The Residuary Legatee; Or, The Posthumous Jest of the Late John Austin

by Frederic Jesup Stimson

I.
ÆNEAS AND CAMILLA.

Poor Austin! A boy’s love feeds on the romance of hopelessness, flourishes apace in the shadow of despair; it delights in patient waiting, in faithful fidelity, in lapses of years; but a man’s is peremptory, immediate, uncompromising. Some secret instinct bids a Romeo to contemplate a tragedy with cheerfulness; and ten to one that his years of gloom change, as they fall behind him, to “un joli souvenir.” But a man, middle-aged, knows when he wants his Dulcinea, and he wants her here and now. No glamour of blighted affections can make up for the hard facts of life to him.

When a middle-aged man can’t get the woman he wants, there are three recognized and respectable courses open to him. He works a little harder, plays a good deal harder, or he marries someone else. The last was out of the question for a man so consumed by the fires of passion as Austin May, but the fuel of his heart was transformed into nervous energy of the entire system. He plunged again, like a rocket, into a rapid and circuitous course of travel and adventure; and, after a brilliant career through the remote East, descended, like a burned-out stick, some fifteen months later, in San Francisco. Thence he went home.

The fact was, he wanted rest. His heart was tired of throbbing, his head weary with thinking. And all his mad adventure had only tired the body, had made him sleep at night, nothing more. He had been through the world again, but Gladys Dehon was all of it to him. He thought of her now with a certain dull pain—less madly, more hopelessly, than in England the two years before.

He could not bear to go back to his home. He went to Boston, and he saw his lawyers; but he did not go out to Brookline. This he vowed he would not do until that day when he had promised Gladys he would be there. He did not forget that he had promised the countess, too; but he was no longer so much troubled by the countess. He would kill her, if necessary.

Meantime, he went to pass the winter in New York. He had himself elected a member of two fashionable clubs. He followed the hounds in Long Island and in Jersey. He went to dinners and he danced at Germans, albeit with an aching heart. He renaturalized himself; he made friends with his countrymen, and he studied his countrywomen. He got himself once more désorienté in American society. He observed what respect was everywhere shown to the VanDees, and how little, comparatively, one thought of the McDums. He found that civilization was pitched on a higher scale, financially, than he had supposed. Thirty thousand a year was none too much for a man to marry on. Now, Austin had not over twenty thousand, even if he fulfilled the hard conditions of his uncle’s will.

He took an interest in yachting, and gave orders for a cutter that was to beat the prevailing style of sloop. He also imported a horse or two, and entered one of them at Sheepshead Bay. He had a luxuriously furnished flat, near Madison Square. He went to St. Augustine in the spring, with the VanDees, and while there was introduced to Georgiana Rutherford. He saw her afterward in New York, and early in June he asked her to marry him.

Miss Rutherford was a young lady of supreme social position, great wealth, and beauty. She had for two years been the leading newspaper belle of New York society. Her movements, her looks, her dresses, the state of her health, the probable state of her affections—everything about her, to the very dimples in her white shoulders—had been chronicled with crude precision in the various metropolitan journals having pretensions to haut ton (for high tone is not a good translation), and had thence been eagerly copied throughout the provincial weeklies of the land. Miss Rutherford was absolutely a person to be desired.

It would not be fair to May to say that he was false to Gladys Dehon. His passion for her, too vehement, had fairly burned itself out. In the two years since he had left her, May’s heart had, as it were, banked its volcanic fires. However fissured were its ravined depths, the surface was at rest, and the lava-flood that concealed it was already cool. And a beautiful huntswoman who had ridden out of sight of her first husband, as had Gladys Dehon, was not at all the sort of person for middle-aged Austin May to marry and bring to Boston. These things he felt for some weeks before he proposed to Miss Rutherford, and she was precisely the sort of girl he saw was best. If old Uncle Austin had selected her himself, he could not have made a better choice. And well, thought May, he saw the motives of his kind old uncle’s will, and the wisdom born of much experience, and long consideration and a knowledge of Eclipse claret that had prompted it. A young man, if left to himself, would choose him a different wife for each three years of his life. It is only after he has run the gamut of all impossibilities that he settles down upon the proper thing. And this, at last, May felt assured that he had done.

May did not pretend to himself that he loved Georgiana Rutherford as he had loved Gladys Dehon. Even now, he was not blind to that. But he thought that she was pretty, and well-placed, and good style; and she had a large fortune, and a still larger family connection, all of the very best securities.