"Oh, James, pray for grace to be a man once in your life and send her back
to us! Be a man--try to be a man! Remember the angel you killed! Remember
all we have done for you and what a return you have made, and be a man for
the first time. Try and be a man!
"Your unhappy sister-in-law, "MARTHA SHERWOOD."
Mr. Fisbee read the letter with a great, rising delight which no sense of
duty could down; indeed, he perceived that his sense of duty had ceased to
conflict with the one strong hope of his life, just as he perceived that
to be a man, according to Martha Sherwood, was, in part, to assist Martha
Sherwood to have her way in things; and, for the rest, to be the sort of
man she persuaded herself she would be were she not a woman. This he had
never been able to be.
By some whimsy of fate, or by a failure of Karma (or, perhaps, by some
triumph of Kismetic retribution), James Fisbee was born in one of the most
business-like and artless cities of a practical and modern country, of
money-getting, money-saving parents, and he was born a dreamer of the
past. He grew up a student of basilican lore, of choir-screens, of Persian
frescoes, and an ardent lounger in the somewhat musty precincts of Chaldea
and Byzantium and Babylon. Early Christian Symbolism, a dispute over the
site of a Greek temple, the derivation of the lotus column, the
restoration of a Gothic buttress--these were the absorbing questions of
his youth, with now and then a lighter moment spent in analytical
consideration of the extra-mural decorations of St. Mark's. The world
buzzed along after its own fashion, not disturbing him, and his
absorptions permitted only a faint consciousness of the despair of his
relatives regarding his mind. Arrived at middle-age, and a little more, he
found himself alone in the world (though, for that matter, he had always
been alone and never of the world), and there was plenty of money for him
with various bankers who appeared to know about looking after it.
Returning to the town of his nativity after sundry expeditions in Syria--
upon which he had been accompanied by dusky gentlemen with pickaxes and
curly, long-barrelled muskets--he met, and was married by, a lady who was
ambitious, and who saw in him (probably as a fulfilment of another
Kismetic punishment) a power of learning and a destined success. Not long
after the birth of their only child, a daughter, he was "called to fill
the chair" of archaeology in a newly founded university; one of the kind
which a State and a millionaire combine to purchase ready-made. This one
was handed down off the shelf in a more or less chaotic condition, and for
a period of years betrayed considerable doubt as to its own intentions,
undecided whether they were classical or technical; and in the settlement
of that doubt lay the secret of the past of the one man in Plattville so
unhappy as to possess a past. From that settlement and his own preceding
action resulted his downfall, his disgrace with his wife's relatives, the
loss of his wife, the rage, surprise, and anguish of her sister, Martha,
and Martha's husband, Henry Sherwood, and the separation from his little
daughter, which was by far to him the hardest to bear. For Fisbee, in his
own way, and without consulting anybody--it never occurred to him, and he
was supposed often to forget that he had a wife and child--had informally
turned over to the university all the money which the banks had kindly
taken care of, and had given it to equip an expedition which never
expedited. A new president of the institution was installed; he talked to
the trustees; they met, and elected to become modern and practical and
technical; they abolished the course in fine arts, which abolished
Fisbee's connection with them, and they then employed his money to erect a
building for the mechanical engineering department. Fisbee was left with
nothing. His wife and her kinsfolk exhibited no brilliancy in holding a
totally irresponsible man down to responsibilities, and they made a
tragedy of a not surprising fiasco. Mrs. Fisbee had lived in her
ambitions, and she died of heartbreak over the discovery of what manner of
man she had married. But, before she died, she wisely provided for her
daughter.