Chapter VI

When I began to build my palace in New York City, in Fifth Avenue near Fifty-ninth Street, I intended it to be the seat of my family for many generations. My architect obeyed my orders and planned the most imposing residence in the city; but, before it was finished--indeed, before we had any considerable amount of furniture collected for it--no less than seven palaces were under way, each excelling mine in every respect--in extent, in costliness of site and structure, in taste, and in spaciousness of interior arrangement. This was mortifying, for it warned me that within a few years my palace would be completely, even absurdly, in eclipse, for it would stand among towering flat-houses and hotels--a second-class neighbourhood.

But, irritating and expensive though the lesson was, it was of inestimable value to me with my ability to see and to profit. It taught me my own ignorance and so set me to educating myself in matters most important to the dignity of my family line. Also it taught me how I was underestimating New York and its expansive power, and therefore the expansive power of the whole country. I began to acquire large amounts of real estate which have already vindicated my judgment; and I made bolder and more sweeping moves in my industrial and railway developments--those moves that have frightened many of my associates. Naturally, to the short-sighted, the far-sighted seem visionary. A man may stake his soul, or even his life, on something beyond his vision, and therefore, to him, visionary; but he won’t stake enough of his money in it seriously to impair his fortune if he loses. That’s why large success is only for the far-sighted.

While I was debating the palace problem, along came the craze for country establishments near New York--palaces set in the midst of parks. I was suspicious of this apparently serious movement among the people of my class, for I knew that at bottom we Americans of all classes are a show-off people--that is, are human. Only the city can furnish the crowd we want as a background for our prosperity and as spectators of it; we are not content with the gaping of a few undiscriminating, dull hayseeds. We like intelligent gaping--the kind that can come pretty near to putting the price-marks on houses, jewels, and dresses. We’d put them there ourselves, even the most “refined” of us, if custom, made, by the way, by the poor people with their so-called culture, did not forbid it. So, though I was too good a judge of business matters to have much faith in the country-house movement, I bought “Ocean Farm” and planned my house there on a vast scale. It is, as a little study of it will reveal, ingeniously arranged, so that, if the country-seat fashion shall ever revive, it can be expanded without upsetting proportions, and splendid improvements can easily be made in the handsome, five-hundred-acre park which surrounds it.

But just as I was taking up the problem of an establishment for Walter, the shrewdness of my doubts about the country began to appear. I had been investing in real estate in and near upper Fifth Avenue; I determined to build myself a new palace there that would be monumental. It will never be possible for a private establishment in New York to cover more surface than a block, so I fixed on and bought the entire block between ---- and ---- Streets and Fifth and Madison Avenues. Then I ordered my architect to drop everything else and spend a year abroad in careful study of the great houses of Europe, both old and new. This detailing of a distinguished architect for a year might seem to be an extravagance; in fact, it was one of those wise economies which are peculiarly characteristic of me.

Money spent upon getting the best possible in the best possible way is never extravagance. People incapable of thinking in large sums do not see that to lay out five millions economically one must adopt methods proportionately broader than those one would use in laying out five thousand or five hundred thousand to the best advantage. It has cost me hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to learn that lesson.

I sent a man from my office along with my architect to act as an auditor for his expense accounts, and to see that he did his work conscientiously and did not use my money and my purchase of his time in junketing “_au grand prince_.” In addition to planning the palace, he was to settle upon interior decorations and to buy pictures, tapestries, carvings, furniture, etc., etc.--of course, making no important purchases without consulting me by cable. I believe he never did a harder year’s work in his life--and I’m not easily convinced as to what I haven’t seen with my own eyes.

When he came home and submitted the results of his tour, I myself took them abroad and went over them with the authorities on architecture and decoration in Paris. It was two years before the final plan was ready for execution. In those two years I had learned much--so much that my palace near Fifty-ninth Street, which I had imagined the acme of art and splendour when I accepted its final plans, had become to me an intolerable flaunting of ignorance and tawdriness. I had intended still to retain it as the hereditary residence for the heirs-apparent of my line, and, when they should succeed to the headship of the family, the so-to-speak dowager-residence. But my education had made this impossible. I was impatient for the moment to arrive when I could sell it, or tear it down, and put in place of it a flat-house for people of moderate wealth, or a first-class hotel.

