The Indian Drum by William MacHarg (classic english novels txt) 📕

"It was one of the great advantages of the West, I think—and particularly of Chicago at that time—that it gave opportunity for friendships of that sort," Sherrill said. "Corvet was a man of a sort I would have been far less likely ever to have known intimately in the East. He was both what the lakes had made him and what he had made of himself; a great reader—wholly self-educated; he had, I think, many of the attributes of a great man—at least, they were those of a man who should have become great; he had imagination and vision. His whole thought and effort, at that time, were absorbed in furthering and developing the traffic on the lakes, and not at all from mere desire for personal success. I met him for the first time one day when I went to his office on some business. He had just opened an office at that time in one of the old ramshackle rows along the river front; there was nothing at all pretentious about it—the contrary, in fact; but as I went in and waited with the others who were there to see him, I had the sense of being in the ante-room of a great man. I do not mean there was any idiotic pomp or lackyism or red tape about it; I mean that the others who were waiting to see him, and who knew him, were keyed up by the anticipation and keyed me up....

"I saw as much as I could of him after that, and our friendship became very close.

"In 1892, when I married and took my residence here on the lake shore—the house stood where this one stands now—Corvet bought the house on Astor Street. His only reason for doing it was, I believe, his desire to be near me. The neighborhood was what they call fashionable; neither Corvet nor Mrs. Corvet—he had married in 1889—had social ambitions of that sort. Mrs. Corvet came from Detroit; she was of good family there—a strain of French blood in the family; she was a schoolteacher when he married her, and she had made a wonderful wife for him—a good woman, a woman of very high ideals; it was great grief to both of them that they had no children.

"Between 1886, when I first met him, and 1895, Corvet laid the foundation of great success; his boats seemed lucky, men liked to work for him, and he got the best skippers and crews. A Corvet captain boasted of it and, if he had had bad luck on another line, believed his luck changed when he took a Corvet ship; cargoes in Corvet bottoms somehow always reached port; there was a saying that in storm a Corvet ship never asked help; it gave it; certainly in twenty years no Corvet ship had suffered serious disaster. Corvet was not yet rich, but unless accident or undue competition intervened, he was certain to become so. Then something happened."

Sherrill looked away at evident loss how to describe it.

"To the ships?" Alan asked him.

"No; to him. In 1896, for no apparent reason, a great change came over him."

"In 1896!"

"That was the year."

Alan bent forward, his heart throbbing in his throat. "That was also the year when I was brought and left with the Weltons in Kansas," he said.

Sherrill did not speak for a moment. "I thought," he said finally, "it must have been about that time; but you did not tell my daughter the exact date."

"What kind of change came over him that year?" Alan asked.

Sherrill gazed down at the rug, then at Alan, then past him. "A change in his way of living," he replied. "The Corvet line of boats went on, expanded; interests were acquired in other lines; and Corvet and those allied with him swiftly grew rich. But in all this great development, for which Corvet's genius and ability had laid the foundation, Corvet himself ceased to take active part. I do not mean that he formally retired; he retained his control of the business, but he very seldom went to the office and, except for occasional violent, almost pettish interference in the affairs of the company, he left it in the hands of others. He took into partnership, about a year later, Henry Spearman, a young man who had been merely a mate on one of his ships. This proved subsequently to have been a good business move, for Spearman has tremendous energy, daring, and enterprise; and no doubt Corvet had recognized these qualities in him before others did. But at the time it excited considerable comment. It marked, certainly, the beginning of Corvet's withdrawal from active management. Since then he has been ostensibly and publicly the head of the concern, but he has left the management almost entirely to Spearman. The personal change in Corvet at that time is harder for me to describe to you."

Sherrill halted, his eyes dark with thought, his lips, pressed closely together; Alan waited.

"When I saw Corvet again, in the summer of '96—I had been South during the latter part of the winter and East through the spring—I was impressed by the vague but, to me, alarming change in him. I was reminded, I recall, of a friend I had had in college who had thought he was in perfect health and had gone to an examiner for life insurance and had been refused, and was trying to deny to himself and others that anything could be the matter. But with Corvet I knew the trouble was not physical. The next year his wife left him."

"The year of—?" Alan asked.

