“Look at me,” she went on. Our eyes met. “Say it again.”
“Yes, I will forgive him,” I said, and I meant it--unless the wrong
should prove to be one of those acts for which forgiveness is
impossible.
She turned her face away, then said, slowly, each word coming with an
effort: “It wasn’t James who forged your name. It was Walter.”
I felt enormously relieved, for, while I shouldn’t have hesitated
to break my promise had it been wise to do so, I am a man who holds
his word sacred even to his own hurt, provided it is not also to the
jeopardy of vital affairs. “I’m not surprised,” said I. “It is like
Walter to hide behind any one foolish enough to shield him.”
“No--he’s not that way any more,” she pleaded, her passion for
shielding her children from my justice as strong as ever. “He told me
long ago--when you caught him in that speculation. And we talked it
over and then we went to see James, and he insisted that we shouldn’t
tell you.”
“Why?” I asked. “What reason did he give?”
“He said he had made his life and you yours, and that he knew you
didn’t want to be disturbed any more than he did.”
“He was right,” said I.
The forgery has long ceased to be important. James and his wife,
with their wholly different ideas and methods, could not possibly be
remoulded now to my purposes. I have educated Walter and Natalie to
the headship of the family; I’ve neither time nor inclination to take
up a couple of strangers and make an arduous and extremely dubious
experiment.
“So,” my wife went on, “I ask you to send for James. I wish to see him
restored to what is rightfully his before I die.”
“I’ll send for him,” said I. “It may take a little time, as he is out
of town. But be patient, and I’ll send for him.”
I learned that I had spoken more truthfully than I knew. He was camping
with his wife in the depths of the Adirondacks, several days away from
the mails. The next day I told Cress to write him a letter saying I’d
interpose no objection if he should try to see his mother, who was ill.
I ordered Cress to hold the letter until the following day. But that
night she died. She was not fully conscious again after her exhausting
talk with me.
The evening of the day of the funeral I took Walter into my
sitting-room and repeated to him what his mother had told me. “But,”
said I, “because I promised her, I forgive you. It would have been
more manly had you confessed to me, but I’ve learned not to expect the
impossible.”
“All I ask, sir,” said he, “is that you never let Natalie know. She’d
despise me--she’d leave me.”
I could not restrain a smile at this absurd exaggeration--at this
delusion of vanity that he was the important factor with Natalie, and
not I and my property.
“You can say,” he went on, “that you have changed your mind, and you
needn’t give a reason. And James can take my place, and, believe me,
she’ll not be at all surprised.”
I had no difficulty in believing him, for Natalie’s experience with her
dowry had no doubt put her in the proper frame of mind for any further
change of plan I might happen to make. I patted him on the shoulder.
“I promised your mother I’d forgive you,” said I, “and I’ll fulfil
my promise to the letter. James is best off where he is, and, if you
continue to try to please, your prospects shall remain as they are.”
He was overcome with gratitude and relief. But he was presently trying
to look sorry. “I feel ashamed of myself,” he said.
“You can afford to,” I replied, drily. “It will cost you nothing. But
I venture to suggest that instead of pretending to quarrel with good
fortune, you would better be planning to deserve it.”
The two deaths--my wife’s and Ridley’s--coming so close together made
a profoundly disagreeable impression upon me. My abhorrence of “the
end,” to which I have referred several times, then definitely became
a monomania with me. The thought of “the end” began to thrust itself
upon me daily--or, rather, nightly. I have never been a happy man.
Added to my natural incessant restlessness, which always characterises
a creative intellect, and which has kept me as well as every one around
me in a state of irritation, there is in me an absolute incapacity
to live in the present; and to be happy, I have long since seen, one
must live in the present. Occasionally, when my fame or my power or
my wealth has been suddenly and vividly revealed to me in moments of
triumph, I have lived in the present for a little while. But soon the
future, its projects, its duties, its possibilities, have stretched me
on the rack again. As for the much-talked-of happiness of anticipation,
that is possible only to children and childish persons. When the battle
is on--and when has the battle not been on with me?--the general is too
busy to indulge in any anticipations of victory. He has hardly time
even for anxieties about defeat.
I neglected to note, in its proper order, that my wife willed all
her jewels--a value of eight hundred thousand dollars--to James. I
consulted my lawyer and found that through carelessness, or, rather,
through ignorance of the law, I had given her a legal title to
them, a legal right to dispose of them by will. There was nothing
for it but to make the best bargain I could. After some roundabout
negotiations James declined my proposal that he accept a cash valuation
on fair appraisement. He then indulged his passion for theatrical
sentimentality and declined the legacy beyond a few trinkets worth
hardly a thousand dollars, I should say, which had belonged to his
mother in her girlhood and in the first years of her married life.
These Helen persuaded him to divide with her. Aurora at first insisted
on having part of the jewels; but I wished to keep them all for the
direct succession, and so induced her to take two hundred thousand
dollars for her claim--agreeing not to subtract it from her share under
my will. As she is a satisfactory child, I consider the promise binding.
