A Rich Man's Relatives Volume I Part 3

"It shows the generosity of Gerald's sister, and that is all I care for. But often, I will own it, my conscience has reproached me with depriving you of your splendid inheritance; only, we are so happy here; and if love can make up for money--if my love----"

"Hush, George! I have all I want--more, I think sometimes, than should fall to one woman's share--and I wonder if it can last. But who told you about the will?"

"Who but your sister Judith!"

"She? I did not think you knew her; and she spoke so unkindly when I proposed to bring and introduce you. You surprise me."

"Ah! Miss Judy is a woman of surprises--a woman of energy who does not stick at trifles; and she is a diplomatist. She would not let you introduce me, that would have been yielding you a point; but she could find me out for herself when she wished to speak to me. That was on what she considered business, and did not oblige her to know me next time we met. It would have forced _me_ to know _her_ afterwards, if she had wished it; but that is nothing. Where would be the gain in being a lady, if rules worked both ways? Miss Judy found me out, and requested a few minutes' private conversation in the most gracious way possible. She apologized profusely for the intrusion, with quite a pretty warming of the complexion and an engaging little twitter behind her glove tips. a.s.s that I was, I grew red like a lobster all over my face, and my heart thumped against my ribs like a smithy hammer. I imagined your family were relenting towards me--that piety and true principle had overcome in the second Miss Herkimer her disapproval of our attachment, and that she had come to tell me so. I could have knelt down and kissed her hand, so overcome was I with grateful joy.

It was well I did not. The group would have been too ridiculous. Miss Judy appealed to my feelings as a gentleman and a man of honour 'not to ruin the prospects of her sweet young sister;' that was her phrase, and she rendered it in a fine adagio manner, accompanied by a tremolo of her crumpled pocket-handkerchief, which did her artistic instinct the greatest credit, and really made the little pet.i.tion seem both reasonable and affecting. Judy would have succeeded on the stage, Mary, I do believe, if they had put her in training early."

"George, you are profane. It sounds ribald to speak of serious people in that way."

"Judy and the playhouse, eh? It _is_ a little incongruous, I admit; but which has most right to resent the juxtaposition we need not stop to inquire. Miss Judith told me you had come into a large fortune, and your family were anxious about your matrimonial prospects, so many swells were your friends, and you were so highly connected. There was at least one general officer and a captain of dragoons, besides many more; but whether they wanted to marry you, or were only your grandfather's cousins, I did not quite catch. You see my feelings were a little tumultuous, like those of the man stepping on board a steamboat to meet his sweetheart, when he misses the plank and drops into the water. I had a feeling of cold bath all over, and was cross, I dare say; at least I did not respond to Miss Judy's condescensions as she had expected. At once she changed her tone, drawing herself up and looking severely superior. It was scarcely conceivable, she told me with dignified coldness, that I could seriously have expected anything more than a little notoriety would result from my appearing in public conversing with her sister, but if I cherished any delusion on the subject, it was for my good that she should speak plainly, and as a Christian she saw it her duty to do so. It was out of the question, she told me, that you should marry a man in my position, and one who was not a gentleman. This to me, whose gentlemanly feelings she had just been appealing to! It sent the blood tingling down to my fingertips, and revived me after the _douche_ of what she had been saying before. I told her these were matters I declined to discuss with a lady whom I had not the honour of being acquainted with, and that while I enjoyed the privilege of your friendship, none but yourself should dictate to me the terms. Then she pulled out a paper which she said was a copy of your brother Gerald's will, and another, the private instructions he had left with Jordan. She insisted on reading them both to me, word by word, and was especially emphatic in her rendering of the instructions in which I am mentioned by name as a person you were not to marry."

"I know, George; and I think it was cruel in Gerald to make such a stipulation. However, it does not matter. I did not want the money, and you do not grudge to earn money for us both; and what do we want which we have not got?"

"True, my darling; and after all, your dividends which fell due before you disobeyed your kinsman's commands by marrying me have bought us this cosey little home, so you did not come to me a penniless bride after all. Talking of these things, by-the-way, reminds me--Did you observe Considine's name in the war news this morning? He is a general now. Why, Mary, you might have been one of their great ladies down there, if you had chosen!"

"But I did not choose; and I question if a general's lady down there has much to congratulate herself on. Grant is in Memphis, I see, and steadily working southwards. The negroes on the plantations are in a ferment, and Mrs. Dunwiddie, the refugee who is staying with Mrs.

Brown, and called here to-day, says the boxes of silver spoons and candlesticks the Yankee officers are sending home to their friends by express are more than the Express Company's car will carry, and they talk of requisitioning a gunboat to carry their loot North to Cincinnati. I should not have liked to ride with my plate and valuables in an ambulance in the rear of even a husband's column. But is it not fortunate that Gerald's property was realized, and the money received safely in Canada before these troubles began? You and I may not be the richer for it, but think of Edith, the little elf; what a sum it will be when she is old enough to receive it!"

