"Following our letter of yesterday's date we write to say that we have been directed by your uncle Mr. Bartholomew Whittingham, to forward to you the sealed enclosure which you will find herewith. We regret to inform you that our client is sinking fast, and that the doctors who are attending him fear that he cannot last through the week.
"We have the honour to remain,
"Your obedient servants,
"Bulfinch & Bulfinch."
Before unfastening the "sealed enclosure," Chaytor rose in a state of great excitement, and allowed his thoughts to find audible expression:
"At last! Here is the certainty. No more Will-o'-the-wisps. Fortune is mine--do you hear?--mine. Truly, justly mine. Who has worked for it but I? Tell me that. Would the idiot Basil ever have humbled himself as I did; would he ever have worked his old uncle as I have done? What is the result? I softened the old fellow's heart, and the money he would have left to some charity has fallen to me. Every labourer is worthy of his hire, and I am worthy of mine. Basil would never have had one penny of the fortune, and therefore it is my righteous due. At last, at last! No more sweating and toiling. The world is before me, and I shall live the life of a gentleman. There is work still to be done, both here and at home, and I will do it. No blenching, Chaytor; no flinching now. What has to be done must and shall be done. There is less danger in making the winning move than in upsetting the board after the game I have played. Hurrah! Let me see what the precious 'enclosure' has to say for itself."
He broke the seal, and read:
"My Dear Nephew Basil,
"My sands of life are running out, and before it is too late I write to you, probably for the last time. You will be glad to hear from me direct, I know, for your nature is different from mine, and your heart has always been open to tender impressions. When I cast you from me I dare say you suffered, but after my first unjust feeling of resentment was over my sufferings have been far greater than yours could have been. It is the honest truth that in abandoning you I abandoned the only real pleasure which life had for me; but my obstinacy, dear lad, would not allow me to take steps towards a reconcilement. It may be that had you done so I should still have hardened my heart against you, and should have done you the injustice of thinking that you wished to propitiate me for selfish motives. In these, as I believe them to be, the last hours of my life, I have no wish to spare myself; I can see more clearly now than I have done for many a long year, and my pride deserves no excuse. This 'pride' has been the bane of my life; it has sapped the fountains of innocent enjoyment; it has enveloped me in a steel shroud which shut me out from love and sympathy. You, and you alone, since I was a young man, were able to penetrate this shroud, and even to you I showed only that worse side of myself by which the world must have judged me. I did not give myself the trouble of inquiring whether the counsel I was instilling into you was true or false; I see now that it was false, and it is some comfort to me to know that your nature was too simple and honourable, too loving and sympathetic, to be warped by it. Early in life I met with a disappointment which soured me. There is no need to inscribe that page in this letter--a loving letter, I beg you to believe. It was a disappointment in love, and from the day I experienced it I became soured and embittered. I was a poor man at the time, and I devoted myself to the task of making money; I made it, and much good has it done me. With wealth at my command I set up two dark starting points, which I allowed to influence me in every question under consideration--one, money, the other human selfishness. These, with a dogged and obstinate belief in the correctness of my own judgment on every matter which came before me, made me what I have been. I had no faith, I had no religion; my life was godless, and the attribute of selfishness which I ascribed to the actions of all other men guided and controlled me in mine. You never really saw me in my true character. That I regarded money as the greatest good I did not conceal from you, but other sides of me, even more objectionable than this, were not, I think, revealed to you. The mischief I would have done you glanced off harmlessly, as the action you took in ruining yourself to pay your father's debts proved. You were armed with an shield, my dear lad, a shield in which shone the religious principle, honourable conduct, and faith in human nature. Be thankful for that armour, Basil; it is not every man who is so blessed. And let me tell you this. It is often an inheritance, and if not that, it is often furnished by a mother's loving teaching and influence. You had the sweetest of mothers; mine was of harder grain. I lay no blame upon her, nor, I repeat, do I seek to excuse myself, but I would point out to you, as a small measure of extenuation, that some of us are more fortunate than others in the early training we receive, and in the possession of inherited virtues.
"Basil, my dear lad, you did right in paying your father's debts, despite the base view I expressed of your action. Angry that a step so important should have been taken without my consent being asked, angry, indeed, that it should have been taken at all, I said to myself, 'I will punish him for it; I will teach him a lesson.' So I wrote you a heartless letter, informing you that I had resolved to disinherit you, and suggesting that you should return the money I had freely given you and which was justly yours. There are few men in the world who would have treated that request as you did, and you could not have dealt me a harder blow than when you forwarded me a cheque for the amount, with interest added. Your independence, your manliness, hardened instead of softened me; 'He does it to defy me,' I thought, and I allowed you to leave England under the impression that the ties which had bound us together were irrevocably destroyed. But the blow I aimed at you recoiled upon myself; your reply to my mean and sordid request has been a bitter sting to me, and had you sought to revenge yourself upon me you could not have accomplished your purpose more effectually. I have always lived a lonely life, as you know; since I lost you my home has been still more cheerless and lonesome; but I would not call you back--no, my pride stopped me: I could not endure the thought that you or any man should triumph over me. You see, my boy, I am showing you the contemptible motives by which I was actuated; it is a punishment I inflict upon myself; and I deserve the harshest judgment you could pass upon me. If my time were to come over again, would I act differently? I cannot say. A man's matured character is not easily twisted out of its usual grooves. I am as I have been made, or, to speak more correctly, as I chose to make myself, and I have been justly punished.