I sold my old palace for two and a quarter millions to a _parvenu_,
dazzled by an accidental half a dozen millions and impatient to show
them off before they vanished. While effecting the merger of my three
railways, I made quadruple the balance of the cost of my new palace,
by extinguishing one minority interest at forty-seven and creating
another at one hundred and two. Given the capital, it is incomparably
harder to build a palace than to make a score of millions. A very
crude sort of man may get rich, but refinement and culture and taste
and custom of wealth and a sense of the difference between dignity and
ostentation are required to enable a man to demonstrate his fitness to
possess wealth. I cannot expect my envious contemporaries publicly to
admit that I have demonstrated my fitness. But--future generations will
vindicate me in this as in other respects.
I kept a sharp look-out for a house for Walter--or, rather, for the
hereditary principal heir of my line. Among the minority stockholders
in one of my three railways was Edward Haverford, grandson of that
Haverford who originated the secret freight rebate. By the very
timid use of it natural in a beginner, and at a time when railway
transportation was in its infancy, he had accumulated several millions.
I doubt if he had any great amount of brains. I know that his grandson
is as stupid as he is stingy. But he had a beautiful little palace
in East Seventieth Street, near Fifth Avenue--an ideal home for a
gentleman with expectations, the scion of a great family. In the
“squeeze” incident to my extinguishing the minority existing before the
merger, Haverford lost his fortune and was glad to dispose of his house
to me for a million in cash. I established Walter and Natalie there
and fixed their allowance from me at eight thousand a month. This is
enough to enable them to live in easy circumstances with an occasional
grant from me--a happy compromise between an independence that would
be dangerous and a dependence that would, in an heir-apparent, seem
undignified.
I have decided not to take them in to live with me when Helen is
married. I could not endure the daily espionage of those who are to
succeed me. They could not conceal from _my_ eyes their impatience for
me to be gone. I shall keep them waiting many a year--seventy is not
old for any man. For a man of my natural strength it is merely that
advanced period of middle life when one must make his health his prime
concern.
No, Helen shall stay on with me.
Her case is another instance of the folly of anticipating trouble. From
the day she came to me with her confession that she had defied me by
going to James at the crisis of his illness, I had been looking forward
to a sharp collision with her. Naturally, I assumed that the trouble
would come over her marriage. I pictured her falling in love with some
nobody with nothing and giving me great anxiety if not humiliation;
and, while my wife had a certain amount of capacity in social matters,
especially in the last two or three years of her life, I appreciated
that she had many serious shortcomings. Intellectually, she was so far
inferior to Helen that I could not but fear the worst. I had been,
therefore, impatient for her to find a suitable husband for Helen, and
so put an end to the peril of a severe blow to my pride and plans. As I
had a peculiar affection for Helen, it would have cut me to the quick
had she married beneath her.
I was luckier than I hoped. My wife disappointed me by rising to the
occasion. Old Mrs. Kirkby, having accepted the alliance with my family,
proceeded to make the best of it. She took up my wife and Helen and
put them in her own set--it seems to me the dullest in New York, if
not in the world, but the most envied, and is beyond question composed
of gentlefolk of the true patrician type. As my wife was careful that
Helen should meet no one outside that set, and should go nowhere
without herself or Mrs. Kirkby in watchful attendance, Helen was
completely safeguarded against acquaintance, however slight, with any
man of the wrong kind. So assiduous and careful was my wife--thanks,
no doubt, to sagacious Mrs. Kirkby’s teaching and example!--that she
even never permitted Helen to go either to Walter’s or to Aurora’s when
there were to be guests, without first making a study of the list. This
was a highly necessary precaution, for both Natalie and Aurora, being
safely married, admitted to their houses many persons who were all very
well for purposes of amusement, but not their social equals in the
sense of eligibility to admission into an upper-class family with a
position to maintain.
As everybody knows, the Kuypers are one of the best families in New
York. When the original Kirkby was clerk in a Whitehall grocery
before the Revolutionary War, a Kuyper kept the grocery--an eminently
respectable business in those simple days. He had inherited it from his
grandfather, and also a farm near where the Tombs prison now stands.
The Kuypers have been people of means and of social and political and
military and naval distinction for a century. About a year before my
wife died she and Mrs. Kirkby fixed upon Delamotte Kuyper for Helen;
and, although he was not rich, I approved their selection. With his
comfortable income and what he will inherit and what I intend to
leave Helen, they will be well established. In addition to family
and position and rank as the eldest son in the direct line, he has
the advantages of being a handsome fellow, a graduate of Groton, a
student at Harvard and at Oxford, and one of those men who do all sorts
of gentlemen’s pastimes surpassingly well. My wife was discreet in
concealing her purpose from Helen--so discreet that, when the climax
came, the poor child expected us to oppose the marriage. She had heard
me and her mother comment often on Delamotte’s comparatively small
fortune and expectations--large for an old New York family, but a mere
nothing among the fortunes of us newer and more splendid aristocrats. A
yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and the business was done.
