The only plausible way for him to have found out would have been to hear it from Lockwood or Elizabeth herself, and Lockwood seems by far the more likely of the two. Sybil’s imagination fails, it cannot show her what emotions had been felt by a man cuckolding his own father, a father he must have respected, if not loved, and yet resented at the same time, though he had no right to that resentment. And piled atop the resentment, the blocked affections that must have tormented him whenever he saw them, the sons of the father’s son, his, his. My God, having to look upon them, even if it was only for a day or two, once a year at most, and all the while have to stifle what was in his heart and feign and dissemble, must have split him in two.

It would have happened when Lockwood appeared at Mingulay to beg his father for money once again. They would have gone into the library, that same room with its view of lawn and sea and island where, in Sybil’s re-creating, Nathaniel had seen Lockwood drunkenly pissing on the desk, muttering “Liquidation!” Lockwood would have argued that he had learned his lesson and taken his medicine and done all the manly things, and that there was now no point in denying him that relief from debt which Cyrus could grant with a signature. The harsh laws of the sea did not prevail here, this wasn’t a case of a man recklessly sailing into uncharted waters or carrying more sail than the wind would allow. Lockwood had not done anything foolish, but had only failed, while trying his damnedest not to. He was the son of a millionaire, and he was living in a boardinghouse on the New York waterfront, for Christ’s sake, and through no fault of his own. “It’s not that it isn’t fair, Father,” Lockwood might have said, “it’s that it isn’t right.” Yet Cyrus turned him down, perhaps remembering that he had been reduced to poverty once through no fault of his own, had been shown the door by his father, and had walked out of it with never a look back or a cry for help, but had, by dint of unswerving effort and risk and vision, restored his fortunes and reclaimed what should have been his by heritage. Why should Lockwood do any less? Why should Lockwood, having been helped once and told to expect no more, now expect more?