His dinner was brought to his room and was sent down again untasted. He locked his doors and sat down to think. The sounds about the house which at best barely penetrated the heavy walls of his apartment died gradually away. A clock within the room chiming the hour annoyed him and he stopped it. His thoughts ran over his affairs and the affairs of his brother and his sister and partners and turned to those in various measure dependent upon his bounty.
His sense of justice, never wholly obscured, because rooted in his exorbitant pride, was keenly alive in this hour of silent reckoning. No injustice, however slight, must be left that could be urged against his memory, and none, he believed, could now thus be urged. If there were a shock on the exchanges at the news of his death, if the stocks of his companies should be raided, no harm could come to the companies themselves. The antidote to all uneasiness lay in the unnecessarily large cash balances, rooted likewise in the Kimberly pride, that he kept always in hand for the unexpected.
His servants, to the least, had been remembered and he was going over his thought of them when, with a pang, he reflected that he had completely forgotten the maid, Annie. It was a humiliation to think that of all minor things this could happen--that the faithful girl who had been closer than all others to her who was dearest to him could have been neglected. However, this could be trusted to a letter to his brother, and going to a table he wrote a memorandum of the provisions he wished made for Annie.
Brother Francis and his years of servitude came to his mind. Was there any injustice to this man in leaving undone what he had fully intended to do in providing for the new school? He thought the subject over long and loosely. What would Francis say when he heard? Could he, stricken sometime with a revolting disease, ever think of Kimberly as unjust?
The old fancy of Francis in heaven and Dives begging for a drop of water returned. But the thought of lying for an eternity in hell without a drop of water was more tolerable than the thought of this faithful Lazarus' accusing finger pointing to a tortured Dives who had been in the least matter unjust. If there were a hereafter, pride had something at stake in this, too.
And thus the thought he most hated obtruded itself unbidden--was there a hereafter?
Alice rose before him. He hid his face in his hands. Could this woman, the very thought of whom he revered and loved more than life itself--could she now be mere dissolving clay--or did she live? Was it but breathing clay that once had called into life every good impulse in his nature?
He rose and found himself before his mother's picture. How completely he had forgotten his mother, whose agony had given him life! He looked long and tenderly into her eyes. When he turned away, dawn was beating at the drawn shades. The night was gone. Without even asking what had swayed him he put his design away.
CHAPTER XLV
Kimberly took up the matters of the new day heavy with thought. But he sent none the less immovably for Nelson and the troublesome codicil for the school was put under immediate way. He should feel better for it, he assured himself, even in hell. And whether, he reflected, it should produce any relief there or not, it would silence criticism. With his accustomed reticence he withheld from Nelson the name of the beneficiaries until the final draught should be ready, and in the afternoon rode out alone.