The Story of Wellesley | Page 6

lakes, its tranquil, winding river, its hallowed memories of John Eliot and his Christian Indian chieftains, Waban and Pegan, its treasured literary associations with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Chief Waban gave his name, "Wind" or "Breath", to the college lake; on Pegan Hill, from which so many Wellesley girls have looked out over the blue distances of Massachusetts, Chief Pegan's efficient and time-saving squaw used to knit his stockings without heels, because "He handsome foot, and he shapes it hisself"; and Natick is the Old Town of Mrs. Stowe's "Old Town Folks."
In those first years after they began to spend their summers at Wellesley, the family lived in a brown house near what is now the college greenhouse, but Mr. Durant meant to build his new house on the hill above the lake, or on the site of Stone Hall, and to found a great estate for his little son. From time to time he bought more land; he laid out avenues and planted them with trees; and then, the little boy for whom all this joy and beauty were destined fell ill of diphtheria and died, July 3, 1863, after a short illness.
The effect upon the grief-stricken father was startling, and to many who knew him and more who did not, it was incomprehensible. In the quaint phraseology of one of his contemporaries, he had "avoided the snares of infidelity" hitherto, but his religion had been of a conventional type. During the child's illness he underwent an old-fashioned religious conversion. The miracle has happened before, to greater men, and the world has always looked askance. Boston in 1863, and later, was no exception.
Mr. Durant's career as a lawyer had been brilliant and worldly; he had rarely lost a case. In an article on "Anglo-American Memories" which appeared in the New York Tribune in 1909, he is described as having "a powerful head, chiseled features, black hair, which he wore rather long, an olive complexion, and eyes which flashed the lightnings of wrath and scorn and irony; then suddenly the soft rays of sweetness and persuasion for the jury. He could coax, intimidate, terrify; and his questions cut like knives." The author of "Bench and Bar in Massachusetts", who was in college with him, says of him: "During the five years of his practice at the Middlesex Bar he underwent such an initiation into the profession as no other county could furnish. Shrewdness, energy, resource, strong nerves and mental muscles were needed to ward off the blows which the trained gladiators of this bar were accustomed to inflict. With the lessons learned at the Middlesex Bar he removed to Boston in 1847, where he became associated with the Honorable Joseph Bell, the brother-in-law of Rufus Choate, and began a career almost phenomenal in its success. His management of cases in court was artistic. So well taken were the preliminary steps, so deeply laid was the foundation, so complete and comprehensive was the preparation of evidence and so adroitly was it brought out, so carefully studied and understood were the characters of jurors,--with their whims and fancies and prejudices,--that he won verdict after verdict in the face of the ablest opponents and placed himself by general consent at the head of the jury lawyers of the Suffolk Bar." Adjectives less ambiguous and more uncomplimentary than "shrewd" were also applied to him, and his manner of dominating his juries did not always call forth praise from his contemporaries. In one of the newspaper obituaries at the time of his death it is admitted that he had been "charged with resorting to tricks unbecoming the dignity of a lawyer," but the writer adds that it is an open question if some, or indeed all of them were not legitimate enough, and might not have been paralleled by the practices of some of the ablest of British and Irish barristers. Both in law and in business--for he had important commercial interests--he had prospered. He was rich and a man of the world. Boston, although critical, had not found it unnatural that he should make himself talked about in his conduct of jury trials; but the conspicuousness of his conversion was of another sort: it offended against good taste, and incurred for him the suspicion of hypocrisy.
For, with that ardor and impetuosity which seem always to have made half measures impossible to him, Mr. Durant declared that so far as he was concerned, the Law and the Gospel were irreconcilable, and gave up his legal practice. A case which he had already undertaken for Edward Everett, and from which Mr. Everett was unwilling to release him, is said to be the last one he conducted; and he pleaded in public for the last time in a hearing at the State House in Boston, some years later,