I had decided to concentrate upon Roebuck, because he was the richest and most powerful of "The Seven." For, in my pictures of the three main phases of "finance"—the industrial, the life-insurance and the banking—he, as arch plotter in every kind of respectable skulduggery, was necessarily in the foreground. My original intention was to demolish the Power Trust—or, at least, to compel him to buy back all of its stock which he had worked off on the public. I had collected many interesting facts about it, facts typical of the conditions that "finance" has established in so many of our industries.

For instance, I was prepared to show that the actual earnings of the Power Trust were two and a half times what its reports to stock-holders alleged; that the concealed profits were diverted into the pockets of Roebuck, his sons, eleven other relatives and four of "The Seven," the lion's share going, of course, to the lion. Like almost all the great industrial enterprises, too strong for the law and too remote for the supervision of their stock-holders, it gathered in enormous revenues to disburse them chiefly in salaries and commissions and rake-offs on contracts to favorites. I had proof that in one year it had "written off" twelve millions of profit and loss, ten millions of which had found its way to Roebuck's pocket. That pocket! That "treasury of the Lord"!

Dishonest? Roebuck and most of the other leaders of the various gangs, comprising, with all their ramifications, the principal figures in religious, philanthropic, fashionable society, did not for an instant think their doings dishonest. They had no sense of trusteeship for this money intrusted to them as captains of industry bankers, life-insurance directors. They felt that it was theirs to do with as they pleased.

And they felt that their superiority in rank and in brains entitled them to whatever remuneration they could assign to themselves without rousing the wrath of a public too envious to admit the just claims of the "upper classes." They convinced themselves that without them crops would cease to grow, sellers and buyers would be unable to find their way to market, barbarism would spread its rank and choking weeds over the whole garden of civilization. And, so brainless is the parrot public, they have succeeded in creating a very widespread conviction that their own high opinion of their services is not too high, and that some dire calamity would come if they were swept from between producer and consumer! True, thieves are found only where there is property; but who but a chucklebrain would think the thieves made the property?

Roebuck was the keystone of the arch that sustained the structure of chicane. To dislodge him was the direct way to collapse it. I was about to set to work when Langdon, feeling that he ought to have a large supply of cash in the troublous times I was creating, increased the capital stock of his already enormously overcapitalized Textile Trust and offered the new issue to the public. As the Textile Trust was even better bulwarked, politically, than the Power Trust, it was easily able to declare tempting dividends out of its lootings. So the new stock could not be attacked in the one way that would make the public instantly shun it—I could not truthfully charge that it would not pay the promised dividends. Yet attack I must—for that issue was, in effect, a bold challenge of my charges against "The Seven." From all parts of the country inquiries poured in upon me: "What do you think of the new Textile issue? Shall we invest? Is the Textile Company sound?"

I had no choice. I must turn aside from Roebuck; I must first show that, while Textile was, in a sense, sound just at that time, it had been unsound, and would be unsound again as soon as Langdon had gathered in a sufficient number of lambs to make a battue worth the while of a man dealing in nothing less than seven figures. I proceeded to do so.

The market yielded slowly. Under my first day's attack Textile preferred fell six points, Textile common three. While I was in the midst of dictating my letter for the second day's attack, I suddenly came to a full stop. I found across my way this thought: "Isn't it strange that Langdon, after humbling himself to you, should make this bold challenge? It's a trap!"

"No more at present," said I, to my stenographer. "And don't write out what I've already dictated."

I shut myself in and busied myself at the telephone. Half an hour after I set my secret machinery in motion, a messenger brought me an envelop, the address type-written. It contained a sheet of paper on which appeared, in type-writing; these words, and nothing more:

"He is heavily short of Textiles."

It was indeed a trap. The new issue was a blind. He had challenged me to attack his stock, and as soon as I did, he had begun secretly to sell it for a fall. I worked at this new situation until midnight, trying to get together the proofs. At that hour—for I could delay no longer, and my proofs were not quite complete—I sent my newspapers two sentences:

"To-morrow I shall make a disclosure that will send Textiles up. Do not sell Textiles!"