"That was 1897. We did not know at first, of course, that the separation was permanent. It proved so, however; and Corvet, I know now, had understood it to be that way from the first. Mrs. Corvet went to France—the French blood in her, I suppose, made her select that country; she had for a number of years a cottage near Trouville, in Normandy, and was active in church work. I know there was almost no communication between herself and her husband during those years, and her leaving him markedly affected Corvet. He had been very fond of her and proud of her. I had seen him sometimes watching her while she talked; he would gaze at her steadily and then look about at the other women in the room and back to her, and his head would nod just perceptibly with satisfaction; and she would see it sometimes and smile. There was no question of their understanding and affection up to the very time she so suddenly and so strangely left him. She died in Trouville in the spring of 1910, and Corvet's first information of her death come to him through a paragraph in a newspaper."

Alan had started; Sherrill looked at him questioningly.

"The spring of 1910," Alan explained, "was when I received the bank draft for fifteen hundred dollars."

Sherrill nodded; he did not seem surprised to hear this; rather it appeared to be confirmation of something in his own thought.

"Following his wife's leaving him," Sherrill went on, "Corvet saw very little of any one. He spent most of his time in his own house; occasionally he lunched at his club; at rare intervals, and always unexpectedly, he appeared at his office. I remember that summer he was terribly disturbed because one of his ships was lost. It was not a bad disaster, for every one on the ship was saved, and hull and cargo were fully covered by insurance; but the Corvet record was broken; a Corvet ship had appealed for help; a Corvet vessel had not reached port.... And later in the fall, when two deckhands were washed from another of his vessels and drowned, he was again greatly wrought up, though his ships still had a most favorable record. In 1902 I proposed to him that I buy full ownership in the vessels I partly controlled and ally them with those he and Spearman operated. It was a time of combination—the railroads and the steel interests were acquiring the lake vessels; and though I believed in this, I was not willing to enter any combination which would take the name of Sherrill off the list of American shipowners. I did not give Corvet this as my reason; and he made me at that time a very strange counter-proposition—which I have never been able to understand, and which entailed the very obliteration of my name which I was trying to avoid. He proposed that I accept a partnership in his concern on a most generous basis, but that the name of the company remain as it was, merely Corvet and Spearman. Spearman's influence and mine prevailed upon him to allow my name to appear; since then, the firm name has been Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman.

"Our friendship had strengthened and ripened during those years. The intense activity of Corvet's mind, which as a younger man he had directed wholly to the shipping, was directed, after he had isolated himself in this way, to other things. He took up almost feverishly an immense number of studies—strange studies most of them for a man whose youth had been almost violently active and who had once been a lake captain. I cannot tell you what they all were—geology, ethnology, nearly a score of subjects; he corresponded with various scientific societies; he has given almost the whole of his attention to such things for about twenty years. Since I have known him, he has transformed himself from the rather rough, uncouth—though always spiritually minded—man he was when I first met him into an educated gentleman whom anybody would be glad to know; but he has made very few acquaintances in that time, and has kept almost none of his old friendships. He has lived alone in the house on Astor Street with only one servant—the same one all these years.

"The only house he has visited with any frequency has been mine. He has always liked my wife; he had—he has a great affection for my daughter, who, when she was a child, ran in and out of his home as she pleased. He would take long walks with her; he'd come here sometimes in the afternoon to have tea with her on stormy days; he liked to have her play and sing to him. My daughter believes now that his present disappearance—whatever has happened to him—is connected in some way with herself. I do not think that is so—"

Sherrill broke off and stood in thought for a moment; he seemed to consider, and to decide that it was not necessary to say anything more on that subject.

"Recently Corvet's moroseness and irritability had very greatly increased; he had quarreled frequently and bitterly with Spearman over business affairs. He had seemed more than usually eager at times to see me or to see my daughter; and at other times he had seemed to avoid us and keep away. I have had the feeling of late, though I could not give any actual reason for it except Corvet's manner and look, that the disturbance which had oppressed him for twenty years was culminating in some way. That culmination seems to have been reached three days ago, when he wrote summoning you here. Henry Spearman, whom I asked about you when I learned you were coming, had never heard of you; Mr. Corvet's servant had never heard of you....

"Is there anything in what I have told you which makes it possible for you to recollect or to explain?"

Alan shook his head, flushed, and then grew a little pale. What Sherrill told him had excited him by the coincidences it offered between events in Benjamin Corvet's life and his own; it had not made him "recollect" Corvet, but it had given definiteness and direction to his speculations as to Corvet's relation