Gwynne found few letters awaiting him; he had not encouraged correspondence, and only his mother, Flora Thangue, and his solicitors knew his address. It had been announced and reiterated in London that he was making a tour of the world. During the first month of his absence Lady Victoria had sent him a large bundle of clippings from newspapers, some acid in comment upon his obvious intention of neglecting his duties as a peer of the realm, his fruitless exposure of a chagrin at an elevation in which he would find more and more consolation as time went on. A few were sympathetic. Others went so far as to indicate a program in which he might serve his country with modesty, if not with the scintillations of the free-lance; and reminded him that peers had risen to the post of prime-minister ere this, of viceroy, lord-lieutenant, governor-general, and ambassador. Then, apparently, they dismissed him. The fiscal question was acute. Dissolution threatened. There were bright particular stars still in both parties, and the press and public had enough to do with sitting in judgment upon their respective rays.
In the two letters from his mother, written at Homburg, there was no news beyond the letting of the properties and a bulletin of her health, which promised an imminent fitness for travel. His solicitors wrote that the income from the two estates was ample to keep the numerous women of the family in comfort, and leave a surplus which should be paid to his mother, according to his directions. This, with the southern ranch and the San Francisco property, should yield her an income of two thousand five hundred pounds a year. The confidential member of the firm hinted that if his lordship found means of increasing her ladyship's income in that land of gold and plenty it would be wise to do so, as her ladyship knew less than nothing of economy and was even more deeply in debt than usual.
He missed Flora's gay letter of gossip, and looked with narrowing lids at the pile of newspapers. None had been sent him before, and he had left not a subscription behind him; but it was evident that his mother and Flora were under the mistaken impression that he would welcome this greeting in his new home. They had accumulated for a month. He recognized the type of the leading dailies, and could guess the names of the numerous illustrated weeklies. Suddenly he took them in his arms and walked quickly over to the stove, his eye roving in search of a match-box. But even as he stooped he rose again, and, blushing for his weakness, carried them back to the table, tore them open with nervous haste. He skimmed the great pages of the dailies from start to finish, telling himself that he must have a breath from home, news from authoritative sources, stated in excellent English; sickened with the knowledge that he was but searching eagerly for a word of himself; sickening more when he found none. Then he fell upon the weeklies, his eye glancing indifferently from the paragraphs and presentments of the royal and the engaged, but scanning every personality. He had had one rival and there was much of him.
Before he had finished the third his struggling pride conquered. He gathered the heap and flung it into a corner, then caught up his hat and struck out for the loneliest part of the ranch. He writhed in the throes of disappointment, jealousy, disgust of self. He attempted consolation by picturing all the other ambitious men he knew exhibiting a similar weakness and vanity when there was no eye to see. His imagination did not rise to marvellous feats—and what if it did not? He had never aspired to be in the same class with other men.
The bitter tide receded only to give place to apprehension. His temperament was mercurial, balanced by a certain languor in the earlier stages of emotion, and there had been little to depress his spirit during those thirty years when all the fairies had danced attendance on him; even defeat had but intoxicated his fighting instinct and given another excuse for flattery and encouragement. During the eleven months since he had left England he had experienced neither encouragement nor flattery. He could not recall having made a profound impression upon any of his casual acquaintances; he certainly had created no sensation. It was true that his r鬺e had been that of the listener, the student, but he had so long accepted himself as a personality, as the most remarkable of England's younger productions, that he had been deeply mortified more than once at the cavalier treatment of middle-aged business men with no time to waste upon a young Britisher of no possible use to them.
To-day he boldly faced the haunting doubt if he were really a great man; if his success in England, as well as his phenomenal self-confidence, had not been merely the result of an inordinate ambition fed by fortuitous circumstances. He recalled that from childhood his grandfather and his mother had practically decreed that the bright, lovable, mischievous boy was to be a great man; that as he grew older the entire family connection joined the conspiracy. It is easy enough to believe in yourself when the world believes in you, and easy enough to make the world take you at your own valuation when you have a powerful backing, a reasonable amount of cleverness, a sublime audacity, the power of speech, and a happy series of accidents. Were all great men two-thirds accidental or manufactured? He felt inclined to believe it, but while it soothed his torn and throbbing pride, it by no means lessened his apprehension.
