The Last Penny

THOMAS LEIGH, ex-boy, considered the dozen neckties before him a long time, and finally decided to wait until after breakfast.

It was his second day at home and his third day out of college. Already his undergraduate life seemed far away. His triumphs--of personality rather than of scholarship--lingered as a luminous mist that softened the sterner realities and mellowed them goldenly. When one is young reminiscences of one's youth are apt to take on a tinge of melancholy, but Tommy, not having breakfasted, shook off the mood determinedly. He was two hundred and fifty-five months old; therefore, he decided that no great man ever crosses a bridge until he comes to it. Tommy's bridge was still one long joy-ride ahead. The sign, “Slow down to four miles an hour!” was not yet in sight. The selection of the necktie was a serious matter because he was to lunch at Sherry's with the one sister and the younger of the two cousins of Rivington Willetts.

In the mean time he had an invitation to spend the first half of July with Bull Wilson's folks at Gloucester, a week with “Van” Van Schaick for the cruise at Newport, as long as he wished with Jimmy Maitland at Mr. Maitland's camp in the Adirondacks, and he had given a half promise to accompany Ellis Gladwin to Labrador for big game in the fall.

He suddenly remembered that he was at his last ten-spot. There was the Old Man to touch for fifty bucks. And also--sometime--he must have a heart-to-heart talk of a business nature about his allowance. He and his friends desired to take a post-graduate course. They proposed to specialize on New York.

Mr. Leigh always called him Thomas. This had saved Mr. Leigh at least one thousand dollars a year during Tommy's four at college, by making Tommy realize that he had no doting father. At times the boy had sent his requests for an extra fifty with some misgivings--by reason of the impelling cause of the request--but Mr. Leigh always sent the check for the exact amount by return mail, and made no direct reference to it. Instead he permitted himself an irrelevant phrase or two, like, “Remember, Thomas, that you must have no conditions at the end of the term.”

Possibly because of a desire to play fair with a parent who had no sense of humor, or perhaps it was because he was level-headed enough not to overwork a good thing, at all events Tommy managed, sometimes pretty narrowly, to escape the conditions. And being very popular, and knowing that quotable wisdom was expected of him, he was rather careful of what he said and did.

He knew nothing about his father's business affairs, excepting that Mr. Leigh was connected with the Metropolitan National Bank, which was a very rich bank, and that he continued to live in the little house on West Twelfth Street, because it was in that house that Mrs. Leigh had lived her seventeen months of married life--it was where Tommy was bom and where she died. The furniture was chiefly old family pieces which, without his being aware of it, had made Tommy feel at home in the houses of the very wealthy friends he had made at college. It is something to have been American for two hundred years. Family furniture reminds you of it every day.

Tommy wondered, curiously rather than anxiously, how much his father would allow him, and whether it would be wiser to argue like a man against its inadequacy or to plead like a boy for an increase; then whether he ought to get it in cash Saturday mornings or to have a checking account at his father's bank. But one thing was certain--he would not be led into reckless check-signing habits. His boy-financier days were over. Those of his friends who had multi-millionaire fathers were always complaining of being hard up. It was, therefore, not an unfashionable thing to be. He surmised that his father was not really rich, because he kept no motor, had no expensive personal habits, belonged to no clubs, and never sent to Tommy at college more money than Tommy asked for, and, moreover, sent it only when Tommy asked. Since his Prep-school days Tommy had spent most of his vacations at boys' houses. Mr. Leigh at times was invited to join him, or to become acquainted with the families of Tommy's friends, but he never accepted.

Tommy, having definitely decided not to make any plans until after his first grown-up business talk with his father, looked at himself in the mirror and put on his best serious look. He was satisfied with it. He had successfully used it on mature business men when soliciting advertisements for the college paper.

He then decided to breakfast with his father, who had the eccentric habit of leaving the house at exactly eight-forty a.m.

It was actually only eight-eight when Tommy entered the dining-room. Maggie, the elderly chambermaid and waitress, in her twenty-second consecutive year of service, whom he always remembered as the only woman who could be as taciturn as his father, looked surprised, but served him oatmeal. It was a warm day in June, but this household ran in ruts.

Mr. Leigh looked up from his newspaper. “Good morning, Thomas,” he said. Then he resumed his Tribune.

“Good morning, father,” said Tommy, and had a sense of having left his salutation unfinished. He breakfasted in a sober, business-like way, feeling age creeping upon him. Nevertheless, when he had finished he hesitated to light a cigarette. He never had done it in the house, for his father had expressed the wish that his son should not smoke until he was of age. Tommy's twenty-first birthday had come off at college.

Well, he was of age now.

