be any question of more. He was a rich man, and
he had made his money out of nothing, or, at least,
from a beginning of utter poverty. But in his
last years he came to a sense of its worthlessness,
such as few men who have made their money ever have.
He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly
educated, and he was ungrammatical, and he never was
at home in society; but he had a tender heart and
an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one
would believe I could without knowing him as I did.
His money became a burden and a terror to him; he
did not know what to do with it, and he was always
morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking
that money was an evil in itself.”
“That is what we think,” I ventured.
“Yes, I know. But he had thought this out
for himself, and yet he had times when his thinking
about it seemed to him a kind of craze, and, at any
rate, he distrusted himself so much that he died leaving
it all to me. I suppose he thought that perhaps
I could learn how to give it without hurting; and
then he knew that, in our state of things, I must
have some money to keep the wolf from the door.
And I am afraid to part with it, too. I have
given and given; but there seems some evil spell on
the principal that guards it from encroachment, so
that it remains the same, and, if I do not watch,
the interest grows in the bank, with that frightful
life dead money seems endowed with, as the hair of
dead, people grows in the grave.”
“Eveleth!” her mother murmured again.
“Oh yes,” she answered, “I dare
say my words are wild. I dare say they only mean
that I loathe my luxury from the bottom of my soul,
and long to be rid of it, if I only could, without
harm to others and with safety to myself.”
It seemed to me that I became suddenly sensible of
this luxury for the first time. I had certainly
been aware that I was in a large and stately house,
and that I had been served and banqueted with a princely
pride and profusion. But there had, somehow,
been through all a sort of simplicity, a sort of quiet,
so that I had not thought of the establishment and
its operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs.
Makely’s far inferior scale of living; or else,
what with my going about so much in society, I was
ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts
as I had been at first. But I was better qualified
to judge of what I saw, and I had now a vivid sense
of the costliness of Mrs. Strange’s environment.
There were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot;
there were tens of thousands in the pictures on the
walls. In a bronze group that withdrew itself
into a certain niche, with a faint reluctance, there
was the value of a skilled artisan’s wage for
five years of hard work; in the bindings of the books
that showed from the library shelves there was almost
as much money as most of the authors had got for writing
them. Every fixture, every movable, was an artistic
masterpiece; a fortune, as fortunes used to be counted
even in this land of affluence, had been lavished
in the mere furnishing of a house which the palaces
of nobles and princes of other times had contributed
to embellish.
