The Ralstons

by F. Marion Crawford

CHAPTER XXIV.

The letter Alexander Lauderdale Junior had written to Ralston will have given some idea of what he was willing to sacrifice for the sake of having the will annulled. A moral degeneration had begun in him, which might go far in the end. The passion he had so long tried to conceal, with considerable success, and which had fed for many years on a small object, was stirred up and set at large by the enormous wealth now at stake. The man’s pride shrank away before it, and even his rigid principles wavered. He began to make those compromises with his conscience which circumstances suggested, and he forced his religious habits to help in doing the dirty work of his greed. In a lower walk of life, perhaps, such a man, in such a situation, would have committed crimes to obtain the money. Alexander Junior robbed his own soul, and murdered his own conscience. We shall know some day what difference there is between that and murder in the first degree.

It was not an affair of a few days. Such a character could not change easily nor quickly, either for better or for worse. For years the thought of his uncle’s money had been constantly present with him, and for many years he had dreamt the miser’s dream of endless gold. There was nothing new in it, nor, of itself, had it ever disturbed the equanimity of his well-practised righteousness. It had never even occurred to him that in not spending his hoarded income he was wronging any one. He had regarded his wife’s painting and selling her miniatures as a wholesome occupation, and as what certain persons call a moral discipline. The principles of economy which he forced his household to practise were agreeable to the ascetic disposition which in a greater or less degree showed itself in the Scotch blood of the Lauderdales. Economy was a means of feeling that he was better than other people, and, axiomatically, it cost nothing, and helped to satisfy his main passion. Only his sense of social importance, which was strong and hereditary, had hindered him from actually reducing his establishment to a condition of positive penury. But that would have been impossible, because it would have been impossible to conceal it. He preserved the limits so carefully that, while every one said that the Lauderdales lived very quietly, no one ever thought of saying that they lived poorly. Then, too, Mrs. Lauderdale was herself an excellent manager, and had long been deceived by her husband’s assurance that he was poor and wholly dependent upon the salary he received from the Trust Company, in which he held no interest, as he could always easily prove. As a matter of fact, though he practically directed the affairs of the Company himself, he considered United States’ bonds as a safer investment. He did not consider that he was deceiving his wife, either. In his own opinion he was poor. What was a million? There were some who had nearly two hundred millions. Scores, perhaps hundreds, in the country had more than fifty millions. What was a million? Was not a man poor who had but one dollar when his neighbour had two hundred? It was no business of his wife’s, nor of any one else, if he had something put away. It had always been possible, within the limits of the law, that his uncle might leave him nothing. So he had practised economy, and grown rich secretly.

But all his hardly hoarded savings were but as a drop to the sea of gold which surged upon the horizon of his hopes when he thought of Robert Lauderdale’s death, and which rushed forward all at once to his very feet, as soon as the old man was really dead. It washed away his elaborately drawn pattern of morality, as the tide obliterates the figures a child has scrawled upon the sand; it rose by quick degrees, and flowed higher than the rigid landmarks which he had driven like stakes into the flat expanses of his soul; it boiled up and sucked back the earth from beneath the very foundations of the chapel of ease he had built for his conscience, over his own little spring of wealth, when all the shore had been dry and arid, and the golden ocean very far off.

The long cherished hope had prepared the circumstances for the reality. He meant now to have at least half the fortune, or perish in the attempt to get it. That is, he was ready to spend even what he had saved, in order to get possession of the greater sum. And he was far more ready to spend other things, such as his pride and his manliness. He was ready and willing to lay the shears to his garment of righteousness, and to clip and cut it to the very limits of moral decency, leaving but enough to cover the nakedness of his miserly soul.

Therefore he had written that letter to John Ralston, and one something like it to John’s mother, believing it probable that she had been told by her son of much that had taken place. His lawyer had told him that if the will were probated, and if it became necessary to attack it on other grounds, it would be of the highest importance that the next of kin should act in concert against the distant relations who had been so highly favoured. It became his business, therefore, to make sure of having the Ralstons on his side.

He distrusted them, after what had happened. He knew that they cared little for money, and much for a certain kind of sentiment which was quite foreign to him, and he believed them capable of opposing him, merely in order that the dead man’s wishes might be carried out. The situation in which he found himself was an unexpected one, too. He had been taken by surprise and obliged to act at short notice, and he was no diplomatist. He merely took the first means which offered for carrying out his lawyer’s idea. The will itself was of an unusual character. He had expected that his uncle would either divide the fortune between the next of kin, in trusts for their children, with a legacy to the Brights, or that he would make something like an equal distribution amongst all the living members of the family. He had long cherished, however, the secret hope that as his own branch of the family was the most numerous, and as he himself had such an unassailable character for uprightness and economy, the largest share might be placed in his hands for administration, if not actually as his own property. He had been disappointed, and he considered the will a piece of flagrant injustice.

Many outsiders shared his opinion, and asked one another why the Brights should have so much, and Alexander Junior had the satisfaction of feeling that his action would be approved by a large number of hard-headed business men amongst his acquaintances. His lawyer, too, was encouraged by this fact; and looked forward confidently to pocketing an enormous fee. He was a man as hard headed, as upright, and as spotless in reputation as his client, and the high morality of their united forces was imposing.

If Alexander had conceived it possible that Mrs. Ralston and her son could agree to have no opinion in the matter, but to abide by their lawyer’s judgment, and let him act as he thought best, he might have spared himself the trouble and humiliation of writing the letter to John. He would have known that Mr. Henry Brett was not the man to advise his clients against taking their rights without any regard to sentiment, and Alexander’s joy was great when he found that Brett was with him—a much younger man than his own lawyer, but keen, business-like, and of excellent standing. Brett had married the widow of the notorious forger and defaulter, John Darche, and had diminished neither his popularity nor his credit by so doing.

Alexander reproached himself in a way that would have surprised his former virtue, for having so bitterly opposed Katharine’s marriage with John Ralston. He really could not conceive how he could ever have attached so much importance to the young fellow’s youthful follies. It was the most natural thing in the world as it seemed to him now, that with the prospect of boundless wealth the boy should have idled away his time and amused himself as other boys did. His mind was full of excuses for Ralston. What he could not pardon, he allowed to be swamped by the gold-flood as soon as it presented itself. That one unpardonable thing was the blow he had received. When he could not help thinking of it, and when it stung his manliness—for he was a brave man—he took pains to recollect that he had at once got John by the throat, and would probably have broken some of his bones for him, if Katharine’s hurt had not interrupted the struggle. It was not as though he had received a blow tamely, without retaliation. His blood had been up, and Ralston must have got the worst of it if circumstances had not obliged him to pause in his vengeance. Nothing can equal the unconscious sophistry of a man whose main passion requires that he shall not feel that he has been insulted.