Mr. Bingle | Page 9

bit of good fortune! It was
really a splendid joke on her, this smash of his. No doubt the children
also hated him the more because of his failure to remain on his feet
down in Wall Street, but he consoled himself with the thought that they
would sometimes long for the old days when father did the providing,
and wish that things hadn't turned out so badly.
In his hour of disgrace--and we may add degeneration--he possessed
but one blood relation who stood by him and pitied him in spite of his
faults. That was his nephew, Tom Bingle, the son of his only sister,
many years dead. But even so, he did not deceive himself in respect to
the young man's attitude toward him. He realised that Tom was kind to
him simply because it was his nature to be kind to every one, no matter
how unworthy. It wasn't in Tom Bingle to be mean, not even to his
worst enemy. Notwithstanding the fact that the young man had just
taken unto himself a wife, and was as poor as a church-mouse, the door
and the cupboard in his modest little flat were opened cheerfully to the
delinquent Uncle Joe, and be it said to the latter's discredit and

shame--he proceeded to impose upon the generosity of his nephew in a
manner that should have earned him a booting into the street. But
young Tom was patient, he was mild, he even seemed to enjoy being
put upon by the wretched bankrupt. The thing that touched his heart
most of all and caused him to overlook a great many shortcomings, was
the cruel, unfilial slap in the face that had been administered by the
three children of the man, and the crushing, bewildering effect it had
upon him.
It was Tom who virtually picked the once fastidious Joseph Hooper out
of the gutter, weeks after the smash, and took him under his puny wing,
so to speak, during a somewhat protracted period of regeneration. The
broken, shattered man became, for the time being, the Bingle burden,
and he was not by any means a light or pleasant one. For months old
Joseph ate of his nephew's food, drained his purse, abused his
generosity, ignored his comforts and almost succeeded in driving the
young but devoted wife back to the home from which Tom had married
her.
It was at this juncture that the mild-mannered bookkeeper arose to the
dignity of a fine rage, and co-incidentally Joseph Hooper for the first
time realised what an overbearing, disagreeable visitor he had been and
departed, but without the slightest ill-feeling toward his benefactors.
Indeed, he was deeply repentant, deeply apologetic. He ruefully
announced that it would never be in his power to repay them for all
they had done for him, but, resorting to a sudden whim, declared that
he would make them his heirs if they didn't mind being used as a means
to convey his final word of defiance to the children who had cast him
off. Not that he would ever have a dollar to leave to them, but for the
satisfaction it would give him to cut the traitors off with the proverbial
shilling. Beset with the notion that this was an ideal way to show his
contempt for his offspring, he went to the safety deposit vault and took
there from the worthless document known as his last will and testament
and in the presence of witnesses destroyed the thing, thereby
disinheriting the erstwhile wife and her children as effectually as if he
had really possessed the estate set forth in the instrument.

"I'll make a will in your favour, Tom," he said at the time, with a
mocking grin, "and in it I will include this miserable carcass of mine,
so that you may at least have something to sell to the doctors. And who
knows? I may scrape together a few hundred dollars before I die,
provided I don't die too soon."
"We will give you a decent burial, Uncle Joe," said Thomas Bingle,
revolting against the specific. "Do you suppose I would sell my uncle
to a--"
"Haven't you a ray of humour in that head of yours?" demanded his
uncle. "Can't you SEE a joke?"
"Well, if you were joking," said Bingle, relieved, "all well and good,
but it didn't sound that way."
"You are a simple soul," was all that Joseph said, and then borrowed
fifty dollars from his nephew for a fresh start in the world, as he
expressed it. With this slender fortune in his purse he set out into a
world that knew him not, nor was it known to him.
He came back fifteen years afterward, poorer than when he went away,
broken in health, old to the