Predestined; a novel of New York life

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Chapter I

It was said that Felix Piers inherited his good looks and attractive manners from his mother, who had died in his childhood. The son had at home an old, faded photograph of her, by aid of which he made himself believe that he remembered her. She was portrayed in a beaded zouave-jacket and a voluminous skirt, wearing a chignon, leaning over a flower stand, before a fringed curtain looped up with heavy tassels. Despite her clumsy-looking dress she appeared charming, and in her face was beauty of so peculiar a quality that one was puzzled by it. What sort of woman had she been? The boy, noting her dark eyes and crinkling black hair, had always felt tender satisfaction at the thought that he resembled her.

On the other hand, none could perceive what attributes Felix had obtained from the husband who survived her.

This gentleman, Sheridan Piers, was bony, sallow, “plain-looking,” his eyes pale blue, his mouth hidden by a gray mustache, his face — which had been shortened by false teeth — wearing invariably a saturnine expression. He attracted none of his acquaintances to intimacy. Even when young, for the most part he had shunned companionable customs.

Shy and retiring as a boy, by disposition always solemn and austere, he had experienced in his life but one great happiness — an idealistic passion for the brilliant, ardent woman he had married. At her death, which occurred when she still possessed all her powers of fascination, he thought himself despoiled of everything that made his life worth living. When told that his intense grief would wear away in time, he repulsed his comforters with the fury of a priest before a shrine to which some one has offered sacrilege. He was determined never to mourn her less intensely.

He was rich; he had no business; he lived a life of leisure. His mind was not adapted to profitable intellectual pursuits. His time was taken up with petty occupations. He was one of those persons for whom living has been made easy through inheritance, who never feel any positive incentive to achievement, who are content to spend a lifetime aimlessly, from time to time wondering at their ennui and discontent. Growing old, he fell into the melancholy ways of solitaries.

He travelled; he made elaborate collections of curiosities that might, perhaps, have been of use in museums ; he accumulated rare books wherein the pages all remained uncut; he lined his walls with gloomy paintings that would have been appropriate in the chapels of cathedrals. But when he was on his travels the beauties and the gayeties about him roused in him no response. With a sombre countenance he looked at sunsets on Italian lakes, Swiss mountain peaks at dawn, the Paris boulevards in the golden dusk, Norwegian fjords by moonlight. Before each exquisite scene he forced himself to think: “If she were here!” In New York, amid his books and pictures, during the long evenings his thoughts were all introspective and regretful. Reviewing his unprofitable, lonely life, he told himself that its poor quality was traceable entirely to fate, which had deprived him of his wife. “If she had lived!” He asked himself unanswerable riddles: Why must we have sorrow ? Why do we survive for years to mourn a loved one? Why do we attain happiness just for a moment — just long enough to realize its worth? Sometimes he exclaimed proudly: “Have I forgotten her? Have I ceased to mourn her? Am I like those people who get over grief?” His wife had furnished his life’s one romance; and faithfully he kept fresh his sorrow at the loss of it, as if by so doing he were paying back in part a great debt that he owed her.

Monotony and solitary living made him, at last, morose, hypochondriacal, “peculiar.” He found the world a poor place ; he began to look forward curiously toward a future life, and wondered: “Shall I meet her there? How shall I find her?” He was drawn to investigate doctrines of immortality, was excited at the thought of “spiritistic phenomena,” and finally fell into the hands of trance-mediums and those adroit magicians who, in a darkened room, seem to materialize the dead. His name, his secret thoughts and habits, the intimate details of his family history were drawn from him by clever charlatans, and passed about through that profession which preys on the grief of the bereaved. In “private seances” he seemed to see, emerging from the shadows of a cabinet, the vague simulacrum of his wife; sometimes he heard her speak ; sometimes he touched her, kissed her, and then — his normal senses overwhelmed by emotion — believed that he recognized her face. She told him she was “waiting for him.” At last he shut himself up the more; his world was a world of shadows — a place thronged with invisible presences ; and when he went abroad he looked with impatience on the activities of healthy life, with which he no longer had anything in common. He had become an eccentric. His former associates told one another that his mind was diseased.

