He respected Roebuck; Roebuck feared him. Roebuck did have some sort of conscience, distorted though it was, and the dictator of savageries Galloway would have scorned to commit. Galloway had no professions of conscience—beyond such small glozing of hypocrisy as any man must put on if he wishes to be intrusted with the money of a public that associates professions of religion and appearances of respectability with honesty. Roebuck's passion was wealth—to see the millions heap up and up. Galloway had that passion, too—I have yet to meet a multi-millionaire who isn't avaricious and even stingy. But Galloway's chief passion was power—to handle men as a junk merchant handles rags, to plan and lead campaigns of conquest with his golden legions, and to distribute the spoils like an autocrat who is careless how they are divided, since all belongs to him, whenever he wishes to claim it.

He pierced me with his blue eyes, keen as a youth's, though his face was seamed with scars of seventy tumultuous years. He extended toward me over the table his broad, stubby white hand—the hand of a builder, of a constructive genius. "How are you, Blacklock?" said he. "What can I do for you?" He just touched my hand before dropping it, and resumed that idol-like pose. But although there was only repose and deliberation in his manner, and not a suggestion of haste, I, like every one who came into that room and that presence, had a sense of an interminable procession behind me, a procession of men who must be seen by this master-mover, that they might submit important and pressing affairs to him for decision. It was unnecessary for him to tell any one to be brief and pointed.

"I shall have to go to the wall to-day," said I, taking a paper from my pocket, "unless you save me. Here is a statement of my assets and liabilities. I call to your attention my Coal holdings. I was one of the eight men whom Roebuck got round him for the new combine—it is a secret, but I assume you know all about it."

He laid the paper before him, put on his nose-glasses and looked at it.

"If you will save me," I continued, "I will transfer to you, in a block, all my Coal holdings. They will be worth double my total liabilities within three months—as soon as the reorganization is announced. I leave it entirely to your sense of justice whether I shall have any part of them back when this storm blows over."

"Why didn't you go to Roebuck?" he asked without looking up.

"Because it is he that has stuck the knife into me."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I suspect the Manasquale properties, which I brought into the combine, have some value, which no one but Roebuck, and perhaps Langdon, knows about—and that I in some way was dangerous to them through that fact. They haven't given me time to look into it."

A grim smile flitted over his face. "You've been too busy getting married, eh?"

"Exactly," said I. "It's another case of unbuckling for the wedding-feast and getting assassinated as a penalty. Do you wish me to explain anything on that list—do you want any details of the combine—of the Coal stocks there?"

"Not necessary," he replied. As I had thought, with that enormous machine of his for drawing in information, and with that enormous memory of his for details, he probably knew more about the combine and its properties than I did.

"You have heard of the lockout?" I inquired—for I wished him to know I had no intention of deceiving him as to the present market value of those stocks.

"Roebuck has been commanded by his God," he said, "to eject the free American labor from the coal regions and to substitute importations of coolie Huns and Bohemians. Thus, the wicked American laborers will be chastened for trying to get higher wages and cut down a pious man's dividends; and the downtrodden coolies will be brought where they can enjoy the blessings of liberty and of the preaching of Roebuck's missionaries."

I laughed, though he had not smiled, but had spoken as if stating colorless facts. "And righteousness and Roebuck will prevail," said I.

He frowned slightly, a sardonic grin breaking the straight, thin, cruel line of his lips. He opened his table's one shallow drawer, and took out a pad and a pencil. He wrote a few words on the lowest part of the top sheet, folded it, tore off the part he had scribbled on, returned the pad and pencil to the drawer, handed the scrap of paper to me. "I will do it," he said. "Give this to Mr. Farquhar, second door to the left. Good morning." And in that atmosphere of vast affairs speedily despatched his consent without argument seemed, and was, the matter-of-course.

I bowed. Though he had not saved me as a favor to me, but because it fitted in with his plans, whatever they were, my eyes dimmed. "I shan't forget this," said I, my voice not quite steady.

"I know it," said he curtly. "I know you." I saw that his mind had already turned me out. I said no more, and withdrew. When I left the room it was precisely as it had been when I entered it—except the bit of paper torn from the pad. But what a difference to me, to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands directly and indirectly interested in the Coal combine and its strike and its products, was represented by those few, almost illegible scrawlings on that scrap of paper.

Not until I had gone over the situation with Farquhar, and we had signed and exchanged the necessary papers, did I begin to relax from the strain—how great that strain was I realized a few weeks later, when the gray appeared thick at my temples and there was in my crown what was, for such a shock as mine, a thin spot. "I am saved!" said I to myself, venturing a long breath, as I stood on the steps of Galloway's establishment, where hourly was transacted business vitally affecting the welfare of scores of millions of human beings, with James Galloway's personal interest as the sole guiding principle. "Saved!" I repeated, and not until then did it flash before me, "I must have paid a frightful price. He would never have consented to interfere with Roebuck as soon as I asked him to do it, unless there had been some powerful motive. If I had had my wits about me, I could have made far better terms." Why hadn't I my wits about me? "Anita" was my instant answer to my own question. "Anita again. I had a bad attack of family man's panic." And thus it came about that I went back to my own office, feeling as if I had suffered a severe defeat, instead of jubilant over my narrow escape.

Joe followed me into my den. "What luck?" asked he, in the tone of a mother waylaying the doctor as he issues from the sick-room.

"Luck?" said I, gazing blankly at him.

"You've seen the latest quotation, haven't you?" In his nervousness his temper was on a fine edge.

"No," replied I indifferently. I sat down at my desk and began to busy myself. Then I added: "We're out of the Coal combine. I've transferred our holdings. Look after these things, please." And I gave him the checks, notes and memoranda of agreement.

"Galloway!" he exclaimed. And then his eye fell on the totals of the stock I had been carrying. "Good God, Matt!" he gasped. "Ruined!"

And he sat down, and buried his face and cried like a child—it was then that I measured the full depth of the chasm I had escaped. I made no such exhibition of myself, but when I tried to relight my cigar my hand trembled so that the flame scorched my lips.

"Ruined?" I said to Joe, easily enough. "Not at all. We're back in the road, going smoothly ahead—only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe, of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out—clear out—and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread. And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them—have got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert."

"That's so," said Joe. "It's hard luck." But I saw he was thinking only of himself and his narrow escape from having to give up his big house and all the rest of it; that, soft-hearted and generous though he was, to those poor chaps and their wives and children he wasn't giving a thought.

Wall Street never does—they're too remote, too vague. It deals with columns of figures and slips of paper. It never thinks of those abstractions as standing for so many hearts and so many mouths, just as the bank clerk never thinks of the bits of metal he counts so swiftly as money with which things and men could be bought. I read somewhere once that Voltaire—I think it was Voltaire—asked a man what he would do if, by pressing a button on his table, he would be enormously rich and at the same time would cause the death of a person away off at the other side of the earth, unknown to him, and probably no more worthy to live, and with no greater expectation of life or of happiness than the average sinful, short-lived human being. I've often thought of that as I've watched our great "captains of industry." Voltaire's dilemma is theirs. And they don't hesitate; they press the button. I leave the morality of the performance to moralists; to me, its chief feature is its cowardice, its sneaking, slimy cowardice.

"You've done a grand two hours' work," said Joe.

"Grander than you think," replied I. "I've set the tiger on to fight the bull."

"Galloway and Roebuck?"

"Just that," said I. And I laughed, started up, sat down again. "No, I'll put off the pleasure," said I. "I'll let Roebuck find out, when the claws catch in that tough old hide of his."



XXVII. A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ANITA

On about the hottest afternoon of that summer I had the yacht take me down the Sound to a point on the Connecticut shore within sight of Dawn Hill, but seven miles farther from New York. I landed at the private pier of Howard Forrester, the only brother of Anita's mother. As I stepped upon the pier I saw a fine-looking old man in the pavilion overhanging the water. He was dressed all in white except a sky-blue tie that harmonized with the color of his eyes. He was neither fat nor lean, and his smooth skirt was protesting ruddily against the age proclaimed by his wool-white hair. He rose as I came toward him, and, while I was still several yards away, showed unmistakably that he knew who I was and that he was anything but glad to see me.

"Mr. Forrester?" I asked

He grew purple to the line of his thick white hair. "It is, Mr. Blacklock," said he. "I have the honor to wish you good day, sir." And with that he turned his back on me and gazed out toward Long Island.

