Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “George!” he whispered, rather hoarsely. But George did not hear.

  There was nothing to be done but to cross the room and rouse him. The old man stepped as softly as he could upon the uncarpeted wooden floor, and placed himself between the light and the writer. George looked up and started violently, so that his pen flew into the air and fell upon the boards. At the same time he uttered a short, sharp cry, neither an oath nor exclamation, but a sound such as a man might make who is unexpectedly and painfully wounded in battle. Then he saw his father and laughed nervously.

  “You frightened me. I did not see you come in,” he said quickly.

  “I am sorry,” said his father, not understanding at all how a man usually calm and courageous could be so easily startled. “It is rather important, or I would not interrupt you. Mr. Sherrington Trimm is down stairs.”

  “What does he want?” George asked vaguely and looking as though he had forgotten who Sherrington Trimm was.

  “He wants you, my boy. You must go down at once. It is very important. Tom Craik was buried yesterday.”

  “Buried!” exclaimed George. “I did not know he was dead.”

  “I understand that he died several days ago, in consequence of that fit of anger he had. You remember? What is the matter with you, George?”

  “Cannot you see what is the matter?” George cried a little impatiently. “I am just finishing my book. What if the old fellow is dead? He has had plenty of leisure to change his will — in all this time. What does Sherry want?”

  “He did not change his will, and Mr. Trimm wants to read it to you. George, you do not seem to realise that you are a very rich man, a very, very rich man,” repeated Jonah Wood with weighty emphasis.

  “It will do quite as well if he reads the confounded thing to you,” said George, picking up his pen from the floor beside him, examining the point and then dipping it into the ink.

  He was never quite sure how much of his indifference was assumed and how much of it was real, resulting from his extreme impatience to finish his work. But to Jonah Wood, it had all the appearance of being genuine.

  “I am surprised, George,” said the old gentleman, looking very grave. “Are you in your right mind? Are you feeling quite well? I am afraid this good news has upset you.”

  George rose from the table with a look of disgust, bent down and looked over the last lines he had written, and then stood up.

  “If nothing else will satisfy anybody, I suppose I must go down,” he said regretfully. “Why did not the old brute leave the money to you instead of to me? You do not imagine I am going to keep it, do you? Most of it is yours anyhow.”

  “I understand,” answered Jonah Wood, pushing him gently towards the door, “that the estate is large enough to cover what I lost four or five times over, if not more. It is very important — —”

  “Do you mean to say it is as much as that?” George asked in some surprise.

  “That seems to be the impression,” answered his father with an odd laugh, which George had not heard for many years. Jonah Wood was ashamed of showing too much satisfaction. It was his principle never to make any exhibition of his feelings, but his voice could not be altogether controlled, and there was an unusual light in his eyes. George, who by this time had collected his senses, and was able to think of something besides his story, saw the change in his father’s face and understood it.

  “It will be jolly to be rich again, won’t it, father?” he said, familiarly and with more affection than he generally showed by manner or voice.

  “Very pleasant, very pleasant indeed,” answered Jonah Wood with the same odd laugh. “Mr. Trimm tells me he has left you the house as it stands with everything in it, and the horses — everything. I must say, George, the old man has made amends for all he did. It looks very like an act of conscience.”

  “Amends? Yes, with compound interest for a dozen years or more, if all this is true. Well, here goes the millionaire,” he exclaimed as they left the room together.

  It would be hard to imagine a position more completely disagreeable than that in which Sherrington Trimm was placed on that particular afternoon. It was bad enough to have to meet George at all after what had happened, but it was most unpleasant to appear as the executor of the very will which had caused so much trouble, to feel that he was bringing to the heir the very document which his wife had stolen out of his own office, and handing over to him the fortune which his wife had tried so hard to bring into his own daughter’s hands. But Sherrington Trimm’s reputation for honesty and his courageous self-possession had carried him through many difficult moments in life, and he would never have thought of deputing any one else to fulfil the repugnant task in his stead.

  Jonah Wood left his son at the door of the sitting-room and discreetly disappeared. George went in and found the lawyer standing before the fire with a roll of papers in his hands. He was a little pale and careworn, but his appearance was as neat and dapper and brisk as ever.

  “George,” he said frankly as he took his hand, “poor Tom has left you everything, as he said he would. Now, I can quite imagine that the sight of me is not exactly pleasant to you. But business is business and this has got to be put through, so just consider that I am the lawyer and forget that I am Sherry Trimm.”

  “I shall never forget that you are Sherry Trimm,” George answered. “You and I can avoid unpleasant subjects and be as good friends as ever.”

  “You are a good fellow, George. The best proof of it is that not a word has been breathed about this affair. We have simply announced that the engagement is broken off.”

  “Then Mamie has refused to change her mind,” observed George, wondering how he could ever have been engaged to marry her, and how he could have forgotten that at his last meeting with Sherry Trimm he had still left the matter open, refusing to withdraw his promise. But between that day and this he had lived through many emotions and changing scenes in the playhouse of his brain, and his own immediate past seemed immensely distant from his present.

