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Updated: May 12, 2025
I changed my name to Thorold and started in business as an army contractor. I made money. The money that's made us rich, the money that's sending me to Forsland" a bitterness not in his voice before edged his mention of the embassy "came from that bounty that the provost marshal gave me."
The struggle was spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the funeral cortège of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine passage that brought him past the gates and under the glass dome of the train-shed.
They were the means by which Chicago had risen from the sand-flats of the fifties to the Michigan Avenue of the present, that wide street of the high skyline that fronted the world as it faced the Great Lakes, squarely, solidly, openly. They were the means, too, by which James Thorold had augmented his fortune until it had acquired the power to send him to Forsland.
That the fire held grapeshot for his father when he talked of the latter's worthiness for the ambassadorship to Forsland he could not guess; but he found that he was pouring salt in a wound when he went back to comment upon Isador Framberg's death.
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.
"I was so glad of Forsland yesterday. Through all these years I have told myself that, after all, I had done no great wrong. But sometimes, when the bands were playing and the flags were flying, I knew that I had turned away from the Grail after I had looked upon it. I knew it to-day when I stood beside that boy's coffin. I had said that times change. I know now that only the time changes.
Think of it!" he almost shouted. "Ambassador to Forsland! Say, but that's bully!" He slipped his arm around his father's shoulder, while James Thorold watched him with eyes that shone with joy. "What do you call an ambassador?" he demanded laughingly. "Fortunately," the older man said, "there is no title accompanying the office." "Well, I should think not," the boy exclaimed.
"Peter," he said huskily, "there's something you'll have to know before I go to Forsland if ever I go to Forsland. You'll have to decide." The boy shrank from the ominous cadence of the words. "Why, I can't judge for you, dad," he said awkwardly. "Our children are always our ultimate judges," James Thorold said.
Searchingly he stared into the face of the older man as Galahad might have gazed upon a sorrowing Percival. "You're going to give up Forsland?" he breathed, touching the paper on the table. "I gave up Forsland," James Thorold said, "when I saw you at Isador Framberg's side. I knew that I was not worthy to represent your America and his." He held out his hands to Peter longingly.
The memory of that other day of dirges linked itself suddenly in the mind of James Thorold with the picture of the lilacs blooming in the yard of the Adams homestead on the parkway, that old house where Abraham Lincoln had been wont to come; and the fusing recollections spun the ambassador to Forsland upon his heel and sent him far down the platform, where he stood, gloomily apart, until the limited, rolling in from the end of the yards, brought him hastening to its side.
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