XXXIII. MRS. LANGDON MAKES A CALL. Next day Langdon's stocks wavered, going up a little, going down a little, closing at practically the same figures at which they had opened. Then I sprang my sensation—that Langdon and his particular clique, though they controlled the Textile Trust, did not own so much as one-fiftieth of its voting stock. True "captains of industry" that they were, they made their profits not out of dividends, but out of side schemes that absorbed about two-thirds of the earnings of the Trust, and out of gambling in its bonds and stocks. I said in conclusion:

"The largest owner of the stock is Walter G. Edmunds, of Chicago—an honest man. Send your voting proxies to him, and he can take the Textile Company away from those now plundering it."

As the annual election of the Trust was only six weeks away, Langdon and his clique were in a panic. They rushed into the market and bought frantically, the public bidding against them. Langdon himself went to Chicago to reason with Edmunds—that is, to try to find out at what figure he could be bought. And so on, day after day, I faithfully reporting to the public the main occurrences behind the scenes. The Langdon attempt to regain control by purchases of stock failed. He and his allies made what must have been to them appalling sacrifices; but even at the high prices they offered, comparatively little of the stock appeared.

"I've caught them," said I to Joe—the first time, and the last, during that campaign that I indulged in a boast.

"If Edmunds sticks to you," replied cautious Joe.

But Edmunds did not. I do not know at what price he sold himself. Probably it was pitifully small; cupidity usually snatches the instant bait tickles its nose. But I do know that my faith in human nature got its severest shock.

"You are down this morning," said Thornley, when I looked in on him at his bank. "I don't think I ever before saw you show that you were in low spirits."

"I've found out a man with whom I'd have trusted my life," said I. "Sometimes I think all men are dishonest. I've tried to be an optimist like you, and have told myself that most men must be honest or ninety-five per cent. of the business couldn't be done on credit as it is."

Thornley smiled, like an old man at the enthusiasm of a youngster. "That proves nothing as to honesty," said he. "It simply shows that men can be counted on to do what it is to their plain interest to do. The truth is—and a fine truth, too—most men wish and try to be honest. Give 'em a chance to resist their own weaknesses. Don't trust them. Trust—that's the making of false friends and the filling of jails."

"And palaces," I added.

"And palaces," assented he. "Every vast fortune is a monument to the credulity of man. Instead of getting after these heavy-laden rascals, Matthew, you'd better have turned your attention to the public that has made rascals of them by leaving its property unguarded."

Fortunately, Edmunds had held out, or, rather, Langdon had delayed approaching him, long enough for me to gain my main point. The uproar over the Textile Trust had become so great that the national Department of Commerce dared not refuse an investigation; and I straightway began to spread out in my daily letters the facts of the Trust's enormous earnings and of the shameful sources of those earnings. Thanks to Langdon's political pull, the president appointed as investigator one of those rascals who carefully build themselves good reputations to enable them to charge higher prices for dirty work. But, with my facts before the people, whitewash was impossible.

I was expecting emissaries from Langdon, for I knew he must now be actually in straits. Even the Universal Life didn't dare lend him money; and was trying to call in the millions it had loaned him. But I was astounded when my private door opened and Mrs. Langdon ushered herself in.

"Don't blame your boy, Mr. Blacklock," cried she gaily, exasperatingly confident that I was as delighted with her as she was with herself. "I told him you were expecting me and didn't give him a chance to stop me."

I assumed she had come to give me wholly undeserved thanks for revenging her upon her recreant husband. I tried to look civil and courteous, but I felt that my face was darkening—her very presence forced forward things I had been keeping in the far background of my mind, "How can I be of service to you, Madam?" said I.

"I bring you good news," she replied—and I noted that she no longer looked haggard and wretched, that her beauty was once more smiling with a certain girlishness, like a young widow's when she finds her consolation. "Mowbray and I have made it up," she explained.

I simply listened, probably looking as grim as I felt.

"I knew you would be interested," she went on. "Indeed, it means almost as much to you as to me. It brings peace to two families."

Still I did not relax.

"And so," she continued, a little uneasy, "I came to you immediately."

I continued to listen, as if I were waiting for her to finish and depart.

