"H'm!... I don't know, certainly. But I should have known, somehow, if she were dead. Of course, if further memory or inquiry proves that she is dead, that's another matter."
"But, in the meanwhile, how can you prove your identity with Harrisson and claim all your property without her knowing?... What I mean is, I can't think it out. There may be a way...."
"My dear boy"—Fenwick says this very quietly—"that's exactly the reason why I said you would have to help me to settle whether I should be that man again or not. I say not, if the decision lies with me."
"Not?—not at all?" The doctor fairly gasps; his breath is taken away. Never perhaps was a young man freer from thought and influence of money than he, more absorbed in professional study and untainted by the supremacies of property. But for all that he was human, and English, and theoretically accepted gold as the thing of things, the one great aim and measure of success. Of other men's success, that is, and their aim, not his. For he was, in his own eyes, a humble plodder, not in the swim at all. But he ascribed to the huge sums real people had a right to, outside the limits of the likes of him, a kind of sacredness
that grew in a geometrical ratio with their increase. It gave him much more pain to hear that a safe had been robbed of thousands in gold than he felt when, on opening a wrapped-up fee, what seemed a guinea to the touch turned out a new farthing and a shilling to the sight. It was in the air that he lived in—that all of us live in.
So, when Fenwick made in this placid way a choice of conduct that must needs involve the sacrifice of sums large enough to be spoken of with awe, even in the sacred precincts of a bank, poor Dr. Conrad felt that all his powers of counsel had been outshot, and that his mind was reeling on its pedestal. That a poor man should give up his savings en bloc to help a friend would have seemed to him natural and reasonable; that he should do so for honest love of a woman still more so; but that a millionaire should renounce his millions! Was it decent? was it proper? was it considerate to Mammon? But that must have been Fenwick's meaning, too. The doctor did not recover his speech before Fenwick spoke again:
"Why should I claim all my property? How should I be the gainer if it made Rosey unhappy?"
"I see. I quite see. I feel with you, you know; feel as you do. But what will become of the money?"
"The poor darling money? Just think! It will lie neglected at the bank, unclaimed, forsaken, doing no more mischief than when it was harmless dust and nuggets in the sand of the Klondyke. While it was there, gold was a bit—a mighty small bit—dearer than it has become since. Now that it is in the keeping of chaps who won't give it up half as easily as the Klondyke did, I suppose it has appreciated again, as the saying is. The difference of cost between getting it out of the ground and out of the bank is a negligible factor...." Fenwick seemed to find ease in chatting economics in this way. Some of it was so obviously true to Vereker that he at once concluded it would be classed among fallacies; he had had experience of this sort of thing. But he paid little attention, as he was thinking of how much of this interview he could repeat to Sally, to whom every step they took brought him nearer. The roar of a lion in his path was every moment more audible to the ears of his imagination. And it left him silent; but Fenwick went on speaking: