CHAPTER XVIII.

THE BROKER BROKE.

Ralph Herkimer sat in his New York hotel looking glum. The turn he had been expecting in Pikes Peak and Montana had come; the stock had been brought into notice at last, but it would have been better for him if it had remained unquoted on the share list, as it had been for weeks back. The turn was one for the worse. The shares had gone begging on Wall Street. Nobody would buy. He sat with his hands in his pockets, his chair tilted back, and his hat drawn over his eyes, pulling furiously at a huge cigar, and involving himself in smoke. It was a serious position of his affairs, and there was nothing he could do in the circumstances but wait--wait till he was ruined outright, which at the moment seemed likely enough, or be patient through months, if not years, till improvement came. Of the two alternatives, the former seemed at that moment the preferable, in so far as that it would be soonest over.

The Canada mail was in; his letters were brought him--an unpleasant bundle always now. "They can wait. There is no hurry." He pushes them aside. But, stay! There is one from his wife. "Martha," he says, and breaks the seal.

He was intensely sorry for himself that afternoon. The world was so hard. Nobody seemed a bit interested to know that he was on the verge of being ruined; in fact, it inclined them rather to get out of his way. "Ill-luck," one would have said, to see them, "must be infectious." His friends on Wall Street seemed busy that day whenever he wanted to discuss with them, and some had even been rather short, as to a manifest bore. If he would, he might have recollected that such are the manners and customs among money-makers, when a money-loser comes along. He had practised them himself; but that was when other people were the losers; now it was he, and that made all the difference.

But Martha was fond of him, and he turned to her letter for comfort and sympathy in his deep self-pity. He was fond of Martha, as fond, at least, as a busy man with his head full of other things can afford to be of anybody; but that Martha was fond of _him_ in he never doubted, and that was the aspect of their connection, which was comfortable to dwell on at that moment. He lit a fresh cigar, and opened his letter.

It was a long letter, and began by answering all the questions which he had asked, and then it went on:

"Gerald and Muriel talk about their marriage continually, as is to be expected, poor children. I have been trying to stave it off till you shall have arranged your affairs, and are able to play the part you would wish on the occasion; but I am only Gerald's mother, and it is Muriel who has the right to say when. Besides, Gerald will not allow me to put in a word which would sound like wishing delay, and Muriel seems to think that if Gerald is there, it does not matter much about his father. I cannot altogether blame the girl; it would have been my own thought twenty-five years ago, and, to be sure, I like to see my boy valued as he deserves.

"But it is Matilda who is hurrying things forward in this railway fashion. No doubt she has the best right to arrange Muriel's affairs, she has been a mother to her; but the fact is, it is going to be a double wedding. Matilda herself and Muriel are to be married the same day; Considine has plucked up heart at last, proposed, and been accepted. He should have done it long ago, as I tell him. And now that the game is in Matilda's hands, she is more eager than the little girl of sixteen. She has had longer to wait, you will say, and that there are no fools like old fools. I know the way you men like to talk, pretending to be hard, and you as soft as the women--you, Ralph, at least, only your head is so full of business you do not give yourself leisure to think.

"And, oh! Ralph, dear, I do wish you would come back to Canada and silence the scurrilous reports that are in circulation. Only show face, and the cowards and liars who invent stories about an absent man will be silenced; for well I know there is not a syllable of truth in the whole _farrago_. The city papers are detestable just now; and really, Ralph, you ought, for your son's and your wife's sake, as much as your own, to write your solicitors at once, and get them heavily fined for their abominable calumnies. Indifferent as you are to such things, you really cannot let that story pass which appeared in the papers the other day. It is getting copied into every paper in the Dominion, Gerald says, and he feels so sore about it; he won't show face in Montreal, he says, till it is set right. I mean, of course, the vile libel of that low Indian, Paul, which his counsel repeated to the magistrate, accusing you of having conspired to carry off and make away with your own first cousin--Mary Selby's child. I wish, dear Ralph, you would come back and face them out, the foul-tongued ruffians. That would shame them out of countenance and stop their mouths. The papers say there is a writ out against you. Come back, Ralph, give yourself up, and hurry on the trial. The sooner the truth is known the better. For all my confidence in you, I feel it painful to have the people's eyes fixed on me when I walk up the village to go to church, as if I were an evildoer. Think of it, Ralph, and come.

