Of course the telegram was connected in some way with the payment of the first half-yearly dividend. Perhaps my father had decided on an instant removal to Italy. So my schoolmates thought as they stood enviously watching me pack.
Towards evening I stepped into the village’s one and only cab. I shook the dust of the Red House from my feet without regret. With the intense selfishness of youth, my own hope for the future made me almost forgetful of the Creature’s tragedy.
It was about eight o’clock when I reached Pope Lane. All the front of the house was in darkness. I tugged vigorously at the bell, feeling a little slighted that none of them had been on the look-out. Directly the door opened, I rushed in with a mouthful of excited questions. Hetty stared at me disapprovingly. “Don’t make so much noise, Master Dante,” she said; “your mother and Miss Ruthita ’ave ’ad a worryin’ day and ’ave gorn to bed. They didn’t know you was comin’.”
I noticed that the stairway was unlighted, that the gas in the hall was on the jet, and that Hetty herself was partly prepared for bed. I was beginning to explain to her about the telegram, speaking below my breath the way one does when death is in the house. Just then my father came out from his study. His pen was behind his ear and his shoulders looked stoopy. His face had the worn expression of the old days, which came from overwork.
“Father, why did you send for me?”
He led me into the study, closing the door behind him.
“You’ve got to be brave.”
At his words my heart sank. My eyes retreated from his face. I wanted to lengthen out the minutes until I should know the worst.
“My boy, your Uncle Obad’s gone to smash. We’ve lost everything.”
He seated himself at the table, his head supported on his hand. He had tried to speak in a matter-of-fact manner, as much as to say, “Of course this is just what we all expected.” But I could see that hope had gone out of him. I wanted to say something decent and comforting; but everything that came to me seemed too grandiloquent. There was nothing adequate that could be said. Florence, realization of dreams, respite from drudgery—all the happiness that money alone could purchase and that had seemed so accessible, was now placed apparently forever beyond reach of his hand.
He took his pen from behind his ear and commenced aimlessly stabbing the blotting-pad.
He spoke again, looking away from me. “That money was yours. I saved it for you. It was for giving you a chance in the world. I ought to have known that your uncle wasn’t to be trusted—he’s never been able to earn a living by honest work. But there, I don’t blame him as much as I blame myself. I must have been mad.”
“Shan’t we get anything back?”
He shook his head. “This fellow Rapson is a common swindler, from what I can make out. He simply used your uncle. He may never have had any diamond mines. If he had, they were worthless. He doesn’t appear to have had any capital except what he got by your uncle selling his shares. He paid his one dividend last summer in order to tempt investors, and now he’s decamped. We shan’t see a penny back.”
I tried to tell him that he needn’t worry for my sake—I could work.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “that’s why I sent for you. Of course your fees are all paid for this term; but if you’ve got to enter the commercial world, the sooner the better. You’ve come to an age when every day spent at school is a day wasted, unless you’re going to enter a profession. You can’t get a University education without money and, in any case, it’s worse than valueless unless you have the money to back it.”
“But I don’t mind working,” I assured him; “I shall be glad to work. P’raps by starting early I’ll be able to earn a lot of money and help you one day, Dad.”
He frowned at my cheerfulness; he had finished with optimism forever. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Money isn’t so easily earned. It took me fifteen years of pinching and scraping to save two thousand pounds.” Then, conscious of ungraciousness, he added, “But I like your spirit, Dante, and it was good of you to say that.”
His fear of heroics and sentiment made him rise quickly and turn out the lamp.
“Best go to bed.”
I groped my way upstairs through the darkened house. There was something unnatural about its darkness. Its silence was not the silence of a house in which people were sleeping, but one in which they lay without rest staring into the shadows. In my bedroom I felt it indecent to light the gas. I sat by the window, looking out across gardens to our neighbors’ illumined windows. Someone was playing a piano; it seemed disgustingly bad taste on their part to do that when we had lost two thousand pounds.
My thought veered round. What after all were two thousand pounds to be so miserable about! I began to feel annoyed with my father that he should have made such a fuss about it. I was sure that neither the Snow Lady nor Ruthita had wanted to go to bed so early. Probably he didn’t really want to himself. He just got the idea into his head, and had forced it on the family. In our house, until Mr. Rapson came along, it had always been like that: he punished us, instead of the people who had hurt him, by the moods that resulted from his disappointments. Why, if it was simply a matter of my going to work, I rather liked the prospect. Anyhow, it was for the most part my concern. And then I remembered how sad he had looked, and was sorry that such thoughts had come into my head.
A tap at my door made me jump up conscience-stricken. “It’s only Ruthita,” a low voice said.
She crept in noiselessly as a shadow. Her warm arms went about my neck, drawing my face down to hers. “Oh, Dannie, I’m so, so sorry,” she whispered.
“What about?”
“Because I’ve never missed welcoming you home ever since you went to school, and you needed me most of all this evening—and because you’ve got to go to work.”
“That doesn’t matter, Ruthie. If I go to work I’ll earn money, and then I’ll be able to do things for you.”
