The Common Lot. Robert Herrick
he would like to brain some rich passer-by. His was a handsome face, with firm, straight lines, a thick black mustache, and clear eyes, deep set. But it was a face torn and macerated by the hunger of unappeased desires—unselfish and honorable desires, however; a face that thinly covered a fuming crater beneath. When life treated this man rudely, he would fight back, and he would win against odds. But as the architect saw him, he was a tough, unlovely specimen.
"I suppose any one would like to have money," Hart answered vaguely. Then feeling that the doctor's company was intolerable, he turned down a side street, calling out, "So long, Coburn."
The doctor's face betrayed a not wholly sympathetic amusement when his companion left him in this abrupt manner.
When Jackson entered the house, his uncle's old home, his mother was sitting by the library table reading, just as she had sat and read at this hour for the past twenty years. Powers Jackson had carefully made such provision for her as would enable her to continue this habit as long as she might live. She called to her son:—
"You're late, son. Supper's on the table."
"Don't wait for me," he answered dully, going upstairs to his room.
When he joined his mother at the supper-table, his mustache was brushed upwards in a confident wave, and his face, though serious, was not blackened by soot and care.
"Did you see Everett?" Mrs. Hart asked suggestively.
Jackson told her in a few words the event of the afternoon, recounting the chief provisions of the will as he remembered them. For some moments she said nothing. Then she remarked, with a note of annoyance in her voice:—
"Powers was always bound I sh'd never leave this house except to follow him to Rose Hill. And he's fixed it so now I can't! I could never make him see how sooty it was here. We have to wash the curtains and things once a fortnight, and then they ain't fit to be seen half the time."
Her son, who thought that he had his own grievances against his uncle, made no reply to this complaint. Before they had finished their meal, Mrs. Hart added:—
"He might have done more for you, too, seeing what a sight of money he left."
"Yes, he might have done it! But you see he didn't choose to. And I guess the best thing we can do under the circumstances is to say as little as possible about the will. That is, unless we decide to fight it."
He threw this out tentatively. It had not occurred to him to contest the will until that moment. Then he thought suddenly, "Why should I stand it?"
But Mrs. Hart, who had never opposed her brother in all her life, exclaimed:—
"You couldn't do that, Jackson! I am sure Powers wouldn't like it."
"Probably not," the young man replied ironically. "But it isn't his money any longer!"
It occurred to him soon, however, that by this act he would endanger his mother's comfortable inheritance, besides estranging his cousin Everett and all the old man's friends. To contest the will would be a risk and, moreover, would be ungrateful, petty. It was a matter at any rate upon which he should have to take the best of advice. When he spoke again at the end of their supper, he said impartially:—
"I am glad you are comfortably looked out for, though I hope I should always be able to give you a home, anyway. And we must remember that uncle gave me my education and my three years in Paris, and I suppose that after that he thought ten thousand dollars was all that I was worth—or could take care of."
He said this, standing in front of the heavy black-walnut sideboard which he abhorred, while he lit a cigarette. As he spoke he felt that he was taking his injury in a manly way, although he still reserved to himself the right to seek relief from the courts.
And in the deeper reaches of his being there lay a bitter sense of resentment, a desire to make the world pay him in some manner for his disappointment. If he had to, he would show people that he could make his own way; that he was more than the weakling his uncle had contemptuously overlooked in the disposal of his property. He should rise in his profession, make money, and prove to the world that he could swim without Powers Jackson's millions.
Oddly enough, as he stood there smoking, his eyes narrowed, his handsome face hardened into something like the stocky doctor's bull-dog expression. The rough, brute man in him thrust itself to the surface!
"What kind of a school are they going to start with all that money?" Mrs. Hart asked, as she seated herself for the evening.
"Oh, something technical. For sons of mechanics, a kind of mechanics' institute, I should say."
He thought of some of the old man's caustic remarks about charities, and added:—
"Wanted to make good before he quit, I suppose?"
"Will you have to stay on with that firm?" Mrs. Hart asked, taking up Lanciani's "Pagan and Christian Rome."
"I suppose I'll have to for a time," answered Jackson, gloomily. …
Thus these two accepted the dead man's will. Powers Jackson had come to his decision after long deliberation, judging that toward all who might have claims of any kind upon him he had acted justly and generously. He had studied these people about him for a long time. With Everett, who was only distantly related to him, he had acquitted himself years before, when he had put it in the young man's way to make money in his profession, to kill his prey for himself. Jackson, he deemed, would get most out of the fight of life by making the struggle, as he had made it himself, unaided. As for Helen, he had given the girl what was most intimately his, and what would do her the least harm by attracting to her the attention of the unscrupulous world. There remained what might be called his general account with the world, and at the end he had sought to settle this, the largest of all.
Powers Jackson had not been a good man, as has been hinted, but that he took his responsibilities to heart and struggled to meet them there can be no doubt. Whether or not he had chosen the best way to settle this account with the world, by trying to help those to live who were unfavored by birth, cannot be easily answered. Conceiving it to be his inalienable right to do with his money what he would, after death as in life, he had tried to do something large and wise with it. Thus far, he had succeeded in embittering his nephew.
CHAPTER IV
The next morning Jackson Hart was once more bending over the large sheets of the plans for the Denver hotel. Now that he knew his fate, the draughting-room under the great skylights of the Maramanoc Building seemed like a prison indeed. The men in the office, he felt sure, had read all about the will, and had had their say upon his private affairs before he had come in. He could tell that from the additional nonchalance in the manner of the head draughtsman, Cook, when he nodded to him on his way to the cubby-hole where he worked. Early in the afternoon a welcome interruption came to him in the shape of an urgent call from the electricians working on the Canostota apartment house on the South Side. The head of the office asked Hart to go to the Canostota and straighten the men out, as Harmon, their engineer, was at home ill.
As Jackson crossed the street to take the elevated train he met his cousin. They walked together to the station, and as Wheeler was turning away, the architect broke out:—
"I've been thinking over uncle's will. I can't say I think it was fair—to treat me like that after—after all these years."
The lawyer smiled coldly.
"I didn't get much, either," he remarked.
"Well, that don't make it any better; besides, you have had as good as money from him long ago. Your position and mine aren't just the same."
"No, that's so," the lawyer admitted. "But what are you going to do about it?"
"I don't know yet. I want to think