“I would give you more, but you are both comparatively young, and I do not wish to encourage habits of extravagance in you. The world is full of vicissitudes, and it is impossible for anybody to know how he may be pecuniarily situated in ten years’ time. But I wish you, Ernest, to keep up your rank—moderately, if you like, but still to keep it up. Life is all before you now, and whatever you choose to go in for, you shall not want the money to back you. Look here, my children, I may as well tell you that when I die you will inherit nearly all I have got; I have left it to be divided equally between you, with reversion to the survivor. I drew up that will some years back, and I do not think that it is worth while altering it now.”
“Forgive me,” said Ernest, “but how about Jeremy?”
Mr. Cardus’s face changed a little. He had never got over his dislike of Jeremy, though his sense of justice caused him to stifle it.
“I have not forgotten Jeremy,” he said, in a tone that indicated that he did not wish to pursue the conversation.
Ernest and Dorothy thanked the old man for his goodness, but he would not listen, so they went off and left him to return to his letter-writing. In the passage Dorothy peeped through the glass half of the door which opened into her grandfather’s room.
There sat the old man writing, writing, his long iron-gray hair hanging all about his face. Presently he seemed to think of something, and a smile, which the contorted mouth made ghastly, spread itself over the pallid countenance. Rising, he went to the corner and extracted a long tally-stick on which notches were cut. Sitting down again, he counted the remaining notches over and over, and then took a penknife and cut one out. This done, he put the stick back, and, looking at the wall, began to mutter—for he was not quite dumb—and to clasp and unclasp his powerful hand. Dorothy entered the room quickly.
“Grandfather, what are you doing?” she said sharply.
The old man started, and his jaw dropped. Then the eyes grew dull, and his usual apathetic look stole over his face. Taking up his slate, he wrote, “Cutting out my notches.”
Dorothy asked him some farther questions, but could get nothing more out of him.
“I don’t at all like the way grandfather has been going on lately,” she said to Ernest. “He is always muttering and clinching his hand, as though he had some one by the throat. You know he thinks that he has been serving the fiend all these years, and that his time will be up shortly, whereas you know, though Reginald had no cause to love him, he has been very kind to him. If it had not been for Reginald, my grandfather would have been sent to the madhouse; but because he was connected with his loss of fortune, he thinks he is the devil. He forgets how he served Reginald; you see even in madness the mind only remembers the injuries inflicted on itself, and forgets those it inflicted on others. I don’t at all like his way.” “I should think that he had better be shut up.”