“Paula, the man who loses at the outset of a doubtful game, is fortunate. I did not lose, I won. As if in that first dishonest deed of mine I had summoned to my side the aid of evil influences, each and every operation into which I entered prospered. It seemed as if I could not make a mistake; money flowed towards me from all quarters; power followed, and I found myself one of the most successful and one of the most unhappy men in New York. There are some things of which a man cannot write even to the one dear heart he most cherishes and adores. You have lived in my home, and will acquit me from saying much about her who, with all her faults and her omissions, was ever kind to you. But some things I must repeat in order to make intelligible to you the change which gradually took place within me as the years advanced. Beauty, while it wins the lover, can never of itself hold the heart of a husband who possesses aspirations beyond that which passion supplies. Reckless, worldly and narrow-minded as I had been before the commission of that deed which embittered my life, I had become by the very shock that followed the realization of my wrong-doing, a hungry-hearted, eager-minded and melancholy-spirited man, asking but one boon in recompense for my secret remorse, and that was domestic happiness and the sympathetic affection of wife and children. Woman, according to my belief, was born to be chiefly and above all, the consoler. What a man missed in the outside world, he was to find treasured at home. What a man lacked in his own nature, he was to discover in the delicate and sublimated one of his wife. Beautiful dream, which my life was not destined to see realized!
“The birth of my only child was my first great consolation. With the opening of her blue eyes upon my face, a well-spring deep as my unfathomable longing, bubbled up within my breast. Alas, that very consolation brought a hideous grief; the mother did not love her child; and another strand of the regard with which I still endeavored to surround the wife of my youth, parted and floated away out of sight. To take my little one in my arms, to feel her delicate cheek press yearningly to mine, to behold her sweet infantile soul develop itself before my eyes, and yet to realize that that soul would never know the guidance or sympathy of a mother, was to me at once rapture and anguish. I sometimes forgot to follow up a fortunate speculation, in my indulgence of these feelings. I was passionately the father as I might have been passionately the husband and the friend. Geraldine died; how and with what attendant circumstances of pain and regret, I will not, dare not state. The blow struck to the core of my being. I stood shaken before God. The past, with its one grim remembrance—a remembrance that in the tide of business successes and the engrossing affection which had of late absorbed me, had been well-nigh swamped from sight—rose before me like an accusing spirit. I had sinned, and I had been punished; I had sown, and I had reaped.
“More than that, I was sinning still. My very enjoyment of the position I had so doubtfully acquired, was unworthy of me. My very wealth was a disgrace. Had it not all been built upon another man’s means? Could the very house I lived in be said to be my own, while a Japha existed in want? In the eyes of the world, perhaps, yes; in my own eyes, no. I became morbid on the subject. I asked myself what I could do to escape the sense of obligation that overwhelmed me. The few sums with which I had been secretly enabled to provide Colonel Japha during the final days of his ruined and impoverished life, were not sufficient. I desired to wipe out the past by some large and munificent return. Had the colonel been living, I should have gone to him, told him my tale and offered him the half of my fortune; but his death cut off all hopes of my righting myself in that way. Only his daughter remained, the poor, lost, reprobated being, whom he was willing to curse, but whom he could not bear to believe suffering. I determined that the debt due to my own peace of mind should be paid to her. But how? Where was I to find this wanderer? How was I to let her know that a comfortable living awaited her if she would only return to her friends and home? Consulting with a business associate, he advised me to advertise. I did so, but without success. I next resorted to the detectives, but all without avail. Jacqueline Japha was not to be found.
“But I did not relinquish my resolve. Deliberately investing a hundred thousand dollars in Government bonds, I put them aside for her. They were to be no longer mine. I gave them to her and to her heirs as completely and irrevocably, I believed, as if I had laid them in her hand and seen her depart with them. I even inserted them as a legacy to her in my will. It was a clear and definite arrangement between me and my own soul; and after I had made it and given orders to my lawyer in Grotewell to acquaint me if he ever received the least news of Jacqueline Japha, I slept in peace.
“Of the years that followed I have small need to speak. They were the years that preceded your coming, my Paula, and their story is best told by what I was when we met again, and you made me know the sweet things of life by entering into my home. Woman as a thoughtful, tender, elevated being had been so long unknown to me! The beauty of the feminine soul with its faith fixed upon high ideals, was one before which I had ever been ready to bow. All that I had missed in my youth, all that had failed me in my maturing manhood, seemed to flow back upon me like a river. I bathed in the sunshine of your pure spirit and imagined that the evil days were over and peace come at last.
“A rude and bitter shock awoke me. Ona’s father, who had followed us to New York, and of whose somewhat checkered career during the past few years, I have purposely forborne to speak, had not been above appealing to us for assistance at such times as his frequently unfortunate investments left him in a state of necessity. These appeals were usually made to Ona, and in a quiet way; but one day he met me on the street—it was during the second winter you spent in my home—and dragging me into a restaurant down town, began a long tale, to the effect that he wanted a few thousands from me to put into a certain investment, which if somewhat shady in its character, was very promising as to its results; and gave as a reason why he applied to me for the money, that he knew I had not been above doing a wrongful act once, in order to compass my ends, and therefore would not be liable to hesitate now.
