The canoe hung idly among the gathering shadows of the shore where the waters were black and oily in the shelter of the wooded islands; but Ralph took no heed of the twilight closing in. The coolness, the drowsy movement, and the murmur soothed him, and his thoughts flowed freely in their wonted channels. They were like the streams we read of which run over golden sands, for they were all about money, shares, stocks, margins, shorts, longs, bulling and bearing the market, with sunny visions of a hundred per cent. glittering remotely, like islands of the blest, and with banks of contingency drifting in between. Then his memory wandered to the fortune he had missed, and which should surely have been left to him, his father's only son, and the only male shoot of the family tree. To think of so much money being deliberately left past him!---tied up for twenty years to wait for heirs unborn at the time of Gerald's death. He snorted and moved restlessly in his seat as he thought of it, till the jerking of his limbs disturbed the unstable equilibrium of the canoe, and he only composed and controlled himself in time to avoid a ducking from the rolling over of the lightly-poised craft. Paul raised his hand and caught the water with his paddle at the same instant, relapsing into his impassive wont so soon as the accident was averted.
"Too bad!" muttered Ralph, when the disturbance of his nerves had subsided, and his thoughts fell back into their channel. "If the old man would none of me personally, there was my boy, and he bears his name and is a Herkimer--nearer to him, surely, than the music master's brat; and she a girl, too, as it turns out!" Then his thoughts grew deep again--sank into silence, as the rivers in a limestone country disappear into the ground, and thread mysterious miles through caves of night and blackness.
He whipped the waters with his line, letting it drift anon and forgetting to draw it in even when an infatuated bass caught hold and jerked and struggled till he got away again, and even the apathetic Paul looked up surprised; but then, the ways of the pale faces are not as those of the red man, so he merely grunted, and became quiescent again as before.
"Too bad!" Ralph muttered again. "Only a life between my boy and a million!--it will be nearer three millions by the end of the twenty years--just one life between my Gerald and all that; and what a life! Only a year old--incapable of knowing anything about it, or taking any satisfaction out of it. A girl, too, at that. Child of an organ-grinder. Nobody worth knowing will ever care to know her. Of what use can a million of dollars be to such as she?" Here with a groan and a snort the black waters of unwholesome thought sunk down again out of sight, and out of ken of the thinker, if that were possible, for--under the devil's guidance shall we call it?--one will sometimes avert the eyes from the working and festering of his own soul with a sense of conventional shame (hypocrisy is like the polar frosts which strike a yard or two down into the ground), and still with the back turned as it were to the evil thought, as a man must continue to do within himself if he would retain his own good opinion, there will be a furtive peering glance cast down and backward into the deeper depths, awaiting till some deeper down conscience is overcome, which is not the admitted self at all, yet the vanquishment of which will be so good an excuse for dropping the moral barriers in the upper stratum of admitted consciousness. To that wave of unstemmable temptation, a cyclone as it were to which nature in her strength succumbs, and the best of men may yield, lifting their heads again after it, like palm trees when the tempest has passed over, and saying, "A storm; a convulsion beyond human might to withstand; for yielding to that, who can be blamed? Let us spread our draggled plumage wide to dry. The gale is over, and we shall soon be as honorable as before."
Not that Ralph could be called a hypocrite in the vulgar sense. For why? He troubled himself little about morals of any kind, that not being, as he said, his particular "fad." But there is a righteousness which is not ecclesiastical. There are decencies of life for us all, and a standard of right and wrong, which it is base to contravene even when we put on speculative airs and question the Church's teachings. Right is always right, and wrong wrong, decency decent, and baseness contemptible, even if there were no God in heaven, and no account to render at the last day; and there are thoughts which a man must turn his back on when they pass through his mind, if he would continue to enjoy his own respect.
There is a way of seeing sidewise, however, when the eyes are averted--a policy of reconciliation between doing and eschewing, when deeds at once vile and profitable are under consideration--and I fear me much this luckless Ralph Herkimer had found out the trick of it.
