“Give my love to Hester,” said Katharine, as she went out. “Oh, don’t come down; I know the way.”
He followed her, of course, and let her out himself. It was past twelve o’clock, and she felt the sun on her shoulders as she turned to the right up Lafayette Place, and she breathed the sparkling air with a sense of wild delight. It was so fresh and pure, and somehow she felt as though she had been in a contaminating atmosphere during the last three quarters of an hour.
CHAPTER XI.
Alexander Lauderdale Junior was a man of regular ways, as has been seen, and of sternly regular affections, so far as he could be said to have any at all. Most people were rather afraid of him. In the Trust Company which occupied his attention he was the executive member, and it was generally admitted that it owed something of its exceptional importance to his superior powers of administration, his cast-iron probity and his cold energy in enforcing regulations. The headquarters of the Company were in a magnificent granite building, on the second floor at the front, and Alexander Junior sat all day long in a spotless and speckless office, behind a highly polished table and before highly polished bookcases, upon which the light fell in the daytime through the most expensive and highly polished plate glass windows, and on winter afternoons from glittering electric brackets and chandeliers. He himself was not less perfect and highly polished in appearance than his surroundings. He was like one of those beautiful models of machinery which work silently and accurately all day long, apparently for the mere satisfaction of feeling their own wheels and cranks go round, behind the show window of the shop where the patent is owned, producing nothing, indeed, save a keen delight in the soul of the admiring mechanician.
He was perfect in his way. It was enough to catch one glimpse of him, as he sat in his office, to be sure that the Trust Company could be trusted, that the widow’s portion should yield her the small but regular interest which comforts the afflicted, and that the property of the squealing and still cradle-ridden orphan was silently rolling up, to be a joy to him when he should be old enough to squander it. The Trust Company was not a new institution. It had been founded in the dark ages of New York history, by just such men as Alexander Junior, and just such men had made it what it now was. Indeed, the primeval Lauderdale, whom Charlotte Slayback called Alexander the Great, had been connected with it before he died, his Scotch birth being counted to him for righteousness, though his speech was imputed to him for sin. Neither of his sons had, however, had anything to do with it, nor his sons’ sons, but his great-grandson, Alexander the Safe, was predestined from his childhood to be the very man wanted by the Company, and when he was come to years of even greater discretion than he had shown as a small boy, which was saying much, he was formally installed behind the plate glass and the very shiny furniture of the office he had occupied ever since. With the appearance of his name on the Company’s reports the business increased, for in the public mind all Lauderdales were as one man, and that one man was Robert the Rich, who had never been connected with any speculation, and who was commonly said to own half New York. Acute persons will see that there must have been some exaggeration about the latter statement, but as a mere expression it did not lack force, and pleased the popular mind. It mattered little that New York should have enough halves to be distributed amongst a considerable number of very rich men, of whom precisely the same thing was said. Robert the Rich was a very rich man, and he must have his half like his fellow rich men.
Alexander Junior had no more claim upon his uncle’s fortune than Mrs. Ralston. His father was one of Robert’s brothers and hers had been the other. Nor was Robert the Rich in any way constrained to leave any money to any of his relations, nor to any one in particular in the whole wide world, seeing that he had made it himself, and was childless and answerable to no man for his acts. But it was probable that he would divide a large part of it between his living brother, the philanthropist, and the daughter of his dead brother Ralph—the soldier of the family, who had been killed at Chancellorsville. Now as it was certain that the philanthropist, for his part, if he had control of what came to him, would forthwith attempt to buy the Central Park as an airing ground for pauper idiots, or do something equally though charitably outrageous, the chances were that his portion—if he got any—would be placed in trust, or that it would be paid him as income by his son, if the latter were selected to manage the fortune. This was what most people expected, and it was certainly what Alexander Junior hoped.
It was natural, too, and in a measure just. The male line of the Lauderdales was dying out, and Alexander Junior would be the last of them, in the natural succession of mortality, being by far the youngest as he was by far the strongest. It would be proper that he should administer the estate until it was finally divided amongst the female heirs and their children.
He was really and truly a man of spotless probity, in spite of the suspicion which almost inevitably attaches to people who seem too perfect to be human. On the surface these perfections of his were so hard that they amounted to defects. It is aggressive virtue that chastises what it loves—by its mere existence. But neither his probity, nor his exterior mechanical superiority, so to say, was connected with the mainspring of his character. That lay much deeper, and he concealed it with as much skill as though to reveal its existence would have ruined him in fortune and reputation, though it would probably have affected neither the one nor the other. The only members of the family who suspected the truth were his daughter Charlotte and Robert the Rich.
Charlotte, who was afraid of nothing, not even of certain things which she might have done better to respect, if not to fear, said openly in the family, and even to the face of her father, that she did not believe he was poor. Thereupon, Alexander Junior usually administered a stern rebuke in his metallic voice, whereat Charlotte would smile and change the subject, as though she did not care to talk of it just then, but would return to it by and by. She had magnificent teeth, and, when she chose, her smile could be almost as terribly electric as Alexander’s own.
As for Robert Lauderdale, he had more accurate knowledge, but not much. Like many eminently successful men he had an unusual mastery of details, and an unfailing memory for those which interested him. He knew the exact figure of his nephew’s salary from the Trust Company, and he was able to calculate with tolerable exactness, also, what the Lauderdales spent, what Mrs. Lauderdale earned and how much the annual surplus must be. He knew also that Alexander Junior’s mother, who had thoroughly understood her husband, the philanthropist, had left what she possessed to her only son, and only a legacy to her husband. Her property had been owned in New England; the executor had been a peculiarly taciturn New England lawyer, and Alexander had never said anything to any one else concerning the inheritance. His mother had died after he had come of age, but before he had been married, and there were no means whatever of ascertaining what he had received. The philanthropist and his son had continued to live together, as they still did; but the old gentleman had always left household matters and expenses in his wife’s charge, and had never in the least understood, nor cared to understand, the details of daily life. He had his two rooms, he had enough to eat and he spent nothing on himself, except for the large quantity of tobacco he consumed and for his very modest toilet. As for the cigars, Alexander had brought him down, in the course of ten years, by very fine gradations, from the best Havanas which money could buy to ‘old Virginia cheroots,’ at ten cents for a package of five,—a luxury which even the frugal inhabitant of Calabrian Mulberry Street would consider a permissible extravagance on Sundays. Alexander, who did not smoke, saw that the change had not had any ill effect upon his father’s health, and silently triumphed. If the old gentleman’s nerves had shown signs of weakness, Alexander had previously determined to retire up the scale of prices to the extent of one cent more for each cigar. In the matter of dress the elder Alexander pleased himself, and in so doing pleased his son also, for he generally forgot to get a new coat until the old one was dropping to pieces, and he secretly bought his shoes of a little Italian shoemaker in the South Fifth Avenue, as has been already noticed; the said shoemaker being the unhappy father of one of the philanthropist’s most favourite and unpromising idiots.