“Your brother has forfeited everything,” I said, in conclusion. “It remains for you to prove yourself worthy of the place I had designed for him. In the will I shall make to-morrow my estate will be divided equally among my three children, your mother getting her dower rights. If you do not show the qualities I hope, the will shall stand. If you do, I shall make another, giving you your own share plus what I had intended for James.”
Walter is a square-shouldered youth of medium height, with irregular, rather commonplace features, a rough skin, and an unpleasant habit of shifting his eyes rapidly round and round yours as you talk with him—I am as impartial a judge of my own family as a stranger would be. Walter has been a good deal of a sneak all his life—at least, he was up to the time when a man’s real character disappears behind the pose he adopts to face and fool the world with. “I don’t know what to say, sir,” he said to me now. “I’d plead for my brother, only that you are just and must have done what was right. I don’t know how to thank you for the chance you’re giving me. I can’t hope to come up to your standards, but I’ll just keep on trying to do my best to please you and show my gratitude to you. I always have been very proud of being your son. It will make me doubly proud if I can win your confidence so that you will select me as head of our family if it should ever need another head. But all that’s too far away to think about.”
I was much pleased by the modesty and sound sense of what he said, and from that moment have been taking a less unfavourable view of him. Indeed, it seems to me that I was unjust to him in my partiality for his brother. I exaggerated Jim’s impudence into courage, Walter’s diplomacy into cringing cowardice. This is another illustration of how careful a man should be not to let his hopes and desires blind him. I had been refusing to see what a wretched, untrustworthy scoundrel James was, all because I wished my elder son and namesake to be my principal heir and had made up my mind that he must be worthy of the honour.
There was only one point left unguarded—lest his mother should, in her weakness for her first-born, secretly supply him with money. I might have been powerless to prevent this, though I had determined to take from her all power over the domestic expenditures and put it in the hands of Burridge, in order that she might have as few spare dollars as possible. I knew I could count on her not sacrificing her personal vanity to keep him in funds. But with characteristic folly James shut his one door upon himself and spared me the trouble of watching his mother.
She came to town Thursday last and sent for me. I went up to the house for luncheon with her. As soon as she heard that I was there she joined me in the library. Her face was stern and hard. “Read this,” she said, handing me a letter. It was in James’s handwriting:
Mother dear: You don’t know Theodora, or you couldn’t have written what you did about her. You will love her—no one can help loving her who knows her. We were married this morning. When will you come and let me show her what a beautiful, good mother I have? I know you’ll come as soon as ever you can.
Jim.
“Theodora?” I said—I couldn’t imagine whom he had induced to share his poverty.
“Theodora Glendenning,” she replied.
“The miserable boy!” I exclaimed, forgetting for an instant that he is nothing to me. Theodora Glendenning was a widow, an adventuress from heaven knows where. She had obtained a slight footing in fairly good New York society a few years before, as a young girl, and had been invited to one or two first-class houses. She was good-looking, had the ways and voice of a siren, and a certain plausible sweetness and gentleness. She trapped young Nick Glendenning. His family promptly cast him off and they sank into obscurity, living on the income of the few hundred thousands he had inherited from a grandaunt. Then he died. We did not know where or how James met her.