“Oh! come, you’re both right and both wrong. People who argue always are,” interposed the hearty, jovial voice of Mr. Randolph. He was a tall, fine-looking man, with clear brown eyes, remarkably keen, and rather lacking in tenderness, but of a certain restless quickness as they swept from one face to another. His features were regular, and his manner genial, while his laugh was equal to that immortal one of Scrooge’s nephew. Henry Randolph was a man of enormous popularity, and so trusted by his friends that even the knowledge that he had availed himself of the terms of his father’s will to keep back his sister’s portion did not shake their faith. He must have such good reasons, they said.
In truth, his reasons were of the very best. He was a man who speculated largely, and for the most part successfully; but, just at the time of Alice’s marriage, his losses had been so heavy that to resign the control of such a large amount would have been to him financial ruin, while, with it at his command, he could in a short time make good his loss. The temptation to refuse his consent to the marriage, and thus make the money legally his, was doubled by his real objection to Dr. Richards as an irreligious man, whose views upon social and political matters were also open to exception. He honestly wished his sister to accompany the family abroad, as, even if her marriage were not thereby definitely broken off, it would at least be deferred sufficiently long to serve his purpose financially.
Now, of all this Frederick Richards was perfectly aware; that is, he knew—as every one did—of the sudden collapse of the scheme which crippled Mr. Randolph, and swallowed whole innumerable smaller fortunes, and, through some murmur of the reeds such as betrayed King Midas’ secret, learned that Henry Randolph was a loser to a large amount. But to Alice the doctor said nothing; only, when the family returned to Micklegard, and the offer was made to let bygones be bygones, and restore to Alice the fortune her father had left her, Dr. Richards quietly refused.
Why?
It is hard to make his motives comprehensible to those who regard wealth as the supreme good.
The grandfather of Henry and Alice Randolph had made his fortune by means which, even in that day and generation, were regarded with scorn and horror. He was a slave-trader; but his only daughter, surrounded by luxury and educated at a Northern school, never suspected by what iniquitous means her wealth was acquired. To her, her father had always been the man he had become after his runaway marriage with the daughter of an aristocratic family, and his purchase of an estate in the far South,—handsome, jovial, and, to her, always tenderly indulgent. Her marriage to a representative of one of the “old families” strengthened her belief in herself as one of the chosen few for whose benefit the world was made and ordered; and her husband did not behold in the pearls and rubies upon his bride’s fair neck the blood and tears of suffering human beings, though somewhat distressfully aware of the not over-creditable manner in which his father-in-law had “made his money.” A convenient term this of “making money,” by the by. One might call it the great nineteenth-century petitio principii; for what a man makes might certainly be considered as his by all social and moral laws, while that which he merely acquires is suggestive of all sorts of confusing possibilities. Yet, if he makes, of what does he make, and whence came his material? Unless he makes also that, can he be said really to own the thing finally produced?
All which would have appeared to Henry Randolph very empty and unprofitable speculation,—mere sound, signifying nothing. Certainly, if one had accused him of insensibility to such suffering as he did not actually see, there are few of us who could afford to cast a stone at him; and he would have said of himself that to cases of real distress his heart and purse were always open; yet, to Frederick Richards’s mind, an invisible, semi-tangible hardness, under the manufacturer’s generous, cordial exterior, was always accounted for and excused by his grandfather’s occupation. That his own Alice had, as he firmly believed, escaped such a core to her loving heart (like the earth’s inmost hypothetical solid centre), was a freak of heredity for which he did not profess to be able to account. Yet, even Alice did not entirely concur in her husband’s opinion about the fortune, as was indeed most natural. She yielded to his feeling upon the matter; but her own was by no means what it would have been had the fruit of speculation been “lifted” bodily from a bank vault, or the slave-trader’s chattels been of pure Caucasian parentage. Also the money would have been in many ways a convenience, and, in case of “anything happening” to herself or the doctor, would have given her an ease of mind in regard to Freddy, which she was by no means able to derive from the thought of an overruling Providence.
What Henry Randolph thought of his brother-in-law, we had better not inquire; what he said was this,—
“Well, it’s his own affair; and if he can afford to despise such a sum of money, he is better off than I am,” which in a sense was true, since Dr. Richards had as much as he wanted.
The amount in question, however, was carefully “left” to Alice in her brother’s will, he being, according to his lights, a just man, whenever speculation would allow him; and, meanwhile, the two families were on studiously cordial terms, and were assembled on Christmas Eve to hail the lighting of the tree Ygdrasil.