“Yes, yes, you are right there; and a deuced unlucky speculation it proved too. But I was overruled by that fellow Peck. Says I to him, says I, ‘Capitalist!—pshaw! no popular interest there; it don’t address the great public! Very confined class the capitalists, better throw ourselves boldly on the people. Yes,’ said I, ‘call it the “Anti-Capitalist.”’ By Jove! sir, we should have carried all before us! but I was overruled. The ‘Anti-Capitalist’!—what an idea! Address the whole reading world, there, sir: everybody hates the capitalist—everybody would have his neighbor’s money. The ‘Anti-Capitalist’!—sir, we should have gone off, in the manufacturing towns, like wildfire. But what could I do?—”
“John Tibbets,” said my father, solemnly, “Capitalist ‘or’ Anti-Capitalist,’ thou hadst a right to follow thine own bent in either,—but always provided it had been with thine own money. Thou seest not the thing, John Tibbets, in the right point of view; and a little repentance in the face of those thou hast wronged, would not have misbecome thy father’s son and thy sister’s brother!”
Never had so severe a rebuke issued from the mild lips of Austin Caxton; and I raised my eyes with a compassionate thrill, expecting to see John Tibbets gradually sink and disappear through the carpet.
“Repentance!” cried Uncle Jack, bounding up as if he had been shot. “And do you think I have a heart of stone, of pumice-stone? Do you think I don’t repent? I have done nothing but repent; I shall repent to my dying day.”
“Then there is no more to be said, Jack,” cried my father, softening, and holding out his hand.
“Yes!” cried Mr. Tibbets, seizing the hand and pressing it to the heart he had thus defended from the suspicion of being pumice, “yes,—that I should have trusted that dunderheaded, rascally curmudgeon Peck; that I should have let him call it ‘The Capitalist,’ despite all my convictions, when the Anti—‘”
“Pshaw!” interrupted my father, drawing away his hand.
“John,” said my mother, gravely, and with tears in her voice, “you forget who delivered you from prison; you forget whom you have nearly consigned to prison yourself; you forg—”
“Hush, hush!” said my father, “this will never do; and it is you who forget, my dear, the obligations I owe to Jack. He has reduced my fortune one half, it is true; but I verily think he has made the three hearts, in which lie my real treasures, twice as large as they were before. Pisistratus, my boy, ring the bell.”
“My dear Kitty,” cried Jack, whimperingly, and stealing up to my mother, “don’t be so hard on me; I thought to make all your fortunes,—I did indeed.”