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    The Mansion
    The Mansion
    The Mansion
    Ebook51 pages42 minutes

    The Mansion

    By Henry Van Dyke

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateSep 1, 1974
    Author

    Henry Van Dyke

    Henry Van Dyke (1928–2011) was born in Allegan, Michigan, and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where his parents were professors at Alabama State College. He served in the Army in occupied Germany, playing flute in the 427th Marching Band. There he abandoned his early ambition to become a concert pianist and began to write. In 1958, after attending the University of Michigan on the G.I. Bill and living in Ann Arbor, he moved to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Henry taught creative writing part-time at Kent State University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993, and was the author of four novels, including Blood of Strawberries, a sequel to Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes.

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    • 3/5
      A pillar of the community, a man of rectitude and charity, differs with his son about several matters. The son wants to give up business for a while and to assist a friend of his in need, both of which the father disapproves of. On Christmas Eve, the father dreams of his arrival in Heaven, which shows him the true worth of his life and actions.Van Dyke wrote several inspiring fables of this sort. This one takes aim at the self-satisfied and comfortable. The message is still apt.

    Book preview

    The Mansion - Henry Van Dyke

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mansion, by Henry Van Dyke

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: The Mansion

    Author: Henry Van Dyke

    Posting Date: July 23, 2008 [EBook #704] Release Date: October, 1996

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MANSION ***

    Produced by Michael Leonard

    The Mansion

    By

    Henry van Dyke

    There was an air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an expression of complacency and half-disdain.

    The house was not beautiful. There was nothing in its straight front of chocolate-colored stone, its heavy cornices, its broad, staring windows of plate glass, its carved and bronze-bedecked mahogany doors at the top of the wide stoop, to charm the eye or fascinate the imagination. But it was eminently respectable, and in its way imposing. It seemed to say that the glittering shops of the jewelers, the milliners, the confectioners, the florists, the picture-dealers, the furriers, the makers of rare and costly antiquities, retail traders in luxuries of life, were beneath the notice of a house that had its foundations in the high finance, and was built literally and figuratively in the shadow of St. Petronius' Church.

    At the same time there was something self-pleased and congratulatory in the way in which the mansion held its own amid the changing neighborhood. It almost seemed to be lifted up a little, among the tall buildings near at hand, as if it felt the rising value of the land on which it stood.

    John Weightman was like the house into which he had built himself thirty years ago, and in which his ideals and ambitions were incrusted. He was a self-made man. But in making himself he had chosen a highly esteemed pattern and worked according to the approved rules. There was nothing irregular, questionable, flamboyant about him.

    He was solid, correct, and justly successful.

    His minor tastes, of course, had been carefully kept up to date.

    At the proper time, pictures of the Barbizon masters, old English plate and portraits, bronzes by Barye and marbles by Rodin, Persian carpets and Chinese porcelains, had been introduced to the mansion. It contained a Louis Quinze reception-room, an Empire drawing-room, a Jacobean dining-room, and various apartments dimly reminiscent of the styles of furniture affected by deceased monarchs. That the hallways were too short for the historic perspective did not make much difference. American decorative art is capable de tout, it absorbs all periods. Of each period Mr. Weightman wished to have something of the best. He understood its value, present as a certificate, and prospective as an investment.

    It was only in the architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian. His country house at Dulwich-on-the-Sound was a palace of the Italian Renaissance. But in town he adhered to an architecture which had moral associations, the Nineteenth-Century-Brownstone epoch. It was a symbol of his social position, his religious doctrine, and even, in a way, of his business creed.

    A man of fixed principles, he would say, "should express them in the looks of his house. New

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