Weighed and Wanting | Page 4

could answer came a sudden spatter of rain on the window.
"There! I told you so! That's always the way! Just my luck! For me to set my heart on a thing is all one with being disappointed of it."
"But if the thing was not worth setting your heart on?" said Hester, speaking with forced gentleness.
"What does that signify? The thing is that your heart is set on it. What you think nothing other people may yet be bold enough to take for something."
"Well, at least, if I had to be disappointed, I should like it to be in something that would be worth having."
"Would you now?" returned Cornelius spitefully. "I hope you may have what you want. For my part I don't desire to be better than my neighbor. I think it downright selfish."
"Do you want to be as good as your neighbor, Cornie?" said his mother, looking up through a film of tears. "But there is a more important question than that," she went on, having waited a moment in vain for an answer, "and that is, whether you are content with being as good as yourself, or want to be better."
"To tell you the truth, mother, I don't trouble my head about such things. Philosophers are agreed that self consciousness is the bane of the present age: I mean to avoid it. If you had let me go into the army, I might have had some leisure for what you call thought, but that horrible bank takes everything out of a fellow. The only thing it leaves is a burning desire to forget it at any cost till the time comes when you must endure it again. If I hadn't some amusement in between, I should cut my throat, or take to opium or brandy. I wonder how the governor would like to be in my place!"
Hester rose and left the room, indignant with him for speaking so of his father.
"If your father were in your place, Cornelius," said his mother with dignity, "he would perform the duties of it without grumbling, however irksome they might be."
"How do you know that, mother? He was never tried."
"I know it because I know him," she answered.
Cornelius gave a grunt.
"If you think it hard," his mother resumed, "that you have to follow a way of life not of your own choosing, you must remember that you never could be got to express a preference for one way over another, and that your father had to strain every nerve to send you to college--to the disadvantage, for a time at least, of others of the family. I am sorry to have to remind you also that you did not make it any easier for him by your mode of living while there."
"I didn't run up a single bill!" cried Cornelius with indignation; "and my father knows it!"
"He does; but he knows also that your cousin Robert did not spend above two-thirds of what you did, and made more of his time too."
"He was in rather a different set," sneered the youth.
"And you know," his mother went on, "that his main design in placing you in your uncle's bank was that you might gain such a knowledge of business as will be necessary to the proper management of the money he will leave behind him. When you have gained that knowledge, there will be time to look farther, for you are young yet."
Now his father's money was the continuous occasion of annoyance to Cornelius, for it was no secret from his family how he meant to dispose of it. He intended, namely, to leave it under trustees, of whom he wished his son to be one until he married, when it was to be divided equally among his children.
This arrangement was not agreeable to Cornelius, who could not see, he said, what advantage in that case he had from being the eldest of the family.
He broke out in a tone of expostulation, ready to swell into indignant complaint.
"Now, mother," he said "do you think it fair that I should have to look after the whole family as if they were my own?"
This was by no means his real cause of complaint, but he chose to use it as his grievance for the present.
"You will have the other trustees to advise with," said his mother. "It need not weigh on you very heavily."
"Well, of course, I could do better with it than anybody out of the family."
"If you have your father's love of fair play, Cornelius, you will. What you can do to that end now is to make yourself thoroughly acquainted with business."
"A bank's not the place to get the knowledge of business necessary for that sort of thing."
"Your father has reasons for preferring a general to any special knowledge. The fitness resulting