Three years and a half from the sailing of my architect in quest of ideas I took possession of the completed palace. First and last I had spent nearly five millions and a half upon it; I was well content with the result. Nor has the envious chatter of alleged critics in this country disturbed me. There will be scores of houses as costly, and many as imposing, before fifty years have passed; but, until there is a revolution in the art of building, there will be none more dignified, more conspicuous, or more creditable. I flatter myself that, as money is spent, I got at least two dollars of value for every dollar I paid out. I wished to build for the centuries, and I am confident that I have accomplished my purpose. Only an earthquake or a rain of ruin from the sky or a flood of riot can overthrow my handiwork.

But to go back a little. Just as we were about to move, my wife and Ridley died within a few days of each other. At first these deaths were a severe shock to me, as, aside from the sad, yet after all inevitable, parting, there was the prospect of the complete disarrangement of my domestic plans, and at a highly inconvenient moment. But, thanks to my unfailing luck, my fears proved groundless. Helen came splendidly to the rescue and displayed at once an executive ability that more than filled the gap. My plans for the change of residence, for the expansion of the establishment, and for my own comfort--everything went forward smoothly, far more smoothly than I had hoped when my wife and Ridley were alive and part of my calculation.

At first blush it may seem rather startling, but I missed poor old Ridley far more than I missed my wife. A moment’s consideration, however, will show that this was neither strange nor unnatural. For twenty years he was my constant companion whenever I was not at work down-town. During those twenty years I had seen little of my wife except in the presence of others, usually some of them not members of my family. Whenever we were alone, it was for the despatch of more or less disagreeable business. She had her staff of servants, I mine; she had her interests, I mine. Wherever our interests met, they clashed.

I think she was a thoroughly unhappy woman--as every woman must be who does not keep to the privacy and peace of the home. I looked at her after she had been dead a few hours, and was impressed by the unusualness of the tranquillity of her face. It vividly recalled her in the days when we lived in the little house in the side street away down-town and talked over our business and domestic affairs every night before going to sleep. After the first few years and until almost the end she was a great trial to me. But I have no resentment. Indeed, now that she is gone I feel inclined to concede that she was not so much to blame as are these absurd social conditions that tempt women to yield to their natural folly and give them power to harass and hamper men.

I’m inclined to despair of marriage, at least so far as we of the upper and dominating, and example-setting, class are concerned. With us what basis of common interest is there left between husband and wife? He has his large business affairs which wholly absorb him, which do not interest her--indeed, which he would on no account permit her small, uninformed mind to meddle in. With all his energy and all his intelligence enlisted elsewhere, what time or interest has he for home and wife? And to her he seems dull, an infliction and a bore. Nor has she any interest at home--governesses, a housekeeper, an army of servants do her work for her. So far as I can see, except as a means whereby a woman may disport herself in mischief-breeding luxury and laziness, marriage has no rational excuse for persisting.

It was with genuine regret that I was compelled to deny my wife’s last request. I say “deny,” but I was, of course, far too generous and considerate to torment her in her last moments. When she made up her mind that the doctors and nurses were deceiving her and that she wasn’t to get well, she asked for me. When we were alone, she said: “James, I wish to see our son--I wish _you_ to send for him.”

I did not pretend to misunderstand her. I knew she meant James. As she was very feeble, and barely conscious, she was in no condition to decide for herself. It was a time for me to be gentle; but there is never a time for weakness. “Yes,” I said, humouring her, “I will have him sent for.”

“I wish _you_ to send for him, James,” she insisted; “send right away.”

“Very well,” said I, “I’ll send for him.” And I rose as if to obey.

“Don’t go just yet,” she went on; “there’s something more.”

I sat in silence so long that I began to think she was asleep or unconscious. But finally she spoke: “I got Walter’s permission this morning. James, if I tell you of a great wrong he has done, a very great wrong, will you forgive him for my sake?”

I thought over her request. Finally I said, “Yes.”

“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.

I knew only too well what he thought.

* * * * *

On the following day--or was it the second day?--Gunderson Kuyper came to see me. Deaths in my family and in his, and other matters, chiefly--at least so I had imagined--my unwillingness to have Helen go away for a wedding trip, had delayed the marriage of my daughter and his son. Then, too, there had been some attempt on the part of his lawyer to find out my intentions in the matter of an allowance for Helen. But, feeling that this was a true love match which ought not to be spoiled by any intrusion of the material and the business-like, I had waved the lawyer off with some vague politeness.

I was completely taken by surprise when, with an exceedingly small amount of hemming and hawing for so aristocratic a despiser of commercialism as Gunderson Kuyper, he flatly demanded a joint settlement of five millions on his son and Helen!

It was particularly important that I should not be excited. The doctors had warned me that rage would probably be fatal. But in spite of this I could not wholly conceal my agitation. “You will have to excuse me, Mr. Kuyper,” said I. “You see what a nervous state I am in. Discussion about business would be highly dangerous. I can only assure you that, as Helen is my favourite child, she and, of course, her husband will be amply provided for. I must beg you not to continue the subject.”