"If you want, I'll go to Anita." Natural feminine tact would have saved her from this rawness; but, convinced that she was a "great lady" by the flattery of servants and shopkeepers and sensational newspapers and social climbers, she had discarded tact as worthy only of the lowly and of the aspiring before they "arrive."

"You are too kind," said I. "Mrs. Blacklock and I feel competent to take care of our own affairs."

"Please, Mr. Blacklock," she said, realizing that she had blundered, "don't take my directness the wrong way. Life is too short for pose and pretense about the few things that really matter. Why shouldn't we be frank with each other?"

"I trust you will excuse me," said I, moving toward the door—I had not seated myself when she did. "I think I have made it clear that we have nothing to discuss."

"You have the reputation of being generous and too big for hatred. That is why I have come to you," said she, her expression confirming my suspicion of the real and only reason for her visit. "Mowbray and I are completely reconciled—completely, you understand. And I want you to be generous, and not keep on with this attack. I am involved even more than he. He has used up his fortune in defending mine. Now, you are simply trying to ruin me—not him, but me. The president is a friend of Mowbray's, and he'll call off this horrid investigation, and everything'll be all right, if you'll only stop."

"Who sent you here?" I asked.

"I came of my own accord," she protested. Then, realizing from the sound of her voice that she could not have convinced me with a tone so unconvincing, she hedged with: "It was my own suggestion, really it was."

"Your husband permitted you to come—and to me?"

She flushed.

"And you have accepted his overtures when you knew he made them only because he needed your money?"

She hung her head. "I love him," she said simply. Then she looked straight at me and I liked her expression. "A woman has no false pride when love is at stake," she said. "We leave that to you men."

"Love!" I retorted, rather satirically, I imagine. "How much had your own imperiled fortune to do with your being so forgiving?"

"Something," she admitted. "You must remember I have children. I must think of their future. I don't want them to be poor. I want them to have the station they were born to." She went to one of the windows overlooking the street. "Look here!" she said.

I stood beside her. The window was not far above the street level. Just below us was a handsome victoria, coachman, harness, horses, all most proper, a footman rigid at the step. A crowd had gathered round—in those stirring days when I was the chief subject of conversation wherever men were interested in money—and where are they not?—there was almost always a crowd before my offices. In the carriage sat two children, a boy and a girl, hardly more than babies. They were gorgeously overdressed, after the vulgar fashion of aristocrats and apers of aristocracy. They sat stiffly, like little scions of royalty, with that expression of complacent superiority which one so often sees on the faces of the little children of the very rich—and some not so little, too. The thronging loungers, most of them either immigrant peasants from European caste countries or the un-disinfected sons of peasants, were gaping in true New York "lower class" awe; the children were literally swelling with delighted vanity. If they had been pampered pet dogs, one would have laughed. As they were human beings, it filled me with sadness and pity. What ignorance, what stupidity to bring up children thus in democratic America—democratic to-day, inevitably more democratic to-morrow! What a turning away from the light! What a crime against the children!

"For their sake, Mr. Blacklock," she pleaded, her mother love wholly hiding from her the features of the spectacle that for me shrieked like scarlet against a white background.

"Your husband has deceived you about your fortune, Mrs. Langdon," I said gently, for there is to me something pathetic in ignorance and I was not blaming her for her folly and her crime against her children. "You can tell him what I am about to say, or not, as you please. But my advice is that you keep it to yourself. Even if the present situation develops as seems probable, develops as Mr. Langdon fears, you will not be left without a fortune—a very large fortune, most people would think. But Mr. Langdon will have little or nothing—indeed, I think he is practically dependent on you now."

"What I have is his," she said.

"That is generous," replied I, not especially impressed by a sentiment, the very uttering of which raised a strong doubt of its truth. "But is it prudent? You wish to keep him—securely. Don't tempt him by a generosity he would only abuse."

She thought it over. "The idea of holding a man in that way is repellent to me," said she, now obviously posing.

"If the man happens to be one that can be held in no other way," said I, moving significantly toward the door, "one must overcome one's repugnance—or be despoiled and abandoned."

