“No, Thomas. Being a boy, with a boy's mind and a boy's fears, you are assuring yourself that technically you are not the son of a thief. You are beyond the reach of the law of the land, but I am none the less a thief. I tell you I took two thousand dollars a year from the bank for ten years, undetected. I stole it and was glad of it to the extent that I had made detection humanly impossible. I never”—and Mr. Leigh smiled, grimly—“went so far as to feel an artist's pride over my exploit. Indeed, at times I rather regretted the necessity of violating the trust reposed in me, for without that trust all my cleverness would have availed nothing. But I tell you that money was in my pocket. I felt it there for many, many years. Your father was a thief as surely as if a jury had found him guilty.”
“And if a jury did his son wouldn't,” said Tommy, eagerly. “And if anybody calls me the son of a thief I'll admit it—with pride!”
“Boy, boy, you do not understand,” said Mr.
Leigh, in a low voice. “You cannot know what it cost me. But I do not begrudge the cost!”
“That's what you said, that made me so certain that you had—” Tommy checked himself abruptly.
“That I had stolen the money? Well, I did, Thomas,” said Mr. Leigh, firmly.
Tommy smiled forgivingly and said, “Tell me now how you did not steal the money that you spent on me, won't you?”
“Well, when I saw how, without being discovered, I could take the money, as soon as I was ready I studied in turn the bank's problem—how to make it impossible for anybody to steal money; and I found a way of preventing not only my theft, but other thefts by other people in other positions. And then, because I wondered why people studied so hard how to make money and so little how to keep it, I began to study how to make it. I analyzed some of the bank's most profitable deals and the operations of our most successful financiers. I saw what capital with brains could do alone; and then what capital without brains, and then what brains without capital could do. I found it was not difficult for brains to make money the moment capital was made aware of the existence of brains.
“Then I studied opportunities—and found them. So I went to the president, who was a personal friend, but too busy to remember personal friends except in his private office, and had a long talk with him. A special position was made for me. I changed our system of accounts, introduced methods and checks that are now in use in nearly all the big banks, and I became an adviser in certain deals. It seems I had some gifts in that direction, my son, peculiar to myself and therefore, I feared, not transmissible to my son. And—well, I made much more than I had intended to steal; and made it much more easily. But I kept my nominal salary from the bank exactly what it had been, twenty-five hundred dollars a year, that I might continue to be an old and trusted employee—to remind me of what I might have been! It was not hard to make money. I studied money-making in order not to want to kiss you—you were about eight then—and I devoted myself to evolving financial plans for a certain group of capitalists associated with our bank. It was the only way in which I could love you with safety to myself and to you. But I prospered so much that I brought upon your head and mine a second danger, far greater than the love of a father; who, though too weak to refuse you anything, was too poor to give you the easiest way to perdition.” The old man looked sternly at his son. “It was the danger of being the son of a rich man—the same man, but rich!”
“And is that why at college you always sent what I asked for?”