“And so I say to you now,” pursued Reuben, with a sense of exultation in the resolute words as they sounded on his ear, “I will not allow any professional chimeras to bind me to inactivity, to acquiescence, if a wrong is being done to you. And more, I will do all that lies in my power to help you understand the whole situation. And if, when it is all mapped out before us, you need my assistance to set crooked things straight, why, with all my heart you shall have it, and the partnership shall go out of the window.”
“If you had said that at the beginning,” sighed Kate.
“Ah, then I did not know what I know now!” answered Reuben, holding her eyes with his, while the light on his face grew ruddier.
“Well, then, this is what I can tell you,” said the elder girl, “and I am to tell it to you as our lawyer, am I not—our lawyer in the sense that Mr. Boyce is mamma’s lawyer?”
Reuben bowed, and settled himself in his chair to listen. It was a long recital, broken now by suggestions from Ethel, now by questions from the lawyer. From time to time he made notes on the blotter before him, and when the narrative was finished he spent some moments in consulting these, and combining them with figures from another paper, in new columns. Then he said, speaking slowly and with deliberation:
“This I take to be the situation: You are millionnaires, and are in a strait for money. When I say ‘you’ I speak of your mother and yourselves as one. Your income, which formerly gave you a surplus of sixty thousand or seventy thousand dollars a year for new investments, is all at once not large enough to pay the interest on your debts, let alone your household and personal expenses. First, what has become of this income? It came from three sources—the furnaces, the telegraph stock, and a group of minor properties. These furnaces and iron-mines, which were all your own until you were persuaded to put a mortgage on them, have been closed by the orders of outsiders with whom you were persuaded to combine. Exit your income from that source. Telegraph competition has cut down your earnings from the Northern Union stock to next to nothing. No doubt we shall find that your income from the other properties has been absorbed in salaries voted to themselves by the men into whose hands you have fallen. That is a very old trick, and I shall be surprised if it does not turn up here. In the second place, you are heavily in debt. On the 1st of January next, you must borrow money, apparently, to pay the interest on this debt. What makes it the harder is that you have not, as far as I can discover, had any value received whatever for this debt. In other words, you are being swindled out of something like one hundred thousand dollars per year, and not even such a property as your father left can stand that very long. I should say it was high time you came to somebody for advice.”
Before this terribly lucid statement the two girls sat aghast.
It was Ethel who first found something to say. “We never dreamed of this, Mr. Tracy,” she said, breathlessly. “Our idea in coming, what we thought of most, was the poor people being thrown out of work in the winter, like this, and it being in some way, our fault!”
“People think it is our fault,” interposed Kate. “Only to-day, as we were driving here, there were some men standing on the corner, and one of them called out a very cruel thing about us, as if we had personally injured him. But what you tell me—is it really as bad as that?”
“I am afraid it is quite as bad as I have pictured it.”