His thoughts, at all events, sank down deep into those sunless channels where even he himself declined wittingly to follow them though keeping watch. He whipped the water more briskly than before, and stared intently at the end of his line; but somehow he did not lose the thread of his reflections; he kept on thinking all the time and even with more and more intentness, though still he made pretence to himself of ignoring the whole of the deep-down discussion--till it was finished, that is--then he succumbed, as who may not, under sufficient temptation? It is a question of price or number. Ralph yielded before the flashing glory of millions of dollars! So Danæ may have stretched her arms, erewhile so chaste and cold, to welcome Jove when drest in that disguise he sought the mercenary maid. Was not gold divine? And has it not continued ever since to be the same? Even Miss Judy can appraise to a cent the good to be achieved with part in saving souls, and still leave unexpressed the balance--the pride and finery which what remains will bring the priests and priestesses of Goody.
Millions of dollars! That was the burden and refrain which repeated itself over and over in Ralph's mind; and it ought by right to be his. Was not he grandson of the father of this childless Gerald who had made the money? The only grandson too, and the only person through whom future generations of Herkimers could connect themselves with this fortune? And Gerald to pass him over! Gerald who talked so much about Shropshire, and all the rest of it, things of which he (Ralph) knew nothing--old Uncle Gerald who would not hear, even, of Aunt Mary's marrying a music master. That the old man's money should be tied up for twenty years and then handed over to this very music master's brats. Gerald could not have meant it; notwithstanding the little unpleasantness which occurred when he (Ralph) returned from Natchez, and Gerald refused to admit him to his presence. The bequest must have been merely a threat which the imprudent old man had supposed so terrible that nobody would brave it. If he could have dreamed that Mary would defy him, and marry all the same, he would have made a different disposition of his property altogether. What he meant was to go on governing his relations after death as he had ruled them while in life.
There seemed at the moment a pathos to this hard and worldly-minded Ralph, swinging and oscillating silently in the fading light, with air and tinted greyness all around, and only the heaving, quivering reflections upon which he swung beneath; there seemed a pathos in it, and he felt a sympathy with the vanished and disappointed maker of the fortune, or rather with the straying misdirected wealth. If he had lived, how different all would have been; and Ralph looked out into the empty evening air, feeling as if he might catch some shadowy glimpse of a disembodied presence, which would look on him friendly-wise, and which he would have greeted--oh, so reverently!--the revisiting shadow of a millionaire, come back regretfully to make amends to an ill-used relative whom the glamour of life and the flesh had led him to misjudge. Ralph felt he could meet his uncle in a fitting spirit, friendly, forgiving, and open to any suggestions the other state might have enlightened him to make; for was he not doing his best to remedy the unfortunate and injudicious dispositions of the will? Had he not already taken the best advice in the province to remedy them, and been told that the will was good, sure, fast, and without flaw--that it would stand, and there was no remedy?
He peered far off into the shadows, and around on either hand. There was nothing but a gradual failing in the light--neither sound nor vision--only, over against him, let the canoe turn as it might, there sat the Indian Paul, an image brown and still, with dull, quiescent eyes, gazing into nowhere, ready at a moment to flash into fire and life, but absent until wanted; plainer than the unseen vision in his thoughts, yet less to be understood--a mute and dusky image of the unknowable. The dark unwinking eyes gleamed with no thought or intelligence; they looked out seemingly beyond, and burned, or rather smouldered, like coals abstracted from the nether fire, awaiting the gust of passion to rouse the slumbering blaze. Black like the mirrors used by necromancers, they showed back, when he looked in them, his own soul stripped of conventional trappings, looking out of them into himself, and seeming to have gathered active evil in their dusky depths--a wish to guide the dubious hand of Fate which deals the cards promiscuously as though her eyes were bandaged, and influence the falling of the aces and kings, just one place now and then to the right or left. We would all like to do that, if we could--just a little--and bring out more clearly as we think, the poetical justice of Time; but it comes right in the end, of itself, without our help, and "if it tarry," as the Prophet says, "wait for it;" it is for the best.