"I have come to ask a favor of you, sir," said I, as polite to that hostile back as if I had been addressing a cordial face. And I waited.

He wheeled round, looked at me from head to foot. I withstood the inspection calmly; when it was ended I noted that in spite of himself he was somewhat relaxed from the opinion of me he had formed upon what he had heard and read. But he said: "I do not know you, sir, and I do not wish to know you."

"You have made me painfully aware of that," replied I. "But I have learned not to take snap judgments too seriously. I never go to a man unless I have something to say to him, and I never leave until I have said it."

"I perceive, sir," retorted he, "you have the thick skin necessary to living up to that rule." And the twinkle in his eyes betrayed the man who delights to exercise a real or imaginary talent for caustic wit. Such men are like nettles—dangerous only to the timid touch.

"On the contrary," replied I, easy in mind now, though I did not anger him by showing it, "I am most sensitive to insults—insults to myself. But you are not insulting me. You are insulting a purely imaginary, hearsay person who is, I venture to assure you, utterly unlike me, and who doubtless deserves to be insulted."

His purple had now faded. In a far different tone he said: "If your business in any way relates to the family into which you have married, I do not wish to hear it. Spare my patience and your time, sir."

"It does not," was my answer. "It relates to my own family—to my wife and myself. As you may have heard, she is no longer a member of the Ellersly family. And I have come to you chiefly because I happen to know your sentiment toward the Ellerslys."

"I have no sentiment toward them, sir!" he exclaimed. "They are non-existent, sir—nonexistent! Your wife's mother ceased to be a Forrester when she married that scoundrel. Your wife is still less a Forrester."

"True," said I. "She is a Blacklock."

He winced, and it reminded me of the night of my marriage and Anita's expression when the preacher called her by her new name. But I held his gaze, and we looked each at the other fixedly for, it must have been, full half a minute. Then he said courteously: "What do you wish?"

I went straight to the point. My color may have been high, but my voice did not hesitate as I explained: "I wish to make my wife financially independent. I wish to settle on her a sum of money sufficient to give her an income that will enable her to live as she has been accustomed. I know she would not take it from me. So, I have come to ask you to pretend to give it to her—I, of course, giving it to you to give."

Again—we looked full and fixedly each at the other. "Come to the house, Blacklock," he said at last in a tone that was the subtlest of compliments. And he linked his arm in mine. Halfway to the rambling stone house, severe in its lines, yet fine and homelike, quaintly resembling its owner, as a man's house always should, he paused. "I owe you an apology," said he. "After all my experience of this world of envy and malice, I should have recognized the man even in the caricatures of his enemies. And you brought the best possible credentials—you are well hated. To be well hated by the human race and by the creatures mounted on its back is a distinction, sir. It is the crown of the true kings of this world."

We seated ourselves on the wide veranda; he had champagne and water brought, and cigars; and we proceeded to get acquainted—nothing promotes cordiality and sympathy like an initial misunderstanding. It was a good hour before this kind-hearted, hard-soft, typical old-fashioned New Englander reverted to the object of my visit. Said he: "And now, young man, may I venture to ask some extremely personal questions?"

"In the circumstances," replied I, "you have the right to know everything. I did not come to you without first making sure what manner of man I was to find." At this he blushed, pleased as a girl at her first beau's first compliment. "And you, Mr. Forrester, can not be expected to embark in the little adventure I propose, until you have satisfied yourself."

"First, the why of your plan."

"I am in active business," replied I, "and I shall be still more active. That means financial uncertainty."

His suspicion of me started up from its doze and rubbed its eyes. "Ah! You wish to insure yourself."

"Yes," was my answer, "but not in the way you hint. It takes away a man's courage just when he needs it most, to feel that his family is involved in his venture."

"Why do you not make the settlement direct?" he asked, partly reassured.

"Because I wish her to feel that it is her own, that I have no right over it whatever."

He thought about this. His eyes were keen as he said, "Is that your real reason?"

I saw I must be unreserved with him. "Part of it," I replied. "The rest is—she would not take it from me."

The old man smiled cynically. "Have you tried?" he inquired.

"If I had tried and failed, she would have been on the alert for an indirect attempt."

"Try her, young man," said he, laughing. "In this day there are few people anywhere who'd refuse any sum from anybody for anything. And a woman—and a New York woman—and a New York fashionable woman—and a daughter of old Ellersly—she'll take it as a baby takes the breast."

"She would not take it," said I.

My tone, though I strove to keep angry protest out of it, because I needed him, caused him to draw back instantly. "I beg your pardon," said he. "I forgot for the moment that I was talking to a man young enough still to have youth's delusions about women. You'll learn that they're human, that it's from them we men inherit our weaknesses. However, let's assume that she won't take it: Why won't she take your money? What is there about it that repels Ellersly's daughter, brought up in the sewers of fashionable New York—the sewers, sir!"

"She does not love me," I answered.

"I have hurt you," he said quickly, in great distress at having compelled me to expose my secret wound.

"The wound does not ache the worse," said I, "for my showing it—to you." And that was the truth. I looked over toward Dawn Hill whose towers could just be seen. "We live there." I pointed. "She is—like a guest in my house."

When I glanced at him again, his face betrayed a feeling of which I doubt if any one had thought him capable in many a year. "I see that you love her," he said, gently as a mother.

"Yes," I replied. And presently I went on: "The idea of any one I love being dependent on me in a sordid way is most distasteful to me. And since she does not love me, does not even like me, it is doubly necessary that she be independent."

"I confess I do not quite follow you" said he.

"How can she accept anything from me? If she should finally be compelled by necessity to do it, what hope could I have of her ever feeling toward me as a wife should feel toward her husband?"

At this explanation of mine his eyes sparkled with anger—and I could not but suspect that he had at one time in his life been faced with a problem like mine, and had settled it the other way. My suspicion was not weakened when he went on to say:

"Boyish motives again! They show you do not know women. Don't be deceived by their delicate exterior, by their pretenses of super-refinement. They affect to be what passion deludes us into thinking them. But they're clay, sir, just clay, and far less sensitive than we men. Don't you see, young man, that by making her independent you're throwing away your best chance of winning her? Women are like dogs—like dogs, sir! They lick the hand that feeds 'em—lick it, and like it."

"Possibly," said I, with no disposition to combat views based on I knew not what painful experience. "But I don't care for that sort of liking—from a woman, or from a dog."

"It's the only kind you'll get," retorted he, trying to control his agitation. "I'm an old man. I know human nature—that's why I live alone. You'll take that kind of liking, or do without."

"Then I'll do without," said I.

"Give her an income, and she'll go. I see it all. You've flattered her vanity by showing your love for her—that's the way with women. They go crazy about themselves, and forget all about the man. Give her an income and she'll go."

"I doubt it," said I. "And you would, if you knew her. But, even so, I shall lose her in any event. For, unless she is made independent, she'll certainly go with the last of the little money she has, the remnant of a small legacy."

The old man argued with me, the more vigorously, I suspect, because he found me resolute. When he could think of no new way of stating his case—his case against Anita—he said: "You are a fool, young man—that's clear. I wonder such a fool was ever able to get together as much property as report credits you with. But—you're the kind of fool I like."

"Then—you'll indulge my folly?" said I, smiling.

He threw up his arms in a gesture of mock despair. "If you will have it so," he replied. "I am curious about this niece of mine. I want to see her. I want to see the woman who can resist you."

"Her mind and her heart are closed against me," said I. "And it is my own fault—I closed them."

"Put her out of your head," he advised. "No woman is worth a serious man's while."

"I have few wants, few purposes," said I. "But those few I pursue to the end. Even though she were not worth while, even though I wholly lost hope, still I'd not give her up. I couldn't—that's my nature. But—she is worth while." And I could see her, slim and graceful, the curves in her face and figure that made my heart leap, the azure sheen upon her petal-like skin, the mystery of the soul luring from her eyes.

After we had arranged the business—or, rather, arranged to have it arranged through our lawyers—he walked down to the pier with me. At the gangway he gave me another searching look from head to foot—but vastly different from the inspection with which our interview had begun. "You are a devilish handsome young fellow," said he. "Your pictures don't do you justice. And I shouldn't have believed any man could overcome in one brief sitting such a prejudice as I had against you. On second thought, I don't care to see her. She must be even below the average."

"Or far above it," I suggested.

"I suppose I'll have to ask her over to visit me," he went on. "A fine hypocrite I'll feel."

