A dilemma
by S. Weir Mitchell
I was just thirty-seven when my Uncle Philip died. A week before that event he sent for me; and here let me say that I had never set eyes on him. He hated my mother, but I do not know why. She told me long before his last illness that I need expect nothing from my father’s brother. He was an inventor, an able and ingenious mechanical engineer, and had made much money by his improvement in turbine-wheels. He was a bachelor; lived alone, cooked his own meals, and collected precious stones, especially rubies and pearls. From the time he made his first money he had this mania. As he grew richer, the desire to possess rare and costly gems became stronger. When he bought a new stone, he carried it in his pocket for a month and now and then took it out and looked at it. Then it was added to the collection in his safe at the trust company.
At the time he sent for me I was a clerk, and poor enough. Remembering my mother’s words, his message gave me, his sole relative, no new hopes; but I thought it best to go.
When I sat down by his bedside, he began, with a malicious grin:
“I suppose you think me queer. I will explain.” What he said was certainly queer enough. “I have been living on an annuity into which I put my fortune. In other words, I have been, as to money, concentric half of my life to enable me to be as eccentric as I pleased the rest of it. Now I repent of my wickedness to you all, and desire to live in the memory of at least one of my family. You think I am poor and have only my annuity. You will be profitably surprised. I have never parted with my precious stones; they will be yours. You are my sole heir. I shall carry with me to the other world the satisfaction of making one man happy.
“No doubt you have always had expectations, and I desire that you should continue to expect. My jewels are in my safe. There is nothing else left.”
When I thanked him he grinned all over his lean face, and said:
“You will have to pay for my funeral.”
I must say that I never looked forward to any expenditure with more pleasure than to what it would cost me to put him away in the earth.
As I rose to go, he said:
“The rubies are valuable. They are in my safe at the trust company. Before you unlock the box, be very careful to read a letter which lies on top of it; and be sure not to shake the box.” I thought this odd.
“Don’t come back. It won’t hasten things.”
He died that day week, and was handsomely buried. The day after, his will was found, leaving me his heir. I opened his safe and found in it nothing but an iron box, evidently of his own making, for he was a skilled workman and very ingenious. The box was heavy and strong, about ten inches long, eight inches wide and ten inches high. On it lay a letter to me. It ran thus:
“Dear Tom: This box contains a large number of very fine pigeon-blood rubies and a fair lot of diamonds; one is blue – a beauty. There are hundreds of pearls – one the famous green pearl and a necklace of blue pearls, for which any woman would sell her soul – or her affections.”
I thought of Susan.
“I wish you to continue to have expectations and continuously to remember your dear uncle. I would have left these stones to some charity, but I hate the poor as much as I hate your mother’s son, – yes, rather more.
The box contains an interesting mechanism, which will act with certainty as you unlock it, and explode ten ounces of my improved, supersensitive dynamite – no, to be accurate, there are only nine and a half ounces. Doubt me, and open it, and you will be blown to atoms. Believe me, and you will continue to nourish expectations which will never be fulfilled. As a considerate man, I counsel extreme care in handling the box. Don’t forget your affectionate
Uncle.”
I stood appalled, the key in my hand. Was it true? Was it a lie? I had spent all my savings on the funeral, and was poorer than ever.
Remembering the old man’s oddity, his malice, his cleverness in mechanic arts, and the patent explosive which had helped to make him rich, I began to feel how very likely it was that he had told the truth in this cruel letter.
I carried the iron box away to my lodgings, set it down with care in a closet, laid the key on it, and locked the closet.
Then I sat down, as yet hopeful, and began to exert my ingenuity upon ways of opening the box without being killed. There must be a way.
After a week of vain thinking I bethought me, one day, that it would be easy to explode the box by unlocking it at a safe distance, and I arranged a plan with wires, which seemed as if it would answer. But when I reflected on what would happen when the dynamite scattered the rubies, I knew that I should be none the richer. For hours at a time I sat looking at that box and handling the key.
At last I hung the key on my watch-guard; but then it occurred to me that it might be lost or stolen. Dreading this, I hid it, fearful that some one might use it to open the box. This state of doubt and fear lasted for weeks, until I became nervous and began to dread that some accident might happen to that box. A burglar might come and boldly carry it away and force it open and find it was a wicked fraud of my uncle’s. Even the rumble and vibration caused by the heavy vans in the street became at last a terror.
