He found it not altogether so careless an existence since it was worth so much financially. His acute sensibilities realized a sort of espionage before he was definitely aware of it. He came to know that he was reckoned up. What he did, where he went, how he felt, were matters in which other people were concerning themselves. He resented the irksome experience as an attack on his liberty. He felt no longer a free man. And this impression grew as the yield from the property promised more and more. The Bonley Company had gone to heavy expenses. They had put in costly machinery. They had hired gangs and gangs of men. They had built miles of narrow-gauge railroad, to convey the stone by land as well as by water. It had become a gigantic venture. The jocose “Take care!” “Live for my sake!” “Be good to yourself!” which had at first formed the staple of the injunctions to him when he chanced to encounter any member of the company, changed to serious solicitous inquiry which affronted him. More than once Mr. Bonley called upon him to remonstrate about late hours, heavy suppers, and the disastrous effects upon the constitution of drinking wine and strong waters. Thus the rubicund Mr. Gerault Bonley, whose countenance was brilliant with the glow of old Rye! In one instance, when Royce’s somewhat cavalier and scornful reception of these kind attentions served to rouse Mr. Bonley to the realization that the cestui que vie claimed the right to have other objects in existence than merely to live for the corporation’s sake, the president of the company apologized, but urged him to consider, for the justification of this anxiety, what large financial interests and liabilities hung upon the thread of his life. There was a panic among the company whenever he went to the seashore for a short vacation, and once he allowed himself to be persuaded out of a trip to Europe, of which acquiescence he was afterward ashamed,—so much so that when a place in the office of the Bonley Company was offered him, with a large increase of salary, but with the unavowed purpose of keeping him under surveillance, that he might always be at hand and easily reckoned up, he declined it with such peremptoriness as to cause the company to relax this unwise exhibition of solicitude for the time, and greatly to please his own firm, Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, who had not relished the effort to decoy a confidential clerk from their employ. On one occasion when, in training for a boat-race, he was suddenly prostrated by the heat, the anxiety of the Gerault Bonley Marble Company knew no bounds, and its manifestation more than verged upon the ridiculous; it was the joke of the whole town. The claims of his own personal friends—he had no near relatives—were set at naught. The company took possession of him. He came to himself in one of the well-appointed guest-chambers of Mr. Bonley’s own house; and when he rallied, which he did almost immediately, with the recuperative powers of youth and his great strength, he was detained there several days longer than was necessary by his host’s insistence, until indeed the physician in charge laughed in the face of Mr. Gerault Bonley, the broker.
“Take care you don’t do anything eccentric,” the doctor said in parting at last from his patient. “That company might shut you up in a lunatic asylum or a sanitarium, where you would be ready for inspection at all hours,—just to make sure you are alive, you see.”
It was meant for a joke, but it grated on the nerves of the cestui que vie. And now it came back as he lay under the dark roof of Tubal Cain Sims’s house, staring into the unresponsive night, with the thought that a good strong state prison would serve the purpose of the Marble Company, looking toward his safekeeping, more effectually still. He could well understand their despair upon the supposed determination of the life estate, for since they had secured the land at slight cost, the vast profits of the industry were to the ordinary business mind all the dearer, being the favor, as it were, of chance, or the uncovenanted mercy of Providence,—“clean make.” How could they survive the reversion of the property, with all its present wealth and its future prospects, to the original grantor? His imagination, alert as it was, failed to respond to so heavy a demand upon its resources. Should they find that the death of the cestui que vie was spurious, their tenancy not yet expired, should they be restored to their former status, what a warning this untoward alarm would seem, what restraints upon his liberty might not be attempted! The idea bereft him of his last hope. Could he reasonably expect to escape prosecution when his custody in the clutches of the law was so obviously to the interests of a powerful corporation like this? Even if his own firm of Greenhalge, Gould & Fife should be averse to it to avenge their losses, what powerful influence would be brought to bear upon them by the Gerault Bonley Marble Company; what substantial values were to be dangled before the eyes of a broken firm in the friendship and backing of a strong financial association like this! The Marble Company would move heaven and earth to place him behind the bars. There could Mr. Bonley come and look at him any fine day, as he sat making shoes and saddles,—he had heard that at the penitentiary they put their swell guests to such occupations, and his deft fingers might commend their utility in this service to the commonwealth,—or perhaps busied in some clerical capacity to which his long experience in counting-rooms rendered him apt. Mr. Bonley’s scarlet countenance and bristly white mustache were of a calmer aspect as they appeared in this vision than they had worn in reality for many a long day! The menu would contain naught to destroy the digestion of the cestui que vie or affright the Marble Company in the way of midnight suppers and unlimited champagne. There would be no wild uproarious companions, no gambling escapades, no perilous activities on the horizontal bar,—what war had Mr. Bonley waged against his attachment to the gymnasium!—no swimming-matches, no boat-races, no encounters with gloves or foils. Truly Mr. Bonley’s estate would be gracious indeed!
