A Rich Man's Relatives Volume I Part 9

"We have been thirteen years in Canada without meeting them. Mamma had only a sister--Aunt Bunce--who died before we left Bermuda; if her family live in Upper Canada still, they cannot know much about us. It is so long since poor mamma died--before Aunt Bunce, even--so very long that I do not care to count the years; it makes me feel so old."

"Don't talk of being old, child! You have not aged one bit. Think of me! But why need we bother with telling fibs about the child? Fibs always end in bother; I have been taught that all my life."

"Do you want us to be laughed at? Are you willing to confess yourself an old maid--a Protestant grey nun--adopting babies left on your doorstep? I am not, if you are; though I suppose I _am_ older to-day than I was five years ago," and she shook out her ringlets with a defiant toss. "Just let it become generally known that we keep an upper-cla.s.s foundling asylum, and we shall soon get plenty of pupils!

They will bring them from Vermont, I daresay, or up from Quebec."

"Tush! Tilly."

"It is true. Only how should we dispose of them after they were brought up? Other inst.i.tutions train them for service; now I do not think we could do that, so what would become of them? And what will become of our own little pet if we let her be looked on as a stray, and different from other children? Think of the slights she will be exposed to; and the unkind remarks, especially as she is sure to be pretty. It would be cruelty to bring her up with ourselves, and yet deprive her of the chance of marrying. Think of her struggles as a lonely woman to support herself after we are gone. Our gentle nurture would prove a curse to her and not a blessing."

"But we could not let a gentleman marry a nameless girl under a false impression."

"Certainly not. We would explain all to any gentleman who had a right to know; and if he _was_ a gentleman, I do not think it would prevent the marriage; but that is quite different from proclaiming a poor girl's misfortune."

"Think the matter over, Penelope, and I am sure you will come to see it as I do. Meanwhile there is no hurry. We need not converse to visitors about our _protegee_, she is too little yet to be shown to company, and as the weather is growing cold, I propose we arrange that room at the top of the house as a nursery, and establish her there with Smithers. She will be out of the way both of draughts and idle curiosity."

CHAPTER X.

TEN YEARS LATER.

Ten years later. What a startlingly abrupt transition for the onlooker from the "then" to the "now!" And yet how intimately the two are connected, and how utterly the one is dependent on the other! Two cities on the same broad river, the upper spreading along the stream, set in a fruitful plain, the key to fertile regions farther up, gathering the produce and shipping it down the current; the other perched upon cliffs and overhanging sh.o.r.es, and twice each day lapped by the turning tide from the distant sea whither everything is tending. Yet to the voyager the transition is gradual enough, and smooth, and natural. But for the retreating objects along the sh.o.r.e he would not recognize that he was moving, save when descending a rapid, or running on a sandbank--the events, marriages, deaths, failures, and successes of his onward way. It is the same river still, in part the very drops of water which tumbled over Niagara long ago, pa.s.sed through Ontario, and down the rapids to Montreal, and onward through the broads and the deeps till it meets tide-water at Quebec, and still with all the gathered tributes it hurries on, a river still for scores and scores of miles between ever widening banks, on to the misty everlasting sea, where the voyager disappears for ever from the view.

Not that my friends have moved their dwelling-place down stream to Quebec, but there is a sadness in the thought of the slowly pa.s.sing years which makes one moralize and grow metaphoric before he is aware.

No, the people of this history are still geographically where they were, standing on their own ground, while the big tumultuous river rushes by--but the figure which their permanence suggests is even a sadder one, that of the fabled maidens drawing water in their sieves, water which will not be drawn or held, but keeps oozing through and slipping away, just as the stream runs by and will not wait; for life is but a sorry comedy with its stayless pa.s.sing. Yet which of us would stop it if we could, even at its best? It always seems as if a sweeter drop were somewhere up the stream, and even if the present could be held, we would let it pa.s.s to taste the fancied sweeter yet to come.

In ten years the American war had ended and specie payments were resumed. In ten years Ralph Herkimer had made a fortune and a "position"--the terms are interchangeable in the moneyed world, and elsewhere too. No one was better liked or more respected as a good fellow, a clear-headed business man, and a high-souled altogether superior person. Even General Considine--who had been taken prisoner during the war, exchanged, "paroled," withdrawn from the game like the slaughtered p.a.w.n from a chess board--had quite forgotten having grandly dropped his acquaintance in Natchez and the reasons for so doing; and, on taking up his abode in Montreal, was very pleased to renew intimacy with his young friend of _ante bellum_ times. Ralph was happy to respond. If there ever had been an imputation on his courage, it seemed well to support the only one who could remember, in forgetting it; though really, as he told himself, there was nothing to be ashamed of. He had merely shown disapproval of a bloodthirsty and barbarous custom in a state of society already pa.s.sed away; and no one who was anybody would have the bad taste to be amused at anecdotes told at the expense of a man so well off as himself, and who entertained so liberally. Still, since it is wiser to humour fools than to fight them, he would be civil to this broken-down fireater, heap coals of fire on his head like a good Christian, and make him thoroughly ashamed of his rudeness in former years.

