The Three Fates 3
Enough has been said to define and explain the character and life of the
young man whose history this book is to relate. He himself was far from
being conscious of all his virtues, faults, and capabilities. He neither
knew his own energy nor was aware of the hidden enthusiasm which was
only just beginning to make itself felt as a vague, uneasy longing for
something that should surpass ordinary things. He did not know that he
possessed singular talents as well as unusual defects. He had not even
begun to look upon life as a problem offered him for solution, and upon
his own heart as an object for his own study. He scarcely felt that he
had a heart at all, nor knew where to look for it in others. His life
was not happy, and yet he had not tasted the bitter sources of real
unhappiness. He was oppressed by his surroundings, but he could not have
told what he would have done with the most untrammelled liberty. He
despised money, he worked for a pittance, and yet he secretly longed for
all that money could buy. He was profoundly attached to his father, and
yet he found the good man’s company intolerable. He shrank from a
society in which he might have been a welcome guest, and yet he dreamed
of playing a great part in it some day. He believed himself cynical when
he was in reality quixotic, his idols of gold were hidden behind images
of clay, and he really cared little for those things which he had
schooled himself to admire the most. He fancied himself a critic when he
was foredestined by his nature and his circumstances to become an object
of criticism to others. He forced his mind to do what it found least
congenial, not acting in obedience to any principle or idea of duty, but
because he was sure that he knew his own abilities, and that no other
path lay open to success. He was in the darkest part of the transition
which precedes development, for he was in that period during which a man
makes himself imagine that he has laid hold on the thread of the future,
while something he will not heed warns him that the chaos is wilder than
ever before. In the dark hour before manhood’s morning he was journeying
resolutely away from the coming dawn.
CHAPTER II.
“It is very sad,” observed Mrs. Sherrington Trimm, thoughtfully. “Their
mother died in London last autumn, and now they are quite alone—nobody
with them but an aunt, or something like that—poor girls! I am so glad
they are rich, at least. You ought to know them.”
“Ought I?” asked the visitor who was drinking his tea on the other side
of the fireplace. “You know I do not go into society.”
“The girls go nowhere, either. They are still in mourning. You ought to
know them. Who knows, you might marry one or the other.”
“I will never marry a fortune.”
“Do not be silly, George!”
The relationship between the two speakers was not very close. George
Winton Wood’s mother had been a second cousin of Mrs. Sherrington
Trimm’s, and the two ladies had not been on very friendly terms with
each other. Moreover, Mrs. Trimm had nothing to do with old Jonah Wood,
the father of the young man with whom she was now speaking, and Jonah
Wood refused to have anything to do with her. Nevertheless she called
his son by his first name, and the latter usually addressed her as
“Cousin Totty.” An examination of Mrs. Sherrington Trimm’s baptismal
certificate would have revealed the fact that she had been christened
Charlotte, but parental fondness had made itself felt with its usual
severity in such cases, and before she was a year old she had been
labelled with the comic diminutive which had stuck to her ever since,
through five and twenty years of maidenhood, and twenty years more of
married life. On her visiting cards, and in her formal invitations she
appeared as Mrs. Sherrington Trimm; but the numerous members of New York
society who were related to her by blood or marriage, called her “Totty”
to her face, while those who claimed no connection called her “Totty”
behind her back; and though she may live beyond three score years and
ten, and though her strength come to sorrow and weakness, she will be
“Totty” still, to the verge of the grave, and beyond, even after she is
comfortably laid away in the family vault at Greenwood.
After all, the name was not inappropriate, so far at least, as Mrs.
Trimm’s personal appearance was concerned; for she was very smooth, and
round, and judiciously plump, short, fair, and neatly made, with pretty
little hands and feet; active and not ungraceful, sleek but not sleepy;
having small, sharp blue eyes, a very obliging and permanent smile, a
diminutive pointed nose, salmon-coloured lips, and perfect teeth. Her
good points did not, indeed, conceal her age altogether, but they
obviated all necessity for an apology to the world for the crime of
growing old; and those features which were less satisfactory to herself
were far from being offensive to others.
She bore in her whole being and presence the stamp of a comfortable
life. There is nothing more disturbing to society than the forced
companionship of a person who either is, or looks, uncomfortable, in
body, mind, or fortune, and many people owe their popularity almost
solely to a happy faculty of seeming always at their ease. It is certain
that neither birth, wealth, nor talent will of themselves make man or
woman popular, not even when all three are united in the possession of
one individual. But on the other hand they are not drawbacks to social
success, provided they are merely means to the attainment of that
unobtrusively careless good humour which the world loves. Mrs.
