“I loved her, my son! I loved her! You cost me her life! You did not do it intentionally. But—but I felt you owed me something, and so I—charged you with the expense incurred. She would have—fought for you; but I held it against you and I wrote it down. And I wrote it down, in black and white, that in my grief I might have an added grief, my son!”
Tommy looked up suddenly, and saw that his father was nodding toward the photograph on the table, nodding again and again. And Tommy felt himself becoming more and more a son—to both! He did not think concretely of any one thing, but he felt that he was enveloped by a life that does not die. That, after all, is the function of death.
Presently Mr. Leigh ceased to nod at the photograph and looked at Tommy. And in the same dispirited monotone, as though his very soul had kept books for an eternity, said:
“We talked over your life, my son. Months before you came she picked out your schools and your college. It is to those that you have gone. She had no social ambitions for herself. They were all for you. She wanted you to be the intimate of those whom we called the best people in those days. They are your friends to-day. I promised her that I would do as she wished.” The old man looked at Tommy straight in the eyes. “You have had everything you wished—at least, everything you ever asked me for. I have kept my promise to her. And, my son, I do not begrudge the cost!”
The way he looked when he said this made Tommy exceedingly uncomfortable. It was plain that Mr. Leigh was much poorer than Tommy had feared. In some way not quite fully grasped, Tommy Leigh realized that all his plans—the plans he really had not formed!—were brought to naught. And when his father spoke again Tommy listened with as poignant an interest as before, but with distinctly less curiosity.
“Her plans for you all were for your boyhood. After your graduation from college I was to take charge of your business career, provide or suggest or approve of your life's occupation. The day is here. I owe you an explanation, that you may be helped to a decision following your understanding of your position—and of mine!” He ceased to speak, rose, took from the table the photograph of his wife, looked at it, and muttered, “It is now between us men!”
He carried the photograph to his bedroom. He returned presently and, looking at Tommy full in the face, said with a touch of sternness that had been absent from his voice while the photograph was on the table:
“My son, when we married I was getting exactly eighteen dollars a week. Your grandmother lived with us and paid the rent of this house, in return for which she had her meals with us. When you were born I was getting one thousand and forty dollars a year. This house—the only house in which she lived with me—I kept after she died and after your grandmother went away. I do not own it. It is too big for my needs—and too small for my regrets. But I could not live anywhere else. And so I have kept it all these years. My salary at the bank was raised to fifteen hundred dollars when you were four years old, and later to eighteen hundred dollars. For the last fourteen years my salary from the bank has been twenty-five hundred dollars a year.”
Tommy felt as if something as heavy as molten lead and as cold as frozen air had been force-pumped into his heart and had filled it to bursting.
“You have cost me, up to this day, a trifle over seventeen thousand dollars. At school you cost me a little less than my salary. At college you spent one thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight dollars for your Freshman, two thousand and twelve dollars for your Sophomore, two thousand one hundred and forty-six dollars for your Junior, and two thousand three hundred and ninety-one dollars for your Senior year. Your summer vacation expenses have added an average of four hundred dollars a year to what you cost me since you were sixteen. But I have kept my promise to her. I do not begrudge the cost!”
There was a subtle defiance' in the old man's voice, and also a subtle accusation. To Tommy his father's arithmetic had in it something not only incomprehensible, but uncanny. The old man looked as if he expected speech from his son, so Tommy stammered uncomfortably:
“I—I suppose—your s-savings—”
The grim lines came back to the old man's mouth. “I had the house rent to pay, and my salary was what I have told you.”
“I don't quite understand—” floundered Tommy.
“You have had the college and the friends she wished you to have. When you asked for money I always sent it to you. I asked no questions and urged no economies.”
“I had no idea—” began Tommy, and suddenly ceased to talk. There came a question into his eyes. The past was over and done with. There remained the future. What was expected of him? What was he to do?
But the old man missed the question. All he saw was an interrogation, and he said, “You wish to know how I did it?”
This was not at all what Tommy really wished to know, but he nodded, for, after all, his father's answer would be one of the many answers to one of the many questions he had to ask.
“My son”—Mr. Leigh spoke in a low voice, but looked unflinchingly at his son—“I ask you, as a grown man, what does an old and trusted bank employee always do who spends much more than his salary?”
Tommy's soul became a frozen mass, numb, immobile. Then a flame smote him full in the face, so intense that he put up his hands to protect it. He stared unseeingly at his father. There flashed before him ten thousand cinematograph nightmares that fleeted by before he could grasp the details. He felt a slight nausea. He feared to breathe, because he was afraid to find himself alive.
“Father!” he gasped.
Mr. Leigh's face was livid. He said, sternly, “I have kept my promise to her!”
“But why did you—why did you—keep me at college? Why didn't you tell me you had no money?”
“I did as she wished me to do. Believe me, my son, I am not sorry. But it need not go on.”
“No!” shouted Tommy. “No!” Then he added, feverishly: “Certainly not! Certainly not!” He shook his head furiously. His brain was filled with fragments of thoughts, shreds of fears, syncopated emotions that did not quite crystallize, but were replaced by others again and again. But uppermost in the boy's mind, not because he was selfish but because he was young and, therefore, without the defensive weapons that experience supplies, was this: I am the son of a thief!
Then came the poignant realization that all that he had got from life had been obtained under false pretenses. The systematic stealing for years had gone to pay for his friendships and his good times. The tradesmen's bills had been settled with other people's money. He was innocent of any crime, but he had been the beneficiary of one. And the boy for whom a father had done this asked himself why his father had done it. And his only answer was that he now was the son of a thief.
As the confusion in his mind grew less explosive, fear entered Tommy's soul—the oldest of all civilized fears, the fear of discovery! He began to read the newspaper head-lines of the inevitable to-morrow. He found himself looking into the horror-stricken faces of those whom he loved best, the warm-hearted companions of his later life, whose opinions became more awful than the wrath of his Maker and more desirable than His mercy.
He would give his life, everything, if only discovery were averted until he could return the money. If fate only waited! Where could he get the money? Where was the source of money?
His father was the natural person from whom to ask, from whom the answer would come, and the habit of a lifetime could not be shaken off in an instant. It was exquisite agony to be deprived abruptly of what had become almost an instinct.
And Tommy was not thinking of his father, not even to blame him, not even to forgive him. He thought of himself, of his own life, of the dreadful future that settled itself into the words: “If it were known!”
“What shall I do?” he muttered, brokenly, gazing at his father with eyes that did not see one face, but many—the faces of friends!
“At