Either through the softening influence of the Thanksgiving festival upon litigious natures, or by reason of the relaxing reaction from over-feasting, it happened that no clients of any kind visited Reuben Tracy’s law office next day. He came down early enough to light his own fires in both the inner and outer rooms—an experience for which he had been prepared by long observation of the effect produced by holidays upon his clerk—and he sat for a couple of hours by the stove, with his feet on the table and a book in his lap, waiting for Horace Boyce to keep the appointment. The book was an old collection of Carlyle’s earlier essays, and Reuben liked it better, perhaps, than any other member of his library family. He had not read it through, and there was a good deal in it which he seemed likely never to read. But there were other portions, long since very familiar to his mind and eye, which it was his habit to go over again whenever he had nothing else to do. The rough, thought-compelling diction rested his brain, by some curious rule of paradox. In the front of the volume he had written, “Not new books, but good books,” an apothegm adapted from a preface of an old English play which had pleased him.
He was indolently ruminating on the wealth of epithet with which the portrait of Cagliostro is painted, when his expected visitor arrived. He laughed aloud at some whimsical conceit that this association of people suggested, and tossed the book aside as he rose.
“I’ve been killing time,” he said, still smiling, “by reading about the prize impostor of the eighteenth century. You know it?—The Diamond Necklace. I like to read it. For good, downright swindling and effrontery there’s nothing anywhere like that fellow.”
Horace glanced at the book as he shook hands and took off his overcoat. He said nothing, but made a mental note that Reuben had come to know about Carlyle after everybody else had ceased reading him.
The two young men sat down together, and their talk for the first hour or so was of business matters. Reuben made clear what his practice was like, its dimensions, its profits, and its claims upon his time. The railroad business had come to him through the influence of his old friend Congressman Ansdell, of Tecumseh, and was very important. The farmers in the vicinity, too, had brought him the bulk of their patronage in the matter of drawing deeds and mortgages—most frequently the latter, he was sorry to say—because he was a farmer’s son. This conveyancing work had grown to such proportions, and entailed such an amount of consultation, that he had been more and more crowded out from active court practice, which he was reluctant to abandon. This was his reason for thinking of a partner. Then the conversation drifted into discussion of Horace’s fitness for the place, and his proper share in the earnings of the firm. They went over for dinner to the Dearborn House, where Reuben lived, before this branch of the talk was concluded. Upon their return, over some cigars which Horace thought very bad, they made more headway, and arrived at an understanding satisfactory to both. Reuben printed the firm name of “Tracy & Boyce” on a blotter, to see how it would look, and Horace talked confidently of the new business which the long connection of his family with Thessaly would bring to them.
“You know, they’ve been here from the very beginning. My great-grandfather was county judge here as far back as 1796, almost the first one after the county was created. And his son, my great-uncle, was congressman one term, and assemblyman for years; and another brother was the president of the bank; and my grandfather was the rector of St. Matthew’s; and then my father being the best-known soldier Dearborn sent out during the war—what I mean is, all this ought to help a good deal. It’s something to have a name that is as much a part of the place as Thessaly itself. You see what I mean?”
Horace finished with an almost nervous query, for it had dawned upon him that his companion might not share this high opinion of the value of an old name and pedigree. Come to think of it, the Tracys were nobody in particular, and he glanced apprehensively at Reuben’s large, placid face for signs of pique. But there was none visible to the naked eye, and Horace lighted a fresh cigar, and put his feet up on the table beside those of his new partner.
“I daresay there’s something in that,” Reuben remarked after a time. “Of course there must be, and for that matter I guess a name goes for more in our profession than it does anywhere else. I suppose it’s natural for people to assume that jurisprudence runs in families, like snub-noses and drink.” As soon as he had uttered this last word, it occurred to him that possibly Horace might construe it with reference to his father, and he made haste to add:
“I never told you, I think, about my own career. I don’t talk about it often, for it makes a fellow sound like Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times—the chap who was always bragging about being a self-made man.”
“No; I’d like to hear about it,” said Horace. “The first I remember of you was at the seminary here.”