“It was the thunderbolt of my life. My sin was not then buried. It had been known to this man from the start. With an insight for which I had never given him credit, he had read my countenance in the days of my early temptation, and guessed, if he did not know, where the five thousand dollars came from with which I began my career as speculator. Worse than that, he had led me on to the act by which he now sought to hold me. Having been the secret agent in losing my aunt’s money, he knew at the time that I was cherishing empty hopes as regarded a legacy from her, yet he let me dally with my expectations, and ensnare myself with his daughter’s fascinations, till driven mad by disappointment and longing, I was ready to resort to any means to gain my purpose. It was a frightful revelation to come to me in days when, if I were not a thoroughly honest man, I had at least acquired a deep and ineradicable dread of dishonor. Answering him I know not how, but in a way that while it repudiated his proposition, unfortunately acknowledged the truth of the suppositions upon which it was founded, I left him and went home, a crushed and disheartened man. Life which had been so long in acquiring cheerful hues, was sunk again in darkness; and for days I could not bear the sight of your innocent face, or the sound of your pure voice, or the tokens of your tender and unsuspecting presence in my home. But soon the very natural thought came to comfort me, that the sin I so deplored was as much dead now, as it was before I learned the fact of this man’s knowledge of it. That having repented and put it away, I was as free to accept your gentle offices and the regard of all true men, as ever I had been; and beguiled by this plausible consideration, I turned again to my one visible source of consolation, and in the diversion it offered, let the remembrance of this last bitter experience pass slowly from my mind. The fact that Mr. Delafield left town shortly after his interview with me, and smitten by shame perhaps, forbore to acquaint us with his whereabouts or afflict us with his letters, may have aided me in this strange forgetfulness.
“But other and sharper trials were in store; trials that were to test me as a man, and as it proved, find me lacking just where I thought I was strongest. Paula, that saying of the Bible, ‘Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall,’ might have been written over the door of my house on that day, ten months ago, when we two stood by the hearthstone and talked of the temptations that beset humanity, and the charity we should show to such as succumb to them. Before the day had waned, my own hour had come; and not all the experience of my life, not all the resolves, hopes, fears of my later years, not even the remembrance of your sweet trust and your natural recoil from evil, were sufficient to save me. The blow came so suddenly! the call for action was so peremptory! One moment I stood before the world, rich, powerful, honored, and beloved; the next, I saw myself threatened with a loss that undermined my whole position, and with it the very consideration that made me what I was. But I must explain.
“When I entered the Madison Bank as President, I gave up in deference to the wishes of Mr. Stuyvesant all open speculation in Wall Street. But a wife and home such as I then had, are not to be supported on any petty income; and when shortly after your entrance into my home, the opportunity presented itself of investing in a particularly promising silver mine out West, I could not resist the temptation; regarding the affair as legitimate, and the hazard, if such it were, one that I was amply able to bear. But like most enterprises of the kind, one dollar drew another after it, and I soon found that to make available what I had already invested, I was obliged to add to it more and more of my available funds, until—to make myself as intelligible to you as I can—it had absorbed not only all that had remained to me after my somewhat liberal purchase of the Madison Bank stock, but all I could raise on a pledge of the stock itself. But there was nothing in this to alarm me. I had a man at the mine devoted to my interests; and as the present yield was excellent, and the future of more promise still, I went on my way with no special anxiety. But who can trust a silver mine? At the very point where we expected the greatest result, the vein suddenly gave out, and nothing prevented the stock from falling utterly flat on the market, but the discretion of my agent, who kept the fact a secret, while he quietly went about getting another portion of the mine into working order. He was fast succeeding in this, and affairs were looking daily more promising, when suddenly an intimation received by me in a bit of conversation casually overheard at that reception we attended together, convinced me that the secret was transpiring, and that if great care were not taken, we should be swamped before we could get things into working trim again. Filled with this anxiety, I was about to leave the building, in order to telegraph to my agent, when to my great surprise the card of that very person was brought in to me, together with a request for an immediate interview. You remember it, Paula, and how I went out to see him; but what you did not know then, and what I find some difficulty in relating now, is that his message to me was one of total ruin unless I could manage to give into his hand, for immediate use, the sum of a hundred thousand dollars.
“The facts making this demand necessary were not what you may have been led to expect. They had little or nothing to do with the new operations, which were progressing successfully and with every promise of an immediate return, but arose entirely out of a law-suit then in the hands of a Colorado judge for decision, and which, though it involved well-nigh the whole interest of the mine, had never till this hour given me the least uneasiness, my lawyers having always assured me of my ultimate success. But it seems that notwithstanding all this, the decision was to be rendered in favor of the other party. My agent, who was a man to be trusted in these matters, averred that five days before, he had learned from most authentic sources what the decision was likely to be. That the judge’s opinion had been seen—he did not tell me how, he dared not, nor did I presume to question, but I have since learned that not only had the copyist employed by the judge turned traitor, but that my own agent had been anything but scrupulous in the use he had made of a willing and corruptible instrument—and that if I wanted to save myself and the others connected with me from total and irremediable loss, I must compromise with the other parties at once, who not being advised of the true state of affairs, and having but little faith in their own case, had long ago expressed their willingness to accept the sum of a hundred thousand dollars as a final settlement of the controversy. My agent, if none too nice in his ideas of right and wrong, was, as I have intimated, not the man to make a mistake; and when to my question as to how long a time he would give me to look around among my friends and raise the required sum, he replied, ‘Ten hours and no more,’ I realized my position, and the urgent necessity for immediate action.