Ay—victims!—for he who was said to have made so many, was himself the victim of the society that spoiled and flattered him, and fostered his foibles, in the beginning, with its false and fawning breath, and, later, blew on him a blast of ice from its remorseless, pestilent jaws, that froze him out of his humanity.
He could not live—moulded, as he was, of all sweet elements—apart from social influences, from the regard, the affection, the approbation of his kind—and he died of heart-starvation; fortunate, indeed, in that he was mercifully permitted so to die, rather than have lived, as less fervent natures might have done, in cold and cheerless apathy.
I do not defend his errors; I only seek to extenuate them. Pity and justice are not the same; but one may still so temper the other that Mercy, the appointed angel of this earth, may be the result.
Let us, who are mortal and fallible, be wary how we condemn one whose head was rendered giddy by his very pinnacle of power! Peace be his!
I have diverged so widely from my subject—a most bitter and revolting one to me, eventually—that I will not return to it just now; nor, indeed, do I even in thought revert to it with any thing like patience or pardon. There are some things, paradoxical as this may seem, we must forget, in order to forgive.
I am lingering too long on this period of my story, uneventful as it is just yet, and circumscribed as I am in space; but, as the boldest rider draws rein with a beating heart beside the dark abyss over which he must fling his horse, or perish, so I pause here, on the threshold of despair, and take breath for a flying leap—for I shall clear it, reader, believe me!
It will be remembered that, at my father's death, half of my means were invested in the stocks of the Bank of Pennsylvania; and that his directions were that, as the different loans he had made became due, they should, one after the other, be drawn in and invested in like manner by Mr. Bainrothe.
No details of my business had ever been discussed before me, nor had I any insight into the periods at which these loans were due, or how the money was cared for when paid in by my father's executors, of whom, to my regret, Mr. Gerald Stanbury had refused to be one.
One thing alone I had heard them say, and it was said, I doubt not, expressly for my hearing. All debts should be paid in gold, as, according to law, this was the only legal tender. Paper, however excellent, should never be received in discharge of any liability of my estate, since it might render the executors responsible to me, to depart a hair's-breadth from the very letter of the law, which enjoined specie payment.
"But why not receive bank stocks instead?" I had ventured to suggest, a little indignantly, "seeing all moneys are to be immediately reinvested in that form. Pennsylvania Bank stocks, I mean."