I read the mystic, involved, subjective words again, as most of the
Concord Sage's words require, and reflected how well they jumped with
the note of my heathen Epictetus, who had said, "Be natural and
noble". And, so thinking, I began to wonder whether, after all, my
father, whose ruthless ways I betimes had explored, whose ruthless
sins I had betimes atoned, had not been, perhaps, a better man than
sometimes I had credited him with being. He, in accordance with his
lights, had accepted the part given him by the Poet of the Play. He
had confided himself childlike to the genius of his age, roaring,
fighting, scrambling, getting and sometimes giving. He had trusted
himself; and in the end, a bold man, he had advanced bravely on Chaos
and the Dark. After a life of war and sometimes of rapine, done under
the genius of his day, he had struck boldly the last chord on an iron
string. Dear old Governor! I did not regret the million of his money I
had spent to restore his memory clean in my own mind: for after all,
it had all been in open war--that time when he unloaded a worthless
mine on his friend, Dan Emory--Helena's father, Daniel Emory, who was,
at first, said to have left his family penniless; until a shrewd
lawyer in some miraculous way had managed to sell at a good price a
box full of worthless mining stock to some innocent victim.
Helena Emory never knew of that sale, nor did her guardian aunt. I did
know of it, for the very good reason that I was both the shrewd lawyer
and the innocent purchaser. It was the last act of my professional
career; and it was this which caused the general report that I had
made a bad mining venture, had lost my father's fortune, and retired
from my career a ruined man. A few friends knew otherwise: and I
blessed the rumor which cost me certain friends who thought me poor
and so forsook me. Perhaps, my father would have called me quixotic
had he known. Now, as I read and pondered, I neither blamed him for
his own course in fair business war with old Dan Emory, nor did I
censure myself for my own hidden act of restitution. Let the world wag
its head if it liked, and remain ignorant of other millions given to
me before my father's death, unprobated, secret, after the fashion of
my pirate parent who buried his treasures and told none but his kin
how they might be found.
Of course, in time, it all might come out. In time, Helena would know
that this yacht which she supposed to be Davidson's was my own, that
the farm I was supposed to have rented really was a handsome estate
that I owned, that many covert deeds in finance had been my own--it
was only my silence and my absence in many parts of the world which
had prevented her, also much a traveler, from knowing the truth about
me long ago. And the truth was, I was not a poor man, but a rich one.