Sherrington Trimm knew this. If not talented, she possessed at all
events a pedigree and a fortune; and as for talent, she looked upon
culture as an hereditary disease peculiar to Bostonians, and though not
contagious, yet full of danger, inasmuch as its presence in a
well-organised society must necessarily be productive of discomfort. All
the charm of general conversation must be gone, she thought, when a
person appeared who was both able and anxious to set everybody right.
She even went so far as to say that if everybody were poor, it would be
very disagreeable to be rich. She never wished to do what others could
not do; she only aimed at being among the first to do what everybody
would do by and by, as a matter of course.
Mrs. Trimm’s cousin George did not understand this point of view as yet,
though he was beginning to suspect that “Totty and her friends”—as he
generally designated society—must act upon some such principle. He was
only five and twenty years of age, and could hardly be expected to be in
the secrets of a life he had hitherto seen as an outsider; but he
differed from Totty and her friends in being exceedingly clever,
exceedingly unhappy, and exceedingly full of aspirations, ambitions,
fancies, ideas, and thoughts; in being poor instead of rich, and,
lastly, in being the son of a man who had failed in the pursuit of
wealth, and who could not prove even the most distant relationship to
any one of the gentlemen who had signed the Declaration of Independence,
fought in the Revolution, or helped to frame the Constitution of the
United States. George, indeed, possessed these ancestral advantages
through his mother, and in a more serviceable form through his
relationship to Totty; but she, on her part, felt that the burden of his
cleverness might be too heavy for her to bear, should she attempt to
launch him upon her world. Her sight was keen enough, and she saw at a
glance the fatal difference between George and other people. He had a
habit of asking serious questions, and of saying serious things, which
would be intolerable at a dinner-party. He was already too strong to be
put down, he was not yet important enough to be shown off. Totty’s
husband, who was an eminent lawyer, occasionally asked George to dine
with him at his club, and usually said when he came home that he could
not understand the boy; but, being of an inquiring disposition, Mr.
Trimm was impelled to repeat the hospitality at intervals that gradually
became more regular. At first he had feared that the dark, earnest face
of the young man, and his grave demeanour, concealed the soul of a
promising prig, a social article which Sherrington Trimm despised and
loathed. He soon discovered, however, that these apprehensions were
groundless. From time to time his companion gave utterance to some
startling opinion or freezing bit of cynicism which he had evidently
been revolving in his thoughts for a long time, and which forced Mr.
Trimm’s gymnastic intelligence into thinking more seriously than usual.
Doubtless George’s remarks were often paradoxical and youthfully wild,
but his hearer liked them none the less for that. Keen and successful in
his own profession he scented afar the capacity for success in other
callings. Accustomed by the habits and pursuits of his own exciting life
to judge men and things quickly, he recognised in George another mode of
the force to which he himself owed his reputation. To lay down the law
and determine the precise manner in which that force should be used, was
another matter, and one in which Sherrington Trimm did not propose to
meddle. More than once, indeed, he asked George what he meant to do in
the world, and George answered, with a rather inappropriate look of
determination that he believed himself good for nothing, and that when
there was no more bread and butter at home he should doubtless find his
own level by going up long ladders with a hod of bricks on his shoulder.
Mr. Trimm’s jovial face usually expressed his disbelief in such theories
by a bland smile as he poured out another glass of wine for his young
guest. He felt sure that George would do something, and George, who got
little sympathy in his life, understood his encouraging certainty, and
was grateful.
Mrs. Trimm, however, shared her cousin’s asserted convictions about
himself so far as to believe that unless something was done for him, he
might actually be driven to manual labour for support. She assuredly had
no faith in general cleverness as a means of subsistence for young men
without fortune, and yet she felt that she ought to do something for
George Wood. There was a good reason for this beneficent instinct. Her
only brother was chiefly responsible for the ruin that had overtaken
Jonah Wood, when George was still a boy, and she herself had been one of
the winners in the game, or at least had been a sharer with her brother
in the winnings. It is true that the facts of the case had never been
generally known, and that George’s father had been made to suffer
unjustly in his reputation after being plundered of his wealth; but Mrs.
Trimm was not without a conscience, any more than the majority of her
friends. If she loved money and wanted more of it, this was because she
wished to be like other people, and not because she was vulgarly
avaricious. She was willing to keep what she had, though a part of it
should have been George’s and was ill-gotten. She wished her brother,
Thomas Craik, to keep all he possessed until he should die, and then she
wished him to leave it to her, Charlotte Sherrington Trimm. But she also
desired that George should have compensation for what his father had
lost, and the easiest and least expensive way of providing him with the<
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