I was luckier than I hoped. My wife disappointed me by rising to the occasion. Old Mrs. Kirkby, having accepted the alliance with my family, proceeded to make the best of it. She took up my wife and Helen and put them in her own set—it seems to me the dullest in New York, if not in the world, but the most envied, and is beyond question composed of gentlefolk of the true patrician type. As my wife was careful that Helen should meet no one outside that set, and should go nowhere without herself or Mrs. Kirkby in watchful attendance, Helen was completely safeguarded against acquaintance, however slight, with any man of the wrong kind. So assiduous and careful was my wife—thanks, no doubt, to sagacious Mrs. Kirkby’s teaching and example!—that she even never permitted Helen to go either to Walter’s or to Aurora’s when there were to be guests, without first making a study of the list. This was a highly necessary precaution, for both Natalie and Aurora, being safely married, admitted to their houses many persons who were all very well for purposes of amusement, but not their social equals in the sense of eligibility to admission into an upper-class family with a position to maintain.
As everybody knows, the Kuypers are one of the best families in New York. When the original Kirkby was clerk in a Whitehall grocery before the Revolutionary War, a Kuyper kept the grocery—an eminently respectable business in those simple days. He had inherited it from his grandfather, and also a farm near where the Tombs prison now stands. The Kuypers have been people of means and of social and political and military and naval distinction for a century. About a year before my wife died she and Mrs. Kirkby fixed upon Delamotte Kuyper for Helen; and, although he was not rich, I approved their selection. With his comfortable income and what he will inherit and what I intend to leave Helen, they will be well established. In addition to family and position and rank as the eldest son in the direct line, he has the advantages of being a handsome fellow, a graduate of Groton, a student at Harvard and at Oxford, and one of those men who do all sorts of gentlemen’s pastimes surpassingly well. My wife was discreet in concealing her purpose from Helen—so discreet that, when the climax came, the poor child expected us to oppose the marriage. She had heard me and her mother comment often on Delamotte’s comparatively small fortune and expectations—large for an old New York family, but a mere nothing among the fortunes of us newer and more splendid aristocrats. A yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and the business was done.
The yachting trip was my suggestion.
I don’t recall ever having had a more agreeable sensation than when she came to me just after her return—poor Ridley was in the room, I remember. She threw her arms round my neck and said: “You dear splendid old father! How happy you have made me. There never was a luckier girl than I!”
That added half a million to what I’m leaving her in my will.
What a pity, what a shame that she’s a woman! She has my brains. She has my courage. She has a noble character—yes, I admire even her enthusiasms and sentimentalities. She has all the qualifications for the succession except one. There fate cheated me.
I have a sick feeling every time I think what might have happened had James remained in my family and been my principal heir. There’s not the slightest doubt that he would have upset all my plans as soon as I was gone. He would have done his best to recreate for my family the conditions of the old America which made “three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves” proverbial. How fortunate that he shouldered the blame for Walter’s boyish folly! How fortunate that I did not learn it at a time when I might have been tempted to take him back! I was indeed born under a lucky star.
A lucky star! And yet what have I ever got out of it?—I, who have spent my life in toil and sweat without a moment’s rest or happiness, sacrificing myself to my future generations. Sometimes I look at all these great prizes which I have drawn and hold, and I wonder whether they are of any value, after all. But, valuable or worthless, it was they or nothing, for what else is there beside wealth and power and position?
Nothing!