"You can make it one of the conditions of your gift that she is not to thank you or speak of it," said I. "I fear your face would betray us, if she ever did."

"An excellent idea!" he exclaimed. Then, as he shook hands with me in farewell: "You will win her yet—if you care to."

As I steamed up the Sound, I was tempted to put in at Dawn Hill's harbor. Through my glass I could see Anita and Alva and several others, men and women, having tea on the lawn under a red and white awning. I could see her dress—a violet suit with a big violet hat to match. I knew that costume. Like everything she wore, it was both beautiful in itself and most becoming to her. I could see her face, could almost make out its expression—did I see, or did I imagine, a cruel contrast to what I always saw when she knew I was looking?

I gazed until the trees hid lawn and gay awning, and that lively company and her. In my bitterness I was full of resentment against her, full of self-pity. I quite forgot, for that moment, her side of the story.



XXVIII. BLACKLOCK SEES A LIGHT

It was next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance of the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his "respectable" dirty work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the profits and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk. It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom, or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I put it aside instantly. "The kind of man a woman really cares for," I would say to myself, "is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man she imagines she cares for."

Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces in the friendliest way—I was harboring no resentment against him, and I wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the buzzing and battering of a summer fly. "I've been trying to get in to see you," said he. "I wanted to explain about that unfortunate Textile deal."

This, when the assault on me had burst out with fresh energy the day after he landed from Europe! I could scarcely believe that his vanity, his confidence in his own skill at underground work could so delude him. "Don't bother," said I. "All that's ancient history."

But he had thought out some lies he regarded as particularly creditable to his ingenuity; he was not to be deprived of the pleasure of telling them. So I was compelled to listen; and, being in an indulgent mood, I did not spoil his pleasure by letting him see or suspect my unbelief. If he could have looked into my mind, as I stood there in an attitude of patient attention, I think even his self-complacence would have been put out of countenance. You may admire the exploits of a "gentleman" cracksman or pickpocket, if you hear or read them with only their ingenuity put before you. But see a "gentleman" liar or thief at his sneaking, cowardly work, and admiration is impossible. As Langdon lied on, as I studied his cheap, vulgar exhibition of himself, he all unconscious, I thought: "Beneath that very thin surface of yours, you're a poor cowardly creature—you, and all your fellow bandits. No; bandit is too grand a word to apply to this game of 'high finance.' It's really on the level with the game of the fellow that waits for a dark night, slips into the barn-yard, poisons the watch-dog, bores an auger-hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at a suspicious sound."

With his first full stop, I said: "I understand perfectly, Langdon. But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so that not even a panic would trouble me."

"That's good," he drawled. I saw he did not believe me—which was natural, as he knew nothing of my arrangement with Galloway and assumed I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad cargo of Coal stocks and contracts. "Come to lunch with me. I've got some interesting things to tell you about my trip."

A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed—my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. "No, thanks. Another day," I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. "A sore subject with all the Langdons," thought I. "It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners, neglect them."

My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction—like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I all in an instant saw my world as it really was. I saw the great rascals of "high finance," their respectability stripped from them; saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly-trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?"

I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to map a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative "securities," but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous.

"I am strong and secure," said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are those mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by cormorant "captains of industry." I must use my strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two?

I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my shell in futile attack. "Meanwhile," I reasoned carefully, "I can be getting good and ready."

Their first new move, after my little talk with Langdon, was intended as a mortal blow to my credit Melville requested me to withdraw mine and Blacklock and Company's accounts from the National Industrial Bank; and the fact that this huge and powerful institution had thus branded me was slyly given to the financial reporters of the newspapers. Far and wide it was published; and the public was expected to believe that this was one more and drastic measure in the "campaign of the honorable men of finance to clean the Augean Stables of Wall Street." My daily letter to investors next morning led off with this paragraph—the first notice I had taken publicly of their attacks on me:

"In the effort to discredit the only remaining uncontrolled source of financial truth, the big bandits have ordered my accounts out of their chief gambling-house. I have transferred the accounts to the Discount and Deposit National, where Leonidas Thornley stands guard against the new order that seeks to make business a synonym for crime."

Thornley was of the type that was dominant in our commercial life before the "financiers" came—just as song birds were common in our trees until the noisy, brawling, thieving sparrows drove them out. His oldest son was about to marry Joe's daughter—Alva. Many a Sunday I have spent at his place near Morristown—a charming combination of city comfort with farm freedom and fresh air. I remember, one Sunday, saying to him, after he had seen his wife and daughters off to church: "Why haven't you got rich? Why haven't you looked out for establishing these boys and girls of yours?"

"I don't want my girls to be sought for money," said he, "I don't want my boys to rely on money. Perhaps I've seen too much of wealth, and have come to have a prejudice against it. Then, too, I've never had the chance to get rich."

I showed that I thought that he was simply jesting.

"I mean it," said he, looking at me with eyes as straight as a well-brought-up girl's. "How could my mind be judicial if I were personally interested in the enterprises people look to me for advice about?"

And not only did he keep himself clear and his mind judicial but also he was, like all really good people, exceedingly slow to believe others guilty of the things he would as soon have thought of doing as he would have thought of slipping into the teller's cage during the lunch hour and pocketing a package of bank-notes. He gave me his motto—a curious one: "Believe in everybody; trust in nobody."

"Only a thief wishes to be trusted," he explained, "and only a fool trusts. I let no one trust me; I trust no one. But I believe evil of no man. Even when he has been convicted, I see the mitigating circumstances."

How Thornley did stand by me! And for no reason except that it was as necessary for him to be fair and just as to breathe. I shall not say he resisted the attempts to compel him to desert me—they simply made no impression on him. I remember, when Roebuck himself, a large stock-holder in the bank, left cover far enough personally to urge him to throw me over, he replied steadfastly:

"If Mr. Blacklock is guilty of circulating false stories against commercial enterprises, as his enemies allege, the penal code can be used to stop him. But as long as I stay at the head of this bank, no man shall use it for personal vengeance. It is a chartered public institution, and all have equal rights to its facilities. I would lend money to my worst enemy, if he came for it with the proper security. I would refuse my best friend, if he could not give security. The funds of a bank are a trust fund, and my duty is to see that they are employed to the best advantage. If you wish other principles to prevail here, you must get another president."

That settled it. No one appreciated more keenly than did Roebuck that character is as indispensable in its place as is craft where the situation demands craft—and is far harder to get.

I shall not relate in detail that campaign against me. It failed not so much because I was strong as because it was weak. Perhaps, if Roebuck and Langdon could have directed it in person, or had had the time to advise with their agents before and after each move, it might have succeeded. They would not have let exaggeration dominate it and venom show upon its surface; they would not have neglected to follow up advantages, would not have persisted in lines of attack that created public sympathy for me. They would not have so crudely exploited my unconventional marriage and my financial relations with old Ellersly. But they dared not go near the battle-field; they had to trust to agents whom their orders and suggestions reached by the most roundabout ways; and they were busier with their enterprises that involved immediate and great gain or loss of money.

When Galloway died, they learned that the Coal stocks with which they thought I was loaded down were part of his estate. They satisfied themselves that I was in fact as impregnable as I had warned Langdon. They reversed tactics; Roebuck tried to make it up with me. "If he wants to see me," was my invariable answer to the intimations of his emissaries, "let him come to my office, just as I would go to his, if I wished to see him."

"He is a big man—a dangerous big man," cautioned Joe.

"Big—yes. But strong only against his own kind," replied I. "One mouse can make a whole herd of elephants squeal for mercy."

"It isn't prudent, it isn't prudent," persisted Joe.

"It is not," replied I. "Thank God, I'm at last in the position I've been toiling to achieve. I don't have to be prudent. I can say and do what I please, without fear of the consequences. I can freely indulge in the luxury of being a man. That's costly, Joe, but it's worth all it could cost."

Joe didn't understand me—he rarely did. "I'm a hen. You're an eagle," said he.



XXIX. A HOUSEWARMING

Joe's daughter, staying on and on at Dawn Hill, was chief lieutenant, if not principal, in my conspiracy to drift Anita day by day further and further into the routine of the new life. Yet neither of us had shown by word or look that a thorough understanding existed between us. My part was to be unobtrusive, friendly, neither indifferent nor eager, and I held to it by taking care never to be left alone with Anita; Alva's part was to be herself—simple and natural and sensible, full of life and laughter, mocking at those moods that betray us into the absurdity of taking ourselves too seriously.

