his results until thirty, the better, unless he wants to eat his words, or to sustain outgrown formulas. Brent discovered this, and went about the world still pointless, purposeless, manqué, as they said, — minding his own business, getting his facts. His fortune made him independent. He could go where he pleased.
This was the man who rode up on the iron-gray horse. This was the Indianesque Saxon who greeted me. It put color and poetry into my sulky life to see him.
“Off, old fellow?” said Brent, pointing his whip at my traps. “I can’t hear him squeak, but I’m sure there is pig in that gunny-bag, and flour in that sack. I hope you’re not away for a long trip just as I have come to squat with you.”
“No longer than home across the plains.”
“Bravo! then we’ll ride together, instead of squatting together. Instead of your teaching me quartz-mining, I’ll guide you across the Rockys.”
“You know the way, then.”
“Every foot of it. Last fall I hunted up from Mexico and New Mexico with an English friend. We made winter head-quarters with Captain Ruby at Fort Laramie, knocking about all winter in that neighborhood, and at the North among the Wind River Mountains. Early in the spring we went off toward Luggernel Alley and the Luggernel Springs, and camped there for a month.”
“Luggernel Alley!