  “Mamie would not change her mind, if I would let her,” Trimm answered briefly. “Let us get to business. Here is the will. I opened it yesterday after the funeral in the presence of the family and the witnesses as usual in such cases.”

  “Excuse me,” George said. “I am very glad that I was not present, but would it not have been proper to let me know?”

  “It would have been, of course. But as there was no obligation in the matter, I did not. I supposed that you would hear of the death almost as soon as it was known. You and your father were known to be on bad terms with Tom and if you had been sent for it would have looked as though we had all known what was in the will. People would have supposed in that case that you must have known it also, and you would have been blamed for not treating the old gentleman with more consideration than you did. I have often heard you say sharp things about him at the club. This is a surprise to you. There is no reason for letting anybody suppose that it is not. A lot of small good reasons made one big good one between them.”

  “I see,” said George. “Thank you. You were very wise.”

  He took the document from Trimm’s hands and read it hastily. The touch of it was disagreeable to him as he remembered where he had last seen it.

  “I had supposed that he would make another after what I said to him,” George remarked. “You are quite sure he did not?”

  “Positive. He never allowed it to be out of his sight after he found it. It was under his pillow when he died. The last words that anybody could understand were to the effect that you should have the money, whether you wanted it or not. It was a fixed idea with him. I suppose you know why. He felt that some of it belonged to your father by right. The transaction by which he got it was legal — but peculiar. There are peculiarities in my wife’s family.”

  Sherry Trimm looked away and pulled his grizzled moustache nervously.

  “There will be a good many formalities,” he continued. “Tom owned property in
several different States. I have brought you the schedule. You can have possession in New York immediately, of course. It will take some little time to manage the rest, proving the will half a dozen times over. If you care to move into the house to-morrow, there is no objection, because there is nobody to object.”

  “I have a proposition to make,” said George. “My father is a far better man of business than I. Could you not tell me in round numbers about what I have to expect, and then go over these papers with him?”

  “In round numbers,” repeated Trimm thoughtfully. “The fact is, he managed a great deal of his property himself. I suppose I could tell you within a million or two.”

  “A million or two!” exclaimed George. Sherry Trimm smiled at the intonation.

  “You are an enormously rich man,” he said quietly. “The estate is worth anywhere from twelve to fifteen millions of dollars.”

  “All mine?”

  “Look at the will. He never spent a third of his income, so far as I could find out.”

  George said nothing more, but began to walk up and down the room nervously. He detested everything connected with money, and had only a relative idea of its value, but he was staggered by the magnitude of the fortune thus suddenly thrown into his hands. He understood now the expression he had seen on his father’s face.

  “I had no conception of the amount,” he said at last. “I thought it might be a million.”

  “A million!” laughed Trimm scornfully. “A man does not live, as he lived, on forty or fifty thousand a year. It needs more than that. A million is nothing nowadays. Every man who wears a good coat has a million. There is not a man living in Fifth Avenue who has less than a million.”

  “I wonder how it looks on paper,” said George. “I will try and go through the schedule with you myself.”

  An hour later George was once more in his room. For a few moments he stood looking through the window at the old familiar brick wall and at the windows of the house beyond, but his reflections were very vague and shapeless. He could not realise his position nor his importance, as he drummed a tattoo on the glass with his nails. He was trying to think of the changes that were inevitable in the immediate future, of his life in another house, of the faces of his old acquaintances and of the expression some of them would wear. He wondered what Johnson would say. The name, passing through his mind, recalled his career, his work and the unfinished chapter that lay on the table behind him. In an instant his brain returned to the point at which he had been interrupted. Tom Craik, Sherry Trimm, the will and the millions vanished into darkness, and before he was fairly aware of it he was writing again.

  The days were short and he was obliged to light the old kerosene lamp with the green shade which had served him through so many hours of labour and study. The action was purely mechanical and did not break his train of thought, nor did it suggest that in a few months he would think it strange that he should ever have been obliged to do such a thing for himself. He wrote steadily on to the end, and signed his name and dated the manuscript before he rose from his seat. Then he stretched himself, yawned and looked at his watch, returned to the table and laid the sheets neatly together in their order with the rest and put the whole into a drawer.

  “That job is done,” he said aloud, in a tone of profound satisfaction. “And now, I can think of something else.”

  Thereupon, without as much as thinking of resting himself after the terrible strain he had sustained during ten days, he proceeded to dress himself with a scrupulous care for the evening, and went down stairs to dinner. He found his father in his accustomed place before the fire, reading as usual, and holding his heavy book rigidly before his eyes in a way that would have made an ordinary man’s hand ache.

  “I have finished my book!” cried George as he entered the room.

  “Ah, I am delighted to hear it. Do you mean to say that you have been writing all the afternoon since Mr. Trimm went away?”

  “Until half an hour ago.”

  “Well, you have exceptionally strong nerves,” said the old gentleman, mechanically raising his book again. Then as though he were willing to make a concession to circumstances for once in his life, he closed it with a solemn clapping sound and laid it down.

  “George, my boy,” he said impressively, “you are enormously wealthy. Do you realise the fact?”