I was getting ready a new house in town as a surprise to Anita, and I took Alva into my plot. "I wish Anita's part of the house to be exactly to her liking," said I. "Can't you set her to dreaming aloud what kind of place she would like to live in, what she would like to open her eyes on in the morning, what surroundings she'd like to dress in and read in, and all that?"

Alva had no difficulty in carrying out the suggestions. And by harassing Westlake incessantly, I succeeded in realizing her report of Anita's dream to the exact shade of the draperies and the silk that covered the walls. By pushing the work, I got the house done just as Alva was warning me that she could not remain longer at Dawn Hill, but must go home and get ready for her wedding. When I went down to arrange with her the last details of the surprise, who should meet me at the station but Anita herself? I took one glance at her serious face and, much disquieted, seated myself beside her in the little trap. Instead of following the usual route to the house, she turned her horse into the bay-shore road.

"Several days ago," she began, as the bend hid the station, "I got a letter from some lawyers, saying that an uncle of mine had given me a large sum of money—a very large sum. I have been inquiring about it, and find it is mine absolutely."

I braced myself against the worst. "She is about to tell me that she is leaving," thought I. But I managed to say: "I'm glad to hear of your luck," though I fear my tone was not especially joyous.

"So," she went on, "I am in a position to pay back to you, I think, what my father and Sam took from you. It won't be enough, I'm afraid, to pay what you lost indirectly. But I have told the lawyers to make it all over to you."

I could have laughed aloud. It was too ridiculous, this situation into which I had got myself. I did not know what to say. I could hardly keep out of my face how foolish this collapse of my crafty conspiracy made me feel. And then the full meaning of what she was doing came over me—the revelation of her character. I trusted myself to steal a glance at her; and for the first time I didn't see the thrilling azure sheen over her smooth white skin, though all her beauty was before me, as dazzling as when it compelled me to resolve to win her. No; I saw her, herself—the woman within. I had known from the outset that there was an altar of love within my temple of passion. I think that was my first real visit to it.

"Anita!" I said unsteadily. "Anita!"

The color flamed in her cheeks; we were silent for a long time.

"You—your people owe me nothing" I at length found voice to say. "Even if they did, I couldn't and wouldn't take your money. But, believe me, they owe me nothing."

"You can not mislead me," she answered. "When they asked me to become engaged to you, they told me about it."

I had forgotten. The whole repulsive, rotten business came back to me. And, changed man that I had become in the last six months, I saw myself as I had been. I felt that she was looking at me, was reading the degrading confession in my telltale features.

"I will tell you the whole truth," said I. "I did use your father's and your brother's debts to me as a means of getting to you. But, before God, Anita, I swear I was honest with you when I said to you I never hoped or wished to win you in that way!"

"I believe you," she replied, and her tone and expression made my heart leap with indescribable joy.

Love is sometimes most unwise in his use of the reins he puts on passion. Instead of acting as impulse commanded, I said clumsily, "And I am very different to-day from what I was last spring." It never occurred to me how she might interpret those words.

"I know," she replied. She waited several seconds before adding: "I, too, have changed. I see that I was far more guilty than you. There is no excuse for me. I was badly brought up, as you used to say, but—"

"No—no," I began to protest.

She cut me short with a sad: "You need not be polite and spare my feelings. Let's not talk of it. Let us go back to the object I had in coming for you to-day."

"You owe me nothing," I repeated. "Your brother and your father settled long ago. I lost nothing through them. And I've learned that if I had never known you, Roebuck and Langdon would still have attacked me."

"What my uncle gave me has been transferred to you," said she, woman fashion, not hearing what she did not care to heed. "I can't make you accept it; but there it is, and there it stays."

"I can not take it," said I. "If you insist on leaving it in my name, I shall simply return it to your uncle."

"I wrote him what I had done," she rejoined. "His answer came yesterday. He approves it."

"Approves it!" I exclaimed.

"You do not know how eccentric he is," she explained, naturally misunderstanding my astonishment. She took a letter from her bosom and handed it to me. I read:

"DEAR MADAM: It was yours to do with as you pleased. If you ever find yourself in the mood to visit, Gull House is open to you, provided you bring no maid. I will not have female servants about.

"Yours truly,

"HOWARD FORRESTER."

"You will consent now, will you not?" she asked, as I lifted my eyes from this characteristic note.

I saw that her peace of mind was at stake. "Yes—I consent."

She gave a great sigh as at the laying down of a heavy burden. "Thank you," was all she said, but she put a world of meaning into the words. She took the first homeward turning. We were nearly at the house before I found words that would pave the way toward expressing my thoughts—my longings and hopes.

"You say you have forgiven me," said I. "Then we can be—friends?"

She was silent, and I took her somber expression to mean that she feared I was hiding some subtlety.

"I mean just what I say, Anita," I hastened to explain. "Friends—simply friends." And my manner fitted my words.

She looked strangely at me. "You would be content with that?" she asked.

I answered what I thought would please her. "Let us make the best of our bad bargain," said I. "You can trust me now, don't you think you can?"

She nodded without speaking; we were at the door, and the servants were hastening out to receive us. Always the servants between us. Servants indoors, servants outdoors; morning, noon and night, from waking to sleeping, these servants to whom we are slaves. As those interrupting servants sent us each a separate way, her to her maid, me to my valet, I was depressed with the chill that the opportunity that has not been seen leaves behind it as it departs.

"Well," said I to myself by way of consolation, as I was dressing for dinner, "she is certainly softening toward you, and when she sees the new house you will be still better friends."

* * * * *

But, when the great day came, I was not so sure. Alva went for a "private view" with young Thornley; out of her enthusiasm she telephoned me from the very midst of the surroundings she found "so wonderful and so beautiful"—thus she assured me, and her voice made it impossible to doubt. And, the evening before the great day, I, going for a final look round, could find no flaw serious enough to justify the sinking feeling that came over me every time I thought of what Anita would think when she saw my efforts to realize her dream. I set out for "home" half a dozen times at least, that afternoon, before I pulled myself together, called myself an ass, and, with a pause at Delmonico's for a drink, which I ordered and then rejected, finally pushed myself in at the door. What, a state my nerves were in!

Alva had departed; Anita was waiting for me in her sitting-room. When she heard me in the hall, just outside, she stood in the doorway. "Come in," she said to me, who did not dare so much as a glance at her.

I entered. I must have looked as I felt—like a boy, summoned before the teacher to be whipped in presence of the entire school. Then I was conscious that she had my hand—how she had got it, I don't know—and that she was murmuring, with tears of happiness in her voice: "Oh, I can't say it!"

"Glad you like your own taste," said I awkwardly. "You know, Alva told me."

"But it's one thing to dream, and a very different thing to do," she answered. Then, with smiling reproach: "And I've been thinking all summer that you were ruined! I've been expecting to hear every day that you had had to give up the fight."

"Oh—that passed long ago," said I.

"But you never told me," she reminded me. "And I'm glad you didn't," she added. "Not knowing saved me from doing something very foolish." She reddened a little, smiled a great deal, dazzlingly, was altogether different from the ice-locked Anita of a short time before, different as June from January. And her hand—so intensely alive—seemed extremely comfortable in mine.

Even as my blood responded to that electric touch, I had a twinge of cynical bitterness. Yes, apparently I was at last getting what I had so long, so vainly, and, latterly, so hopelessly craved. But—why was she giving it? Why had she withheld herself until this moment of material happiness? "I have to pay the rich man's price," thought I, with a sigh.

It was in reaching out for some sweetness to take away this bitter taste in my honey that I said to her, "When you gave me that money from your uncle, you did it to help me out?"

She colored deeply. "How silly you must have thought me!" she answered.

I took her other hand. As I was drawing her toward me, the sudden pallor of her face and chill of her hands halted me once more, brought sickeningly before me the early days of my courtship when she had infuriated my pride by trying to be "submissive." I looked round the room—that room into which I had put so much thought—and money. Money! "The rich man's price!" those delicately brocaded walls shimmered mockingly at me.

"Anita," said I, "do you care for me?"

She murmured inaudibly. Evasion! thought I, and suspicion sprang on guard, bristling.

"Anita," I repeated sternly, "do you care for me?"

"I am your wife," she replied, her head drooping still lower. And hesitatingly she drew away from me. That seemed confirmation of my doubt and I said to her satirically, "You are willing to be my wife out of gratitude, to put it politely?"

