“Don’t tempt me. If I could be of the slightest use I would remain. Good-night.”
John Gaunt looked wildly at the door which had been closed so quietly. Then a deep groan came from his parched lips and he fell back heavily into an armchair.
Twelve hours ago he had been so content with his lot. Rich beyond the dreams of avarice—a beautiful wife whom he loved—and who he believed was beginning to care for him in return. How anxiously he had looked forward to the birth of their child. It was upon the coming of the babe that he had counted, to awaken in Lady Mildred’s heart a love as passionate as his own.
Now she lay a-dying, and he could do nothing to help her. In that lay the sting. His check-book was powerless and it seemed strange that it should be so. If she should die—and he would never know the love that he had sworn to arouse.
The issue lay in God’s hands.
In God’s hands, and for years the name of the Deity had never been on his lips, save as an imprecation. In the piling up of his fortune, there had been no place for religion, and he had left his youth behind him with but one determination—to amass wealth—honestly if possible—but to amass wealth. And he had succeeded beyond his most sanguine dreams. There was not a financial pie of any magnitude in which Gaunt had not a finger; and his rivals in the city gave him their unstinted admiration. No brain was as keen as his when the result of a scheme meant money, and he was not the man to allow any delicate scruple to interfere with his plans. One principle he had—one that had helped him enormously, for John Gaunt’s word was his bond, and if a bargain were once made, it would be fulfilled relentlessly, even should it result in loss. But this latter event happened very rarely.
The issue lay in God’s hands.
Could he influence His decision? His mind went back to the time when his mother, a gracious God-fearing woman, was living—his mother—who had endeavored to teach him the religion which had guided her every action until the day of her death, when he was some sixteen years of age. It had been her custom to pray with him; but her influence had not lasted very long, for Fate took Gaunt to a strange land—to the Congo—in search of fortune, and in that country and with that object, religion must be left at home. So the teaching of his mother had been forgotten.
In God’s hands!
Dare he approach Him? There was still the memory of the prayers that he had known, but there was also the black record of the past. The scheming, the fighting, worse than that, the deliberate robbing within the scope of the law. He shuddered to remember the countless ruined lives which lay behind him in the pursuit of wealth.