Considine, too, was no very c.u.mbrous _protege_. He was better supplied with money than many of his compatriots at that time, having inherited some property in New York, which the same events which had ruined his estate in the South had rendered four times as valuable as before, in the paper money of the period. His deportment exhibited a fair share of the manly pathos becoming a fallen hero, and made him an interesting guest to the dwellers in a city at peace. It is true he wore red studs in his shirt front, as his way of mounting his country's colours--red and white--and would defiantly puff out his chest so decorated whenever a Yankee uniform came in sight. But something must be permitted to the bruised susceptibilities of the warrior overcome, and at least he did not travesty the conspiracies of exiled Poles and old time Jacobites by joining in absurd schemes to capture towns on the lakes, or infect the capital with yellow fever; in which crack-brained escapades the excitement for the plotters lay not so much in their design, as in communicating it to one another with infinite stage mystery of whisperings, signs, pa.s.swords, and secret information. In those days a party of refugees on one of the St. Lawrence steamboats would make the voyage as interesting to their fellow-pa.s.sengers as a pantomime, with their dark glances, stealings aside, mysterious beckonings to each other, and hasty whispers, followed by backward glances in search of spies. There may have been real plots, but they were carried on by practical persons who showed no sign, and it was rumour of these which impressed the rest, and filled them with emulation. They imagined they were being watched and reported on at Washington, though what interest their vagaries could have for Mr. Lincoln's government it is hard to imagine. Much, however, should be excused to people deprived by war of their fortunes and their homes, often with but slender means of support, and no occupation, driven to spend eight hours of their day in euchre playing, and the other eight in unending discussions of the war news.

To such, conspiracy must have seemed the most delightful of pastimes, even if barren of practical results.

When Considine approached Ralph with a most respectable sheaf of "greenbacks" under his arm, and appealed to him as an old friend for advice as to their conversion into specie, and their subsequent employment, Ralph was genial, and by-and-by showed him the way to the gold-room, where good Canadians, following the lead of New York, sold each other stacks of foreign currency which the sellers could not deliver and the buyers had no wish to receive. The telegraph clerk hung up the quotations from New York at certain hours, the "operators"

took note and paid their losses--no! "held settlements" is the proper expression, for this was _business_. Respectable gentlemen, church members, and heads of families, brushed their hats each morning and walked down to their offices, gloved and caned, the very pink of respectability, and from thence went on "'Change," where the money would change hands with astounding celerity--all in the way of "business."

"_Faites votre jeu, Messieurs! Le jeu est fait_"? Not at all! This was in Montreal not at Monte Carlo. Strictly "business," and thoroughly respectable. True, many men lost, but some won. And what would you have? How could it be otherwise? There are but a certain number of gold pieces in the world; and, if, after an "operation," my bag contains more, it is certain that my neighbour's must hold less.

Currency, bullion, stocks, shares, grain, cotton, what are any of them but the tokens to win and lose money upon? But the thing is done "upon 'Change," and 'Change, like church, is a good word, and everything belonging to it is respectable. If it were round a green-cloth table now, how different it would be! though the outcome might be the same.

Respectability cannot tolerate the green cloth. And yet, to an all-seeing eye, there may be less amiss when a man's money falls upon the _black_ and the _red_. At least the play at Monte Carlo is "on the square;" there are no misquotations or false telegrams, bogus prospectuses, lying reports, collusive understandings, and traps for the unwary, such as have been heard of at times in the places of better repute.

Ralph Herkimer made a great deal of money; Considine made some; and by-and-by, as American finance returned to a normal position, other fields of enterprise were needed as the possibilities of gambling in gold and greenbacks grew less; and then Considine's American connections became a valuable introduction for Ralph to several "good things." There were estates whose owners, stripped of all their other property, and still enc.u.mbered by their debts, could not wring a subsistence from the devastated acres, and were willing to part with them for a trifle; but no one would buy--no one at hand, that is, who had opportunity to know about the war-ravaged fields and the intractable labourers. But at a distance, in a land of peace, where a good t.i.tle and a veracious statement of the acreage and the yielding capacity were the data--where, in fact, a pencil and a piece of paper were the means for judging the promise of the venture--how different it all was. Here was a country where snows and frosts were scarcely known, or, so it was said, where the cattle could range without shelter all through the year, where the gardens were planted with figs and pomegranates, and pigs fattened in the orchards on peaches too plentiful to repay the gathering. There were minerals too, every variety of riches, gold, coal, copper, hidden in the ground, and only awaiting the capital and skill to dig them up; and forests of pine, now vastly enhanced in value by the Chicago fire, waiting to be cut down and converted into lumber if only foreign enterprise would undertake the task. What could be better calculated to stir the imagination of people accustomed to contend for three long months of the year with the fiercest severities of winter, and to wring fixed and moderate profits by patient industry from a soil which still was five or ten times the price of these fields of endless summer? The fevers, malaria, bad water, and general backwardness did not show on the map, and a dense silence kept them from the knowledge of investors.