No; Lucien Royce felt that his escape was a crowning mercy vouchsafed. His most imperative care should be to make it good, or he might well spend a decade of the best years of his life behind the bars for a crime he had not committed. His incarceration would easily be compassed, were his defense far more complete than perverse circumstance rendered possible, by the craft and persistence of men who had such large interests at stake on the life and well-being of a wild, adventurous, hairbrained boy. His supposititious death had saved his name, his commercial honor, which he held dear. John Grayson, with the theft of the belt and its treasure, had also taken his life—for he had no life left! He was dead! He was very dead! And let the Gerault Bonley Marble Company mourn him. With a laughing sneer on his face, he cursed again, as he had cursed a thousand times, the plastic folly, or the vagary of chance, or whatever fate it was that induced him to lend himself to the broker’s scheme; for although he had thought it a mere formality, it had in effect sold him into a species of slavery for the rest of his natural life. “But is not my advice good advice?” Mr. Bonley had more than once urged upon his recalcitrant mood. “Is it not in your own interests as well as in ours? Is it not exactly the advice I would give to my own son?”
“He needs it. Give it to him,” the cestui que vie would reply in flippant despair. But Mr. Bonley’s son was not worth so much money to the company, and he went his own ways with some celerity, all unchecked.
The continually administered cautions, the sense of sustaining anxiety, espionage, criticism, of thus sharing his life, had made it in some sort a burden to the merry cestui que vie; and therefore, in the first days of his escape, the realization of the petty persecutions, the irksome advice of the ill-advised Mr. Bonley, shaken off and forever thwarted, seemed to the young man only matter for self-gratulation. In the accumulation of these trifles in his thoughts, he had lost sight of the far-reaching significance of the event until he had reached the haven of Etowah Cove, and his bodily fatigue and distress of mind were somewhat allayed. Then he began to perceive that in this fictitious death a great property had changed hands, a definite right was subverted; a terrible fraud had been practiced on the tenants per autre vie, in that the life estate was not yet terminated. Mr. Gerault Bonley was mulcted of his prominence as a ludicrous, pertinacious, troublous bore, and the personality of the company was asserted as possessors of certain rights and large interests of which they were to be bereft through his agency. He was offered his choice,—to stay dead, or to go back and serve a term in the penitentiary for a crime he had never committed, to benefit the financial interests of Mr. Gerault Bonley and his associates. He sought now and again some solace in reflecting upon the hard bargain that Mr. Bonley had driven with the original owner, the poetic justice that his lands should revert to him in his lifetime, their value enhanced a thousandfold by their own inherent natural wealth, which had been merely developed, not bestowed, by the Marble Company. “I have made one poor soul happy, anyhow! It’s just as well that he should get the land before they have sold and shipped all the rock in it. He would have nothing left except a hole in the ground but for this,” he muttered to his pillow. For the Marble Company had been exempted by the terms of the grant from “any impeachment of waste,” and had successfully defended a suit brought by the reversioner, who sought to restrain their operations by showing that not even the surface of his tract would be left to him upon the determination of the estate per autre vie. “He never seemed to have any grudge against me, and I can’t say I blame him for being glad I am dead,” said Royce, seeking to gauge the sentiments of the joyful reversioner.
