The Substitute Millionaire Page #8

Jack Norman had no idea he was Silas Gyde's sole heir—until the multimillionaire was killed by an anarchist's bomb and Jack found himself the richest man in New York. The inheritance included a warning from his benefactor about an elaborate protection scheme promising to protect the wealthy from anarchists, in which Gyde had declined to enroll. Recognizing his own danger, Jack enlists a out-of-work actor to take on his own identity, while he, in the guise of Jack Norman's secretary, works furiously behind the scenes to break up the gang and unmask their leader, the mysterious Mr. B.

• Fiction
• Mystery

								


The air in the room was heavy, but less foul than might have been expected.  Jack found behind the curtains that ventilators had been ingeniously contrived, which could be opened and shut without one's showing oneself at the window.  For that matter the glass of the windows was well-nigh opaque with the accumulation of years of dust. The bed was tumbled but clean.  Jack suspected that the old man had changed linen with the bed in the hotel.  There was a similar oil lamp and oil heater in here.

"Those outside were a plant while these got the oil he carried in," thought Jack.

The room was hideously cheerless.  Rubbish was piled everywhere.  There was an old flat-topped desk with its back to the windows, and a sort of path had been cleared from the desk to the closet door with a branch to the bed midway.  Elsewhere the litter had swamped everything.  It was principally newspapers.  Jack had never seen so many old newspapers in his life.  One corner of the room was filled by a small mountain of scrap books containing faded clippings.  When Jack came to examine them he found that all the items related to Silas Gyde, and most of them were abusive.

Yet from the walls of this unlovely room looked down a few rarely beautiful old pictures, and, as Jack was to learn later, they were of almost priceless value.  Evidently at some period of his career the old miser had had generous stirrings.  One of these pictures caused Jack a great start.  It occupied the space next to the closet door, hence he did not see it until he had come into the room and had turned around.

It was his mother.  An enlargement by a talented hand of the wistful girlhood picture Delamare had given him that morning.  She looked down on the fusty disarray with pitying eyes: she was startlingly young and alive in that dark place.  The tears welled up in Jack's eyes again.

"Think of her presiding over a den like this!  I'll give her a sunnier prospect.  But he must have loved her well!  I'll credit him with that."

A tour of the rest of the house from cellar to garret revealed only emptiness, darkness and a smell of must.

Returning to Silas Gyde's room, Jack went to his desk.  This spot alone of all the room was in good order.  On it lay a book open and face down at the page where the dead man had left off reading.  It was the Ordeal of Richard Feveril, and it was open at the page describing the first meeting of Richard and Lucy.  Jack read a few lines and wondered that Silas Gyde could have cared for that sort of thing.  It didn't seem to go with the rest of him.  Jack slipped the book in his pocket, against an opportunity to make its better acquaintance.

There was also a fat red leather note book, a sort of journal, in which Silas Gyde had entered the details of his financial transactions.  Jack saved that for his lawyer.  Finally there was a manuscript which Death had interrupted in the middle of a sheet.  Turning back to the first page Jack was not a little astonished to find that it was a sort of letter addressed to himself.  From the dates upon it, it had been started five years before and added to from time to time.

Jack sat down to read it.  The little dog, making it clear that he had adopted a new master, lay at his feet.

"To John Farrow Norman:

"Dear Jack:

"Everybody knows old Silas Gyde--or thinks he does.  Miser, usurer, skinflint, champion tightwad--I quote from the collection of clippings I have made.  What everybody says must be true, I suppose, but it is not the whole truth.  There is another Silas Gyde--or there was once, and it is he who writes to you.

"Little did you guess that I have been keeping track of you since you were quite a small boy.  I have always from that time intended to make you my heir.  I suppose you wonder why I never made myself known to you.  There were several reasons.  For one thing I have noticed that the relations between a rich man and his heir are seldom happy.  I didn't care to read in your eyes that you wished the old fool would hurry up and die and be done with it.

"Another thing, and this is the real reason: as the years pass it becomes more and more difficult for me to make overtures to anybody. It sounds silly for an old fellow of near sixty to confess that he is shy, but such is the fact.  And shyness in the old is a torturing thing.  They call me queer, cranky, crazy, and the truth is simply that I am shy.  I never could run with the herd.

"It is true what they say, that I have not a friend in the world, and now I would not know how to set about making one.  Especially a young one.  I am afraid of you, my boy; afraid of your terrible, pitiless youthfulness.  And so I just imagine you are my friend.  I have long talks with you, and give you quantities of good advice, to which you give dutiful heed.

"At the same time I have always kept a sort of watch over you.  And if actual misfortune had overtaken you I would have found a way to come to your assistance.  A little poverty and hard work will enable you to appreciate riches later.

"By this time you have learned that I was once your mother's suitor. She refused me for the first Jack Norman, your father.  I wonder if your mother ever talked to you about me.  Probably not.  She was never a talker.  Well, I hope you will never have such a blow as that was to me.  I don't think you will.  You have a certain grace (I have seen you), Phoebe's grace, that will endear you to your chosen maiden.  As for me, even as a youth I was a dry stick.

"What made it harder for me was that I despised your father as a weaker man than myself.  When I let this out to your mother in my anger and bitterness, she retorted that if he was less strong he was certainly more lovable.

"I left Cartonsville in my bitterness.  My one idea, like so many galled young men before me, was to do something that would force Phoebe Farrow to acknowledge to herself that she had chosen the wrong man.  I resolved to make myself a rich man, the richest in America.  To gain this end I was prepared to deny myself everything above the barest necessities of life.  Every cent was to be set to work to earn five.

"I succeeded, as every man must, who is bent on a thing so determinedly as I was.  I did not return to Cartonsville for fifteen years.  Fifteen years of slavery they were.  Those were the years that formed me for life--deformed me I should say.  I was already a rich man when I went back.

"I found the situation much as I had imagined it.  Your mother was the hard-working wife of a poor man--a man destined to die poor.  She lived in a small inconvenient house without any servant, and her pretty hands were red and rough.  And I was a millionaire.  You were five years old at that time and your parents' only child.  Both your elder brothers had died in an epidemic.

"But my triumph did not come off as I had pictured.  Phoebe pitied me.
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