Ralph and his friend being well-to-do, their statements and recommendations were implicitly accepted; and, indeed, the statements in themselves were not untruthful; it was in the counter-balancing facts, which were left unstated, that those who afterwards considered themselves their dupes, found the limitation and disillusion of their hopes, which teach men in the end that Fortune is as likely to find them out while labouring at home, as to be found by them without exertion and experience, in distant places. But that was the buyers'

concern--knowledge which came to them later and by degrees, Ralph and his friend had completed their share of the transaction and pocketed their commission when the sale was made; what followed had for them no interest.

They made many such sales, pocketing large commissions--the larger, indeed, the worse the property they disposed of--vast tracts in some cases, containing untold wealth in minerals and forests, where the buyers sunk fortunes in endeavouring to bring the riches within reach; and at length, having exhausted their resources, had to subside into the ranks of the ruined people around them, and wait patiently for a generation, till the march of time should bring within reach of their children the sums they had placed out of reach for themselves. There were smaller farms, too, where st.u.r.dy yeomen with their blooming children went to make rich more quickly; but somehow few appeared to thrive in those distant migrations. Their livestock was apt to die; too little rain, or too much, would destroy their crops, and their own health would fail; and in a year or two they would find their way back to Canada, with an enlarged experience but a shrunken purse; while of the children, some would be left behind in the foreign churchyard, and the rest, yellow and gaunt, bore small resemblance to the bright-eyed youngsters they had been before.

In a few years the trade in southern homesteads died out, Canadian enterprise laid down her telescope and interested herself with things nearer home. Science, ransacking her own soil, had come on hid treasure of many kinds, gold, copper, iron, phosphates, and plumbago, and showed where, instead of sending her savings abroad, she might sink them at home--her own savings and those of many a sanguine stranger. On every side Ralph saw opportunities of money-making, and he was ready to use them; but now his operations, he found, must be on another footing than before. Hitherto he had been a financier; now, his neighbours recognized him as a capitalist. The change of standing was gratifying, but it had its dangers and its drawbacks.

Finance has been described as the art of transferring money from one pocket to another--in a Stock Exchange sense, be it understood, not an Old Bailey one--and the financiers are the artists who perform the feat. Money is a volatile and also an adhesive substance--matter in a state of unstable equilibrium, which must not be disturbed or changes will ensue--wherefore, in the process of transferring, some of it is certain to be spilled, and that the artist may pick up if he can; it is his perquisite. A good deal too is apt to stick to the artist's fingers--perquisites again--and hence the profit of handling other people's money. If it were one's own already, whence would come the profit? A man can scarcely gain by paying perquisites to himself; though, to be sure, he may obviate the necessity of paying them to any one else. But there cannot be a doubt that the financier escapes much embarra.s.sment when he is not a capitalist. See, for example, with what calm unflinching pluck a "general manager" can carry on war with a rival railway! The next half-yearly dividend may be sacrificed in the contest, but he does not falter, he goes bravely on. _He_ is not a shareholder; it makes no matter to _him_. To seek a parallel in the political world capitalists and financiers stand to one another as kings to their ministers. When things go well the minister does the work, the king has the profit and glory; but when they miscarry, though the minister did the mischief, it is the king who loses his crown; the minister merely withdraws into privacy, and lives comfortably in retirement on the emoluments of former office. Yet who, if he could, would not be a king, to be trembled before and worshipped? and after all, the successful revolutions are not numerous.

Ralph recognized the new danger in his path, and regretted a little, at times, when he found he must let a profitable opportunity go by, merely because it was one which only an impecunious promoter durst undertake; but he had his compensations. Like the man who becomes a king, he got well grovelled to, and he liked it. He could _influence_, too, if the after responsibilities of "promoting" were too onerous to be undertaken. The use by other men of his name, unauthorizedly, as a heavy holder of their stocks, was worth money; and, as long as he "unloaded" in time, perfectly safe. He did not now flutter about 'Change, scattering reports and picking up news; he sat in his office, and was waited on by those who sought his countenance in their schemes and wished to learn its price.

