"Why, what's the matter with him?"
"He wants money—all I've got in the world, if I'll give it to him. He says he shall be ruined if he can't get it."
"Indeed!"
"I don't know nothin' about it, but he says something's wrong in the firm. He wants forty thousand dollars, and must have it, or be ruined and disgraced. Don't you tell a soul what I'm saying to you, Philip."
A flood of light was suddenly cast in upon my perplexed understanding. Forty thousand dollars! That was about the amount of the mysterious invoices. After this revelation I had no difficulty in believing that Mr. Whippleton had been using the money of the firm in his private land speculations. The invoices were fictitious, and this explanation showed me why the junior partner did not wish me to mention them to any one. I even thought I comprehended the nature of Mr. Whippleton's sudden illness when I showed him my trial balance. Now he was trying to get the money from his mother to make good his accounts with the firm.
I was grieved and amazed at the revelation thus forced upon me. I understood the old lady's principles, or rather her want of principles, and granting that she had given him her code of worldly wisdom, as she had to me, it was not strange that he should turn out to be a thief and a swindler. However hard and disgusting it may seem, there was something like poetic justice in his coming to her upon her sick bed, perhaps her dying bed, to demand the means of repairing his frauds. I pitied my landlady in her deep distress, but surely worldly wisdom could produce no different result.
Phil receives the Old Lady's Treasure.
Page 129.
"See here, Philip," she continued, raising her head with difficulty from the pillow, and taking from beneath it a great leather pocket-book, distended by its contents. "There's seven thousand dollars, besides notes and bonds for twenty-three thousand more, in it."
"Why do you keep so much money in the house, Mrs. Whippleton? It isn't safe."