"Over a million of dollars. Far too much for a girl to have. Let us hope she may have brothers and sisters to share it with. But where, at the same time, have you left this great heiress? I have not had a chance yet to give her a kiss."

"I called Lisette to come for her when you came in. Ah! There she is, among the raspberry bushes--ruining her white frock with berry juice, I'll be bound, for it is Cato who is carrying her. See how she clutches his curly wool while he picks fruit for her. Her tugging must be quite sore, but he seems positively to enjoy it, he is so fond of her."

"And well he may. Have you forgot Judith's and Ralph's attempt to '_realize_' him when his master died?--to huddle him over to Buffalo and sell him into slavery again. Miss Judith thought she could do so much good with the money, and Ralph encouraged her, and undertook to arrange the transaction on the American side, when he would quietly have pocketed the money, I make no doubt. If you had not interfered and explained things to the poor boy he certainly would have fallen into their trap, and been disposed of for cash down. He is the only decent n.i.g.g.e.r I ever saw, and the only one who could have been so imposed on. Oh, yes! He would do anything for you or the child."

"Dinner will be on the table almost at once, George. Come in and get ready."

"Ah, yes! Dinner and something cool, after the long broiling day.

By-and-by, when the candles are lit, and the moths and beetles come droning in from the darkness to singe their wings in the flame, we will have music and a little singing. Some of those dear old songs by the masters we used to revel in long ago. Haydn and the rest. Such as 'Gra-a-aceful partner.'"

"Quite so, your highness. That I may have to respond 'Spouse adored,'

my most sovereign lord and master! Ha, ha, ha! What it is to be a lord of creation! Meanwhile, there is the bell. Hurry to your room."

CHAPTER IV.

"OUFF."

The hour which saw Mary Selby thus lapping herself in her simple joys, was the same which witnessed the brewing of the storm destined to wreck and scatter them. A premonition must have been upon her spirits--that impalpable tremor and exhilaration preceding a catastrophe which whets the perceptions to intenser enjoyment before the destroying a.s.sault, like advancing fire which illumines, expands, and glorifies ere it leaps on its prey and turns it into smoke and ashes. It is certain at least that her spirits overstepped the limit of their tranquil wont. She turned over the piles of music with her husband in search of something to sing, but the measured graces of the older works were all too serious for her mood.

"Your masters are prosy, George," she cried; "I could not settle down to sing them to-night. Let us have that new duet from the 'Grand d.u.c.h.esse.'"

"From Bach to Offenbach," he answered. "What a leap! You really are exuberant to-night. What next?"

Five or six miles away, on the lake-like broadening of the river which stretches upward from Lachine, a canoe was drifting under the lee of the wooded islands, and in it sat Ralph Herkimer. Remaining in town through the summer to watch the fluctuations of the gold-room--it was during the American war--he betook himself each afternoon to Lachine, to exchange the dust of streets for the breezy coolness of the water.

He had been fishing, and Paul, an Indian from the Indian village of Caughnawaga near by, managed the canoe. His fishing had not prospered.

It seemed indifferent to him, indeed, whether he got "bites" or not, but still from time to time he made a cast of the line, with his eyes brooding on the water where the slackened current drifted lazily by, with its rhythmic ripples flickering in the reddening light. The sun went down behind heavy banks of cloud, and the grey twilight stole silently up with that listening stillness which makes audible the murmur of the stream, a sound unnoticed in the garish hurry of noon when the world is vocal with a hundred noises, but heard at eve when other things with life have sunk to sleep.

The canoe hung idly among the gathering shadows of the sh.o.r.e 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 impa.s.sive 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 ba.s.s 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. n.o.body 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 succ.u.mbs, and the best of men may yield, lifting their heads again after it, like palm trees when the tempest has pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 succ.u.mbed, 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 Danae 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 pa.s.s 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sion 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.

Ralph is impatient, however; and it is not, besides, poetic justice that he is thinking of. Nothing so abstract. It is money, good and lawful coin of the realm, and it is himself and his children, he thinks, who should have it. Gerald, too, he takes it, having attained to that clearer insight which is gained beyond the grave, must wish it likewise, and if the inheritance under that most pernicious will can be turned aside, he feels that he will be fulfilling the present and maturer wishes of the testator. The law may say otherwise; but what of the law? There is a higher law! We have all heard of it, though generally, let us hope, when the issue was unconnected with the possession of dollars. Gerald must have heard of the higher law. Here was a case involving money, and when one comes to money what is more sacred? The forger "gets twenty years" for his crime against property; the culpable homicide five. _His_ fault is only against life, and by good fortune he may escape with a rebuke from the court.

