As Tarboe stood in the church alone at the funeral, in a pew behind John
Grier’s family, sadness held him. He had known, as no one else knew,
that the business would pass into his own hands. He suddenly felt his
task too big for him, and he looked at Carnac now with sympathy. Carnac
had brains, capacity, could almost take his father’s place; he was
tactful, intuitive, alert. Yet Carnac, at present, was out of the
question. He knew the stress of spirit which had turned Carnac from the
opportunity lying at his feet.
In spite of himself there ran through his mind another thought. Near
by, at the left, dressed in mourning also, was Junia. He had made up
his mind that Junia should be his, and suddenly the usefulness of the
business about to fall into his hands became a weapon in the field of
Love. He was physically a finer man than Carnac; he had capacity; he had
personality; and he would have money and position--for a time at least.
In that time, why should he not win this girl with the wonderful eyes
and hair, with the frankness and candour of unspoiled girlhood in her
face? Presently he would be in the blare of sensation, in the height of
as dramatic an episode as comes to the lives of men; and in the episode
he saw advantages which should weigh with any girl.
Then had come the reading of the will after the funeral rites were over,
and he, with the family, were gathered in the dining-room of the House
on the Hill.
He was scarcely ready, however, for the prodigious silence following the
announcement read by the lawyer. He felt as though life was suspended
for many minutes, when it was proclaimed that he, Luke Tarboe, would
inherit the property. Although he knew of the contents of the will his
heart was thumping like a sledge-hammer.
He looked round the room slowly. The only embarrassment to be seen
was on the faces of Fabian and his wife. Mrs. Grier and Carnac showed
nothing. Carnac did not even move; by neither gesture nor motion of body
did he show aught. At the close of it all, he came to Tarboe and held
out a hand.
“Good luck to you, Tarboe!” he said. “You’ll make a success, and that’s
what he wanted more than anything else. Good luck to you!” he said again
and turned away....
When John Grier’s will was published in the Press consternation filled
the minds of all. Tarboe had been in the business for under two years,
yet here he was left all the property with uncontracted power. Mrs. John
Grier was to be paid during her life a yearly stipend of twenty thousand
dollars from the business; she also received a grant of seventy thousand
dollars. Beyond that, there were a few gifts to hospitals and for the
protection of horses, while to the clergyman of the parish went one
thousand dollars. It certainly could not be called a popular will, and,
complimentary as the newspapers were to the energy and success of John
Grier, few of them called him public-spirited, or a generous-hearted
citizen. In his death he paid the price of his egotism.
The most surprised person, however, was Junia Shale.
To her it was shameful that Carnac should be eliminated from all share
in the abundant fortune John Grier had built up. It seemed fantastic
that the fortune and the business--and the business was the
fortune--should be left to Tarboe. Had she known the contents of the
will before John Grier was buried, she would not have gone to the
funeral. Egotistic she had known Grier to be, and she imagined the will
to be a sudden result of anger. He was dead and buried. The places
that knew him knew him no more. All in an hour, as it were, the man
Tarboe--that dominant, resourceful figure--had come into wealth and
power.
After Junia read the substance of the will, she went springing up the
mountain-side, as it were to work off her excitement by fatigue. At the
mountain-top she gazed over the River St. Lawrence with an eye blind
to all except this terrible distortion of life. Yet through her
obfuscation, there ran admiration for Tarboe. What a man he was! He
had captured John Grier as quickly and as securely as a night fisherman
spears a sturgeon in the flare at the bow of the boat. Tarboe’s ability
was as marked as John Grier’s mad policy. It was strange that Tarboe
should have bewildered and bamboozled--if that word could be used--the
old millowner. It was as curious and thrilling as John Grier’s
fanaticism.
Already the pinch of corruption had nipped his flesh; he was useless,
motionless in his narrow house, and yet, unseen but powerful, his
influence went on. It shamed a wife and son; it blackened the doors of a
home; it penalized a family.
Indeed he had been a bad man, and yet she could not reconcile it all
with a wonderful something in him, a boldness, a sense of humour,
an everlasting energy, an electric power. She had never seen anyone
vitalize everything round him as John Grier had done. He threw things
from him like an exasperated giant; he drew things to him like an Angel
of the Covenant. To him life was less a problem than an experiment, and
this last act, this nameless repudiation of the laws of family life, was
like the sign of a chemist’s activity. As she stood on the mountain-top
her breath suddenly came fast, and she caught her bosom with angry
hands.
“Carnac--poor Carnac!” she exclaimed.
What would the world say? There were those, perhaps, who thought Carnac
almost a ne’er-do-well, but they were of the commercial world where John
Grier had been supreme.
At the same moment, Carnac in the garden of his old home beheld the
river too and the great expanse of country, saw the grey light of
evening on the distant hills, and listened to Fabian who condoled with
him. When Fabian had gone, Carnac sat down on a bench and thought over
the whole thing. Carnac had no quarrel with his fate. When in the old
home on the hill he had heard the will, it had surprised him, but it had
not shocked him. He had looked to be the discarded heir, and he knew
it now without rebellion. He had never tried to smooth the path to that
financial security which his father could give. Yet now that disaster
had come, there was a glimmer of remorse, of revolt, because there was
some one besides himself who might think he had thrown away his chances.
He did not know that over on the mountain-side, vituperating the memory
of the dead man, Junia was angry only for Carnac’s sake.
With the black storm of sudden death roaring in his ears, he had a sense
of freedom, almost of licence. Nothing that had been his father’s was
now his own, or his mother’s, except the land and house on which they
were. All the great business John Grier had built up was gone into the
hands of the usurper, a young, bold, pestilent, powerful, vigorous man.
It seemed suddenly horrible that the timber-yards and the woods and the
offices, and the buildings of John Grier’s commercial business were not
under his own direction, or that of his mother, or brother. They
had ceased to be factors in the equation; they were ‘non est’ in the
postmortem history of John Grier. How immense a nerve the old man had to
make such a will, which outraged every convention of social and family
life; which was, in effect, a proclamation that his son Carnac had no
place in John Grier’s scheme of things, while John Grier’s wife was
rewarded like some faithful old servant. Yet some newspapers had said he
was a man of goodwill, and had appreciation of talent, adding, however,
the doubtful suggestion that the appreciation stopped short of the
prowess of his son Carnac in the field of Art. It was evident John
Grier’s act was thought by the conventionalist to be a wicked blunder.
As Carnac saw the world where there was not a single material thing that
belonged to him, he had a sudden conviction that his life would run in
other lines than those within which it had been drawn to the present
time. Looking over this wonderful prospect of the St. Lawrence, he had
an insistent feeling that he ought to remain in the land where he was
born, and give of whatever he was capable to its life. It was all a
strenuous problem. For Carnac there was, duly or unduly, fairly or
unfairly, a fate better than that of John Grier. If he died suddenly,
as his father had died, a handful of people would sorrow with excess of
feeling, and the growing world of his patrons would lament his loss.
No one really grieved for John Grier’s departure, except--strange to
say--Tarboe.