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"He was only nineteen years old, and he was one of the first on the beach after the order to cross to the customhouse. He lived over on Forquier Street, one of the men was telling me there are six of them, the guard of honor for him, on the train and his name was Isador Framberg. He was born in Russia, too, in Kiev, the place of the massacres, you remember. See, dad, here comes the guard!"
On the day before Isador Framberg's body was brought back to Chicago from Vera Cruz, James Thorold's appointment as ambassador to Forsland was confirmed by the Senate of the United States. Living, Isador Framberg might never have wedged into the affairs of nations and the destinies of James Thorold. Marines in the navy do not intrigue with chances of knee-breeches at the Court of St. Jerome.
The spirit does not die, but it's a stream that goes underground to come up, a clear spring, in unexpected places. My father died in Mexico. I failed my country. And Isador Framberg dies at Vera Cruz." "For our country," the boy said bitterly. "And his own," his father added. "For him, for his people, for all these who walk in darkness Abraham Lincoln died.
More than miles lie between Forquier Street and the Lake Shore Drive. Dead, Isador Framberg became, as dead men sometimes become, the archangel of a nation, standing with flaming sword at the gateway to James Thorold's paradise. For ten years the Forsland embassy had been the goal of James Thorold's ambition.
Jerome were not chosen from Chicago every day, he reasoned, finding Isador Framberg already the fly in the amber of his contentment. To change the current of his thought he read over Peter's telegram, smiling at the exuberant message of joy in which the boy had vaunted the family glory.
He might even have seen the shadow of another bier cast upon the retina of his father's sight. He might have seen through his father's watching the memory of another man who had once lain on the very spot where Isador Framberg was lying, a man who had died for his country after he had lived to set his country among the free nations of the earth.
The gates, sliding back, opened the way for the officers who led the procession with which Isador Framberg came back to the city of his adoption.
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