Part 17 (1/2)
(UN)COMMON SENSE.
I.
My first impulse was to become a woman of business, and a.s.sume the entire control of my inheritance. Excepting a few charitable bequests and some trifling legacies, everything was left to me. I was even made executrix; but my father had indicated in a separate paper that in regard to matters out of my knowledge I could safely consult his own legal adviser, Horatio Chelm.
Mr. Chelm was the conventional idea of a successful lawyer,--withered, non-committal, and a little fusty; but technicalities had failed to harden his heart or obscure his good sense. He had a sunny smile, which refreshed my sad spirit when I called upon him shortly after the funeral to inform him of my purpose, and made me feel that I could confide in him.
”What, my dear young lady! take entire charge of four million dollars? I admire your business ambition, but I must tell you that such a task is impossible, if you wish to have leisure for anything else. No, no! your father could not have meant that. I knew him well, and he was the last man to have wished to make you a slave to your good fortune. With an income of nearly two hundred thousand dollars you can afford to leave to some one else the anxiety and drudgery attendant on the care of your property. Your father wished you to enjoy his money and use it well. He has told me so himself. He was very fond and very proud of you, Miss Harlan.”
”But he was very anxious to have me understand business matters, Mr.
Chelm,” I replied.
”And he was quite right, too. Don't think for a moment I am dissuading you from undertaking a general supervision of your property and trying to know all about it. It is your duty under the circ.u.mstances, I fully agree. But it would never do to have you spending the best years of your life cooped up in an office cutting off coupons and worrying over investments. Not, to be sure, that there is much to be done at present, for I never saw a cleaner list of securities than yours; but you have no idea of the amount of watchfulness required to keep an estate like this unimpaired. A family of children are nothing to it, ha! ha! No, Miss Harlan, I tell you what we will do; you shall have a little office adjoining mine, where you can spend one day in every week transacting what is necessary in regard to your property. Everything shall be in your name, and nothing done without your full understanding and consent.
I will be at hand to be plied with questions, and you shall become as wise in finance as Necker himself. But I pray you to devote the six remaining days to other things, and leave to us dry, matter-of-fact lawyers the details of your business. I have a great many millions under my control, and the percentage which I should derive from the care of yours is a matter of indifference to me; but I am very much concerned that you should not make the fatal mistake of becoming a mere feminine trustee.”
I yielded to persuasion; and in accordance with his promise a little room adjoining his own private office was allotted to me, and every Monday morning I drove down-town and spent the day in poring over the ledgers and deeds and reports, and in taking a general scrutiny of my affairs. At first it was all very confusing, but by degrees order was reduced out of chaos to my understanding, and I learned to take a keen interest in the points submitted to me for my decision. At first I felt some humiliation in perceiving that my opinion was consulted merely from form and courtesy,--or, more roughly, because the law required it.
I was forced to laugh and shake my head and acknowledge that I was not capable of judging. I had hoped that I knew enough to be of service sometimes, and the consciousness of my ignorance spurred me to determined exertions to overcome the deficiency. Contrary to our compact, I read and studied at home books relating to financial and economical matters; I concealed railway reports in my m.u.f.f, and tried various artifices to acquire knowledge unbeknown to Mr. Chelm. But it was chiefly to his kindness and unwearying attention that I owed the proficiency I gradually acquired; and I think it was as genuine a pleasure to him as to me, when at last I was able, with a moderate degree of confidence, to choose for myself between two lines of conduct.
I often asked myself what I should have done had I attempted to act alone from the start.
But it was not long before another interest incident to and growing out of this began to occupy my thoughts and time. The bulk of my daily mail was increased by subscription lists and circulars soliciting my a.s.sistance to every kind of charity and enterprise. People whom I had never seen, came to the house to ask aid for struggling talent. I was importuned with begging letters from victims to all sorts of distress.
Zealous philanthropists wrote that they had taken the liberty of putting down my name as a member of their societies, and that the annual a.s.sessment was now due and payable. Here again I had recourse to the counsel of Mr. Chelm, whose experience, as I have hinted, radiated beyond the limits of his lucrative practice, and who was not only liberal toward the poor, but familiar with their needs. From him I obtained a variety of hints and suggestions that enabled me to give my money and time intelligently, and also to refuse them without remorse. I was very glad of this new duty, which easily became a great pleasure despite my occasional disgust at the impertinence of some applicants when it was discovered that I was ready to subscribe freely. I was not however satisfied with the easy work of giving, but soon pa.s.sed from the pa.s.sive act of signing cheques to active work among the needy. I studied the theories of tenement houses and hygiene, and became a leading spirit in several charitable organizations.
