Didactic fiction; Political fiction; Social problems -- Fiction
"At the present, as closely as we can estimate it, there is available
for the purposes of the trust a little over three millions of dollars,"
Hollister stated.
Over three millions! Jackson Hart started in his chair. He had had no
idea that his uncle was worth anything like that amount. And these
shrewd men thought it would probably double during the next five years!
Well, so far as he was concerned it might be three cents. Possibly
Everett would get a few dollars out of it as trustee. He had already
shared in some of the old man's plums, Hart reflected bitterly. When
the trustees began to discuss among themselves some detail of the
management of the real estate involved, the young architect made an
excuse of a business engagement and slipped away. Just as he reached
the door, Everett called out:--
"We'll send the will over for probate to-morrow. If there's no hitch,
the legacies will be paid at once. I'll be over to see your mother
very soon and arrange for the payment of her annuity."
Jackson nodded. He did not like to trust his voice. He knew that it
was very dry. Somehow he found himself in the elevator herded in a
cage of office boys and clerks on their way home, sweating and dirty
from a long day's work. At the street level he bought a newspaper, and
the first thing that caught his eye in its damp folds were the
headlines:--
JACKSON'S MILLIONS GO TO EDUCATION
THE STEEL MAGNATE'S MONEY WILL FOUND INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL
Hart crumpled up the sheet and threw it into the gutter. The first
intelligible feeling that he had over his situation was a sort of shame
that his uncle should have held him so cheap. For so he interpreted
the gift of ten thousand dollars! And he began, unconsciously, to try
in his mind the case between himself and his uncle. He had always been
led to believe that he was the most favored of all the old man's
dependents. Surely he had been treated like a son, and he was not
aware that he had ever been ungrateful or unworthy. Now, without
having committed any piece of public folly, he was made a thing of pity
and contempt before his friends!
He resented the old man's kindness, now that he knew where it ended.
Very swiftly he began to realize what it would mean to him to be
without this fortune on which he had so confidently calculated. He had
made up his mind to move to New York, where some of his friends had
started prosperously and had invited him to join them. And there was
Helen, whom he had come to love in the past year. Marriage was now,
apparently, out of the question for him, unless he could earn more
money than Wright thought he was worth. For Helen no more than he had
been favored by his uncle. Even Helen, whom the old man had made so
much of, had been left with little more than a stony farm! ...
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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