"My life has been a failure," he said to Rod one day. "I might have made a different man of Grove, if I hadn't been so comfortably secure in the egotistic belief that to be my son was guarantee enough. Oh, I've been blind with the sort of pride that goes before a fall. And I was too harsh. He was proud too. I killed him myself, Rod."
He would talk like that, full of grief. And he would go on to speak of expiation, of the obligation upon them to give a steward's account of their trust.
"You see," he would repeat, "it was not simply Grove, but what Grove represented, what he sprang from, that bred people's confidence. No casual promoter, no fly-by-night financier could have induced that simple trust on such a scale. People looked beyond him and they saw something that was solid as a rock, that couldn't fail. We must live up to that, somehow."
The library door opened. Mary beckoned silently.
"He wants to speak to you," she said in the hall.
But the momentary flash of consciousness lapsed before Rod reached the bedside. He had been sinking for days. He was going out now, like a guttering candle. A nurse stood at the foot of the bed. A doctor stood, watch in hand, his fingers on the faint pulse. Rod looked a question. The man shook his head. Rod sat down beside the bed. To his quickened imagination the room seemed full of the flutter of sable wings.
An hour later his father died.
CHAPTER XXIV
"I have seen some financial muddles in my time and some manipulation that was on the borderline of pure theft," Charlie Hale said to Rod, "but this is a little the worst mess I ever had to do with."