She looked straight into my eyes and answered, "I can only say there is no one I like so well, and—I will give you all I have to give."

"Like!" I exclaimed contemptuously, my nerves giving way altogether. "And you would be my wife! Do you want me to despise you?" I struck dead my poor, feeble hope that had been all but still-born. I rushed from the room, closing the door violently between us.

Such was our housewarming.



XXX. BLACKLOCK OPENS FIRE

For what I proceeded to do, all sorts of motives, from the highest to the basest, have been attributed to me. Here is the truth: I had already pushed the medicine of hard work to its limit. It was as powerless against this new development as water against a drunkard's thirst. I must find some new, some compelling drug—some frenzy of activity that would swallow up my self as the battle makes the soldier forget his toothache. This confession may chagrin many who have believed in me. My enemies will hasten to say: "Aha, his motive was even more selfish and petty than we alleged." But those who look at human nature honestly, and from the inside, will understand how I can concede that a selfish reason moved me to draw my sword, and still can claim a higher motive. In such straits as were mine, some men of my all-or-none temperament debauch themselves; others thresh about blindly, reckless whether they strike innocent or guilty. I did neither.

Probably many will recall that long before the "securities" of the reorganized coal combine were issued, I had in my daily letter to investors been preparing the public to give them a fitting reception. A few days after my whole being burst into flames of resentment against Anita, out came the new array of new stocks and bonds. Roebuck and Langdon arranged with the under writers for a "fake" four times over-subscription, indorsed by the two greatest banking houses in the Street. Despite this often-tried and always-good trick, the public refused to buy. I felt I had not been overestimating my power. But I made no move until the "securities" began to go up, and the financial reporters—under the influence where not actually in the pay of the Roebuck-Langdon clique—shouted that, "in spite of the malicious attacks from the gambling element, the new securities are being absorbed by the public at prices approximating their value." Then—But I shall quote my investors' letter the following morning:

"At half-past nine yesterday—nine-twenty-eight, to be exact—President Melville, of the National Industrial Bank, loaned six hundred thousand dollars. He loaned it to Bill Van Nest, an ex-gambler and proprietor of pool rooms, now silent partner in Hoe & Wittekind, brokers, on the New York Stock Exchange, and also in Filbert & Jonas, curb brokers. He loaned it to Van Nest without security.

"Van Nest used the money yesterday to push up the price of the new coal securities by 'wash sales'—which means, by making false purchases and sales of the stock in order to give the public the impression of eager buying. Van Nest sold to himself and bought from himself 347,060 of the 352,681 shares traded in.

"Melville, in addition to being president of one of the largest banks in the world, is a director in no less than seventy-three great industrial enterprises, including railways, telegraph companies, savings-banks and life-insurance companies. Bill Van Nest has done time in the Nevada State Penitentiary for horse-stealing."

* * * * *

That was all. And it was enough—quite enough. I was a national figure, as much so as if I had tried to assassinate the president. Indeed, I had exploded a bomb under a greater than the president—under the chiefs of the real government of the United States, the government that levied daily upon every citizen, and that had state and national and the principal municipal governments in its strong box.

I confess I was as much astounded at the effect of my bomb as old Melville must have been. I felt that I had been obscure, as I looked at the newspapers, with Matthew Blacklock appropriating almost the entire front page of each. I was the isolated, the conspicuous figure, standing alone upon the steps of the temple of Mammon, where mankind daily and devoutly comes to offer worship.

Not that the newspapers praised me. I recall none that spoke well of me. The nearest approach to praise was the "Blacklock squeals on the Wall Street gang" in one of the sensational penny sheets that strengthen the plutocracy by lying about it. Some of the papers insinuated that I had gone mad; others that I had been bought up by a rival gang to the Roebuck-Langdon clique; still others thought I was simply hunting notoriety. All were inclined to accept as a sufficient denial of my charges Melville's dignified refusal "to notice any attack from a quarter so discredited."

As my electric whirled into Wall Street, I saw the crowd in front of the Textile Building, a dozen policemen keeping it in order. I descended amid cheers, and entered my offices through a mob struggling to shake hands with me—and, in my ignorance of mob mind, I was delighted and inspired! Just why a man who knows men, knows how wishy-washy they are as individuals, should be influenced by a demonstration from a mass of them, is hard to understand. But the fact is indisputable. They fooled me then; they could fool me again, in spite of all I have been through. There probably wasn't one in that mob for whose opinion I would have had the slightest respect had he come to me alone; yet as I listened to those shallow cheers and those worthless assurances of "the people are behind you, Blacklock," I felt that I was a man with a mission!

Our main office was full, literally full, of newspaper men—reporters from morning papers, from afternoon papers, from out-of-town and foreign papers. I pushed through them, saying as I went: "My letter speaks for me, gentlemen, and will continue to speak for me. I have nothing to say except through it."

"But the public—" urged one.

"It doesn't interest me," said I, on my guard against the temptation to cant. "I am a banker and investment broker. I am interested only in my customers."

And I shut myself in, giving strict orders to Joe that there was to be no talking about me or my campaign. "I don't purpose to let the newspapers make us cheap and notorious," said I. "We must profit by the warning in the fate of all the other fellows who have sprung into notice by attacking these bandits."

The first news I got was that Bill Van Nest had disappeared. As soon as the Stock Exchange opened, National Coal became the feature. But, instead of "wash sales," Roebuck, Langdon and Melville were themselves, through various brokers, buying the stocks in large quantities to keep the prices up. My next letter was as brief as my first philippic:

"Bill Van Nest is at the Hotel Frankfort, Newark, under the name of Thomas Lowry. He was in telephonic communication with President Melville, of the National Industrial Bank, twice yesterday.

"The underwriters of the National Coal Company's new issues, frightened by yesterday's exposure, have compelled Mr. Roebuck, Mr. Mowbray Langdon and Mr. Melville themselves to buy. So, yesterday, those three gentlemen bought with real money, with their own money, large quantities of stocks which are worth less than half what they paid for them.

"They will continue to buy these stocks so long as the public holds aloof. They dare not let the prices slump. They hope that this storm will blow over, and that then the investing public will forget and will relieve them of their load."

I had added: "But this storm won't blow over. It will become a cyclone." I struck that out. "No prophecy," said I to myself. "Your rule, iron-clad, must be—facts, always facts; only facts."

The gambling section of the public took my hint and rushed into the market; the burden of protecting the underwriters was doubled, and more and more of the hoarded loot was disgorged. That must have been a costly day—for, ten minutes after the Stock Exchange closed, Roebuck sent for me.

"My compliments to him," said I to his messenger, "but I am too busy. I'll be glad to see him here, however."

"You know he dares not come to you," said the messenger, Schilling, president of the National Manufactured Food Company, sometimes called the Poison Trust. "If he did, and it were to get out, there'd be a panic."

"Probably," replied I with a shrug. "That's no affair of mine. I'm not responsible for the rotten conditions which these so-called financiers have produced, and I shall not be disturbed by the crash which must come."

Schilling gave me a genuine look of mingled pity and admiration. "I suppose you know what you're about," said he, "but I think you're making a mistake."

"Thanks, Ned," said I—he had been my head clerk a few years before, and I had got him the chance with Roebuck which he had improved so well. "I'm going to have some fun. Can't live but once."

"I know some people," said he significantly, "who would go to any lengths to get an enemy out of the way." He had lived close enough to Roebuck to peer into the black shadows of that satanic mind, and dimly to see the dread shapes that lurked there.

"I'm the safest man on Manhattan Island for the present," said I.

"You remember Woodrow? I've always believed that he was murdered, and that the pistol they found beside him was a 'plant.'"

"You'd kill me yourself, if you got the orders, wouldn't you?" said I good-humoredly.

"Not personally," replied he in the same spirit, yet serious, too, at bottom. "Inspector Bradlaugh was telling me, the other night, that there were easily a thousand men in the slums of the East Side who could be hired to kill a man for five hundred dollars."

I suppose Schilling, as the directing spirit of a corporation that hid poison by the hogshead in low-priced foods of various kinds, was responsible for hundreds of deaths annually, and for misery of sickness beyond calculation among the poor of the tenements and cheap boarding-houses. Yet a better husband, father and friend never lived. He, personally, wouldn't have harmed a fly; but he was a wholesale poisoner for dividends.