But all admitted that he had acted the part of a good father. He had given Felix “every advantage.”

In childhood, Felix was a quiet boy, dreamy, full of imagination, fond of looking by the hour at pictures in old books, attracted by gentle scenes and beautiful ladies, responsive to affection, easily moved in respect of his emotions. As soon as he learned to read, into juvenile literature he plunged headlong. New worlds were revealed to him. In fancy he floated through nebulae which took the uncertain, gorgeous forms of other lands and epochs. His solitary musings were then all of ancient Britons, of Carthaginians, of Aztecs, of peoples tattooed, painted, crowned with feathers, clothed in shaggy skins, encased in armor, following faithfully his own small figure through the fog of wild enterprises. Walking home from school, swinging his strapful of books, perhaps he was the King of the Incas, covered with gold ornaments, crested majestically with green plumes, passing judgment — in a hall of skulls — on some arch-enemy. “Away with him, to the tormentors!” Felix bumped into people on the street.

When he was fourteen years old he was sent to a big boarding-school in the country.

That was a rolling region. There patches of woodland, dim purple in the distance, were spread on the declivities of hills; there, in the valleys, were laid out fields of yellow, of rich green, of white, of terra-cotta color after ploughing time. The school buildings — all of red brick with blue slate roofs and gables — stood round a great grass circle. In the evening, when all the trees were motionless and seemed enveloped each in a separate, gauze-like haze, the sky would slowly turn from dusky blue to yellow. Down by the still lake, which lay beyond the foot-ball field, at that hour the swallows would come out, sailing and skimming here and there, low down, while uttering shrill cries which rang as if the sky were a hard dome of veritable amber. Sometimes the boys, returning from the tennis-courts, managed to strike down and kill a swallow or two with their racquets.

This placid lakeside was a favorite of Felix’s. His dreams at that time, affected by his text-books, were based on models purely classical. In the flash of a window-pane on a remote hill-top, struck by the last rays of the sun, he saw the bright shields of the

Lacedemonians. At the rumbling of thunder he thought of Attic shepherds falling on their knees in fear of the sonorous voice of Jove. Gray brushwood smoke adrift above the valleys brought up before him scenes of ancient warfare — the pillage and the ruin of old cities. He was in the Wooden Horse when it was trundled into Troy; he led the sack; he was prodigious in a brass helmet crested with red horsehair. And “ Fair-cheeked Chryseis!” Now, in the background of every such sally of imagination hovered some fair-cheeked maiden observing all his feats of valor fondly.

Taunted by his school-mates for his dreaminess, in self-defence he plunged into their gay activities. The habit of excitement grew on him. He became of all the school the most ingenious in devising spectacular and humorous escapades. He furnished gayety for every one, and so became popular.

By his instructors he was thought precocious, talented, and promising. But he grew restless under continuous restraint, erratic in his moods, subject to all wandering impulses that took his fancy, apt to forget completely, in an access of nervous gayety, his duties. He learned, at length, barely enough to “scrape through” into college.

He went to live on a college campus — a tranquil place, full of great elms, of rambling white stone buildings, of winding flag-stone walks where undergraduates in odd head-gear strolled, pipe smoke above them, their arms over one another’s shoulders. Every hour there was thrust through the silence the sound of a clear bell calling to lectures. In the evening the voices of young men, singing with a harmony of many parts, stole from afar across the grassy stretches with a clarity as if across still water. Later, one heard the confused, uneven songs of revellers returning home to bed.

One day a Freshman friend of Felix’s proposed to him in the street:

“ Let’s have a drink.”

They entered a cafe in the town. Felix concealed his curiosity, ashamed that he had never before been in such a place.

Along one side of the cafe ran a bar, behind which three pyramids of glasses were reflected in large mirrors. A man in his shirt-sleeves stood there talking to a rough-looking fellow who leaned across the rail, a glass of beer in his dirty hand. On the other side of the room one saw a row of wooden tables, their round tops marked with gummy spots and rings. There was sawdust on the floor. Against the plaster walls hung a pair of sun-bleached lithographs entitled “The Birth of Venus” and “Diana’s Bath.” The two Freshmen seated themselves at a table. A negro in a stained apron, wiping sweat from his brow, came shuffling to take their orders.

