That letter was the last his mother ever sent him. It had been a consolation to him that before death summoned her, she had at least read his reply, assuring her of his determination to maintain his integrity in all circumstances.
"You say truly," he wrote, "that I never surrender a purpose or fail to carry it out. Reflect, mother dear, that the strongest purpose I ever had is this--to preserve my character. I will not fail to find means for that when the time comes, as I never fail to accomplish objects of less moment."
"The prophecy of the dear old mother is fulfilled," he muttered, while his nails buried themselves in his unconscious palms. "The time she foresaw has come, and I have committed suicide. Thank God the mother did not live to see! Thank God her vision was no clearer! She had hope for me at least. She did not _know_."
As he called up pictures there in the dark, Edgar Braine saw himself a little country boy in Southern Indiana, growing strong in the sweet, wholesome air of the river and the hills, and torturing his young mind with questions to which he could not comprehend the answers.
At first his questioning had to do with nature, whose wonders lay around him. He wanted to know of the river. Whence it came, and how; he asked Wherefore, of the hills; he made friends of all growing things, and companions of those that had conscious life.
Then came his father's death to turn his mind into new and darker chambers of inquiry, and for a time he brooded, disposed, in loyalty to that wisdom which age assumes, to accept the conventional dogmas given to him by the ignorance about him, as explanations of the mysteries, but unable to conceal their absurdity from a mind whose instinct it was to stand face to face with Doubt and to compel Truth to lift her mask of seeming.
The loneliness of his life was good for him for a time. It taught him to find a sufficient companionship in his own mind--a lesson which all of us need, but few learn. But the time came when his wise mother saw the necessity of a change, and, scant as her resources were, she took him to the little city of Jefferson, where the schools were good and companionship was to be found.
The city was at that time a beautiful corpse. It had just died, and had not yet become conscious of the fact. Ten or fifteen years before, a railroad running from the State capital had made its terminus at Jefferson, making the river town the one outlet of the interior. A great tide of travel passed through the place, and a large trade centred there. But the course of railroad development which gave the city life, destroyed it later. Other railroads were built through the interior to other river outlets, and Cincinnati and Louisville took to themselves what had been Jefferson's prosperity.