Humble thankfulness and grateful contentment with the dealings of Providence with him was his also. He had fifty years behind him; pleasant years and wholesome with hard work, during which he had used to great advantage many excellent gifts. The business of his life hitherto had been to make money; in that he had shown himself to be on the large scale. But more essential to him throughout all these years had been his growing artistic perceptions, his increasing love of beauty; that he felt to be the reason and the spring of his happiness. In this regard he had ever cultivated, with the assiduous patience born of love, his natural taste. That keen appreciation of Palestrina and the early melodists was no original birthright of his; it was a cultivated pleasure; a pleasure, no doubt, of which the germ was inborn, but cultivated to a high degree and with effort, because, simply, he believed it to be his duty to make the most of a gift.
In this matter of duty he had often suffered much wrong. The charitable impulse which had led him, one day in the spring, to draw so large a cheque to Mr. Metcalfe, had been an unjust derision in Jack's mouth. Alington really believed (and the most transcendent honesty cannot get below a genuine belief) that part of that notable cheque should be entered as a business transaction, part on the page devoted to charity. He may have deceived himself, but he was not aware of it; he acted, as far as he knew, with the most judicial fairness in the partition of its entry.
But now for weeks past he had looked forward to the day when he should pass out of the money-making world to a fairer and more melodious one. He had no insane ambition to make inordinate wealth, nor to add a million to his million; his wealth he had steadily regarded as a means to an end, that end being the power to gratify his artistic tastes to the full. He did not forget to pray at his _prie-dieu_ morning and evening, nor had he forgotten it on the most feverish days of finance, and he was at peace, imperfectly, no doubt, but, as far as his capabilities went, perfectly, with regard to death and what lay beyond. Meantime this life held for him much that was beautiful, much that was wonderful. He desired to realize its wonder and beauty as completely as possible. All his life he had been a getter of money, or so the world held him. But now no more. On Monday morning all his connection with the market would be severed, the real man should lead his real life.