"What is it all about?" Henry asked.
"Oh, it's the foulest of fabrication. About a year ago there came a widow from Washington with a letter from one of our friends, and asked for a position in the store. Well, we gave her employment, and—and it is about her; but it really amounts to nothing."
"Why, then, didn't you let me kick the scoundrel into the street?"
"My dear boy, to a man who has the money it is easier to pay than to explain. The public is greedy for scandal, but looks with suspicion and coldness upon a correction. One is sweet; the other is tasteless. The rapid acquisition of wealth is associated with some mysterious crime, and men who have failed in wild speculations are the first to cry out against the millionaire. The rich man must pay for the privilege of being rich."
The statement was sent to the city press. It reminded the public of the abduction of Henry Witherspoon; touched upon the sensation created at the time, and upon the long season of interest that had followed; explained the part which the uncle had played, and delicately gave his cause for playing it. And the return of the wanderer was set forth with graphic directness.
At noon the merchant and Henry ate luncheon in a club where thick rugs hushed a foot-fall into a mere whisper of a walk, where servants, grave of countenance and low of voice, seemed to underscore the chilliness of the place. Henry was introduced to a number of astonished men, who said that they welcomed him home, and who immediately began to talk about something else; and he was shown through the large library, where a solitary man sat looking at the pictures in a comic weekly. After leaving the club they went to a tailor's shop, and then drove over the boulevards and through the parks. Witherspoon, with no pronounced degree of pride, had conducted Henry through the Colossus; he had been pleased, of course, at the young man's astonishment, and he must have been moved by a strong surge of self-glorification when his son wondered at the broadness of the Witherspoon empire, yet he had held in a strong subjection all signs of an unseemly pride. But when he struck the boulevard system, his dignified reserve went to pieces.
"Finest on earth; no doubt about that. Oh, of course, many years of talk and thousands of pages of print have paved the Paris boulevards with peculiar interest, but wipe out association, and where would they be in comparison with these? Look at that stretch. And a few years ago this land could have been picked up for almost nothing. Look at those flowers."
It was now past midsummmer, but no suggestion of a coming blight lay upon the flower-beds. "Look at those trees. Why, in time they will knock the New Haven elms completely out."