Felix resented the vulgarity of his surroundings. Why was it that the first step in certain new experiences brought disillusionment, dissatisfaction, and disgust ?

“What will you have?”

The boy glanced furtively at the lounger by the bar.

“Beer,” he said, with a careless air.

He raised his glass, buried his lips in foam, and took a long drink. He had an instant of intense surprise. Setting down his glass empty, he looked round thoughtfully.

“By George! You must be thirsty!”

Felix stared seriously at the other, without replying.

Some students passing by noticed the two emerge from the saloon. Departing arm in arm with his companion, Felix gave them a proud glance.

Neither youth confessed to the other that he had just learned something new.

Felix soon found his friends, the sons of rich parents, jolly, full of spirit, eager to try their wings. They lived in expensive style, drove automobiles breakneck along the country roads, went walking with a swarm of dogs about them, kept polo ponies, had liquor cases in their “studies” and actresses’ pictures on their dressing-tables. Their evenings — when other, earnest-faced young men were making play with eye-shades and lexicons in private — they spent round smoky tables, where the crash of Rabelaisian choruses was emphasized by the clinking of pipe-stems on steins. Becoming sophisticated, finally they believed that they had little more to learn of “life.” They grew to detest their work; and, with delightful feelings of irresponsibility and freedom, evaded, day after day, the tedious routine of lecture-rooms.

In the June of his fourth year, shortly before examination time, suddenly Felix realized that all ii through his college course he had learned nothing well. Sitting up every night till morning with his books, he tried to do in two weeks the work of four years. In the still hours, while he bent beneath the lamp, all his past heedlessness — its charms grown stale — recurred to him, amazed him, filled him with remorse. Then recollecting himself, scanning his text-books afresh, he was aghast at his inability to grasp the meaning of whole chapters. He was thrown into a panic. He went to his examination hopeless. The examiners refused him a degree.

“Well, Tve learned my lesson,” Felix said to himself. He made resolutions. He came back the following fall, did all his last year’s work again, and finally was graduated among the young men whom, in Sophomore year, he had “hazed.”

One evening they sang their last song together, sitting on the grass beneath tall elms, the shadowy foliage of which was splashed here and there with the soft light of Chinese lanterns. A silver lovingcup went round; each, as he received it, stood up and drank from it, while the rest sang to him. Tears ran down their faces.

It was all finished. Felix went back to his rooms and found them stripped: the walls bare, the pictures in piles, the chairs full of ornaments and souvenirs, in the midst of the litter a servant packing trunks. What desolation! Returning to the campus, he wandered off to find some friends, dragging his feet, his eyes wet. He had never felt so before. It seemed to him that he was full of grief and experience.

Presently he found roaming about another sad young man — a poor student who had worked his way through college, who had never found time to make friends or to hunt pleasure, who had spent his four years in a small room with a bed, a wash-stand, a table, a coal-scuttle, a lamp, and a pile of secondhand books. In a cafe, where there was a dejected gathering of his friends, Felix presented himself with his arm across this young man’s shoulder. He felt that to be a fine gesture; he was touched by the thought: “ Sorrow, shared in common, levels all barriers.”

Felix was sent round the world. He saw strange seas and lands. On shipboard he awoke, sometimes, to find blowing through the open port-holes air as extraordinarily flavored as if enveloping another world. He perceived across water for the first time, yet with the inexplicable thrill of an old traveller returning after many years, minarets, pagodas, a Chinese junk, spider-like Malay catamarans. He became enamoured of strange perfumes, antipodal music, women so fantastically charming that they seemed unreal.

