The Master Rogue: The Confessions of a Croesus by David Graham Phillips - HTML preview

POSTSCRIPT

On the second day after James Galloway’s death, his eldest and outcast son called at the Galloway palace and asked for his brother Walter. Presently Walter, in dress and manner an ideal chief mourner and chief beneficiary, came down to him in the library. The dead man lay in a magnificent casket in the adjoining ball-room, which was half full of funeral flowers. They were scenting the whole house with stifling, suffocating perfume, sweet yet sickening.

“You came to see—father?” said Walter.

“No,” replied James. “I do not wish to be reminded. I am trying to forgive him.” Then he looked into his brother’s eyes with the keen, frank glance that is one of his many charms. “I’ve come to see you, to ask you what you intend to do about the will.”

Walter’s eyes shifted. “I don’t understand you,” he answered.

“I mean—do you intend to break it?”

There was a long silence. Walter’s upper lip, in spite of his efforts to control it, was twitching nervously. At length he said: “He is gone. It is his will. It contains his—life ambition. I think it would be wrong not to respect it.” He looked at his brother appealingly.

“Then I must warn you that, unless you break it and divide everything equally among his heirs, I shall make a contest.”

“But you consented, Jim!” pleaded Walter, recovering from his stupor.

“Consented—to what?”

“To—to my staying—where I was.”

“While he lived. I said nothing about afterward. If you won’t break the will, I shall. It will be easy enough. I can prove he made it in the belief that I had forged his name. I can prove—that—I didn’t.”

“But you know, Jim, he heard the truth years before he died.”

James smiled cynically. “How do I know it?”

“I told you that mother told him on her death-bed.”

“Would any jury believe you, or believe that I believed you?”

Walter flushed and looked indignantly at his brother. “You offered to shield me for what I did when I was a boy. I was younger than you—hardly more than a child. Now you want to punish me after making me accept your offer. It ain’t like you, Jim!”

“More like father, ain’t it?” said James, sadly. “But—I can’t do otherwise, Walt. I’m only helping you to do what’s just—what’s merely decent.”

“You are trying to destroy our father’s life-work!”

“No—not his life-work. I can’t do that. I wish I could. I wish I could destroy it even in myself. No, all I can hope to do is to paralyse his dead hand—that awful hand he has plotted to keep on ruling and ruining with for generations. And I will!”

“You sha’n’t do it, Jim Galloway!” exclaimed Walter, in a burst of fury. He stood and waved his arms in a gesture as weak as it was wild. “I won’t let you. I won’t be cheated. I won’t! I won’t!”

“Let’s send for your wife and see what she thinks,” said James.

Walter gasped and sank into his chair. “No!” he muttered. “This is between you and me.” Then, with tears in his eyes, he added: “You ought to be ashamed to take advantage of me. And after letting me alone and letting me get used to the idea! I didn’t think you were mean and a coward.”

“I admit I’m doing right in the wrong way—but it’s the only way open to me. The will must be broken.” James rose to go. “Don’t let’s quarrel, Walter. You know what’s honest and right; I’ve told you what I shall do. Think it over. Talk it over with your wife. Either keep your equal share, and devote the rest to a memorial to mother—colleges, hospitals—anything—or else divide all equally among us four. Be sensible, Walt—think what a hell his money and his ideas made for himself and for the rest of us. If you get only your equal share, you’ll have hard enough work keeping from not being like—him. Be sensible, Walt—and be decent!”

And he left the room and the house; and a huge wave of that suffocating-sweet perfume of funeral flowers poured out through the opened street-door after him as if to overwhelm him—like subtle hate on stealthy murder bent.

That same afternoon the will was opened. There were legacies of ten millions to Walter and to Aurora, and of two millions to James’s children. The rest of the estate, seventy millions, was left unconditionally—to Helen. The will was just one month old.

Walter was beaten in a long contest to have it set aside, and have the estate equally divided among the heirs. The lawyers got five millions. When Helen was finally victorious, she devoted all, except eight millions for James and ten millions for Delamotte and herself, to the magnificent endowment of her father’s various public enterprises. The huge palace she made over into the “James Galloway Memorial Museum of Art.”

“I only carried out his real will,” she said, “for he was one of the noblest men that ever lived—and nobody understood him but me.”

THE END