Murder for dividends. Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and prostitution—for dividends. Not fair competition, in which the stronger and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest and the depraved. And the custom of doing these things so "respectable," the applause for "success" so undiscriminating, and men so unthinking in the rush of business activity, that criticism is regarded as a mixture of envy and idealism. And it usually is, I must admit.

Schilling lingered. "I hope you won't blame me for lining up against you, Matt," said he. "I don't want to, but I've got to."

"Why?"

"You know what'd become of me if I didn't."

"You might become an honest man and get self-respect," I suggested with friendly satire.

"That's all very well for you to say," was his laughing retort. "You've made yourself tight and tidy for the blow. But I've a family, and a damned expensive one, too. And if I didn't stand by this gang, they'd take everything I've got away from me. No, Matt, each of us to his own game. What is your game, anyhow?"

"Fun—just fun. Playing the pipe to see the big fellows dance."

But he didn't believe it. And no one has believed it—not even my most devoted followers. To this day Joe Ball more than half suspects that my real objective was huge personal gain. That any rich man should do anything except for the purpose of growing richer seems incredible. That any rich man should retain or regain the sympathies and viewpoint of the class from which he sprang, and should become a "traitor" to the class to which he belongs, seems preposterous. I confess I don't fully understand my own case. Who ever does?

My "daily letters" had now ceased to be advertisements, had become news, sought by all the newspapers of this country and of the big cities in Great Britain. I could have made a large saving by no longer paying my sixty-odd regular papers for inserting them. But I was looking too far ahead to blunder into that fatal mistake. Instead, I signed a year's contract with each of my papers, they guaranteeing to print my advertisements, I guaranteeing to protect them against loss on libel suits. I organized a dummy news bureau, and through it got contracts with the telegraph companies. Thus insured against the cutting of my communications with the public, I was ready for the real campaign.

It began with my "History of the National Coal Company." I need not repeat that famous history here. I need recall only the main points—how I proved that the common stock was actually worth less than two dollars a share, that the bonds were worth less than twenty-five dollars in the hundred, that both stock and bonds were illegal; my detailed recital of the crimes of Roebuck, Melville and Langdon in wrecking mining properties, in wrecking coal railways, in ejecting American labor and substituting helots from eastern Europe; how they had swindled and lied and bribed; how they had twisted the books of the companies, how they were planning to unload the mass of almost worthless securities at high prices, then to get from under the market and let the bonds and stocks drop down to where they could buy them in on terms that would yield them more than two hundred and fifty per cent, on the actual capital invested. Less and dearer coal; lower wages and more ignorant laborers; enormous profits absorbed without mercy into a few pockets.

On the day the seventh chapter of this history appeared, the telegraph companies notified me that they would transmit no more of my matter. They feared the consequences in libel suits, explained Moseby, general manager of one of the companies.

"But I guarantee to protect you," said I. "I will give bond in any amount you ask."

"We can't take the risk, Mr. Blacklock," replied he. The twinkle in his eye told me why, and also that he, like every one else in the country except the clique, was in sympathy with me.

My lawyers found an honest judge, and I got an injunction that compelled the companies to transmit under my contracts. I suspended the "History" for one day, and sent out in place of it an account of this attempt to shut me off from the public. "Hereafter," said I, in the last paragraph in my letter, "I shall end each day's chapter with a forecast of what the next day's chapter is to be. If for any reason it fails to appear, the public will know that somebody has been coerced by Roebuck, Melville & Co."



XXXI. ANITA'S SECRET

That afternoon—or, was it the next?—I happened to go home early. I have never been able to keep alive anger against any one. My anger against Anita had long ago died away, had been succeeded by regret and remorse that I had let my nerves, or whatever the accursed cause was, whirl me into such an outburst. Not that I regretted having rejected what I still felt was insulting to me and degrading to her; simply that my manner should have been different. There was no necessity or excuse for violence in showing her that I would not, could not, accept from gratitude what only love has the right to give. And I had long been casting about for some way to apologize—not easy to do, when her distant manner toward me made it difficult for me to find even the necessary commonplaces to "keep up appearances" before the servants on the few occasions on which we accidentally met.

But, as I was saying, I came up from the office and stretched myself on—the lounge in my private room adjoining the library. I had read myself into a doze, when a servant brought me a card. I glanced at it as it lay upon his extended tray. "Gerald Monson," I read aloud. "What does the damned rascal want?" I asked.

The servant smiled. He knew as well as I how Monson, after I dismissed him with a present of six months' pay, had given the newspapers the story—or, rather, his version of the story—of my efforts to educate myself in the "arts and graces of a gentleman."

"Mr. Monson says he wishes to see you particular, sir," said he.

"Well—I'll see him," said I. I despised him too much to dislike him, and I thought he might possibly be in want. But that notion vanished the instant I set eyes upon him. He was obviously at the very top of the wave. "Hello, Monson," was my greeting, in it no reminder of his treachery.

"Howdy, Blacklock," said he. "I've come on a little errand for Mrs. Langdon." Then, with that nasty grin of his: "You know, I'm looking after things for her since the bust-up."

"No, I didn't—know," said I curtly, suppressing my instant curiosity. "What does Mrs. Langdon want?"

"To see you—for just a few minutes—whenever it is convenient."

"If Mrs. Langdon has business with me, I'll see her at my office," said I. She was one of the fashionables that had got herself into my black books by her treatment of Anita since the break with the Ellerslys.

"She wishes to come to you here—this afternoon, if you are to be at home. She asked me to say that her business is important—and very private."

I hesitated, but I could think of no good excuse for refusing. "I'll be here an hour," said I. "Good day."

He gave me no time to change my mind.

Something—perhaps it was his curious expression as he took himself off—made me begin to regret. The more I thought of the matter, the less I thought of my having made any civil concession to a woman who had acted so badly toward Anita and myself. He had not been gone a quarter of an hour before I went to Anita in her sitting-room. Always, the instant I entered the outer door of her part of our house, that powerful, intoxicating fascination that she had for me began to take possession of my senses. It was in every garment she wore. It seemed to linger in any place where she had been, for a long time after she left it. She was at a small desk by the window, was writing letters.

"May I interrupt?" said I. "Monson was here a few minutes ago—from Mrs. Langdon. She wants to see me. I told him I would see her here. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I had been too good-natured. What do you think?"

I could not see her face, but only the back of her head, and the loose coils of magnetic hair and the white nape of her graceful neck. As I began to speak, she stopped writing, her pen suspended over the sheet of paper. After I ended there was a long silence.

"I'll not see her," said I. "I don't quite understand why I yielded." And I turned to go.

"Wait—please," came from her abruptly.

Another long silence. Then I: "If she comes here, I think the only person who can properly receive her is you."

"No—you must see her," said Anita at last. And she turned round in her chair until she was facing me. Her expression—I can not describe it. I can only say that it gave me a sense of impending calamity.

"I'd rather not—much rather not," said I.

"I particularly wish you to see her," she replied, and she turned back to her writing. I saw her pen poised as if she were about to begin; but she did not begin—and I felt that she would not. With my mind shadowed with vague dread, I left that mysterious stillness, and went back to the library.

It was not long before Mrs. Langdon was announced. There are some women to whom a haggard look is becoming; she is one of them. She was much thinner than when I last saw her; instead of her former restless, petulant, suspicious expression, she now looked tragically sad. "May I trouble you to close the door?" said she, when the servant had withdrawn.

I closed the door.

"I've come," she began, without seating herself, "to make you as unhappy, I fear, as I am. I've hesitated long before coming. But I am desperate. The one hope I have left is that you and I between us may be able to—to—that you and I may be able to help each other."

I waited.

"I suppose there are people," she went on, "who have never known what it was to—really to care for some one else. They would despise me for clinging to a man after he has shown me that—that his love has ceased."

"Pardon me, Mrs. Langdon," I interrupted. "You apparently think your husband and I are intimate friends. Before you go any further, I must disabuse you of that idea."

She looked at me in open astonishment. "You do not know why my husband has left me?"

"Until a few minutes ago, I did not know that he had left you," I said. "And I do not wish to know why."

Her expression of astonishment changed to mockery. "Oh!" she sneered. "Your wife has fooled you into thinking it a one-sided affair. Well, I tell you, she is as much to blame as he—more. For he did love me when he married me; did love me until she got him under her spell again."

