I had no difficulty in believing him, for Natalie’s experience with her dowry had no doubt put her in the proper frame of mind for any further change of plan I might happen to make. I patted him on the shoulder. “I promised your mother I’d forgive you,” said I, “and I’ll fulfil my promise to the letter. James is best off where he is, and, if you continue to try to please, your prospects shall remain as they are.”
He was overcome with gratitude and relief. But he was presently trying to look sorry. “I feel ashamed of myself,” he said.
“You can afford to,” I replied, drily. “It will cost you nothing. But I venture to suggest that instead of pretending to quarrel with good fortune, you would better be planning to deserve it.”
The two deaths—my wife’s and Ridley’s—coming so close together made a profoundly disagreeable impression upon me. My abhorrence of “the end,” to which I have referred several times, then definitely became a monomania with me. The thought of “the end” began to thrust itself upon me daily—or, rather, nightly. I have never been a happy man. Added to my natural incessant restlessness, which always characterises a creative intellect, and which has kept me as well as every one around me in a state of irritation, there is in me an absolute incapacity to live in the present; and to be happy, I have long since seen, one must live in the present. Occasionally, when my fame or my power or my wealth has been suddenly and vividly revealed to me in moments of triumph, I have lived in the present for a little while. But soon the future, its projects, its duties, its possibilities, have stretched me on the rack again. As for the much-talked-of happiness of anticipation, that is possible only to children and childish persons. When the battle is on—and when has the battle not been on with me?—the general is too busy to indulge in any anticipations of victory. He has hardly time even for anxieties about defeat.
I neglected to note, in its proper order, that my wife willed all her jewels—a value of eight hundred thousand dollars—to James. I consulted my lawyer and found that through carelessness, or, rather, through ignorance of the law, I had given her a legal title to them, a legal right to dispose of them by will. There was nothing for it but to make the best bargain I could. After some roundabout negotiations James declined my proposal that he accept a cash valuation on fair appraisement. He then indulged his passion for theatrical sentimentality and declined the legacy beyond a few trinkets worth hardly a thousand dollars, I should say, which had belonged to his mother in her girlhood and in the first years of her married life. These Helen persuaded him to divide with her. Aurora at first insisted on having part of the jewels; but I wished to keep them all for the direct succession, and so induced her to take two hundred thousand dollars for her claim—agreeing not to subtract it from her share under my will. As she is a satisfactory child, I consider the promise binding.
I sold my old palace for two and a quarter millions to a parvenu, dazzled by an accidental half a dozen millions and impatient to show them off before they vanished. While effecting the merger of my three railways, I made quadruple the balance of the cost of my new palace, by extinguishing one minority interest at forty-seven and creating another at one hundred and two. Given the capital, it is incomparably harder to build a palace than to make a score of millions. A very crude sort of man may get rich, but refinement and culture and taste and custom of wealth and a sense of the difference between dignity and ostentation are required to enable a man to demonstrate his fitness to possess wealth. I cannot expect my envious contemporaries publicly to admit that I have demonstrated my fitness. But—future generations will vindicate me in this as in other respects.
I kept a sharp look-out for a house for Walter—or, rather, for the hereditary principal heir of my line. Among the minority stockholders in one of my three railways was Edward Haverford, grandson of that Haverford who originated the secret freight rebate. By the very timid use of it natural in a beginner, and at a time when railway transportation was in its infancy, he had accumulated several millions. I doubt if he had any great amount of brains. I know that his grandson is as stupid as he is stingy. But he had a beautiful little palace in East Seventieth Street, near Fifth Avenue—an ideal home for a gentleman with expectations, the scion of a great family. In the “squeeze” incident to my extinguishing the minority existing before the merger, Haverford lost his fortune and was glad to dispose of his house to me for a million in cash. I established Walter and Natalie there and fixed their allowance from me at eight thousand a month. This is enough to enable them to live in easy circumstances with an occasional grant from me—a happy compromise between an independence that would be dangerous and a dependence that would, in an heir-apparent, seem undignified.
I have decided not to take them in to live with me when Helen is married. I could not endure the daily espionage of those who are to succeed me. They could not conceal from my eyes their impatience for me to be gone. I shall keep them waiting many a year—seventy is not old for any man. For a man of my natural strength it is merely that advanced period of middle life when one must make his health his prime concern.
No, Helen shall stay on with me.
Her case is another instance of the folly of anticipating trouble. From the day she came to me with her confession that she had defied me by going to James at the crisis of his illness, I had been looking forward to a sharp collision with her. Naturally, I assumed that the trouble would come over her marriage. I pictured her falling in love with some nobody with nothing and giving me great anxiety if not humiliation; and, while my wife had a certain amount of capacity in social matters, especially in the last two or three years of her life, I appreciated that she had many serious shortcomings. Intellectually, she was so far inferior to Helen that I could not but fear the worst. I had been, therefore, impatient for her to find a suitable husband for Helen, and so put an end to the peril of a severe blow to my pride and plans. As I had a peculiar affection for Helen, it would have cut me to the quick had she married beneath her.