“Well, I was only fifteen years old then, and all the story I’ve got dates before that. I can just remember when we moved into this part of the world—coming from Orange County. My father had bought a small farm some fifteen miles from here, over near Tyre, and we moved onto it in the spring. I was about five. I had an older brother, Ezra, and two younger ones. There was a good deal of hard work to do, and father tried to do it all himself, and so by harvest time he was laid up; and the men who came and got in the crops on shares robbed us down to the ground. When winter came, father had to get up, whether he was well enough or not, and chop wood for the market, to make up for the loss on harvesting. One evening he didn’t come home, and the team was away all night, too, with mother never going to bed at all, and then before daybreak taking Ezra to carry a lantern, and starting through the drifts for our patch of woods. They found my father dead in the forest, crushed under a falling tree.
“I suppose it was a terrible winter. I only dimly remember it, or the summer that followed. When another winter was coming on, my mother grew frightened. Try the best she knew how, she was worse off every month than she had been the month before. To pay interest on the mortgage, she had to sell what produce we had managed to get in, keeping only a bare moiety for ourselves, and to give up the woodland altogether. Soon the roads would be blocked; there was not enough fodder for what stock we had, nor even food enough for us. We had no store of fuel, and no means of staving off starvation. Under stern compulsion, solely to secure a home for her boys, my mother married a well-to-do farmer in the neighborhood—a man much older than herself, and the owner of a hundred-acre farm and of the mortgages on our own little thirty acres.
“I suppose he meant to be a just man, but he was as hard as a steel bloom. He was a prodigious worker, and he made us all work, without rest or reward. When I was nine years old, narrow-chested and physically delicate, I had to get up before sunrise for the milking, and then work all day in the hay-field, making and cocking, and obliged to keep ahead of the wagon under pain of a flogging. Three years of this I had, and I recall them as you might a frightful nightmare. I had some stray schooling—my mother insisted upon that—but it wasn’t much; and I remember that the weekly paper was stopped after that because Ezra and I wasted too much time in reading it.
“Finally my health gave out. My mother feared that I would die, and at last gained the point of my being allowed to go to Tyre to school, if I could earn my board and clothes there. I went through the long village street there, stopping at every house to ask if they wanted a little boy to do chores for his board and go to school. I said nothing about clothes after the first few inquiries. It took me almost all day to find a place. It was nearly the last house in the village. The people happened to want a boy, and agreed to take me. I had only to take care of two horses, milk four cows, saw wood for three stoves, and run errands. When I lay awake in my new bed that night, it was with joy that I had found such a kind family and such an easy place!
“I went to school for a year, and learned something—not much, I daresay, but something. Then I went back to the farm, alternating between that and other places in Tyre, some better, some worse, until finally I had saved eight dollars. Then I told my mother that I was going to Thessaly seminary. She laughed at me—they all laughed—but in the end I had my way. They fitted me out with some clothes—a vest of Ezra’s, an old hat, trousers cut perfectly straight and much too short, and clumsy boots two sizes too big for me, which had been bought by my stepfather in wrath at our continual trouble in the winter to get on our stiffened and shrunken boots.
“I walked the first ten miles with a light heart. Then I began to grow frightened. I had never been to Thessaly, and though I knew pretty well from others that I should be well received, and even helped to find work to maintain myself, the prospect of the new life, now so close at hand, unnerved me. I remember once sitting down by the roadside, wavering whether to go on or not. At last I stood on the brow of the hill, and saw Thessaly lying in the valley before me. If I were to live a thousand years, I couldn’t forget that sight—the great elms, the white buildings of the seminary, the air of peace and learning and plenty which it all wore. I tell you, tears came to my eyes as I looked, and more than once they’ve come again, when I’ve recalled the picture. I remember, too, that later on in the day old Dr. Burdick turned me loose in the library, as it were There were four thousand books there, and the sight of them took my breath away. I looked at them for a long time, I know, with my mouth wide open. It was clear to me that I should never be able to read them all—nobody, I thought, could do that—but at last I picked ou............