When death enters a house, an element of sadness and an element of
horror accompany it. Sadness, from the death itself: horror, from the
clouds of blackness we designedly labour to introduce.
The funeral had taken place. Depressed, yet resolved in his demeanour,
Owen Graye sat before his father’s private escritoire, engaged
in turning out and unfolding a heterogeneous collection of
papers--forbidding and inharmonious to the eye at all times--most of all
to one under the influence of a great grief. Laminae of white paper
tied with twine were indiscriminately intermixed with other white papers
bounded by black edges--these with blue foolscap wrapped round with
crude red tape.
The bulk of these letters, bills, and other documents were submitted
to a careful examination, by which the appended particulars were
ascertained:--
First, that their father’s income from professional sources had
been very small, amounting to not more than half their expenditure;
and that his own and his wife’s property, upon which he had relied
for the balance, had been sunk and lost in unwise loans to
unscrupulous men, who had traded upon their father’s too
open-hearted trustfulness.
Second, that finding his mistake, he had endeavoured to regain
his standing by the illusory path of speculation. The most notable
instance of this was the following. He had been induced, when at
Plymouth in the autumn of the previous year, to venture all his
spare capital on the bottomry security of an Italian brig which
had put into the harbour in distress. The profit was to be
considerable, so was the risk. There turned out to be no security
whatever. The circumstances of the case tendered it the most
unfortunate speculation that a man like himself--ignorant of all
such matters--could possibly engage in. The vessel went down, and
all Mr. Graye’s money with it.
Third, that these failures had left him burdened with debts he
knew not how to meet; so that at the time of his death even the few
pounds lying to his account at the bank were his only in name.
Fourth, that the loss of his wife two years earlier had
awakened him to a keen sense of his blindness, and of his duty by
his children. He had then resolved to reinstate by unflagging zeal
in the pursuit of his profession, and by no speculation, at least a
portion of the little fortune he had let go.
Cytherea was frequently at her brother’s elbow during these
examinations. She often remarked sadly--
‘Poor papa failed to fulfil his good intention for want of time, didn’t
he, Owen? And there was an excuse for his past, though he never would
claim it. I never forget that original disheartening blow, and how that
from it sprang all the ills of his life--everything connected with his
gloom, and the lassitude in business we used so often to see about him.’
‘I remember what he said once,’ returned the brother, ‘when I sat up
late with him. He said, “Owen, don’t love too blindly: blindly you
will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to
a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine,”
father said. “Cultivate the art of renunciation.” And I am going to,
Cytherea.’
‘And once mamma said that an excellent woman was papa’s ruin, because he
did not know the way to give her up when he had lost her. I wonder where
she is now, Owen? We were told not to try to find out anything about
her. Papa never told us her name, did he?’
‘That was by her own request, I believe. But never mind her; she was not
our mother.’
The love affair which had been Ambrose Graye’s disheartening blow was
precisely of that nature which lads take little account of, but girls
ponder in their hearts.