In those surroundings precious thoughts came to him, lingered just long enough to enchant him, and then were crowded out of his brain by more. He longed to save them all, to perpetuate them, to move others with them. Beside old ruins — amid the desolate alleyways of Pompeii, in the red trenches of buried Carthage, before the colossi on the Nile at that fleeting moment when the setting sun, touching the desert hills, turns green — he was tormented because his ecstasies were inexpressible. Closing his eyes, he felt the past renewed about him. Pompeii was alive again, full of white togas and bright shawls: the ivory spokes of chariots flashed in the lanes; the gladiators showed their huge bodies and brutal heads along the promenades ; delicate, black-haired women, with ear-rings dangling to their shoulders, went undulating under scarlet parasols; and at the street corners little, thin Greek girls blew plaintive tunes on flutes. He saw the tall pitch-covered palaces of Carthage risen afresh : the streets were full of camels, wild soldiers, and women in black robes with painted eyes; the images of gods, moving in procession, glittered above the heads of the barbaric crowd. The monuments beside the Nile were new and unscarred again, and in and out between the pillars of the temples stole the lean Egyptian priests, with flowers in their hands, the last of the sunlight flashing on their brown, shaven heads. Ah, to have such thoughts — which Felix considered very fine — and to be unable to disseminate them, to create with them in countless minds amazement, admiration, and respect! At last, on shipboard, he began struggling with pen and paper. But nothing looked the same on paper!

He was away a year, and came home “ greatly broadened.” He had received his education. What should now be done with him?

Sheridan Piers, rousing himself to interest, pondered this problem with Felix. They talked of a career in finance: it would be easy for the young man to obtain, through friends, an excellent position in Wall Street, with every chance of quick advancement. They discussed the advantages of law and of the diplomatic service.

“You see, you should do something, Felix,” the old man said vaguely, winking his washed-out eyes in his perplexity. “Most everybody does. I haven’t; but then they say that I’m ‘peculiar.’ And you know you don’t take much after me.”

They were, in fact, so far apart in temperament, that they had never possessed in common an important interest or understood each other. Sheridan Piers’s uncongeniality and sadness chilled the boy and had their effect inevitably on the home. The house was characteristic of the man who lived shut up in it: a place furnished, with faded richness, in an unaesthetic fashion obsolete for two decades, filled with the souvenirs of a departing generation, exhaling the odors of old things, dim, chilly, full of echoes, lonely. Felix had seen so many bright and joyous regions that he was unable to have affection for his home or a desire to inhabit it.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I’d do well in the diplomatic service.” And he pictured himself in some foreign capital : at brilliant garden parties, balls, and state dinners, surrounded by beautiful and gracious women, courtly soldiers in fine uniforms, grave diplomatists expert in repartee and cynicism — in a world out of story-books, where everything was exhilarating, gay, sumptuous, remote from gloom.

They decided that he was to “take his time and think it over.” Felix, while doing so, enjoyed himself— laughed, played, spent money, fell in love, got over that, glanced every day at some lesson of the sort not taught in books. Sheridan Piers, for his part, went on dreaming, regretting, thinking of his wife. Beginning to grow feeble, he imagined that he had all sorts of ailments. He complained of vertigo, tremors, and roaring in the ears. He thought, now and then, that he heard a voice calling him by name. He commenced to read the Bible.

One day Joseph, an old servant who had been with the family for thirty years, brought to his master a little, rusty, tin box, which he had found while rummaging an attic room. Sheridan Piers pried the box open. It contained a heap of tarnished trinkets, faded ribbons, dilapidated dance favors, newspaper clippings, a sheaf of yellow letters. It was a collection of his wife’s mementos.

A mist rose before the old man’s eyes; at first he could not bring himself to touch those objects which, long ago, she had used, cherished, and packed away with her own hands. After a while he drew from the box a coral necklace and a crumbling flower. Upon the brown leaf splashed a tear. Once she had held that blossom in her fingers; that necklace had been qjasped about her throat. He remembered it, and how she had looked while wearing it. His memory of her was of a beautiful young woman, fresh, radiant, redolent with a delicious sweetness.

Trembling with emotion, he began to read the letters.