I thought I understood. "You have been misled, Mrs. Langdon," said I gently, pitying her as the victim of her insane jealousy. "You have—"

"Ask your wife," she interrupted angrily. "Hereafter, you can't pretend ignorance. For I'll at least be revenged. She failed utterly to trap him into marriage when she was a poor girl, and—"

"Before you go any further," said I coldly, "let me set you right. My wife was at one time engaged to your husband's brother, but—"

"Tom?" she interrupted. And her laugh made me bite my lip. "So she told you that! I don't see how she dared. Why, everybody knows that she and Mowbray were engaged, and that he broke it off to marry me."

All in an instant everything that had been confused in my affairs at home and down town became clear. I understood why I had been pursued relentlessly in Wall Street; why I had been unable to make the least impression on the barriers between Anita and myself. You will imagine that some terrible emotion at once dominated me. But this is not a romance; only the veracious chronicle of certain human beings. My first emotion was—relief that it was not Tom Langdon. "I ought to have known she couldn't care for him," said I to myself. I, contending with Tom Langdon for a woman's love had always made me shrink. But Mowbray—that was vastly different. My respect for myself and for Anita rose.

"No," said I to Mrs. Langdon, "my wife did not tell me, never spoke of it. What I said to you was purely a guess of my own. I had no interest in the matter—and haven't. I have absolute confidence in my wife. I feel ashamed that you have provoked me into saying so." I opened the door.

"I am not going yet," said she angrily. "Yesterday morning Mowbray and she were riding together in the Riverside Drive. Ask her groom."

"What of it?" said I. Then, as she did not rise, I rang the bell. When the servant came, I said: "Please tell Mrs. Blacklock that Mrs. Langdon is in the library—and that I am here, and gave you the message."

As soon as the servant was gone, she said: "No doubt she'll lie to you. These women that steal other women's property are usually clever at fooling their own silly husbands."

"I do not intend to ask her," I replied. "To ask her would be an insult."

She made no comment beyond a scornful toss of the head. We both had our gaze fixed upon the door through which Anita would enter. When she finally did appear, I, after one glance at her, turned—it must have been triumphantly—upon her accuser. I had not doubted, but where is the faith that is not the stronger for confirmation? And confirmation there was in the very atmosphere round that stately, still figure. She looked calmly, first at Mrs. Langdon, then at me.

"I sent for you," said I, "because I thought that you, rather than I, should request Mrs. Langdon to leave your house."

At that Mrs. Langdon was on her feet, and blazing. "Fool!" she flared at me. "Oh, the fools women make of men!" Then to Anita: "You—you—But no, I must not permit you to drag me down to your level. Tell your husband—tell him that you were riding with my husband in the Riverside Drive yesterday."

I stepped between her and Anita. "My wife will not answer you," said I. "I hope, Madam, you will spare us the necessity of a painful scene. But leave you must—at once."

She looked wildly round, clasped her hands, suddenly burst into tears. If she had but known, she could have had her own way after that, without any attempt from me to oppose her. For she was evidently unutterably wretched—and no one knew better than I the sufferings of unreturned love. But she had given me up; slowly, sobbing, she left the room, I opening the door for her and closing it behind her.

"I almost broke down myself," said I to Anita. "Poor woman! How can you be so calm? You women in your relations with each other are—a mystery."

"I have only contempt for a woman who tries to hold a man when he wishes to go," said Anita, with quiet but energetic bitterness. "Besides"—she hesitated an instant before going on—"Gladys deserves her fate. She doesn't really care for him. She's only jealous of him. She never did love him."

"How do you know?" said I sharply, trying to persuade myself it was not an ugly suspicion in me that lifted its head and shot out that question.

"Because he never loved her," she replied. "The feeling a woman has for a man or a man for a woman, without any response, isn't love, isn't worthy the name of love. It's a sort of baffled covetousness. Love means generosity, not greediness." Then—"Why do you not ask me whether what she said is true?"

The change in her tone with that last sentence, the strange, ominous note in it, startled me,

"Because," replied I, "as I said to her, to ask my wife such a question would be to insult her. If you were riding with him, it was an accident." As if my rude repulse of her overtures and my keeping away from her ever since would not have justified her in almost anything.

She flushed the dark red of shame, but her gaze held steady and unflinching upon mine. "It was not altogether by accident," she said. And I think she expected me to kill her.

When a man admits and respects a woman's rights where he is himself concerned, he either is no longer interested in her or has begun to love her so well that he can control the savage and selfish instincts of passion. If Mowbray Langdon had been there, I might have killed them both; but he was not there, and she, facing me without fear, was not the woman to be suspected of the stealthy and traitorous.

"It was he that you meant when you warned me you cared for another man?" said I, so quietly that I wondered at myself; wondered what had become of the "Black Matt" who had used his fists almost as much as his brains in fighting his way up.

"Yes," she said, her head down now.

A long pause.

"You wish to be free?" I asked, and my tone must have been gentle.

"I wish to free you," she replied slowly and deliberately.

There was a long silence. Then I said: "I must think it all out. I once told you how I felt about these matters. I've greatly changed my mind since our talk that night in the Willoughby; but my prejudices are still with me. Perhaps you will not be surprised at that—you whose prejudices have cost me so dear."

I thought she was going to speak. Instead she turned away, so that I could no longer see her face.

"Our marriage was a miserable mistake," I went on, struggling to be just and judicial, and to seem calm. "I admit it now. Fortunately, we are both still young—you very young. Mistakes in youth are never fatal. But, Anita, do not blunder out of one mistake into another. You are no longer a child, as you were when I married you. You will be careful not to let judgments formed of him long ago decide you for him as they decided you against me."

"I wish to be free," she said, each word coming with an effort, "as much on your account as on my own." Then, and it seemed to me merely a truly feminine attempt to shirk responsibility, she added, "I am glad my going will be a relief to you."

"Yes, it will be a relief," I confessed. "Our situation has become intolerable." I had reached my limit of self-control. I put out my hand. "Good-by," I said.

If she had wept, it might have modified my conviction that everything was at an end between us. But she did not weep. "Can you ever forgive me?" she asked.

"Let's not talk of forgiveness," said I, and I fear my voice and manner were gruff, as I strove not to break down. "Let's try to forget." And I touched her hand and hastened away.

When two human beings set out to misunderstand each other, how fast and far they go! How shut-in we are from each other, with only halting means of communication that break down under the slightest strain!

As I was leaving the house next morning, I gave Sanders this note for her:

"I have gone to live at the Downtown Hotel. When you have decided what course to take, let me know. If my 'rights' ever had any substance, they have starved away to such weak things that they collapse even as I try to set them up. I hope your freedom will give you happiness, and me peace."

"You are ill, sir?" asked my old servant, my old friend, as he took the note.

"Stay with her, Sanders, as long as she wishes," said I, ignoring his question. "Then come to me."

His look made me shake hands with him. As I did it, we both remembered the last time we had shaken hands—when he had the roses for my home-coming with my bride. It seemed to me I could smell those roses.



XXXII. LANGDON COMES TO THE SURFACE

I shall not estimate the vast sums it cost the Roebuck-Langdon clique to maintain the prices of National Coal, and so give plausibility to the fiction that the public was buying eagerly. In the third week of my campaign, Melville was so deeply involved that he had to let the two others take the whole burden upon themselves.

In the fourth week, Langdon came to me.

The interval between his card and himself gave me a chance to recover from my amazement. When he entered he found me busily writing. Though I had nerved myself, it was several seconds before I ventured to look at him. There he stood, probably as handsome, as fascinating as ever, certainly as self-assured. But I could now, beneath that manner I had once envied, see the puny soul, with its brassy glitter of the vanity of luxury and show. I had been somewhat afraid of myself—afraid the sight of him would stir up in me a tempest of jealousy and hate; as I looked, I realized that I did not know my own nature. "She does not love this man," I thought. "If she did or could, she would not be the woman I love. He deceived her inexperience as he deceived mine."

"What can I do for you?" said I to him politely, much as if he were a stranger making an untimely interruption.

My look had disconcerted him; my tone threw him into confusion. "You keep out of the way, now that you've become famous," he began, with a halting but heroic attempt at his customary easy superiority. "Are you living up in Connecticut, too? Sam Ellersly tells me your wife is stopping there with old Howard Forrester. Sam wants me to use my good offices in making it up between you two and her family."

I was completely taken aback by this cool ignoring of the real situation between him and me. Impudence or ignorance?—I could not decide. It seemed impossible that Anita had not told him; yet it seemed impossible, too, that he would come to me if she had told him. "Have you any business with me?" said I.

