"Heirlooms."
"How's that?"
"They're heirlooms," said Mr. Carmody bitterly.
He always felt bitter when he thought of the Rudge Hall heirlooms. He looked upon them as a mean joke played on him by a gang of sardonic ancestors.
To a man, lacking both reverence for family traditions and appreciation of the beautiful in art, who comes into possession of an ancient house and its contents, there must always be something painfully ironical about heirlooms. To such a man they are simply so much potential wealth which is being allowed to lie idle, doing no good to anybody. Mr. Carmody had always had that feeling very strongly.
Unlike the majority of heirs, he had not been trained from boyhood to revere the home of his ancestors, and to look forward to its possession as a sacred trust. He had been the second son of a second son, and his chance of ever succeeding to the property was at the outset so remote that he had seldom given it a thought. He had gone into business at an early age, and when, in middle life, a series of accidents made him squire of Rudge Hall, he had brought with him to the place a practical eye and the commercial outlook. The result was that when he walked in the picture gallery and thought how much solid cash he could get for this Velasquez or that Gainsborough, if only he were given a free hand, the iron entered into Lester Carmody's soul.
"They're heirlooms," he said. "I can't sell them."
"How come? They're yours, aren't they?"
"No," said Mr. Carmody, "they belong to the estate."
On Mr. Molloy, as he listened to his host's lengthy exposition of the laws governing heirlooms, there descended a deepening cloud of gloom. You couldn't, it appeared, dispose of the darned things without the consent of trustees; while even if the trustees gave their consent they collared the money and invested it on behalf of the estate. And Mr. Molloy, though ordinarily a man of sanguine temperament, could not bring himself to believe that a hard-boiled bunch of trustees, most of them probably lawyers with tight lips and suspicious minds, would ever have the sporting spirit to take a flutter in Silver River Ordinaries.