"I'm going the round of the invalids to-day," began Henrietta, after she had got through the formula of sick-room conversation. "I've just come from old John Skeffington. I found all the family in the depths. He fooled 'em again last night."
Hiram smiled. All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to "fool 'em again." He had been dying for three years. At the first news that he was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its favor. He lingered on, and so did they—watching each other, trying to outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser. And he got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house. He favored first one group, then another, taking fagots from fires of hope burning too high to rekindle fires about to expire.
"How is he?" asked Hiram.
"They say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he happens to be sleeping badly—and that's pretty often—he bangs on the anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then, maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle—right in the dead of night."
"Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the
Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?"
"Everyone—except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the old man's money, that he ought to shy his castor into the ring."
"And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram.
"He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it."
The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over the other—a certain sign that he was thinking intently.
"There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting. We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots."
"Yes—there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently.
"That's another form of the same disease," Henrietta went on. "Did you know General Wilmot?"
"He was a fine man," said Hiram, "one of the founders of this town, and he made a fortune out of it. He got overbearing, and what he thought was proud, toward the end of his life. But he had a good heart and worked for all he had—honest work."
"And he brought his family up to be real down-East gentlemen and ladies," resumed Henrietta. "And look at 'em. They lost the money, because they were too gentlemanly and too ladylike to work to hold on to it. And there they live in the big house, half-starved. Why, really, Mr. Ranger, they don't have enough to eat. And they dress in clothes that have been in the family for a generation. They make their underclothes out of old bed linen. And the grass on their front lawns is three feet high, and the moss and weeds cover and pry up the bricks of their walks. They're too 'proud' to work and too poor to hire. How much have they borrowed from you?"
"I don't know," said Hiram. "Not much."
"I know better—and you oughtn't to have lent them a cent. Yesterday old
Wilmot was hawking two of his grandfather's watches about. And all the
Wilmots have got brains, just as our family has. Nothing wrong with
either of us, but that stream Dory Hargrave was talking about."
"There's John Dumont," mused Ranger.
"Yes—he is an exception. But what's he doing with what his father left him? I don't let them throw dust in my eyes with his philanthropy as they call it. The plain truth is he's a gambler and a thief, and he uses what his father left him to be gambler and thief on the big scale, and so keep out of the penitentiary—'finance,' they call it. If he'd been poor, he'd have been in jail long ago—no, he wouldn't—he'd have done differently. It was the money that started him wrong."
"A great deal of good can be done with money," said Hiram.
"Can it?" demanded Mrs. Fred. "It don't look that way to me. I'm full of this, for I was hauling my Alfred over the coals this very morning"—she laughed—"for being what I've made him, for doing what I'd do in his place—for being like my father and my brothers. It seems to me, precious little of the alleged good that's done with wealth is really good; and what little isn't downright bad hides the truth from people. Talk about the good money does! What does it amount to—the good that's good, and the good that's rotten bad? What does it all amount to beside the good that having to work does? People that have to work hard are usually honest and have sympathy and affection and try to amount to something. And if they are bad, why at least they can't hurt anybody but themselves very much, where a John Dumont or a Skeffington can injure hundreds—thousands. Take your own case, Mr. Ranger. Your money has never done you any good. It was your hard work. All your money has ever done has been—Do you think your boy and girl will be as good a man and woman, as useful and creditable to the community, as you and Cousin Ellen?"
Hiram said nothing; he continued to slide his great, strong, useful-looking hands one over the other.
"A fortune makes a man stumble along if he's in the right road, makes him race along if he's in the wrong road," concluded Henrietta.
"You must have been talking a great deal to young Hargrave lately," said
Hiram shrewdly.
She blushed. "That's true," she admitted, with a laugh. "But I'm not altogether parroting what he said. I do my own thinking." She rose. "I'm afraid I haven't cheered you up much."
"I'm glad you came," replied Hiram earnestly; then, with an admiring look, "It's a pity some of the men of your family haven't got your energy."
She laughed. "They have," said she. "Every one of us is a first-rate talker—and that's all the energy I've got—energy to wag my tongue. Still—You didn't know I'd gone into business?"
"Business?"
"That is, I'm backing Stella Wilmot in opening a little shop—to sell millinery."
"A Wilmot at work!" exclaimed Hiram.
"A Wilmot at work," affirmed Henrietta. "She's more like her great grandfather; you know how a bad trait will skip several generations and then show again. The Wilmots have been cultivating the commonness of work out of their blood for three generations, but it has burst in again. She made a declaration of independence last week. She told the family she was tired of being a pauper and beggar. And when I heard she wanted to do something I offered to go in with her in a business. She's got a lot of taste in trimming hats. She certainly has had experience enough."