I renewed also my old habit of reading, and no longer confined myself to the philosophic and dry subjects pursued under Mr. Fleisch. But I was conscious that the zest which I felt in renewing a wider range of study was due to the fact of my having acquired from his instruction a degree of industry and a power to appreciate that I had not previously possessed. At the suggestion of Mr. Chelm, whom I allured to chat with me regarding outside subjects when my business was finished, I read with regularity the leading newspapers and magazines. A familiarity with the former he declared to be indispensable to a knowledge of current affairs, and also that much of the freshest and most valuable thought of the day was first made public through the medium of periodicals. This practice received likewise the approval of Aunt Helen, who a.s.sured me that she always felt lost for the day if she had not looked at the Deaths and Marriages.
One of my first steps had been to ask Aunt Helen to come and live with me; to which she finally consented, though the consequent necessity of disestablis.h.i.+ng her cosey little parlor, upon the embellishment of which she had spent the overflow of her income for years, cost her many a pang. But she was a far-seeing woman, and had I dare say, while accepting my offer, a delightful vision of helping me to live up to the duties of my position. I can only say that she soon began to impress the importance of this upon me by hints more or less palpable; and it was not long before she was to all intents and purposes the real house-keeper. It was still, to be sure, I that ordered the dinners and engaged the servants, but even in these minor details I was alive to her suggestions; while in the matter of the general direction of what went on, her wishes were supreme. At first I was too sad to be other than indifferent; and later it was a relief to me to have taken off my shoulders the bother of many things which I felt instinctively ought to be done. I could trust Aunt Helen's taste; and so she had my tacit permission to follow out her own inclinations in the way of change and improvements. Under her supervision the house was almost entirely refurnished and adorned with the most exquisite specimens of upholstery and bric-a-brac obtainable. So too, as time went on, she increased the number and raised the standard of the domestics, and persuaded me to buy a variety of horses and equipages. It was she who kept the grooms up to the mark regarding the proper degree of polish for the harnesses, and she spent many days in the selection of an artistic design for the crest to be emblazoned upon them. So far as was possible she represented that all these things were done at my desire and out of her sheer good nature. When I drove with her from shop to shop, as I often did to save myself from depressing thoughts, she invariably made me pa.s.s a formal approval upon whatever charmed her eye. If this innocent self-deceit gave her pleasure, it did not seem to me worth while to protest.
And so by the time I left off my mourning, there was little left to be done to make my establishment one of the most elegant in the city. Aunt Helen now turned her attention to my clothes. The costumes which I suffered her to select were marvels of Parisian art and New York adaptiveness. She sought too, by frequent allusions to my increased personal beauty, to arouse my vanity and induce me to throw off the pall of soberness that had settled upon my spirit. When this failed, she had recourse to an opposite policy, and repeated to me the remarks she overheard in coming out of church and elsewhere concerning me. Many of my acquaintances, she said, were of the opinion that I was eccentric and partial to ”advanced” ideas. Another story current was that I had been compelled by my father on his death-bed, on pain of disinheritance, to dismiss a young artist to whom I was pa.s.sionately attached. There was the same grain of truth to a bushel of error in the remaining conjectures; but Aunt Helen a.s.sured me that every one agreed I was peculiar, and deemed it unfortunate that a young lady possessed of such signal advantages should be different from all the rest of the world.
Even I, un.o.bservant as I was at this time, was made aware by the curious glances directed at me as I descended from my carriage, that to a certain extent an heiress belongs to the public.