The smell of the vile thing made Mr. Leigh look at his son, frowning. Then he ceased to frown. “Ah yes,” he observed, meditatively, “you are of age. You are a man now.”

“I suspect I am, father,” said Thomas, pleasantly. “In fact, I--”

“Then it is time you heard man's talk!”

Mr. Leigh took out his watch, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket with a methodical leisureliness that made Tommy realize that Mr. Leigh was a very old man, though he could not be more than fifty. Tommy was silent, and was made subtly conscious that in not speaking he was somehow playing safe.

“Thomas, I have treated you as a boy during twenty-one years.” Mr. Leigh paused just long enough for Tommy to wonder why he had not added “and three months.” Mr. Leigh went on, with that same uncomfortable, senile precision: “Your mother would have wished it. You are a man now and--”

He closed his lips abruptly, but without any suggestion of temper or of making a sudden decision, and rose, a bit stiffly. His face took on a look of grim resolution that filled Tommy with that curious form of indeterminate remorse with which we anticipate abstract accusations against which there is no concrete defense. It seemed to make an utter stranger of Mr. Leigh. Tommy saw before him a life with which his own did not merge. He would have preferred a scolding as being more paternal, more humanly flesh-and-blood. He was not frightened.

He never had been wild; at the worst he had been a complacent shirker of future responsibilities, with that more or less adventurous desire to float on the tide that comes to American boys whose financial necessities do not compel them to fix their anchorage definitely. At college such boys are active citizens in their community, concerned with sports and class politics, and the development of their immemorial strategy against existing institutions. And for the same sad reason of youth Tommy could not possibly know that he was now standing, not on a rug in his father's dining-room, but on the top of life's first hill, with a pleasant valley below him--and one steep mountain beyond. All that his quick self-scrutinizing could do was to end in wondering which particular exploit, thitherto deemed unknown to his father, was to be the key-note of the impending speech. And for the life of him, without seeking self-extenuation, he could not think of any serious enough to bring so grimly determined a look on his father's face.

Mr. Leigh folded the newspaper, and, without looking at his son, said, harshly, “Come with me into the library.”

Tommy followed his father into the particularly gloomy room at the back of the second floor, where all the chairs were too uncomfortable for any one to wish to read any book there. On the small black-walnut table were the family Bible, an ivory paper-cutter, and a silver frame in which was a fading photograph of his mother.

“Sit down!” commanded the old man. There was a new note in the voice.

Tommy sat down, the vague disquietude within him for the first time rising to alarm. He wondered if his father's mind was sound, and instantly dismissed the suspicion. It was too unpleasant to consider, and, moreover, it seemed disloyal. Tommy was very strong on loyalty. His college life had given it to him.

Mr. Leigh looked, not at his son but at the photograph of his son's mother, a long time it seemed to Tommy. At length he raised his head and stared at his son.

Tommy saw that the grimness had gone. There remained only calm resolve. Knowing that the speech was about to begin, Tommy squared his shoulders. He would answer “Yes” or “No” truthfully. He wasn't afraid now.

“Thomas, the sacrifices I have made for you I do not begrudge,” said Mr. Leigh, in a voice that did not tremble because an iron will would not let it. “But it is well that you should know once for all that you can never repay me in full. You are my only son. But--you cost me your mother!”

Tommy knew that his mother had paid for his life with her own--knew it from Maggie, not from his father. To Tommy love and loyalty were among the undoubted pleasures of life. Recriminations he looked upon as evidences of a shabby soul. He repressed the desire to defend himself against injustice and loyally said, “Yes, sir!”

His father went on, “I have kept also an accurate account of what you have cost me in cash.”

Mr. Leigh went to his desk and took from a drawer a small book bound in morocco. He came back to the table, sat down, motioned Tommy to a chair beside him, opened the book at the first page, and showed Tommy:

Thomas Francis Leigh, In acct. with William R. Leigh, Dr.

Tommy felt that he was at the funeral services of some one he knew. His father seemed to hesitate, then handed the little book to Tommy. The morocco cover was black--the color of mourning.

Mr. Leigh went on in the voice a man will use when he is staring not through space, but across time: “Before you were born we were sure you would be a boy. She formed great plans for you. It is just as well that she did; it gave her the only happiness she ever got from you.” He raised his eyes to Tommy's, and with a half frown that was not of anger, said: “She was very extravagant in her gifts to you. She spent money lavishly, months before you were born, on what she thought you would love to have--large sums, all on paper, for we were very poor and had no money whatever to put aside for the day when you should need it. She told me many times that she did not wish you to have brothers or sisters, because she already loved you so much that she felt she could never love the others, and it would not be fair.” The old, old man paused. Then he added, softly, “She had her wish, my son!”