On the second day after James Galloway’s death, his eldest and outcast
son called at the Galloway palace and asked for his brother Walter.
Presently Walter, in dress and manner an ideal chief mourner and chief
beneficiary, came down to him in the library. The dead man lay in a
magnificent casket in the adjoining ball-room, which was half full of
funeral flowers. They were scenting the whole house with stifling,
suffocating perfume, sweet yet sickening.
“You came to see--father?” said Walter.
“No,” replied James. “I do not wish to be reminded. I am trying to
forgive him.” Then he looked into his brother’s eyes with the keen,
frank glance that is one of his many charms. “I’ve come to see you, to
ask you what you intend to do about the will.”
Walter’s eyes shifted. “I don’t understand you,” he answered.
“I mean--do you intend to break it?”
There was a long silence. Walter’s upper lip, in spite of his efforts
to control it, was twitching nervously. At length he said: “He is gone.
It is his will. It contains his--life ambition. I think it would be
wrong not to respect it.” He looked at his brother appealingly.
“Then I must warn you that, unless you break it and divide everything
equally among his heirs, I shall make a contest.”
“But you consented, Jim!” pleaded Walter, recovering from his stupor.
“Consented--to what?”
“To--to my staying--where I was.”
“While he lived. I said nothing about afterward. If you won’t break
the will, I shall. It will be easy enough. I can prove he made it in
the belief that I had forged his name. I can prove--that--I didn’t.”
“But you know, Jim, he heard the truth years before he died.”
James smiled cynically. “_How_ do I know it?”
“I told you that mother told him on her death-bed.”
“Would any jury believe you, or believe that I believed you?”
Walter flushed and looked indignantly at his brother. “You offered
to shield me for what I did when I was a boy. I was younger than
you--hardly more than a child. Now you want to punish me after making
me accept your offer. It ain’t like you, Jim!”
“More like father, ain’t it?” said James, sadly. “But--I can’t do
otherwise, Walt. I’m only helping you to do what’s just--what’s merely
decent.”
“You are trying to destroy our father’s life-work!”
“No--not his _life_-work. I can’t do that. I wish I could. I wish
I could destroy it even in myself. No, all I can hope to do is to
paralyse his dead hand--that awful hand he has plotted to keep on
ruling and ruining with for generations. And I _will_!”
“You sha’n’t do it, Jim Galloway!” exclaimed Walter, in a burst of
fury. He stood and waved his arms in a gesture as weak as it was wild.
“I won’t let you. I won’t be cheated. I won’t! I _won’t_!”
“Let’s send for your wife and see what she thinks,” said James.
Walter gasped and sank into his chair. “No!” he muttered. “This is
between you and me.” Then, with tears in his eyes, he added: “You
ought to be ashamed to take advantage of me. And after letting me alone
and letting me get used to the idea! I didn’t think you were mean and a
coward.”
“I admit I’m doing right in the wrong way--but it’s the only way
open to me. The will must be broken.” James rose to go. “Don’t let’s
quarrel, Walter. You know what’s honest and right; I’ve told you what I
shall do. Think it over. Talk it over with your wife. Either keep your
equal share, and devote the rest to a memorial to mother--colleges,
hospitals--anything--or else divide all equally among us four. Be
sensible, Walt--think what a hell his money and his ideas made for
himself and for the rest of us. If you get only your equal share,
you’ll have hard enough work keeping from not being like--him. Be
sensible, Walt--and be decent!”
And he left the room and the house; and a huge wave of that
suffocating-sweet perfume of funeral flowers poured out through the
opened street-door after him as if to overwhelm him--like subtle hate
on stealthy murder bent.
That same afternoon the will was opened. There were legacies of ten
millions to Walter and to Aurora, and of two millions to James’s
children. The rest of the estate, seventy millions, was left
unconditionally--to Helen. The will was just one month old.
Walter was beaten in a long contest to have it set aside, and have the
estate equally divided among the heirs. The lawyers got five millions.
When Helen was finally victorious, she devoted all, except eight
millions for James and ten millions for Delamotte and herself, to the
magnificent endowment of her father’s various public enterprises. The
huge palace she made over into the “James Galloway Memorial Museum of
Art.”
“I only carried out his real will,” she said, “for he was one of the
noblest men that ever lived--and nobody understood him but me.”