“I understand. I am sincerely sorry.” The oily scoundrel spoke in tones of the most delicate sympathy. “We will postpone the marriage until your health is such that you are able to discuss it.” He rose and came toward me to take leave.

“Instead of quieting my agitation, you have aggravated it,” I said. “These young people have their hearts set on each other--at least I have been led to believe that your son----”

“And you are right, my dear Galloway,” he said--he patronises me, drops the “Mr.” in addressing me, and makes me feel too distant with him to drop it in return. “But as my son has less than fifteen thousand a year, he could not think of marriage with a woman brought up as your daughter has been--unless there were assurance of some further income. I am not in a position to make him an adequate allowance--I can only double his present income. He will, of course, inherit a considerable fortune at my death. But I feel it is only just that you should do your share toward properly establishing the new family.”

“I shall, I shall,” I said, feebly, trying to make him see how unfit I was for such a discussion. “Let them marry. Everything shall be looked after. Only leave me in peace. Do not disturb me with these mercenary----”

That word must have angered him, for his face whitened, and he said, with suppressed fury: “It is perfectly well known, Mr. Galloway, that you made no provision whatever for your other children, and that you keep your son on a beggarly allowance, considering your fortune and the social station which you are struggling to maintain. You have given your elder daughter nothing. I speak plainly, sir, because your dealings with your children and with Mr. Bradish’s daughter are matters of common gossip. I will permit no evasion, no screening behind illness. I must speak the only language you understand. It is a matter of indifference to us----”

“I had no idea the Kuypers were so--so thrifty,” said I, myself in a fury at this vulgar and insulting tirade.

“As I was saying,” he went on, “it is a matter of indifference to us whether my son marries your daughter or not. His mother and I consented only after he had made it plain to us that his happiness was involved. My consent was conditioned on your acting the part of an honourable and considerate father.”

“Our conceptions of a parent are evidently as wide apart as our conceptions of the feeling a young man should entertain toward a young woman he purposes to marry,” said I. “Your demand for five millions is preposterous. The honour of marrying my daughter should be--shall be--sufficient for your son--if I permit the marriage to go on.”

“Very well, sir. You may keep your daughter and your ill-got millions.”

“Strange that ill-got wealth should have such a fascination for you!”

“Everything is purified by passing to innocent hands,” he replied. “But--enough! I am ashamed that my temper should have degraded me to such a controversy with such a man. The longer we have had this matter under advisement the more nauseating it has become. I might have known that nothing but humiliation would result from even considering an alliance with a family whose head is notorious throughout the length and breadth of this land for chicanery, for impudent dishonesty, for theft----”

I heard no more. I was now dimly conscious that his purpose throughout had been, after a perfunctory attempt to arrange a settlement, to provoke a quarrel that would make the marriage impossible. At his last words I felt a pain shoot from my brain throughout my body--a pain so frightful that I straightway lost consciousness.

At last my stealthy, shuffling, creeping enemy had stolen up behind me and had struck me down.

When I came to myself on the third day, Helen was there. “Poor child!” I said, “your dream is over, but----”

“No! No!” she protested.

“Yes--I know your heart was set on that young fellow.”

“Everything is all right now that you are getting well,” she replied, and would not let me say anything more.

In two weeks I was well enough to go about again as before. I found that Delamotte had defied his father and was only waiting for me to consent. For Helen’s sake, I yielded. Why blame the boy? Why make my child wretched? Let them have the chance I never had. Or, did I have it and throw it away? No matter. To sacrifice them to revenge would be petty.

Petty! What is not petty to me, seated in front of The Great Fact?

I must rearrange my will properly to provide for Helen.

How small and repulsive it all is to me!--all that has seemed so stupendous these forty years. I am worn out. If I have not the courage to die, still less have I the courage to go on--or the interest. I want rest.

They tell me--what they always tell a man in my straits. But they know better--and so do I!

Nor do I care.

* * * * *

Too late! Too late! For now, not the poorest, greediest pedlar that cheats in rags for rags at the area-gate would change places with me.

Oh, vanity, how you have swindled me!

No doubt they think my mind is stunned. I have seen other men of my class stricken as I am. I have watched them in this frightful wait for the shaft they knew death had aimed and would not long delay. I know now why their eyes were dull, why their ears seemed not to hear. I know what they were thinking about. For, hour after hour, I too----

(_Here the manuscript ends_)

POSTSCRIPT

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.”

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.