And then he took his candlestick from the hall-table and passed up the wide, shallow-stepped, softly-carpeted staircase and went into the splendid suite of rooms he had furnished for his boy....
Evidences of the young man’s sporting tastes were not lacking in the driving-whips and fishing-rods, single-sticks, fencing-foils and boxing-gloves that—in conjunction with divers brilliantly-colored pictorial representations of Stars of the Ballet, and Beauties of the Harem, yachts winning cups, favorite racers winning the Derby, and Pets of the Prize-Ring winning Championships—decorated the walls.
The costly inlaid banjo, upon which the hope of the House of Jowell had been wont to thrum out the accompaniment to “Villikins and His Dinah,” lay upon a cedar cigar-cabinet, beside an Oriental divan stood the gilded huqua that had never failed to make its owner deadly sick. A Turkish dressing-gown lay over a chair—an embroidered smoking-cap hung upon the corner of a gilded reading-stand.... Upon a table stood the Ensign’s library, consisting of an English Dictionary, a Bible presented by his mother on his tenth birthday; some Manuals of Infantry Drill and Musketry; sundry lives of celebrated pugilists, Ruff’s Guide to the Turf, the Stud Book, Stonehenge on the Horse, Hoyle on Whist, and the Sporting Almanac.
It had been the father’s whim that Mortimer’s rooms should be kept exactly as Mortimer had left them, and that nothing the Ensign had forgotten should be moved, or put away. There was a pair of doeskin military gloves he had worn, lying upon the toilet-table in the bedroom. And a strap that had formed part of a sword-belt lay forgotten upon the Brussels carpet near the foot of the bed.
Thompson Jowell picked up the strap, and as he set down his candlestick, he ran it between his fingers, remembering that it had belonged to his son, who, rather than be defiled by the golden mud that every roll in the gutter crusted more thickly upon him, had cast him off and chosen to die.
“I’m piling it up for you, Morty, my boy,” he heard himself saying, as he laid himself down heavily into the armchair by the huge carved four-poster, and sat there staring, and drumming heavily with his fists upon his knees.
He had throughout his life been a man destitute of imagination. Now, at this final hour, the gift was born in him. He heard thousands of voices cursing him. He saw thousands of blackened hands pointing at him. He knew himself a murderer. He realized that the millions he had gained by fraud and trickery had bought him estate in Hell.