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He did not know the handwriting. Each letter was signed simply with a “P.” All were dated “Paris,” where he and his wife had lived for several winters, where, at the death of his father in America, he had been forced to leave her for a few months. He remembered that year perfectly; it was the year of Felix’s birth.

But whom were these letters from?

He read some sentences. Written in French, they were exquisitely worded. They spoke of love. He realized that he was reading the love-letters of some other man, addressed to her.

He stared before him, without breathing, his face disfigured by apprehension. For a minute his hands trembled so that he could not continue reading.

Presently, rousing himself to action, he arranged all the letters in order, according to their dates. The correspondence had extended over a period of two years !

He commenced with the first letter. Cold all over, he read deliberately page after page. He was terrified by the elegance, the charm of each succeeding period. He had a sensation of faintness at seeing here expressed for her, with passionate fluency, such thoughts as even he had never had.

The letters began with protestations, entreaties, accusations of “cruelty.” But soon the anxious note in them gave place to an accent of assurance. Each page brought him nearer to the discovery he dreaded. Should he go on?

Soon he was reading of passed notes, kisses behind curtains and in carriages, subtle machinations and deceits, finally clandestine meetings. After all the years, her feminine reluctance to destroy those sentimental treasures, her woman’s yearning to keep by her all her dearest trophies had betrayed her.

He came to the letters that had been written while he was away. A terrible suspicion seized him.

Suffocating, he got up to raise a window. Suddenly he fell flat upon the floor, as if struck down with a club. Old Joseph found him there, lying amid the scattered letters.

To Sheridan Piers’s bedside came quickly two dignified physicians. With the impassive countenances of those who see, every day, tortured bodies struggling between life and death, attentively they watched the patient. Lying on his back, unconscious, with halfopened eyes, slowly puffing out his cheeks, he expelled his breath. They raised his eyelids, listened to the beating of his heart, felt his arteries with their long, flexible fingers, tapped his knee-caps, lifted one by one his arms and legs and let them fall. They put their heads together and decided that he had suffered a stroke of apoplexy.

“Well, Doctor, what would you say?”

“A hemorrhage of the interior capsule, Doctor, but not a fatal one. We have this time merely a paralysis of the left arm, extending to and including the pectoralis major. We can, I think, at a conservative estimate, give him a month for a partial recovery. We shall have then considerable debility, feebleness of the affected parts, and perhaps — remembering the i8 patient’s well-known past oddity of conduct — an increased eccentricity. As for the second shock, when it comes, he may survive it. But of course a third would finish him.”

They did everything necessary and departed.

When he recovered the use of his body, every one in the house observed that he was greatly changed. He would not see Felix; he spoke to none save Joseph; he sat alone in his room, huddled before the fireplace, staring at the flames. Every day he became more debilitated. The foundations of his existence had been struck from beneath him ; he was crumbling to pieces.

He could not keep his hands off the letters. He reread them, crushed them, tore them, hurled them from him. Then, gathering them up, he smoothed them out and pieced them carefully together. Poring over them, with bated breath, he thought of his betrayal by the woman who had been for him a divinity, imagined the secrets of her life, pictured to himself all that she had lived through without his knowledge — with another. It was as if it had just happened, for he had just discovered it.

He perused the clippings that he had found with the letters. They revealed the history of the man; all his public activity was reported in them. Of everything he had done in those days she had treasured these accounts. How she must have loved him — this stranger!

At last, in a frenzy of hatred, he hurled the tin box and its contents into the fire. The letters and the clippings burst into flames; the trinkets glowed and melted among the coals; the tin box crackled and twisted on a bed of ashes. When all was consumed, how he desired to have it back again!

Sometimes he called out her name, over and over, in reproach, till old Joseph came running to him. Then he was apt to believe that she was living, that they were in Paris, that she was planning with her lover to deceive him. “ Where are they to-night, Joseph ? You must hunt for them. Let me tell you : you’ll find them at a ball, in an alcove, behind some palms; or in the back of a box at the opera; or, if you hide on a street corner, you’ll see them coming home in a closed carriage with the horses walking. You’re to go up to the carriage window and whisper: 4 Mr. Piers wants to speak to you.’ That’ll surprise them; don’t you believe so? You know they think I’m very stupid.”

