One of the Jests of Fate

by Tudor Jenks

One of the Jests of Fate

by Tudor Jenks

PEOPLE used to talk of business and of romance as if the two were in all ways opposed. Only of late years have poets and artists so far departed from the conventional as to find subjects for pen and pencil in the minor skirmishes of that great battle with inanimate things which in its entirety is known familiarly as "business." Kipling, in "McAndrew's Hymn," demonstrated that there was no impassable gulf between ancient poesy and modern engineering, and we may be sure that wherever mankind is engaged in the struggle against nature, or against his fellows, to secure for his loved ones that which will make their lives happy, there is the essence of romance, even though it be hidden behind the sordid phrase, "trying to make money."

In the numberless documents that have passed through or that remain filed in the Patent Office at Washington are stories as thrilling and as varied as the one which the genius of Charles Reade evoked from the dry chronicles telling of the life of the parents of the great Erasmus.

A pathetic little story has come to the writer of this, indirectly from the lips of General Leggett, who many years ago was a prominent patent lawyer, with offices in Cleveland, Ohio, and in Washington. He was a man of large practice, having business connections throughout our own country and Europe. He became known later in his life as the head of a great electric-light company, when that business was in the experimental stage. The incidents of the story were said by General Leggett to be found among the records in the Patent Office.

It is hard, lacking the genius of Charles Reade, to tell the incidents in such a way as to round them out and give them life, and I shall not attempt more than a brief suggestion of the outlines of the story, relying upon the reader's imagination to supply the details.

In a small town in Pennsylvania a young man made his living partly from a farm which he owned and partly from a small jewelery shop, exhibiting a few bits of old-fashioned jewelry interspersed among a number of cheap clocks and watches, such as might find purchaser in a small town. Inside, back of the little counter, was a work-bench, the tiny lathe, bits of watch-maker's materials covered by bell-glasses, the high stool and the jeweler's glass, the engraving-pad, and other tools of trade with which the old Swiss watchmakers began, and which remain the insignia of the good old craft wherever machinery ha not supplanted it.

But like many another man apparently immersed in the monotonous round of unchanging routine, this jeweler had his dreams and his ideals. It is true that they were connected closely with his trade. He does not seem to have been a man whose thoughts strayed far from the beaten path. He had been impressed by the high price which was charged for that fine pink powder known as a "jeweler's rouge." He had made inquiries of those who supplied him and found that it was not a manufactured but a natural substance. For a long time they could not inform him whence it came.

His curiosity was a roused, and out of his slender profits he sent for such books as he thought might inform him as to the source of supply. In his leisure hours he pursued the subject, until he had learned that in all the world there were only a few localities in which this precious rouge was to be found; hence the high price, for nothing else could give the same beautiful polish to articles of the precious metals and gems. Gradually he became overmastered by one ruling passion: he would discover a mine of rouge. This became to him the auri sacra fames.

Apparently he was not led to the quest by avarice, for the chances of success were remote. A long search was certain, and he could have no clue pointing to localities where the rouge might be found. It occurred, so his books told him, in isolated pockets, a few of which had been found in America "East of the Alleghenies," they said—and the finding of one brought no likelihood that then was another in the neighborhood. I do not know what this jeweler's rouge is; but it may be the remains of some prehistoric shellfish to be found where communities of the ancient shellfish happened to meet with a favorable environment.

At last the jeweler sold his shop and stock of goods, homestead and farm, to supply himself with the funds for his explorations. We may be sure that he had little hope of success, for he still retained prudence enough, or sentiment enough, to reserve from sale one portion of his farm-that in which was the burial-ground of his family. With all his other worldly to sessions converted into cash, this modern knight of commerce sailed for Europe, and there wandered for years among familiar and unfamiliar, accessible and inaccessible, localities that seemed to him likely to contain the object of his search.

We often hear of the total depravity of inanimate things; in the case of this knight errant, we shall find a new proof that there may be a diabolical nature at work among the ions that vibrate endlessly around us. The quest was neither a success nor a failure. As if some Mephistopheles had so placed the rouge as to lure him ever on, he came now and then upon little pockets of the precious material, but all too small to reward his efforts.

At length, disappointment or the exhaustion of his resources put an end to his mission. With the remnant of his wasted possessions he returned, broken-hearted, to the village where his only home was a burial lot, and like one crossed in love and disappointed in his life's object, he laid him down and died.

Then cam the last jeering smile of the mocking Mephistopheles, for when the grave was opened for his long rest, by the veriest irony of fate the trench prepared for his body proved to be an opening into the long-sought deposit of jeweler's rouge; and even worse, instead of being a small and unimportant pocket of the precious material, this proved to be of almost unlimited extent, and for years furnished the rare mineral in ample quantities. It was one of the pockets "East of the Alleghanies."