“I don’t mean it for growling, Valentine. It is true.”
“It’s not true.”
“Not true! The longer I live the more examples I see of it. A man treads another down that he may rise himself: and there he stands high and flourishing. But wait a few years, and look then. He is gone. Gone, and no trace of his prosperity left. And when I mark that, I recall that verse in the Psalms of David: ‘I went by, and lo, he was gone: I sought him, but his place was nowhere to be found.’ That verse is a true type of real life, Valentine.”
“I don’t believe it,” cried Valentine. “And where’s the good of having the Psalms at your finger-ends?”
“You do believe it. Why, Valentine, take your own case. Was there ever a closer exemplification? Tom was injured; put down; I may say, crushed by you and your father. Yes, crushed: crushed out of his rights. His father made the business; and the half of it, at any rate, ought to have been Tom’s. Instead of that, your father deposed him and usurped it. He repented when he was dying, and charged you to remedy the wrong. But you did not; you usurped it. And what has it ended in?”
“Ended in?” cried Valentine vacantly.
“You are—as you are; ruined in character, in purse, in reputation; and Tom is respected and flourishing. The business has left you and gone to him; not through any seeking of his, but through your own doings entirely; the very self-same business that his father made has in the natural course of time and events gone back to him—and he is not thirty yet. It is retribution, nephew. Justice has been righting herself; and man could neither stay nor hinder it.”
“What nonsense!” debated Valentine testily. “Suppose I had been steady: would the business have left me for Tom then?”
“Yes. In some inscrutable way, that we see not, it would. I am sure of it. You would no more have been allowed to triumph to the end on your ill-gotten gains, than I could stand if I went out and perched myself on yonder weathercock,” affirmed Mrs. Cramp, growing warm. “Your father kept his place, it is true; but what a miserable man he always was, and without any ostensible cause.”