Continual dropping, however, will wear away the hardest stone, and Aunt Helen was not one to weary in what she considered well-doing. When nearly three years had elapsed after my father's death, I yielded to her urgency and consented to inaugurate my return to society by giving a large ball. The idea came to me one night when I was feeling depressed and discouraged over my failure to obtain more than a pa.s.sive sort of happiness in my present occupations. There were so many philanthropists, I thought. I had even begun to feel that the poor were extremely well provided for, and that in some respects they were really rather better off than I was. For despite my studies and my hours with Mr. Chelm, and the society meetings which I attended, I was conscious at heart of being lonely. My ideas too had received certain impressions regarding the people who composed society that were quite foreign to those which had given me an aversion to it. Since my accession to an enormous fortune my attention had naturally been directed to the conduct of people situated similarly to myself. At first I was shocked and made morbid by the whirl of selfish pleasure and dissipation that seemed to characterize the lives of this cla.s.s. But when I came to look a little deeper, I was surprised to find how many people among the rich whom I had judged to be simply frivolous and indifferent were in reality earnest workers in the various fields of philanthropy, science, or art, for the most part carrying on their investigations un.o.bserved. Among them were a number of my old acquaintances with whom at the charitable and other gatherings where we met I had resumed the a.s.sociations of four years ago; and I was struck by the serious spirit that now seemed to determine their actions.
It was clear to me that earnest-minded people existed among the very wealthy no less than among those less fortunately circ.u.mstanced; and as this grew more apparent, I began to catch a glimpse of what my father had meant in speaking of wealth as the power and possibility of the world. Was it not essential to leisure; and leisure to refinement and culture? And where necessity ceased to control action, ought there not to be a greater chance for excellence and progress?
These growing impressions served to temper the almost morbid tendency of my thoughts to the extent that I have indicated. We gave a grand ball, and under the stimulus of the cordial welcome given me I became the gayest of the gay, and surprised not only my old acquaintances but myself by the vivacity and desire to please of which I proved capable.
Without undue confidence, I can say that I achieved a triumph, and put to rout the various uncomplimentary conjectures that the world had hazarded in regard to me. Society opened its arms to me as a returning prodigal, and my revulsion of feeling was all the more spontaneous from the fact, that, if some of my former acquaintances were as frivolous as ever, they had learned to conceal their emptiness by an adaptability which made them agreeable companions. There was a keen satisfaction, too, in the consciousness which became mine, as I went from house to house during the following weeks, that I excelled the most of them in the power to make myself agreeable. The reading and study of the past few years enabled me to s.h.i.+ne as a conversationalist, and in my present regenerated mood I had, on the other hand, no temptation to play the pedant or moralist. I tried to be amusing and to appear clever; and I was pleased to read a favorable verdict upon my effort in the attentions of men as a rule unsusceptible, and in the amazed countenance of Aunt Helen.
Her satisfaction at the course of events was not disguised; but she was diplomatic enough, in her conversations with me, not to take to herself the glory of the evolution. She contented herself by way of recrimination in such expressions as--”To think, Virginia, how near you came to throwing yourself away!” and, ”It takes a great load off my mind to see you yourself once again.” But after the first few entertainments at which we were present together, I often caught her looking at me with a sort of wonder, as though she could scarcely believe that the brilliant young person whose reappearance in the social world was the sensation of a successful season could really be her niece.
One evening as we were sitting after our return from an especially pleasant dinner-party, Aunt Helen surveyed me contentedly through her eye-gla.s.s, and said:--
”I have never seen you look or appear better in your life than you did to-night, my dear. Your dress set to perfection, and you were very agreeable.”
I dropped a little curtsy in return.
”Yes,” she continued, ”I will not disguise that there was a time about a year ago when I felt very anxious in regard to you. Eccentricity, as I have often told you before, is all very well when one has nothing to lose and everything to gain by it. I can understand how a young person with no antecedents or opportunities for getting on in society might secure a temporary advantage by making herself an object of remark. But in your case it has always seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Every one knows who you are and all about you, already. However, all is well that ends well, and it is an unspeakable relief to me that you have come to your senses at last.”
”Don't crow, Aunt Helen, until you are out of the woods. I may be merely a meteor that will vanish some day as quickly as I appeared, and leave you all in the dark.”
”You are your own mistress, of course. If I take any credit to myself for what you are to-day, Virginia, it is because I have never interfered with anything you chose to do. I have expressed my opinion of course when I thought you were making mistakes, but I have stopped short at that. Others in the same position might have behaved differently; but it is not my way. I said to myself, 'If her own good sense does not teach her, nothing will.' So, too, now that you have justified my confidence in you, I have no temptation to act otherwise. You will do what you prefer, of course. But naturally I have my own ideas as to what is desirable for you.”