E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
1922
I have seen the improbable turn true too often not to have it disturb me.Suppose these memoirs still exist when the French royalist plot of 1805and my father's peculiar role in it are forgotten. I cannot help butremember it is a restless land across the water. But surely people willcontinue to recollect. Surely these few pages, written with the solepurpose of explaining my father's part in the affair, will not degenerateinto anything so pitifully fanciful as the story of a man who tried hisbest to be a bad example because he could not be a good one.
It was my Uncle Jason who was with me when I learned of my father'sreturn to America. I still remember the look of sympathetic concern onhis broad, good-natured face, as I read my father's letter. There wasanxiety written there as he watched me, for my uncle was a kindly,thoughtful man. For the moment he seemed to have quite forgotten theaffairs of his counting house, and the inventory of goods from France,which a clerk had placed before him. Of late he had taken in me anunaccustomed interest, in no wise allayed by the letter I was holding.
"So he is here," said my Uncle Jason.
"He is just arrived," I answered.
"I had heard of it," he remarked thoughtfully. "And you will seehim, Henry?"
"Yes," I replied, "since she asked me to."
"She had asked you? Your mother? You did not tell me that." His voicehad been sharp and reproachful, and then he had sighed. "After all," hewent on more gently, "he is your father, and you must respect him assuch, Henry, hard as it is to do so. I am sorry, almost, that he and Ihave quarreled, for in many ways your father was a remarkable man whomight have gone far, except for his failing. God knows I did my best tohelp him."
And he sighed again at the small success of his efforts and returned tothe papers that lay before him on the counting house table. His businesshad become engrossing of late, and gave him little leisure.
"Do not be too hard on him, Henry," he said, as I departed.
It was ten years since I had seen my father, ten years when we changemore than we do during the rest of a lifetime. Ten years back we hadlived in a great house with lawns that ran down to the river where ourships pulled at their moorings. My father and I had left the housetogether—I for school, and my father—I have never learned where he hadgone. I was just beginning to see the starker outlines of a world thathas shaken off the shadows of youth when I saw him again.
I remember it was a morning early in autumn. The wind was fresh off thesea, making the pounding of the surf on the beach seem very near as Iurged my horse from the neat, quiet streets of the town up the ruttedlane that led to the Shelton house. The tang of the salt marshes was inthe wind, and a touch of frost over the meadows told me the ducks wouldsoon be coming in from shelter. Already the leaves were falling off thetall elms, twisting in little spirals through the clear October sunlight.
And yet, in spite of the wind and the sea and the clean light of theforenoon, there was a sadness about the place, and an undercurrent ofuneasy silence that the rustling of the leaves and the noise of the surfonly seemed to accentuate. It was like the silence that falls about atable when the guests