Nevertheless, all his commercial instincts revolted. They would not support this arbitrary dispensing of justice. The Gerault Bonley Marble Company’s right was definite and indefeasible, and unlawfully he had divested them of it. The idea was abhorrent to his commercial conscience. All the depth of character which he possessed lay in this endowment. He had no religious convictions, no spiritual estimate of the abstractions of right and wrong. To him the thought of religion was like a capitulation. It had never occurred to him as a thing to live by. It seemed of the nature of mortuaries, akin to last wills and testaments, of the very essence of finality. His moral structure was the creation of correct commercial principles,—sound enough, but limited. It was an impenetrable external shell, at once an asset, a protection, and a virtue, but it had no intimate inner tissues. His soul languished inert within it. As far as his financial integrity was concerned, there had been no leanings to the wrong, no struggles against temptation, not even temptation; he was proof against it. His integrity diminished even his capacity for repentance. He had never felt himself a sinner. On the contrary, he thought he had done mighty well. He had been for years in touch with the markets at home and abroad, but he could quote no spiritual values. For the first time in his life, he groped for a knowledge of the right, he strove with the definite sense of wrong-doing. His supposed death had all the taint of dishonor; it affected him as a false entry might have done. The indirect good that it wrought, the natural justice that it meted out, appealed to him no more than the success of speculating with the funds of the firm that employed him might serve to commend this peculation to his incorruptible commercial honor.
He fared better when he sought to protest an irresponsibility. It was the Marble Company’s affair to disprove his death if they could, to maintain themselves in continual assurance of his life. “I’ve seen old Bonley perform so long like a hen with one chicken that I imitate him instinctively. I assume a sort of guardianship of the Gerault Bonley Marble Company as they assumed it of me, and one is as absurd as the other. The company’s counsel ought to be equal to the situation. I have nothing to do with them. Their property is held for a term of years, which happens to be the duration of my life. I take on as if a cestui que vie was a salaried officer of the Bonley Company,—as if I were paid for drawing the breath of life. It is no part of my duty to report continually for observation. I forfeit no pledge. I violate no trust. And self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
With these vacillations he had struggled in throes of mental agony as he lay on the ledges of the rocks above the river and affected to angle; or as he wandered alone through the woods; or when he sat, unheeding the drawling talk of his host, in the open passage where they lighted their pipes together, his evident preoccupation shrewdly noted by the suspicious mountaineer; or, more than all, in the silent watches of the night, before physical fatigue could coerce sleep to his aid,—always arguing the wrong that his silence and absence wrought to others, yet the false suspicion on the part of Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, and the consequent terrible fate that his return would bring upon himself; the intrinsic justice in the restoration to the reversioner of his plundered lands, and yet the positive legal rights which the Gerault Bonley Marble Company held in their unexpired tenancy per autre vie; the lies that thus conspired in their masquerade as truth, yet the fact that the truth unmasked would prove the falsest of them all. He had never in all the exercitations of his various problems seemed so near a definite and final decision as now. Never had he reverted so often to one basis of action. He determined that he would not return to the certainty of an ignominious imprisonment on a false suspicion for the sole benefit of a strong corporation of financial sharks, who, on the pretext of a tenancy per autre vie, were tearing the estate of their grantor from off the face of the earth; the reversioner would have nothing left but literally a hole in the ground! This awful sacrificial surrender would serve no moral right, but one of those legalized robberies which arise from a fault of the law through its constitutional deficiencies, being at last only of human device. And if, he argued, it was not his function to remodel the laws, and administer them according to the moral basis of evident right, it was in this instance his privilege to dispense even-handed justice.
But when he fell asleep, and his will lay dormant, and his reasoning faculties were blunted, and only his conscience vaguely throbbed with an unassuaged wound, the sense of the commercial wrong that he did, the realization of the definite legal right that he extinguished, the weight of responsibility with which his mere breathing the breath of life had burdened him, all were reasserted without the connivance of volition, and over and over again that poignant cry, “But the one who lives—the one for whose life—his life—his life—his life!” rang through the house with all the pent-up agony of his days of doubt and strivings and distress in its tone.