“For me! Oh, you darling!” Then she thought a minute and her face clouded. “But no, if you go to work you’ll marry. That’s what always happens.”
She stood gazing up at me, her face looking frailer and purer than ever in the darkness. She had slipped on a long blue dressing-gown to come and see me, and her long black hair hung loose about her. Just below the edge of her gown her small pale feet showed out. Then I realized for the first time that she had changed as I had changed; we were no longer children. Perhaps the same wistful imaginings, exquisite and alluring, had come to her. For her also the walls of childhood, which had shut out the far horizon, were crumbling. Then, with an overwhelming reverence, I became aware of the strange fascination of her appealing beauty.
She snuggled herself beside me in the window. We spoke beneath our breath in the hushed voices of conspirators, lest we should be heard by my father.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said apologetically. “I was lonely, so I came to you. Everything and everybody seem so sad.”
“It was your thoughts that were sad, Ruthie. What were you thinking about?”
She rubbed her cheek against mine shyly and I felt her tremble. “I was thinking about you. We’re growing up, Dante. You may go away and forget—forget all about me and the Snow Lady.”
“I shan’t,” I denied stoutly.
To which she replied, “But people do.”
“Do what?”
“Forget. And then I’m not your sister really—only by pretense.”
“Look here,” I said, “you say that when boys earn money they marry. I don’t think I ever shall because—well, because of something that has happened. So why shouldn’t you and I agree to live always together, the same as we do now?”
She said that that would be grand; she would be a little mother to me. But she wanted to know what made me so sure that I would always be a bachelor. With the sincere absurdity of youth, the more absurd because of its sincerity, I confided my passion for Fiesole. “After what she has done,” I said, “I could never marry her; and yet I love her too well ever to marry anybody else. I can only love golden hair now, and the golden hair of another girl would always remind me of Fiesole.”
Ruthita was silent. Then I remembered that her hair was black and saw that I had been clumsy in my sentiment, so I added, “But, Ruthie, in a sister I think black hair is the prettiest color in the world.”
After she had tiptoed away to her room and I had crept into bed, I lay awake thinking over her words—that she was only my sister by pretense.
Next day my father called me to him. “You had fifty pounds given you last Christmas. I want you to let me have it.”
I supposed that he wanted me to lend it to him, so I gave him my book and we went together to the savings bank and drew it out. I noticed that he drew out Ruthita’s fifty pounds as well. We climbed on to the top of an omnibus; nothing was said about where we were going.
He had bought a paper and I read it across his arm as we journeyed. As he turned over from the first page my eye caught a column headed DISAPPEARANCE OF GEORGE RAPSON. Underneath was a complete account of the whole affair.
My uncle had been interviewed by a reporter and had given a generously indiscreet history of the catastrophe from beginning to end. He tried to defend Rapson, and by his own innocent disclosures pilloried himself as a sanguine, gullible old ass. He insisted on believing in Rapson’s integrity. Things looked queer of course, but sooner or later there would be an explanation, satisfactory to everybody. What the nature of that explanation was likely to be he could not tell, but he hoped for the best. He was reported as having said that Mr. Rapson had repeatedly referred to secret enemies in the financial world. This was the reason he had given to Mr. Spreckles for not disposing of his shares through the ordinary channels.
Mr. Spreckles stated in his interview that, on the evening of the third of January, Rapson had called at his house. He seemed excited and said that certain plots were culminating against his interests which made an instant and secret visit to South Africa essential. He had not hinted at anything definitely serious, but, on the contrary, had given orders for the declaration of the half-yearly dividend, payment of which would not fall due till February. That evening he had disappeared; since then nothing had been heard of him. When four weeks later Mr. Spreckles drew checks on Rapson’s bank-account for payment of the dividends, they were all returned to him dishonored. A month previously, on the morning of January the third, Rapson had withdrawn every penny.
All the names of the people who had lost money in the adventure were appended. For the most part they were wealthy widows and spinsters, heavy contributors to various philanthropies, just the kind of people who would lack the business judgment which would have prevented them from entering into such a gamble. My father’s name was the exception, and was given special attention, being headed A Hard Case. “Mr. Cardover, having endured in his early life the humiliations and struggles which not infrequently fall to the lot of an ambitious penniless young man, had determined that his son, Dante, should not suffer a like embittering experience. To this end he had saved two thousand pounds to start his son on a professional career. This boy was Mr. Spreckles’ favorite nephew. Mr. Spreckles quotes the fact that it was he who induced Mr. Cardover to invest this money in The Ethiopian Diamond Mines as proof of his own honest belief in the value of the shares. The boy will probably now have to be withdrawn from the Red House, where he is being educated. Was it likely, Mr. Spreckles asked, that he would have been a party to the ruin of those whom he loved best, if he had for a moment suspected that the investment was not all that it was represented?”
I had proceeded so far with my reading, when my father crushed the paper viciously into a ball and tossed it over the side of the bus. For the first time within my ............