“Oh, go on then. What is it?”
“Well,” he hesitated, “I have been turning over facts in my mind pretty assiduously, believe me, during the last few days, and one of them is that I am a cripple unable to repair in any way the harm I have done. No, please don’t say anything! I thoroughly realize that the memory of—of Madame Palitzin—will be for ever shadowed by the manner of—in short, by what preceded the accident. Too many know that I was on board the Wild Rose; it will leak out sooner or later that ‘Mr. Harrington,’ the private secretary, was Preston Wynne, and now that it has become a physical impossibility for me to give satisfaction to Prince Palitzin, the stain is and will remain indelible.”
“My dear, good boy,” Tatiana recriminated, “this is sheer morbidity. First of all, who are the many who, according to you, know that ‘Mr. Harrington’ was not ‘Mr. Harrington’? Jean and myself and the Abbé de Kerdren, Régis, old Garrassime, and possibly Marguerite de Plenhöel, although she has not mentioned your name or your presence to a living soul; but, of course, she saw you as you were being carried ashore. None will speak, rest assured; so think no more about it and remember that while there is life there is hope; that you are young, intelligent, gifted, and, moreover, extremely wealthy, since you have inherited during the past four years not only your father’s colossal fortune, but also your grandmother’s. This gives you immense opportunities to do good; to create interests of many sorts for yourself that will occupy your mind. I am not trying to overdose you with rose-colored views of a painful situation, but still—” She paused and finished her discourse by a very convincing little gesture.
“Yes; I dare say you are right,” Preston admitted; “but my money without me would do just as much good, provided I managed to pass it on to somebody who would take the trouble off my hands. Personally I am not a philanthrope, I am afraid.”
“Neither am I,” she retorted. “Organized charities are a horror to me. Don’t misunderstand what I say. I certainly admit that money left to hospitals, orphan-asylums, crèches, etc., etc., is well employed; but it has always seemed to me that one gold piece given to the truly deserving, from hand to hand, as by one human bring to another, so to speak, is far better than inscribing one’s name—almost invariably with the hope of its being published abroad—upon a list of so-called philanthropies.”
“I am entirely of your opinion, excepting that in order to discover the truly deserving it is needful to be up, about, and doing.”
“Not with a fitting and faithful agent.”
“A faithful and fitting representative? Yes ... perhaps!”
“How many millions have you got?” she asked, laughingly, to cheer him up.
“Oh,” he said, immediately catching the spirit of her mood, “let me see—about fifty—that is in dollars, you understand.”