  “I am also enormously hungry,” said George with a laugh. “Is there any cause or reason in the nature of the cook or of anything else why you and I should not be fed?”

  “To tell the truth, I had a little surprise for you,” answered his father. “I thought we ought to do something to commemorate the event, so I went out and got a brace of canvas-backs from Delmonico’s and a bottle of good wine. Kate is roasting the ducks and the champagne is on the ice. It was a little late when I got back — sorry to keep you waiting, my boy.”

  “Sorry!” cried George. “The idea of being sorry for anything when there are canvas-backs and champagne in the house. You dear old man! I will pay you for this, though. You shall live on the fat of the land for the rest of your days!”

  “Enough is as good as a feast,” observed Jonah Wood with great gravity.

  “What roaring feasts we will have — or what stupendously plentiful enoughs, if you like it better! Father, you are better already. I heard you laugh to-day as you used to laugh when I was a boy.”

  “A little prosperity will do us both good,” said the old gentleman, who was rapidly warming into geniality.

  “I say,” suggested George. “I have finished my book, and you have nothing to do. Let us pack up our traps and go to Paris and paint the town a vivid scarlet.”

  “What?” asked Jonah Wood, to whom slang had always been a mystery.

  “Paint the town red,” repeated George. “In short, have a spree, a lark, a jollification, you and I.”

  “I would like to see Paris again, well enough, if that is what you mean. By the way, George, your heart does not seem to trouble you much, just at present.”

  “Why should it? I sometimes wish it would, in the right direction.”

  “You have your choice now, George, you have your choice, now, of the whole female population of the globe — —”

  “Of all the girls beside the water, From Janeiro to Gibraltar, as the old song says,” laughed George.

  “Precisely so. You can have any of them for the asking. Money is a great power, my boy, a great power. You must be careful how you use it.”

  “I shall not use it. I shall give it all to you to spend because it will amuse you, and I will go on writing books because that is the only thing I can do approximately well. Do you know? I believe I shall be ridiculous in the character of the rich man.”

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  THREE YEARS LATER George Wood was sitting alone on a winter’s afternoon in the library where Thomas Craik had once given him his views on life in general and on ambition in particular. It was already almost dark, for the days were very short, and two lamps shed a soft light from above upon the broad polished table.

  The man’s face had changed during the years that had passed since he had found himself free from his engagement to marry his cousin. The angular head had grown more massive, the shadows about the eyes and temples had deepened, the complexion was paler and less youthful, the expression more determined than ever, and yet more kind and less scornful. In those years he had seen much and had accomplished much, and he had learned to know at last what it meant to feel with the heart, instead of with the sensibilities, human or artistic. His money had not spoiled him. On the contrary, the absence of all preoccupations in the matter of his material welfare, had left the man himself free to think, to act and to feel according to his natural instincts.

  At the present moment he was absorbed in thought. The familiar sheet of paper lay before him, and he held his pen in his hand, but the point had long been dry, and had long ceased to move over the smooth surface. There was a number at the top of the page, and a dozen lin
es had been written, continuing a conversation that had gone before. But the imaginary person had broken off in the middle of his saying, and in the theatre of the writer’s fancy the stage of his own life had suddenly appeared, and his own self was among the players, acting the acts and speaking the speeches of long ago, while the owner of the old self watched and listened to the piece with fascinated interest, commenting critically upon what passed before his eyes, and upon the words that rang through the waking dream. The habit of expression was so strong that his own thoughts took shape as though he were writing them down.

  “They have played the parts of the three fates in my life,” he said to himself. “Constance was my Clotho, Mamie was my Lachesis — Grace is my Atropos. I was not so heartless in those first days, as I have sometimes fancied that I was. I loved my Clotho, after a young fashion. She took me out of darkness and chaos and made me an active, real being. When I see how wretchedly unhappy I used to be, and when I think how she first showed me that I was able to do something in the world, it does not seem strange that I should have worshipped her as a sort of goddess. If things had gone otherwise, if she had taken me instead of refusing me on that first of May, if I had married her, we might have been very happy together, for a time, perhaps for always. But we were unlike in the wrong way; our points of difference did not complement each other. She has married Dr. Drinkwater, the Reverend Doctor Drinkwater, a good man twenty years older than herself, and she seems perfectly contented. The test of fitness lies in reversing the order of events. If to-day her good husband were to die, could I take his place in her love or estimation? Certainly not. If Grace had married the clergyman, could Constance have been to me what Grace is, could I have loved her as I love this woman who will never love me? Assuredly not; the thing is impossible. I loved Constance with one half of myself, and as far as I went I was in earnest. Perhaps it was the higher, more intellectual part of me, for I did not love her because she was a woman, but because she was unlike all other women — in other words, a sort of angel. Angels may have loved women in the days of the giants, but no man can love an angel as a woman ought to be loved. As for me, my ears are wearied by too much angelic music, the harmonies are too thin and delicate, the notes lack character, the melodies all end in one close. I used to think that there was no such thing as friendship. I have changed my mind. Constance is a very good friend to me, and I to her, though neither of us can understand the other’s life any longer, as we understood each other when she took up the distaff of my life and first set the spindle whirling.