The yachting trip was my suggestion.
I don’t recall ever having had a more agreeable sensation than when
she came to me just after her return--poor Ridley was in the room, I
remember. She threw her arms round my neck and said: “You dear splendid
old father! How happy you have made me. There never was a luckier girl
than I!”
That added half a million to what I’m leaving her in my will.
What a pity, what a shame that she’s a woman! She has my brains. She
has my courage. She has a noble character--yes, I admire even her
enthusiasms and sentimentalities. She has all the qualifications for
the succession except one. There fate cheated me.
I have a sick feeling every time I think what might have happened had
James remained in my family and been my principal heir. There’s not
the slightest doubt that he would have upset all my plans as soon as
I was gone. He would have done his best to recreate for my family the
conditions of the old America which made “three generations from shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves” proverbial. How fortunate that he shouldered
the blame for Walter’s boyish folly! How fortunate that I did not learn
it at a time when I might have been tempted to take him back! I was
indeed born under a lucky star.
A lucky star! And yet what have I ever got out of it?--I, who have
spent my life in toil and sweat without a moment’s rest or happiness,
sacrificing myself to my future generations. Sometimes I look at all
these great prizes which I have drawn and hold, and I wonder whether
they are of any value, after all. But, valuable or worthless, it was
they or nothing, for what else is there beside wealth and power and
position?
Nothing!
* * * * *
It is curious how the human mind works--curious and terrible. Seven
months after my wife’s death, when we had put aside the mourning and
had resumed our ordinary course of life, I suddenly began to think of
her as I was shaving. “I wonder what brought _her_ into my mind?” said
I to myself, and I decided that my face with the white stubble on its
ridges had suggested my familiar black devil--“the end.” But one day
several months later, as I was driving from my office to lunch at a
directors’ meeting, I happened to notice the lower part of my face in
the small mirror in the brougham.
My attention became riveted upon the line of my mouth, thin and firm
and straight--with a queer sudden downward dip at the left corner.
“Strange!” said I to myself; “I never noticed _that_ before.”
Then I remembered I _had_ noticed it before, _once_ before and only
once--the morning when I was shaving and thought of my wife and “the
end.” I had noticed it then and--had I noticed it no morning since
because it had disappeared? Or had it been there all along, and had my
mind seen it and hidden the fact from me? When one has a well-trained,
obedient mind, it can and will hide from him almost anything he would
find disagreeable or inconvenient to know.
I tried to straighten that line, but, no matter how I twisted my mouth,
the drop at the left corner remained. I caught sight of my eyes in the
mirror and found myself staring into the depth of a Something which
had thus trapped me into letting it mock me. When my carriage stopped
at the Postal Telegraph Building, I was so weak that I could hardly
drag myself across the sidewalk and into the elevator. As I was shaving
the next morning I dared not look myself in the eyes. But there was
the droop, and--yes--a droop of the left eyelid! I gave an involuntary
cry--the razor cut me, and dropped to the floor. My valet rushed in.
“I--I only cut myself,” I stammered, apologetically. For the first time
in my life I was afraid of a human being, from pure terror of what he
might see and think.
How I have suffered in the three weeks that have passed since then!
Day and night, moment by moment, almost second by second, I find
myself listening for a footstep. Now I fancy I hear it, and the icy
sweat bursts from every pore; now I realise that I only imagined those
stealthy, shuffling, hideously creeping sounds coming along the floor
toward me from behind, and I give a gasp of relief.
What a mockery it all is! What a fool’s life I have led! When I am
not listening, I am fiercely hating these people round me. They are
listening, too--listening eagerly--yes, even my own children. I can
see from their furtive glances into my face that they, too, have seen
the droop in the line that was straight, the growing weakness in the
eye that never quailed. It is frightful, this being gently waited on
and soothingly spoken to and patiently borne with--as his gaolers treat
a man who is to be shot or hanged next sunrise.
Yet I dare not resent it. I can only cower and suffer.
My crown is slipping from me. No, worse--it is I that am slipping from
it. It remains; I, its master, must go. I--its master? How it has
tricked me! I have been its slave; it is weary of me; it is about to
cast me off.
It has been years since any one has said “must” to me. I had forgotten
what a hideous word it is. And if one cannot resent it, cannot resist
it! All to whom I have said “must” are revenged.
Every night for a week I have cried like a child. I put my handkerchief
under my head to prevent the tears from wilting my pillow and revealing
my secret to them as they keep the death-watch on me. Last night I
groaned so loudly that my valet rushed in, turned on the electric
lights, and drew back the curtains of my bed. When he saw me blazing at
him in fury, he shrank and stammered: “Oh, sir, I thought----”
“Get out!” I shrieked.