Only one disappointment as yet had befallen him. He wished to become president of a leading bank, and he knew so many of the directors that he made sure of gaining his point. Unfortunately the directors knew him as well, and deemed it advisable to choose some one else; but then of course it was the general body of shareholders who must bear the blame. The ballot leaves so many things in doubt, and covers up so much about which there can be no doubt at all. His friends, the directors, called on him immediately the election was over--the traitors being probably the first to hurry in--and expressed the most cordial regret and condolence; and Ralph was too wise not to accept the profuse explanations with gracious condescension. Their hastening to explain was a tribute, at any rate, to his weight, and showed that they feared him; and as one after another he smiled them out, he promised himself to let them feel yet that their fears had not been groundless. He was not, therefore, in his most debonair mood, when, on being informed by a new clerk that a rough-looking man had been waiting some time, he permitted him to be introduced.

"Paul?"

"----day, sir."

"It seems only the other day since you were here last."

"Six months."

"How many six months do you make in a year?

"Two."

"Hm--I am not so sure of that. Seems to me you have managed to pack three into this last year. However--Here, Stinson!" he called to the clerk appointed to wait without and attend his private behests, while he scribbled a cheque. "Ask the cashier to cash that. Quick!" he added as he raised his eyes and saw the stolid figure of his visitor standing before him, a statue in copper-coloured flesh, motionless and unregarding, unimpressed by his grandeur or the trembling a.s.siduousness of his clerk; an embodiment of still impa.s.sible waiting, like the image carved on the granite door-post of an Egyptian temple.

Paul did not even glance about him, he simply stood, and with unwinking eye gazed into s.p.a.ce, inscrutible and indifferent to all around.

Ralph threw himself back in his chair, fidgetted impatiently, and coughed and snorted. So impressive is that which cannot be gauged or looked into, even if it contain nothing. This was the instrument, too, and the reminder of a crime, who stood before him; a crime of so long ago, and which yet, so long as the Indian lives may come to light--may even be remedied, and leave him unprofited by the deed, as well as disgraced by its discovery. With wonder he asked himself how he could have ventured to do what he had done, the chances of failure being so many, the consequences of detection so ruinous, that to think of them even now sent a cold thrill through him. Since it was done, however--and he felt no remorse at the deed--he was content enough to enjoy the fruits, although his successes since had made him in a measure independent of them; still his uncle's millions when they came--came to his boy that is, but he ere then would be his partner--would, added to his own, gain him a position above rivalry; and even now in expectancy they enhanced his importance.

Stinson returned with the proceeds of the cheque, and Ralph counted over two hundred dollars to hand to Paul. His fingers lingered lovingly over the bits of paper, touching each dollar with a dainty caress as though he loved it and was sad to part.

It is strange how a rich man hates to part with money, while the poor are free and even lavish so far as their little "pile" will go; but perhaps we only invert the statement of what is a truism, that they who dislike to part with their money keep it and grow rich, while they who spend it lavishly grow poor. At any rate, Ralph lingered while he counted the two hundred dollars, and the thought occurred to him "how many times more would this have to be done?" Eight years still before Gerald's money became payable! Sixteen more half-yearly payments of two hundred dollars each! Thirty-two hundred dollars in all, besides interest! It seemed monstrous. Could nothing be done? Could he not be made to take a round sum down, and be bound to keep silence for ever?

No! That had been tried already, and so soon as the money was spent he came back for more, saying he must live, and if Ralph would not pay, a.s.suredly the bereaved parents would. And so it had come about that Paul was grown an annuitant, and came to claim his little income every six months.

"Here you are, Paul," growled Ralph, handing over the money with a sigh; and Paul with a gleam in his eye laid hands upon the roll of bills which vanished from view forthwith.

"Say, Paul," speaking in a more insinuating voice, "would it not suit you better to get a good big lump of money once for all, than to be coming here so often drawing it by dribs and drabs? If I were to give you a thousand dollars now, all at once, see how many things you could do with it! You could open a tavern up the Ottawa and make your fortune right away, and you would save all the money you spend for drink besides."

"Ah!" said Paul, his face lighting up at the inviting picture, and bending forward with extended palm to receive the largess at once.

"I con-sent!"

"Consent to what?"

"Take ze money."

"Of course you will, my fine fellow; I know that. And after you have got rid of it all you will come back to me for more."

"Promise to come no more."

"Of course you do! But you will come all the same. The promise don't count after the money is spent. I have not forgot last time."

Paul smiled like a man who receives a compliment. Veracity was not his point of honour. Rather, it was smartness; and to have "done" this rich and masterful white man seemed an achievement to be proud of. He stroked his beardless cheeks with a simper of gratified vanity, and fairly laughed at last, so tickled was he by the recollection of his cleverness.