Ralph had been meditating and considering, calmly, earnestly, and at length, in a way he was not accustomed to consider, and out here amid evening's impressive silence, where the brooding peace suggested presences far enough removed at other times in the common hubbub of life; and he felt--what? That he must not give in, or acquiesce in a fiddler's children getting all that money!

"The higher fitness" was he to call it?--and old Gerald himself, who must be near, he was sure, though he could not gain speech of him--must disapprove the misapplication of so many dollars. But how to remedy that ill-judged will? If Mary Herkimer, it said, should so far forget herself as to marry the organist, then the money was to remain acc.u.mulating in Jordan's hands for twenty years, and after that was to be paid to her children, secured only against the organist by the provision that in case they died unmarried it should come to the children of Ralph. And Mary had a child. But the child might die. A tremor pa.s.sed through him at the idea. Or how would it be, he set himself to consider, if the child were lost? Children do get lost sometimes, and he raised himself in the canoe to shake off any oppressiveness that might attach to the idea. Suppose the child were lost--one may innocently suppose anything--suppose it could not be found, and never _were_ found. What then? After a time it would be unreasonable to keep the next in succession out of his property; and this next--his blood tingled to think of it--was his own boy Gerald, a quiet, gentle little boy, such as strangely sometimes is given to an unscrupulous father, as if to try how far he will venture to use the facile tool. If ever _his_ Gerald fell heir to property, Ralph made sure of being able to dispose of it; it seemed to him that it would be like money settled on his wife, which he could still use, though no creditor could lay hands on--a cake quite different from that in the children's proverb, which one can both eat and have at the same time.

But at present, to arrange for Mary's child getting--_lost_, seemed the pressing question. There would be time enough to influence his boy's plastic mind afterwards.

The infant's plastic mind need not be taken into account, the infant being only a year old. There were no impressions inscribed on it so far, and it would be some time yet before it acquired any. "Get it away now," he told himself, "and it can do nothing for its own restoration. In a week or two it will have forgotten its mother and there will be no troublesome memories in after life tempting it to suspect and try to unravel a mystery in its fate. Yet how, and through whom, to manage it?" His eyes wandered questioningly over the extent of waters, heaving with regulated swell, suggestive of life and personality and thought; but never an answer came back to him out of the sullen grey. His eye swept the horizon and the distant sh.o.r.e, and at last it rested on the apathetic face of his companion; Still as a mask, and showing not a sign of what might be behind, any more than the swaying tide on which they hung betrayed the mysteries of the pool beneath. The man's long straight hair, and the swarthy skin suggestive of a life apart from civilization, could not but call up the wish that the child could become of these. Wooden, hard, and cold, with his bead-like eyes half closed, were the little one in hands like his it would be as safe as if it were in another planet; thinking such thoughts as it must, in Iroquois, understanding Canadian French, and with only enough English to beg or trade with strangers. Paul he knew as restless, and in some sort a vagabond, attending those who hired him on fishing or hunting expeditions, at times joining the Governor of Hudson's Bay as a canoe-man, on his journeys to Fort William, or wandering on the Ottawa from one Indian settlement to another. If he would only undertake to superintend the fortunes of this inconvenient infant, it would become a waif indeed, and lost beyond restoration.

Ralph sighed with profound relief as the idea pa.s.sed through his mind.

There had been another shadowy suggestion present there all the afternoon, which he had been contemplating as it were with averted eyes, shuddering to consider or reduce to shape, yet refusing to dismiss it, harbouring it as one may an outlaw, whom it would be confusion to acknowledge as a guest. If Paul would undertake the business, the child might live out its life as a squaw among the wigwams of the upper Ottawa, without troubling any one. Exposure to the weather would bronze her to the hue of the other children of the wilderness; and if not, there are few bands now-a-days in which there are not half-breeds, proving that all men are of one blood, and that time and circ.u.mstances alone are needed to blend the races into a common stream. How infinitely more satisfactory this would be than any fatal accident which could be devised! Yes! it must be done, and Ralph looked up to his companion and in his most friendly tone said,--"Paul."

Instantly the bead-like eyes awoke and turned upon him, sharp and interrogative. The propitiatory modulation had not escaped the delicate ear, bred from infancy to catch and interpret the faintest whisper of the forest--the rustle of a leaf disturbed by pa.s.sing game, or the stroke of a wing raising eddies in the stagnant air. Since Paul had grown to be a man whiskey and dollars had become the game of his eagerest pursuit, and the mood of the white man he served for the time was the hunting ground where these were to be run down. That something was wanted of him he knew by the extra friendliness of tone. What Englishman having hired him would speak so softly if he did not want something beyond the stipulated services, something of value, and something which he wished to gain cheaply?

"Ouff," was his answer, dubiously interrogative, and altogether non-committal as to whether he would be interested in what was to follow.

"Have you got children?"

"No," with a slight head-shake.

"Would you not like to have one?"