INHERITANCE
One of my mother’s distant cousins was left a widow, years ago with no assets but the house she lived in, a savings-bank account, and a very pretty daughter, then eighteen years old. Cousin Henrietta’s decisions were always prompt. It took her about six weeks to sell the house, draw the money from the savings-bank and take her daughter to Europe. I think her intention probably was to give Ella the benefit of a year’s polish, and bring her back to the home market, her value enhanced by the reputation of her Continental “Education.” But the impossible happened, as energetic women like Cousin Henrietta can occasionally make it happen. Through some chance connection at the pension in Florence, they made the acquaintance of a wealthy, middle-aged Tuscan, not the traditional European nobleman at all, but a swarthy, well-preserved man of the people, risen to wealth by his own exertions. He was presented to Ella and lost his head entirely over her pale blonde prettiness. He was fifty-five. They were married on her nineteenth birthday.
Cousin Henrietta shared their married life with them, of course, although this did not last very long. Signor Cattaneo, as not infrequently happens to elderly husbands of very young wives, tried to renew his youth too rapidly. He danced all one evening with his bride, an exercise which his great bulk made extremely violent for him; stepped out upon a balcony with her, in a cool, damp wind, and died of double pneumonia at the end of a week.
Cousin Henrietta still in charge of affairs, at once brought home to the God’s country of Chicago, the lovely, wealthy little widow. They set up housekeeping on a grand scale with the money which was sent to them every month from the honest, conscientious Tuscan agent in Florence. The agent got it from the honest, conscientious Tuscan peasants, and they got it out of their bodies, sweating and toiling endlessly long hours in all weathers. Ella and Cousin Henrietta had everything they could think of, that money could buy; and presently Ella, wanting something new, bought herself a husband. He did not turn out very well: Ella had done exactly as she pleased for too long to bother with a husband, and after a time they separated, though there was never any legal action taken, since Cousin Henrietta was an extremely orthodox church member, who disapproved of any laxity in the relations between the sexes. Divorce seemed to her such a laxity.
Then Ella wanted to do as other wealthy and fashionable ladies do and learn how to ride. They bought, as usual, the best that money could buy, and this time it was a little too good for Ella; for the high-spirited thorough-bred took fright one day and, disregarding Ella’s amateur efforts to control him, ran away, threw Ella off and broke her poor little neck.
Cousin Henrietta was horrified and scandalized to find that now Ella’s remote but still legal husband would inherit a very large proportion of the Italian property. Her whole soul and being rose up wildly in an understandable and instinctive protest against this iniquity. She simply could not believe that the law would countenance such a barefaced theft of other people’s property. She filled the newspapers and the courts with her clamor and made us all ashamed of the family name. But that was all the good it did her. Ella had not dreamed of making a will; Cousin Henrietta’s son-in-law had no reason to love his wife’s mother, and could see no reason why she had any more right to that fortune than he had. Neither can I, when it comes to that.
Ella’s husband was rather dazed by his good luck and made all haste to marry. But he did not make quite haste enough. That was one of the years when the influenza was going the rounds, and he died of it two days before his wedding, in spite of all the care of three trained nurses and a whole battery of consulting physicians. I never knew what became of his fiancée, but always wondered if she did not perhaps go to live with Cousin Henrietta, as being the only person who would entirely sympathize with her.
So the Cattaneo fortune passed to the casual next-of-kin, who happened to be the only nephew of Ella’s husband, a young clerk of twenty. The honest conscientious agent in Florence, who was paid a small annual salary for his services, and who would have died before touching a penny not his, went on administering the Italian estate which was growing steadily in value all the time, and paying more income. He sent that income over to the new name and address in America. He was upheld in his meager, narrow, difficult life by feeling that he was living up to the fine old Tuscan code of honor; and he often told his children, who lacked schooling and opportunities he could have given them if he had had more money, that the best inheritance a father can leave his children is an unblemished name.
The children of Ella’s husband’s nephew have something much more substantial as an inheritance than that. For the young man with a fortune was married by a competent, ambitious girl as soon as he came of age. They have three children, who learned very young how to spend a great deal of money with great speed. The money which the Italian day-laborers and small-farmers earn by patient endurance of hardships, by eating rough, poor, scanty food, by working their pregnant wives to the day before their confinements, by taking their children out of school before they can read, is sent month by month to America and spent in buying a new fur set for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s young-lady daughter, a ten-thousand-dollar racing-car for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s seventeen-year-old son, and to keep Ella’s husband’s nephew from doing anything more strenuous than clipping the end of his cigars.