“What’s quite fitting; what’s in keeping?” he demanded.
“Your desertion, your apostasy. After these years of humiliation you have brought me, you throw me off as lightly as though you were a clerk who had worked here a week and left to take another job. But it’s what I deserve for my forbearance. It’s too bad you didn’t go sooner. But it’s quite characteristic that you should wait till there was a chance of your being of some service to me, as age comes on and a son’s right arm would mean much—you wait for a strategic moment and then fire your last volley and leave. No servant ever served me so ill. But I deserve it; go to Walsh; very likely you and he will find yourselves well suited to each other.”
“Walsh did your work for you for twenty years; it’s rather base of you to visit your contempt on him now. If you don’t know it, every man in Pittsburg knows what Tom Walsh was to you—he was your brains.”
Colonel Craighill jumped to his feet, the blood suffusing his face.
“You ungrateful dog—the reason I dispensed with Walsh was that he’s crooked—he’s a man of no principles, he’s a rascal!”
“But it took you twenty years to find it out—twenty years of faithful service and you gave a farewell dinner to a rascal, your rascal, and bade him God-speed.”
“I didn’t know then what he was!” roared Colonel Craighill, “but I have learned since. He lied about the mercantile company to get it away from me. He falsified the statements and I sold to him on an inventory he made himself. No doubt you were in collusion with him and now you’re to be paid for robbing your father. It’s all of a piece; it’s what I have trained you for and my reward for shielding you and bearing with you all these years.”
“For your prayers, your hypocritical snivelling, for wearing the martyr’s crown because you had the ill luck to be my father! Every time I got drunk you re-sanctified yourself; you were glad when I went bad because it brought your own virtue into higher relief. You never met me like a man, because you’re only the outer shell of a man; there’s no heart in you; no soul in you! And don’t be too sure you deceive the people of this town; they know you and just now they’re sneering because they know you’ve been in trouble and they’re glad to find that anything as perfect as you are has clay feet. Walsh never said a word of ill to me of you; he served you with the humility you demanded and the best things you ever did he managed and you got the glory. And he left you because you wanted to sail out into showy schemes like that Mexican fake and he knew where they would land you. The finest testimony of your high character is poor old Gregory who trusted you—trusted you like a child because you were the great Roger Craighill who could do no wrong; and when you had got that Sand Creek deal through you didn’t know him any more, but turned him over to your lawyer. And he’s sitting out there now in the reception room waiting for you to see him; he’s been trying to see you all winter, but you won’t let him in. And Addie, poor Addie up there at the house, you deceived her, too, for she thought she was marrying a man; and the night you went to Boston without her because you were afraid to spring her on the Brodericks, she found you out.”
“I should strike you down for this—for speaking to me of my wife in such infamous terms. The fact that you assume the rôle of her champion is an insult to her—a flagrant, unpardonable insult!”
“It’s you that insulted her; you were ashamed of her; men treat their mistresses better than that! She deserved better of the great Roger Craighill.”