Fashion and Famine

by Ann S. Stephens

God linketh soul so close to soul,

That germs of evil, once unfurled,

Spread through the life and mock control.

Pen, ink, and paper lay upon the table. The curtains were flung back, admitting the broad sunshine that revealed more clearly than the usual soft twilight with which Leicester was in the habit of enveloping himself, the lines which time and passion sometimes allowed to run wild, sometimes curbed with an iron will, had left on his handsome features. Papers were on the table, not letters, but scraps that bore a business aspect, some half printed, others without signature, but still in legal form, as notes of hand or checks are given.

Leicester took one of these checks—a printed blank—and gazed on it some moments with a fixed and thoughtful scrutiny. He laid it gently down, took up a pen, and held the drop of ink on its point up to the light, as if even the color were an object of interest. He wrote a word or two, merely filling up the blank before him, but simple as the act seemed, that hand, usually firm as marble, quivered on the paper, imperceptibly, it is true, but enough to render the words unsteady. His face, too, was fiercely pale, if I may use the term, for there was something in the expression of those features that sent a sort of hard glow through their whiteness. It was the glow of a desperate will mastering fear.

With a quick and scornful quiver of the lip, he tore the half-filled check in twain, and cast the fragments into the fire. "Am I growing old?" he said aloud, "or is this pure cowardice? Fear!—what have I to fear?" he continued, hushing his voice. "It cannot be brought back to me. A chain that has grown, link by link, for years, will not break with any common wrench. Still, if it could be avoided, the boy loves me!—well, and have not others loved me? Of what use is affection, if it adds nothing to one's enjoyments? If the old planter had left my pretty Florence the property at once, why then—but till she is of age—that is almost two years—till she is of age we must live."

Half in thought, half in words, these ideas passed through the brain and upon the lip of William Leicester. When his mind was once made up to the performance of an act, it seldom paused even to excuse a sin to his own soul, but this was not exactly a question of right and wrong: that had been too often decided with his conscience to admit of the least hesitation. There was peril in the act he meditated—peril to himself—this made his brow pale and his hand unsteady. During a whole life of fraud and evil-doing, he had never once placed himself within the grasp of the law. His instruments, less guilty, and far less treacherous than himself, had often suffered for crimes that his keen intellect had suggested. For years he had luxuriated upon the fruit of iniquities prompted by himself, but with which his personal connection could never be proved. But for once his subtle forethought in selecting and training an agent who should bear the responsibility of crime while he reaped the benefit, had failed. The time had arrived when Robert Otis was, if ever, to become useful to his teacher. But evil fruit in that warm, generous nature had been slow in ripening. With all his subtle craft, Leicester dared not propose the fraud which was to supply him with means for two years' residence in Europe.

There was something in the boy too clear-sighted and prompt even for his wily influence, and now, after years of training worthy of Lucifer himself, Leicester, for the first time, was afraid to trust his chosen instrument. Robert might be deluded into wrong—might innocently become his victim, but Leicester despaired of making him, with his bright intellect and honorable impulses, the principal or accomplice of an act such as he meditated.

A decanter of brandy stood upon the table—Leicester filled a goblet and half drained it. This in no way disturbed the pallor of his countenance, but his hand grew firm, and he filled up several of the printed checks with a rapidity that betrayed the misgivings that still beset him.

He examined the papers attentively after they were written, and, selecting one, laid it in an embroidered letter-case which he took from his bosom; the others he placed in an old copy-book that had been lying open before him all the time; it was the same book that Robert Otis had taken from his aunt's stand-drawer on Thanksgiving night.