That was Mose Harbell's idea of humor. It was not Braine's idea of humor at all, and so Mose was greeted with the harshest reproof he had ever received in his life when he next met his chief. He accepted it "genially."
Having sent out the offending paragraph, Mose went out himself to gather river news, and such gossip as he might, concerning the genial folk of Thebes.
Then Abner Hildreth entered the office, and for two hours was closeted with Braine.
Then Braine committed suicide.
Then he wrote his own obituary, to be printed in that evening's Enterprise.
Then he went supperless to his room over a store, where he paced the floor till dawn.
Then began the man's extraordinary career.
II
When Braine returned to his bare little room after his suicide, he was in a strange, paradoxical mood. His thought was intensely introspective, and yet, with a whimsical perversity, his mind seemed specially alert to external objects, and full of fantastic imaginings concerning them.
The bareness of the room impressed him, and he likened it to a cell in some prison.
"Never mind," he said to himself, "I may have to sleep in a cell some time, and the habit of living here will come handy."
Then, with a little laugh, in which there was no trace of amusement, he stood before his desk, and added:
"But I believe they don't put strips of worn out carpet by the prison beds; and I never heard of a cell having a desk in it surmounted by empty collar-boxes for pigeon holes. Let me see – six times five are thirty. What an extravagant fellow I have been, to use up thirty boxes of paper collars in a year! Ten in a box, that's three hundred – almost one a day! I might have done with half the number by turning them, as I had to do at college before paper collars came in. Psha!" and he seemed to spurn the trivial reverie from him as a larger recollection surged up in his mind, and he began to pace the little room again with the purposeless tramp of a caged wild beast, whose memory of the forest is only a pained consciousness that it is his no more.
The June twilight faded into darkness, and the evening gave place to midnight, but the ghost-walk went ceaselessly on.
In those hours of agonizing thought, the young man – to be young no more henceforth – recalled every detail of his life with a vividness which tortured him. He was engaged, unwillingly, in obedience to a resistless impulse, in searching out the roots of his own character, and finding out what forces had made him such as he knew himself to be.
In the process he learned, for the first time, precisely what sort of man he really was. He saw his own soul undressed, and contemplated its nakedness. One's soul is an unusual thing to see en déshabillé, and not always a pleasing one.
He remembered a letter his mother had written him at college – that mother of half Scotch descent, and touched with Scottish second-sight, who had silently studied his character from infancy, and learned to comprehend it not without fear. He could repeat the letter word for word. It had given him his first hint that he had a character, and a duty to do with respect to it. He had cherished the missive for years, and had read it a thousand times for admonition. Alas! how poor a thing is admonition after all!
"There is one danger point in your character, my son" – he recalled the very look of the cramped words on the page of blue-ruled letter paper – "where I have kept watch since you lay in my arms as a baby, and where you must keep watch hereafter. You have high aims and strong convictions, and you mean to do right. You will never be led astray by others – you are too obstinate for that. If you ever go astray, you must take all the blame on your own head.
"You are generous, and I never knew you to do a meanly selfish thing in your life. And yet your point of danger is selfishness of a kind. I have observed you from infancy, and this is what I have seen. Your desire to accomplish your purposes is too strong. You are not held back by any difficulty. You make any sacrifice in pursuit of your ends. You use any means you can find to carry your plans through, and you are quick at finding means, or making them when you want them.
"I was proud of the pluck you showed in doing almost a slave's work for two years, because you had made up your mind to go through college. But I shuddered at the thought of what such determination might lead to.
"Oh! my son, you will succeed in life. I have no fear of that. But how? Beware the time when your purpose is strong, your desire to succeed great, and the only means at command are dishonest and degrading. That time will come to you, be sure. When it comes you must make a hard choice – harder for you than for another. You will then sacrifice a purpose that it will seem like death to surrender – or you will commit moral suicide! I shall not live to see you so tried; but if I see you practise giving up a little and trying to keep guard at this weak place, I may learn before I die to think of that hour of your trial without the foreboding it gives me now."
That letter was the last his mother ever sent him. It had been a consolation to him that before death summoned her, she had at least read his reply, assuring her of his determination to maintain his integrity in all circumstances.
"You say truly," he wrote, "that I never surrender a purpose or fail to carry it out. Reflect, mother dear, that the strongest purpose I ever had is this – to preserve my character. I will not fail to find means for that when the time comes, as I never fail to accomplish objects of less moment."
"The prophecy of the dear old mother is fulfilled," he muttered, while his nails buried themselves in his unconscious palms. "The time she foresaw has come, and I have committed suicide. Thank God the mother did not live to see! Thank God her vision was no clearer! She had hope for me at least. She did not know."
III
As he called up pictures there in the dark, Edgar Braine saw himself a little country boy in Southern Indiana, growing strong in the sweet, wholesome air of the river and the hills, and torturing his young mind with questions to which he could not comprehend the answers.
At first his questioning had to do with nature, whose wonders lay around him. He wanted to know of the river. Whence it came, and how; he asked Wherefore, of the hills; he made friends of all growing things, and companions of those that had conscious life.
Then came his father's death to turn his mind into new and darker chambers of inquiry, and for a time he brooded, disposed, in loyalty to that wisdom which age assumes, to accept the conventional dogmas given to him by the ignorance about him, as explanations of the mysteries, but unable to conceal their absurdity from a mind whose instinct it was to stand face to face with Doubt and to compel Truth to lift her mask of seeming.
The loneliness of his life was good for him for a time. It taught him to find a sufficient companionship in his own mind – a lesson which all of us need, but few learn. But the time came when his wise mother saw the necessity of a change, and, scant as her resources were, she took him to the little city of Jefferson, where the schools were good and companionship was to be found.
The city was at that time a beautiful corpse. It had just died, and had not yet become conscious of the fact. Ten or fifteen years before, a railroad running from the State capital had made its terminus at Jefferson, making the river town the one outlet of the interior. A great tide of travel passed through the place, and a large trade centred there. But the course of railroad development which gave the city life, destroyed it later. Other railroads were built through the interior to other river outlets, and Cincinnati and Louisville took to themselves what had been Jefferson's prosperity.
And so when Edgar Braine first knew the town, it had lost its hold upon life, though it had not yet found out what had happened to it. The great rows of warehouses along the levee, with the legends "Forwarding and Commission," "Groceries at Wholesale Only," "Flour, Grain and Provisions," "Carriage Repository," and all the rest of it, staringly inscribed upon their outer walls, were empty now, and closed. In West Street, two only of the once great wholesale houses maintained a show of life. In one, an old man sat alone all day, and contemplated three bags of coffee and two chests of tea, for which no customer