His eyelids twitched nervously, and he adjusted his lips several times before he was able to say:

"You and your wife don't care to make it up with the Ellerslys? I fancied so, and told Sam you'd simply think me meddlesome. The other matter is the Travelers Club. I've smoothed things out there. I'm going to put you up and rush you through."

"No, thanks," said I. It seemed incredible to me that I had ever cared about that club and the things it represented, as I could remember I undoubtedly did care. It was like looking at an outgrown toy and trying to feel again the emotions it once excited.

"I assure you, Matt, there won't be the slightest difficulty." His manner was that of a man playing the trump card in a desperate game—he feels it can not lose, yet the stake is so big that he can not but be a little nervous.

"I do not care to join the Travelers Club," said I, rising. "I must ask you to excuse me. I am exceedingly busy."

A flush appeared in his cheeks and deepened and spread until his whole body must have been afire. He seated himself. "You know what I've come for," he said sullenly, and humbly, too.

All his life he had been enthroned upon his wealth. Without realizing it, he had claimed and had received deference solely because he was rich. He had thought himself, in his own person, most superior; now, he found that like a silly child he had been standing on a chair and crying: "See how tall I am." And the airs, the cynicism, the graceful condescension, which had been so becoming to him, were now as out of place as crown and robes on a king taking a swimming lesson.

"What are your terms, Blacklock? Don't be too hard on an old friend," said he, trying to carry off his frank plea for mercy with a smile.

I should have thought he would cut his throat and jump off the Battery wall before he would get on his knees to any man for any reason. And he was doing it for mere money—to try to save, not his fortune, but only an imperiled part of it. "If Anita could see him now!" I thought.

To him I said, the more coldly because I did not wish to add to his humiliation by showing him that I pitied him: "I can only repeat, Mr. Langdon, you will have to excuse me. I have given you all the time I can spare."

His eyes were shifting and his hands trembling as he said: "I will transfer control of the Coal combine to you."

His tones, shameful as the offer they carried, made me ashamed for him. For money—just for money! And I had thought him a man. If he had been a self-deceiving hypocrite like Roebuck, or a frank believer in the right of might, like Updegraff, I might possibly, in the circumstances, have tried to release him from my net. But he had never for an instant deceived himself as to the real nature of the enterprises he plotted, promoted and profited by; he thought it "smart" to be bad, and he delighted in making the most cynical epigrams on the black deeds of himself and his associates.

"Better sell out to Roebuck," I suggested. "I control all the Coal stock I need."

"I don't care to have anything further to do with Roebuck," Langdon answered. "I've broken with him."

"When a man lies to me," said I, "he gives me the chance to see just how much of a fool he thinks I am, and also the chance to see just how much of a fool he is. I hesitate to think so poorly of you as your attempt to fool me seems to compel."

But he was unconvinced. "I've found he intends to abandon the ship and leave me to go down with it," he persisted. "He believes he can escape and denounce me as the arch rascal who planned the combine, and can convince people that I foozled him into it."

Ingenious; but I happened to know that it was false. "Pardon me, Mr. Langdon," said I with stiff courtesy. "I repeat, I can do nothing for you. Good morning." And I went at my work as if he were already gone.

Had I been vindictive, I would have led him on to humiliate himself more deeply, if greater depths of humiliation there are than those to which he voluntarily descended. But I wished to spare him; I let him see the uselessness of his mission. He looked at me in silence—the look of hate that can come only from a creature weak as well as wicked. I think it was all his keen sense of humor could do to save him from a melodramatic outbreak. He slipped into his habitual pose, rose and withdrew without another word. All this fright and groveling and treachery for plunder, the loss of which would not impair his fortune—plunder he had stolen with many a jest and gibe at his helpless victims. Like most of our debonair dollar chasers, he was a good sportsman only when the game was with him.

That afternoon he threw his Coal holdings on the market in great blocks. His treachery took Roebuck completely by surprise—for Roebuck believed in this fair-weather "gentleman," foul-weather coward, and neglected to allow for that quicksand that is always under the foundation of the man who has inherited, not earned, his wealth. But for the blundering credulity of rascals, would honest men ever get their dues? Roebuck's brokers had bought many thousands of Langdon's shares at the high artificial price before Roebuck grasped the situation—that it was not my followers recklessly gambling to break the prices, but Langdon unloading on his "pal." As soon as he saw, he abruptly withdrew from the market. When the Stock Exchange closed, National Coal securities were offered at prices ranging from eleven for the bonds to two for the common and three for the preferred—offered, and no takers.

"Well, you've done it," said Joe, coming with the news that Thornley, of the Discount and Deposit Bank, had been appointed receiver.

"I've made a beginning," replied I. And the last sentence of my next morning's "letter" was:

"To-morrow the first chapter of the History of the Industrial National Bank."

* * * * *

"I have felt for two years," said Roebuck to Schilling, who repeated it to me soon afterward, "that Blacklock was about the most dangerous fellow in the country. The first time I set eyes on him, I saw he was a born iconoclast. And I've known for a year that some day he would use that engine of publicity of his to cannonade the foundations of society."

"He knew me better than I knew myself," was my comment to Schilling. And I meant it—for I had not finished the demolition of the Coal combine when I began to realize that, whatever I might have thought of my own ambitions, I could never have tamed myself or been tamed into a devotee of dollars and of respectability. I simply had been keeping quiet until my tools were sharp and fate spun my opportunity within reach. But I must, in fairness, add, it was lucky for me that, when the hour struck, Roebuck was not twenty years younger and one-twentieth as rich. It's a heavy enough handicap, under the best of circumstances, to go to war burdened with years; add the burden of a monster fortune, and it isn't in human nature to fight well. Youth and a light knapsack!

But—to my fight on the big bank.

Until I opened fire, the public thought, in a general way, that a bank was an institution like Thornley's Discount and Deposit National—a place for the safe-keeping of money and for accommodating business men with loans to be used in carrying on and extending legitimate and useful enterprises. And there were many such banks. But the real object of the banking business, as exploited by the big bandits who controlled it and all industry, was to draw into a mass the money of the country that they might use it to manipulate the markets, to wreck and reorganize industries and wreck them again, to work off inflated bonds and stocks upon the public at inflated prices, to fight among themselves for rights to despoil, making the people pay the war budgets—in a word, to finance the thousand and one schemes whereby they and their friends and relatives, who neither produce nor help to produce, appropriate the bulk of all that is produced.

And before I finished with the National Industrial Bank, I had shown that it and several similar institutions in the big cities throughout the country were, in fact, so many dens to which rich and poor were lured for spoliation. I then took up the Universal Life, as a type. I showed how insuring was, with the companies controlled by the bandits, simply the decoy; that the real object was the same as the real object of the big bandit banks. When I had finished my series on the Universal Life I had named and pilloried Roebuck, Langdon, Melville, Wainwright, Updegraff, Van Steen, Epstein—the seven men of enormous wealth, leaders of the seven cliques that had the political and industrial United States at their mercy, and were plucking the people through an ever-increasing army of agents. The agents kept some of the feathers—"The Seven" could afford to pay liberally. But the bulk of the feather crop was passed on to "The Seven."

I shall answer in a paragraph the principal charges that were made against me. They say I bribed employees on the telegraph companies, and so got possession of incriminating telegrams that had been sent by "The Seven" in the course of their worst campaigns. I admit the charge. They say I bribed some of their confidential men to give me transcripts and photographs of secret ledgers and reports. I admit the charge. They say I bought translations of stenographic notes taken by eavesdroppers on certain important secret meetings. I admit the charge. But what was the chief element in my success in thus getting proofs of their crimes? Not the bribery, but the hatred that all the servants of such men have for them. I tempted no one to betray them. Every item, of information I got was offered to me. And I shall add these facts:

First, in not a single case did they suspect and discharge the "guilty" persons.

Second, I have to-day as good means of access to their secrets as I ever had—and, if they discharged all who now serve them, I should be able soon to reestablish my lines; men of their stripe can not hope to be served faithfully.

Third, I had offers from all but three of "The Seven" to "peach" on the others in return for immunity. There may be honor among some thieves, but not among "respectable" thieves. Hypocrisy and honor will be found in the same character when the sun shines at night—not before.

* * * * *

It was the sardonic humor of fate that Langdon, for all his desire to keep out of my way, should have compelled me to center my fire upon him; that I, who wished to spare him, if possible, should have been compelled to make of him my first "awful example."