“The result has justified my utmost hopes,” he ended with, enthusiastically; and then cast a sudden wistful look at me. “It is something in an otherwise empty life, Mr. Pilbrow, to have this object in accumulating. Heaven has seen fit, sir, to deny me the blessing of a family, lest by my improvidence I turned it into a curse. But it has compensated with the left hand while it withheld the right. What prouder trust to have committed to one than the welfare of the child of him who died to prove the truth!”
The visitor stepped back, shading his eyes with his hand.
“You rebuke me, sir,” he said in a stifled voice; “you teach me. Is this the meaning, the atonement? If I, too, might so earn quittance of this curse of emptiness! The child of him who died to prove the truth! My God, my God! To bequeath to him the fruits of this so wretched quest! To turn the curse into a blessing!”
He advanced, and seized my uncle’s hand with a strenuous entreaty.
“Let me be joint trustee with you. By that sacred life laid down for mine, I have a right. If I could so convert this evil—to enrich his son—so perhaps to earn rest.”
My uncle was distinctly snuffling. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and put them on again tremulously.
“So be it, Mr. Pilbrow,” he said. “We have been two selfish souls, perhaps. We will win our redemption through Richard.”
Thus was I made the inheritor of phantom fortunes. I felt quite inclined to put on airs, as the sole legatee to a vast atmospheric estate. Mr. Pilbrow even came to claim me with some show of kind judicial authority, as if the law had appointed him my part guardian. But that was by-and-by.
Now, he uttered a sound, as if his emotions had been too much for him, and stepped back.
“I must go,” he said. “You will excuse me. This wonder—this kindness—I am unused; it overwhelms me. I must rest the body, even if the brain works. You will let me come and see you again?”