is the only person connected with the whole
affair, that's had her way. Everybody else's way has come to nothing,
beginning with my own. _I_ can look back to the time when I meant to
have the late J. Milton Northwick's blood; I was lying low for years,
waiting for him to do just what he did do at last, and I expected
somehow, by the blessing of God, to help run him down, or bring him to
justice, as we say. The first thing I knew, I turned up his daughter's
counsel, and was devoting myself to the interests of a pair of
grass-orphans with the high and holy zeal of a Board of Directors. All I
wanted was to have J. Milton brought to trial, not so I could help send
him to State's prison with a band of music, but so I could get him off
on the plea of insanity. But I wasn't allowed to have my way, even in a
little thing like that; and of all the things that were planned for and
against, and round about Northwick, just one has been accomplished. The
directors failed to be in at the death; and old Hilary has had to resign
from the Board, and pay the defaulter's debts. Pinney, I understand,
considers himself a ruined man; he's left off detecting for a living,
and gone back to interviewing. Poor old Adeline lived in the pious hope
of making Northwick's old age comfortable in their beautiful home on the
money he had stolen; and now that she's dead it goes to his creditors.
Why, even Billy Gerrish, a high-minded, public-spirited man like William
B. Gerrish,--couldn't have his way about Northwick. No, sir; Northwick
himself couldn't! Look how he fooled away his time there in Canada,
after he got off with money enough to start him on the high road to
fortune again. He couldn't budge of his own motion; and the only thing
he really tried to do he failed in disgracefully. Adeline wouldn't let
him stay when he come back to buy himself off; and that killed _her_.
Then, when he started home again, to take his punishment, the first
thing he did was to drop dead. Justice herself couldn't have her way
with Northwick. But I'm not sorry he slipped through her fingers. There
wasn't the stuff for an example in Northwick; I don't know that he's
much of a warning. He just seems to be a kind of--incident; and a pretty
common kind. He was a mere creature of circumstances--like the rest of
us! His environment made him rich, and his environment made him a rogue.
Sometimes I think there _was_ nothing to Northwick, except what happened
to him. He's a puzzl