Was he not a great man, even so? He felt anything but a great man at the moment. He recalled that he had indulged in few lapses into complacency since his departure incognito from England, and that he had deliberately held self-analysis at bay by incessant travel and a compulsory interest in subjects that did not appeal to him in the least. It was this absence of interest after close upon a year in the country that appalled him as much as his inner visioning. He hated the country. He hated its politics, both parties impartially. He hated all the questions that absorbed the American mind, from graft to negroes. He had sat in the Congressional galleries in Washington, attended political meetings wherever he could obtain admittance, studied the press in even the smaller towns, travelled through the South and relieved himself of whatever abstract sympathy he may have cherished for the colored race, visited the sweat-shops of New York, the meat-packing establishments of Chicago, the factories of New England, every phase of the great civilization he knew of; and while he found much to admire and condemn, both left him evenly indifferent. With all his soul he longed for England. She might have her selfishness and her snobberies, lingering taints in her political system, but she stood at the apex of civilization, and her very faults were interesting; far removed from the brazen crudities of the New World's struggle for wealth and power. And although the blood of reformers was in his veins, and in his secret soul he was an idealist to the point of knight-errantry, the desire for reform had ebbed out of him during his American exile. And he knew the fate of a good many American reformers. There were several in high places at present, cheerfully trimmed down from the statesman to the political ideal. Julia Kaye—clever woman!—had put the matter into an epigram. The American statesman was the superior politician.
And how was he, out of tune with every phase of the country, to find the ghost of an opportunity to lead it? He was no actor. If he had a merit it was sincerity, a contempt for subterfuge as beneath both his powers and the lofty position to which he had been born. Moreover, he was honest; an equally aristocratic failing and drawback.
He recalled a conversation he had held in the smoking-compartment of a Pullman with a sharp young politician, who had become voluble after Gwynne had "stood him" two high-balls.
"It's graft or quit," he had announced. "All this cleaning up in insurance and what not, all this talk of curbing the trusts and the rest of it don't fool yours truly one little bit. It's just the ins trying to get ahead of the outs. It's not the honestest or the best man that gets there in God's own country, but the smartest—every time. Those that are crying the loudest against the grafters are just waiting for a chance to graft good and hard themselves. I am, and I don't care who knows it. Only I don't waste any strength kicking. The labor party works itself up over trusts and capitalists, and most of the capitalists come out of that factory, and are the first to grind those left behind them, under both heels. They know what I know, and what you'll know before you get through, that the only fun in life is to be got out of power and money."
The face as sharp as a razor but by no means dishonest rose before Gwynne. He had been a very decent little chap, and in the two days they had travelled together he had displayed a photograph of his wife and "kids," to whom he seemed even sentimentally devoted. Although Gwynne had parted from the man with satisfaction it was impossible to despise him utterly. Since then he had met many of his kind, more or less honest, able, pettily ambitious, fairly educated, unlearned on every subject except politics and the general business of the country; and all equally unsympathetic. He made no pretence to judge the country on its social or intellectual side, for he had been forced to avoid all groups that might have enlightened him—although he found no difficulty in assuming that well-bred and intellectual people were much the same the world over, and was willing to give the United States the benefit of every doubt. But its obvious side was the one that concerned him and his career. In order to succeed—and without success life would mean less than nothing to him—must he in a measure conform to conditions that were the result of a century of complexities? He recurred to the dry biographical sketches he had received, from certain of his travelling companions, of the most distinguished—and successful!—men in American politics to-day. Their ideals and their zeal for reform had played between horizon and zenith like a flaming sword, so compelling the attention of all that would pause to look that the diminishing effulgence had been even more conspicuous; and now, although the sword was occasionally brandished for form's sake, and was even sharper than before, having learned to cut both ways, it had the rust of tin not of blood on it, and deceived no one. But it had served its purpose—if to be sure it had been needed at all—and its owners were past-masters of success. Had he in him the makings of the mere trimmer and politician, in addition to the miserable vanity that had riven him to-day? And would some measure of great success won on those lines stir the dormant greatness in him?—if there were any greatness to stir. This was the fearful doubt, after all, that beset him. He almost saw with his outer vision his ideals lying in a tumbled heap, as he felt himself on the point of crying aloud that to feel once more that sense of power which had exalted him above mere mortals, and given him an ecstasy of spirit that no other passion could ever excite, he would sacrifice everything, everything!
He paused abruptly and looked about him. He was half-way up the mountain. The great valley, that looked as if it might embrace the State itself, lay before him. North and south the scenery was magnificent, ethereal in the distance, melting everywhere into one of those lovely mists that seem to have extracted the spiritual essence of all the colors. But the very beauty of his new domain added to the sense of unreality, of uneasiness, that had so often possessed him since he had crossed the borders of the State. And it was all on such a colossal scale. There could never be anything friendly, anything possessing, in a land destined for a race of primeval giants. He felt so passionate a longing for the sweet embracing historied landscapes of England that the very violence of the nostalgia drove him homeward with the half-formed intention of taking the first train for New York and the first steamer out of it. Moreover, he was suddenly obsessed with the belief that if he had greatness in him England alone held its magnet.
But it was a long walk to his house, and he reached it late in the afternoon, very tired and very hungry. When he entered his comfortable living-room, redolent of flowers, he received something like a shock of peace, and after he had taken a cold bath, he cursed himself roundly for permitting the mixed blood in his veins to contrive at times the temperament of an artist or of some women. As he sat down to a more than palatable supper, he felt thankful that he had had it out with himself so early in the engagement, and thought it odd if the Anglo-Saxon in him could not drive rough-shod over his weaker outcroppings.