“Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he.
He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.”
The coal magnate threw back his head on the pillows and laughed long and loud. He laughed until he grew purple and gasped for breath, and he laughed while he choked, and Sheila flew about for stimulants. For a few breathless moments Sheila thought she had whipped up the hearse—to use the mammoth man’s own metaphor—but after a panting half-hour the heart subsided and the breath came easier.
“You nearly did for me that time, boss. But it fits; Jehoshaphat, it fits me like a B. V. D.! The only difference you might put down to simplified spelling. Eh?” And he cautiously chuckled at his joke.
While Sheila was making ready for the night he chuckled and lapsed into florid, heliotrope studies by turns. “It’s straight, what I told you about being a sinner,” he gave verbal expression to his thoughts at last. “That’s why I don’t leave a cent to charity—not a cent. Ain’t going to have any peaked-faced, oily-tongued jackasses saying over my coffin that I tried to buy my entrance ticket into the Lord Almighty’s kingdom. No, sirree! I know I’ve lived high, eaten well, and drunk some. I’ve made the best of every good bargain that came within eyeshot. I treated my own handsome—and I let the rest of the world go hang. Went to church Easter Sunday every year and put a bill in the plate; you can figure for yourself about how much I’ve given to charity. Never had any time to think of it, anyway—probably wouldn’t have given if I had. Always thought Mother’d live longer’n me and she’d take care of that end of it. But she didn’t.”
For a moment Sheila thought the man was going to cry; his lower lip quivered like a baby’s, and his eyes grew red and watery. There was no denying it, the man was a caricature; even his grief was ludicrous. He wiped his eyes with the back of his heliotrope sleeve and finished what he had to say. “Don’t it beat all how the pious vultures croak over you the minute you’re done for—reminding you you can’t take your money away with you? Didn’t the parson—first time he came—sit in that chair and open up and begin about the rich man’s squeezing through a needle’s eye and a lot about putting away temporal stuff? I don’t aim to do any squeezing into heaven, I can tell you. And I fixed him all right. Ha, ha! I told him as long as the money wouldn’t do me and Mother any more good I’d settle it so’s it couldn’t benefit any one else. And that’s exactly what I’ve done. Left it all for a monument for us, fancy marble, carved statues, and the whole outfit. It’ll beat that toadstool-looking tomb of that prince somewhere in Asia all hollow. Ha, ha!”
He leaned back to enjoy to the full this humorous legacy to himself, but the expression of Sheila’s face checked it. “Say, boss, you don’t like what I’ve done, do you? Run it out and dump it; I can stand for straight talk from you.”
Sheila felt repelled even more than she had at first. To have a man at the point of death throw his money into a heap of marble just to keep it from doing good to any one seemed horrible. And yet the man spoke so consistently for himself. He had lived in the flesh and for the flesh all his days; it was not strange that there was no spirit to interpret now for him or to give him the courage to be generous in the face of what the world would think.
“It’s yours to spend as you like—only—I hate monuments. Rather have the plain green grass over me. And don’t you think it’s queer yourself that a man who had the grit to make himself and a pile of money hasn’t the grit to leave it invested after he goes, instead of burying it? Supposing you can’t live and use it yourself! That’s no reason for not letting your money live after you. I’d want to keep my money alive.”
“Alive? Say, what do you mean?”
“Just what I say—alive. Charity isn’t the only way to dispose of it. Leave it to science to discover something new with; give it to the laboratories to study up typhoid or cancer. Ever think how little we know about them?”