"But I am forgetting to tell you the great news. Your daughter-in-law to be, who do you think she is? A niece of the Stanleys, you will say. Never more mistaken in your life. She is no kin to them at all--not a drop of blood. She is your Aunt Selby's long-lost daughter. Think of that! The Indian, Paul, believed his squaw had killed her, but it seems she carried her into the country and left her at Bruneau's door, and Bruneau's wife, thinking she had enough of his children already on her hands, carried it up, and left it on the Stanleys' doorstep. Everybody supposed Muriel was their niece, though latterly the Bunces have been rather free with their innuendos. And now the girl turns out to be a great heiress. Strangest of all, it is what we have been calling Gerald's fortune, which she is heir to, and Gerald, the lucky boy, will get back by marriage the very fortune he loses by law. Nobody can say either that he marries Muriel for her money; but to tell the truth, they seem a pair of children in everything that relates to that."

Ralph smoked his cigar through to the end, smoked it till the butt dropped of itself upon his letter, charring the paper before it went out. He continued to sit, rigid in every limb, with his features drawn, and grey, and set; breathing heavily, but never moving. His life seemed living itself over again before his eyes, the prizes he had striven for, the means by which he had tried to win them, the vicissitudes of his career, and the end which he had reached. "Fool," was the only word he uttered, and it escaped him in a tone of mingled misery and wonder; misery, that it was himself; wonder, that he should have done it; for now his consciousness seemed divided in two, one half judging and wondering and scorning, the other, crushed into little save memory, and a sense of being undone, and having become a burden longing to be shaken off.

It was no awakening of conscience, such as moralists describe. He had never troubled himself with questions of right and wrong, true and false, honour and baseness. Success was the honour to which he had aspired, failure the one inexpiable baseness. A faculty unused in well-nigh half a century will scarcely leap into action and controlling predominance over powers and habits strengthened by constant use, all of a sudden. It was by his own poor standard that he stood condemned at last. He had so utterly and unnecessarily failed. What opportunities he had had! and how utterly they had been wasted in his hands.

He had been over-smart all through. In striving to make doubly sure, and assisting the forces that were making for his prosperity, he had defeated them. In attempting to shoulder up his fortunes he had pushed them over. And all was over now. What could he do henceforth? Even Martha, poor woman, would turn from him when she came to know. It was infinitely sad; it was beyond remedy, too altogether out of joint, ever to be set right. And then, he was so weary of it all, he had no heart even to try. Sleep, long and unbroken, sleep without dreams, sleep without a waking, that was all he yearned for, the one last good the universe held for him.

It was dusk now; the gas was alight all over the hotel, and in the streets. He staggered to his feet, and slowly went downstairs. A druggist's shop was near, and there he asked for essence of bitter almonds. The druggist observed to him that it was "dangerous in quantity," and must be used with care. "I'll take good care," Ralph answered, as he went out. They were the last words he was ever heard to utter.

They telegraphed to Gerald from New York next day. His father was dead. It is heart disease, to which sudden deaths are attributed now-a-days. It saves many a pang to the loving hearts of survivors. It saved poor Martha an accession to her grief, and even the world began to talk pityingly of one who had seemed so rich so short a time before. For really the world is not a very bad one. With time and leisure it likes to do a good-natured thing, and does it, if it remembers in time. And then it has a most valuable code of proprieties. It holds it wanton and brutal to speak evil of the dead. And so it came to be in bad taste to mention the Herkimer story at all. The poor man was dead--gone to his own place. What more was there to say?

Even the Indians profited. Their trial came on, but no one took much interest in it. The young lady had come to no harm; she was even to marry the son of the man whose name had been dragged into the transaction. They pleaded guilty, and profited largely by the leniency of the court.

