“Ralston? Oh, yes—Mr. Lauderdale wanted him to try again—yes—well, he’s doing pretty well, I’m told. But they tell me he can’t do anything, though he wants to. Praiseworthy, though, very praiseworthy, to try and work, when he’s sure to have plenty of money one of these days. I like the boy myself,” added Mr. Beman, with slightly increasing interest. “He’s got some good in him, somewhere, I’ll be bound.”
“Does he keep pretty steady?” enquired Alexander Junior. “You knew he drank, I suppose?”
“Drinks!” exclaimed Mr. Beman, rather incredulously. “Nonsense—don’t believe it.”
Mr. Beman hated society, and spent many of his leisure hours in a club chiefly frequented by old gentlemen.
“Oh, no! It’s quite true, I assure you. I thought you knew, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it—being a relation. I hope he won’t make a fool of himself, now that he’s with you. Good morning.”
“Good morning, my dear Lauderdale,” answered the banker, cordially shaking hands.
Alexander left the bank and returned to his own office, questioning himself by the way concerning the right and wrong side of what he had just done, in undermining whatever confidence Mr. Beman might have in John Ralston. By dint of moral exertion, he succeeded in inducing his Scotch business instinct to admit that it was fair to warn an old friend if the habits of a young man he had lately taken into employment were not exactly what they should be. He resolutely closed his eyes to the fact that he had waited several days, until something had required that he should see the banker, in order to ask the careless question, and that, during all that time, Katharine’s obstinacy had rankled in his brooding temper like an unreturned blow. He did not wish to think, either, that he had perpetrated a small act of indirect vengeance. He was very intent upon being conscientious—it would not do even to remember that any under-thoughts had floated through his brain beneath the current which he desired to see.
It was easy enough to forget it all, by merely allowing his mind to turn again to the question of his uncle’s millions. That subject had a fascination which never palled. If he is to be excused at all for this and many other things which he subsequently did, his excuse must be stated now, or never.
Let this one fact be remembered, for the sake of his humanity. He had spent the best years of his life in the inner office of a great Trust Company. That alone explains many things. Having originally been in moderate circumstances, he had been brought into daily contact for a long period with the process of hoarding money. He had seen how sums, originally insignificant, doubled and trebled themselves, and grew to fair dimensions by the simplest of all means,—by being kept locked up. He had not been by nature grasping, nor covetous of the goods of others in any inordinate degree, but he had that inborn craving for the actual money itself, for seeing it and touching it, and knowing where it is, which makes one small boy ask his father for a penny ‘to put by the side of the other,’ while his brother spends his mite on a sugar-plum, eats it, and runs off to play. Day by day, month by month, year by year, he had seen that putting of one penny by the side of the other going on under his eyes and personal supervision. It had been his duty to see that the pennies stayed where they were put. It is not strange that, with his temperament, he should have done for himself what he did for others. And with the doing of it came the habit of secrecy, which belongs to the miser’s passion, the instinctive denial of the possession, the mechanical and constantly recurring avowal of an imaginary poverty. All that came as surely as the dream of countless gold, to be counted forever and ever, with the absolute certainty of never reaching the end, and as the nightmare of the empty safe, more real and terrible than the live horror of the waking man who comes home and finds that the wife he loves has left him.
He knew that hideous scene by heart. It visited him sometimes with no apparent cause. He knew how in the night—he always dreamed that it happened at night—he went to his own box in the Safe Deposit Vault, his own familiar box, as in reality he went regularly twice in every week. He felt the thrill of secret, heart-warming anticipation as he came near to it. His heart began to beat as it always did then, and only then, giving him a queer, breathless sensation which he loved, and that peculiar thirsty dryness in the throat. He turned the key, he pressed the spring, and out it came against his greedy, trembling hand—empty. At that point he awoke, clutching at the thin, tough chain by which the real key hung about his neck. His worst fear for years had been to dream that dream—his highest pleasure had been to go, after dreaming it, and find it false, the drawer full, all safe, the good United States Bonds filed away in dockets of a hundred thousand dollars each, untouched and unfingered.