“I never knew,” said Leighton. “I never had the slightest idea of it.”
“I knew you did not know; and Zee does not know, and she mustn’t know. It’s too bad, Morris, that we can’t order our lives as they should be. Mine is a failure. I am sixty years old; and I am not only a failure, but the people I have tried to help I have injured.” He spoke bitterly.
“No, no; you must not talk so. If you have done half as much for any one else as for me,—”
“I have done nothing for you,—or for Zee, and I have tried to help her. I have wanted—I have wanted very much for you to care for each other. It’s like an echo of an old story. All that I ask now is that you will bear me no ill will when I have gone. I have done the best I could.”
“Please don’t! There’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay in the world for many years to come.”
“We don’t say ‘many years’ when we have passed sixty. Your father was my intimate friend, Morris. We were boys together at college,—it’s your college and mine, too. I’m glad you went there. Your father would have liked it so. Some of the fellows who taught us, taught you. When you saw them you saw gentlemen and scholars. They gave up the chance of greater things to stay there among the elms and maples of the old campus. God never made finer gentlemen!
“Your father and I were seniors at Tippecanoe when the Civil War came. Your father rose from the ranks to be a colonel. My own affairs didn’t prosper; but that’s all over now,”—and the old man sighed. “After the war it didn’t seem worth while to go back to school, but your father finished, and stayed there in Tippecanoe where he was born, and studied law. I tried the law here, but it wouldn’t go; the war had spoiled me—I failed there, as everywhere. My father died and left me enough to live on, and a little more; so I’ve never done a single thing to my credit from beginning to end.”
He was speaking brokenly, in a way that was new to him. He felt helplessly about on the table for the safety match-holder, and Leighton sprang up and handed him a light,—something that he had never before felt that he dare do. No one ever held Rodney Merriam’s coat for him, any more than one patted him on the back.
“At the end of our war, the Maximilian affair was on in Mexico and I wanted to have a hand in it. When I came back your father had moved here. He was an ambitious man. There was every likelihood of his taking a high place at the bar; and he had, too, a taste for politics. He could hardly have failed to receive substantial rewards, for everything went to the soldiers in those days. Then he met my sister. She was the youngest member of our family,—only a girl at the end of the war. She was a very beautiful woman, Morris. She and Zee are much alike; but Zee has marked traits of her own. I don’t quite account for them. Her mother was a quick-witted woman, well educated for her day. Zee is more a woman of the world than her mother was and she has more spirit.”
Merriam opened a drawer in his table and drew out a miniature painted on porcelain. He put on his spectacles and studied it intently for a moment before handing it to Leighton.