The weddings were unavoidably postponed. It was Matilda herself who proposed that they should wait six months, out of respect for Martha. Her extravagant haste and eagerness had been for Muriel's behoof. She feared that the past might get more fully canvassed, and arrange itself into some kind of barrier, which, though Muriel might ignore, Gerald might feel ashamed to overpass.

Jordan's career did not close itself so abruptly as his friend's had done, and there were times when he envied Ralph the speedy conclusion of his troubles. His affairs proved to be like an old woman's knitting; when once a stitch of it is dropped, nobody can tell how great may be the devastation. Jordan's fortune had crumbled to pieces; he was a discredited man, and worse, a pensioner on his wife's bounty; and that last, all who knew the charming Amelia--and all who knew her, voted her charming--agreed was no enviable position. About a year after Randolph was married, and settled in a government office at Ottawa, the Minister of Drainage and Irrigation exerted his influence, and got the old man--he is really old now, seventy is the next decade he will touch, and that before long--made stipendiary magistrate at Anticosti, where among the sleet storms of the gulf of St. Lawrence he dispenses justice to litigious fishermen. Amelia did not accompany him. Why should she? To be an ornament of society in Montreal or Ottawa is the role nature intended her to fill, and she works the part industriously. An old _habitante_ woman makes Jordan an infinitely more efficient housekeeper in the far East, where comforts are few, and there is no society, and she writes him every week the most delightful letter, with all the chit-chat and scandal about his old friends carefully chronicled. This affords him nearly as much amusement to read as it gave her to write, and is far more persistently pleasant than he finds the writer, when he spends his annual holiday with her at St. Euphrase.

Gerald and Muriel are an old married couple now. Their boy is just the age of his mother when she was stolen away. He would spend all his time, if he had his way, with his grandmother Selby, who adores him, and often calls him Edith in forgetfulness. There is a drawer upstairs in her room, where there are little shoes, red, white and blue, and sashes of gay colours, and little lace frocks. They are all nicely washed and ironed now--the frocks, that is--and the little fellow puts them on for a lark, at times, though he is getting too big for most of them now. But there was a time when no one was permitted to touch or see those things, and when the tears of ten years and more dropping on the muslin and the lace had rumpled them and blotted them into a faded yellow. They are precious still--his mother wore them when she was his age--but the urchin himself is more precious yet by far. It amuses him to try them on, and, therefore, they have been newly done up for his lordship's greater gratification.

Muriel's fortune turned out less than it might have been. The portion in Jordan's hands having disappeared, Considine offered to make good the deficiency to the last cent he possessed as far as it would have gone. But the moiety he had manipulated himself had prospered, and made a very pretty fortune as it was; and for the rest--no one doubts that some day Muriel will fall heir to all that he, his wife, and her sister possess.

The man with the two wives, is how his acquaintance speak of Considine, for the three go everywhere together. He is as attentive to Penelope as to his wife, and she is far more adoring than her sister, who, being married, has her rights, to criticise, to have little tempers--though, indeed, Matilda's are of the smallest--and so forth.

And now there seems no more to say. Betsey Bunce is in her right place as mistress of a farm. Her poultry lay larger eggs, and her cows give more butter than those of any one else. She is busy and cheery all day long, and neither man nor maid dare ever be idle on the premises. She has proved a fortune to her husband, if she brought him none, and he owns now that the bad luck which first made him think of Betsey was the luckiest circumstance of his life. She is bound to make a rich man of him, and a legislator at Ottawa, some day soon.

FOOTNOTE

[Footnote 1: Sugar-bush. A grove of maple trees. The farmers tap the juice in spring, and boil it into sugar. In Lower Canada and New Hampshire, scarcely any other sugar is consumed in the country places.]

[Footnote 2: Jennie Jeffers, queen of the gypsies in the United States, died in Greenfield, Tennessee, March 10, 1884, and was buried at Dayton, Ohio, April 16. Fifteen hundred gipsies from all parts of the country were present.--_American Paper_.]

THE END.

PRINTED BY KELLY AND CO., GATE STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, W.C.; AND MIDDLE MILL KINGSTON-ON-THAMES.