“Now, look at me. You know how I began life, though I sometimes try to forget it, as I hope others do. My parents were poor, and I received only a moderate education; but I had grit and determination and I won through. And look at me to-day. All who know me look up to and respect me. I’m a self-made man and not ashamed to own it, though I don’t crow about it on the housetops as some of these plebeians do. Though I come of the people, I pride myself on being one of Nature’s gentlemen, and what can you want more than that—eh? We can’t choose our parents, or I might have chosen parents like yours, my dear—blue blood through and through. And that was one reason why I married you. I think I have told you this before. I made up my mind when I was still a lad that the woman I made my wife should be a lady in the true acceptation of that often misapplied word, and the first time I met you—you remember that day, eh, my dear?—I recognized the type, and then and there I decided that you were the lady for me!”
He lay back in the big arm-chair, slipped his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, and looked at his young wife with an expression of extreme self-satisfaction.
“But, Henry,” she said, wincing, “what has all that to do with this calamity? You forget that I knew poor Stephen Lethbridge. Abbey Hall is close to my old home, and Stephen and I were children together. I can’t help feeling upset.”
“I understand that quite well, but the feeling is one you ought to fight against, my dear Cora. A man who deliberately commits suicide, no matter what his social status may be, and no matter what the reason or reasons may be which prompt him to commit the rash act, is guilty of a grave wrong, not to himself alone, but to the whole of the community. Heaven knows I have had difficulties, almost unsurmountable difficulties, to contend with in my time, yet the bare thought of self-destruction never entered my imagination.”
Henry Hartsilver had been married three years. A common, self-centered person, endowed with exceptional shrewdness and with considerable commercial acumen, he had begun life as a jerry-builder in a small country town. Then war with Germany had been declared, and realizing at once what so many failed to realize, namely that such a war must last for years at least, Hartsilver had seized the opportunity he saw spread out before him of amassing money quickly and in large lump sums by securing by divers means building contracts for our Government.
Thus, long before the war ended, he found himself a rich man. Then, anxious to gratify his second ambition, he set to work to look about for a woman of good social standing to become his wife; the thought that any woman to whom he might propose might decline the honor of marrying him did not occur to him.
Consequently he was not surprised, nor did he appreciate the honor conferred upon him, when the only surviving daughter of a well-connected country gentleman accepted his offer of marriage. True, the war had reduced her already impoverished father almost to penury, and in addition both her brothers had been killed in action early in the war, so that when she accepted him she felt that she did not now much care what became of her. Her mother had been dead many years, and her father she literally worshipped. What she never admitted, even to herself, though in her heart she knew it to be the truth, was that by marrying Henry Hartsilver she would be able to provide her father with a comfortable income in his declining years. And since his sons’ death he had aged very rapidly.
Hartsilver was now in his forty-sixth year, his wife just seven-and-twenty. They had no children, but that did not prevent Hartsilver’s everlasting complaint to his wife that he considered himself deeply aggrieved at the Government’s neglect in failing to confer a title upon him.
“Just think, my dear,” he had said to her more than once, “what you would feel like if I made you ‘my lady!’ Shouldn’t we be able to crow it over our friends, eh? And to think of the sums I gave to war charities! Well, we must live in hope!”
Fortunately his wife’s tact, possibly also the sense of humor which she possessed, prevented her from becoming annoyed with him when he spoke like that, and making the sarcastic rejoinder which she sometimes longed to utter. Though she could not accuse herself of having married him for his money, that being the last thing she cared about, she yet felt that she had in a way married him under false pretenses, for certainly she knew that, but for her anxiety to add to her father’s happiness and comfort, this common, self-satisfied, and self-righteous person was one of the last men she would have linked herself to for life.