Finally he got the idea that Felix was involved in their deceit and that he must outwit the three of them. How could he do it ? He sat plotting by the hour, looking cautiously about him. He hit upon a plan.

He sent for a young broker who had been involved in some “shady” business in the past and of whom persons of integrity knew nothing edifying. Sheridan Piers received this man with a calm and plausible demeanor. He had attained the cunning of the demented.

“You see, Mr. Noon, I’m afraid I haven’t long to live, and before I die I want to make considerable changes in the disposition of my property. If you undertake my affair, you’ll find it a large one. But I shall have my work done very quietly. No gossiping. There are some, you know, who think a man has no right to do what he wants with his own money.”

The broker, looking down, smiled deprecat ingly.

Sheridan Piers sold all his outlying real estate. He disposed of all his stocks. He borrowed, quietly, as much money as would equal the value of his house, his stable, and their contents. Little by little, withdrawing his deposits from the banks, he accumulated his whole fortune in his house without any one knowing that he had it there. One evening he had a hot fire kindled in his room. He locked himself in and paid no attention when the whole household besought him to come out.

At midnight Felix sent for a physician.

They broke into the room. They found the old man standing, with a blank face, beside the fireplace, which was choked with ashes. He could not recognize anybody, and took his physician for the man who, twenty-five years before, had wronged him. At this hallucination he had another “ stroke.”

He died in a few hours. Before the end, to Felix, who bent over him, he whispered significantly:

“You’re to look to them hereafter, d’you understand?”

He had destroyed his fortune, leaving nothing.

Felix, in distraction, rushed off to the family’s lawyer.

When that gentleman appreciated the disaster, at once he took thought for his reputation. Malicious persons would say that he was to blame for not having long since deprived his client of power to transact his business. Looking at Felix thoughtfully, he asked the miserable young man:

“Who knows about this destruction of the property besides you?”

“Joseph.”

“Ah, we can depend on him! Now, of course, it must go no farther — it’s too shocking. We can’t make the family name notorious with such an extraordinary tale. I’m your father’s executor, and in his last will everything is left to you. You and I will appear to go over the estate together. We shall find that it was ‘greatly overestimated’ — you understand me? That will do for the present. A year from now there will be no public interest. That’s the way to fix it!”

The lawyer, though not troubled ordinarily by conscience, felt some responsibility in this affair. He was just then on the point of setting out for a vacation in the woods. It occurred to him that it would be a generous act to take Felix along with him. Before he went he saw the house and its contents sold, to pay the debts that Sheridan Piers had contracted. When he and the boy set out, Felix had nothing left but fifteen hundred dollars, his balance at the bank.

In a fishing camp at the edge of a great forest, where the clear air was sweet with the odor of sprucetrees, where loons laughed in mid-lake and deer came down to drink and the cool nights were made beautiful by northern lights, finally the boy conquered his dismay. Plied with encouragement and good advice, he became almost philosophical. At twenty-five the greatest sorrows are not poignant for long, the greatest losses soon cease to seem irreparable. Youth, instead of repining, looks always forward. Felix turned his eyes toward the future.

He had decided what he was going to do. It seemed to him now that all through his life every inclination and predilection of his had been urging him toward one vocation. With feelings of calmness and of assurance, as if he had solved at last the meaning of all his spiritual cravings and emotions, he contemplated his career. He intended to become “a famous writer.,,

Late in the evening, when, on the luminous waters of the lake, islands and peninsulas seemed like mysterious, long shadows suspended in mid-air, Felix, looking with awe into the spangled sky, felt in himself illimitable possibilities. The solitude, the hush, the swimming vagueness of the lake, the solemnity of the bright heavens ennobled him. It was as if a strange soul, finer than his own, possessed him. For the moment, so ethereal were all his sensations that no heights seemed unattainable. Exalted by superb aspirations, he dreamed of the future, which appeared before him like a bright mist, glittering resplendently.