"Thank you," she said, giving me her hand. "Thank you—more than I can say." She had forgotten entirely that she came to plead for her husband. "And I hope you will soon be as happy as I am." That last in New York's funniest "great lady" style.

I bowed, and when there was the closed door between us, I laughed, not at all pleasantly. "This New York!" I said aloud. "This New York that dabbles its slime of sordidness and snobbishness on every flower in the garden of human nature. New York that destroys pride and substitutes vanity for it. New York with its petty, mischievous class-makers, the pattern for the rich and the 'smarties' throughout the country. These 'cut-out' minds and hearts, the best of them incapable of growth and calloused wherever the scissors of conventionality have snipped."

I took from my pocket the picture of Anita I always carried. "Are you like that?" I demanded of it. And it seemed to answer: "Yes,—I am." Did I tear the picture up? No. I kissed it as if it were the magnetic reality. "I don't care what you are!" I cried. "I want you! I want you!"

"Fool!" you are saying. Precisely what I called myself. And you? Is it the one you ought to love that you give your heart to? Is it the one that understands you and sympathizes with you? Or is it the one whose presence gives you visions of paradise and whose absence blots out the light?

I loved her. Yet I will say this much for myself: I still would not have taken her on any terms that did not make her really mine.



XXXIV. "MY RIGHT EYE OFFENDS ME"

Now that Updegraff is dead, I am free to tell of our relations.

My acquaintance with him was more casual than with any other of "The Seven." From the outset of my career I made it a rule never to deal with understrappers, always to get in touch with the man who had the final say. Thus, as the years went by, I grew into intimacy with the great men of finance where many with better natural facilities for knowing them remained in an outer circle. But with Updegraff, interested only in enterprises west of the Mississippi and keeping Denver as his legal residence and exploiting himself as a Western man who hated Wall Street, I had a mere bowing acquaintance. This was unimportant, however, as each knew the other well by reputation. Our common intimacies made us intimates for all practical purposes.

Our connection was established soon after the development of my campaign against the Textile Trust had shown that I was after a big bag of the biggest game. We happened to have the same secret broker; and I suppose it was in his crafty brain that the idea of bringing us together was born. Be that as it may, he by gradual stages intimated to me that Updegraff would convey me secrets of "The Seven" in exchange for a guarantee that I would not attack his interests. I do not know what his motive in this treachery was—probably a desire to curb the power of his associates in industrial despotism.

Each of "The Seven" hated and feared and suspected the other six with far more than the ordinary and proverbial rich man's jealous dislike of other rich men. There was not one of them that did not bear the ever-smarting scars of vicious wounds, front and back, received from his fellows; there was not one that did not cherish the hope of overthrowing the rule of Seven and establishing the rule of One. At any rate, I accepted Updegraff's proposition; henceforth, though he stopped speaking to me when we happened to meet, as did all the other big bandits and most of their parasites and procurers, he kept me informed of every act "The Seven" resolved upon.

Thus I knew all about their "gentlemen's agreement" to support the stock market, and that they had made Tavistock their agent for resisting any and all attempts to lower prices, and had given him practically unlimited funds to draw upon as he needed. I had Tavistock sounded on every side, but found no weak spot. There was no rascality he would not perpetrate for whoever employed him; but to his employer he was as loyal as a woman to a bad man. And for a time it looked as if "The Seven" had checkmated me. Those outsiders who had invested heavily in the great enterprises through which "The Seven" ruled were disposing of their holdings—cautiously, through fear of breaking the market. Money would pile up in the banks—money paid out by "The Seven" for their bonds and stocks, of which the people had become deeply suspicious. Then these deposits would be withdrawn—and I knew they were going into real estate investments, because news of booms in real estate and in building was coming in from everywhere. But prices on the Stock Exchange continued to advance.

"They are too strong for you," said Joe. "They will hold the market up until the public loses faith in you. Then they will sell out at top-notch prices as the people rush in to buy."

I might have wavered had I not been seeing Tavistock every day. He continued to wear his devil-may-care air; but I observed that he was aging swiftly—and I knew what that meant. Fighting all day to prevent breaks in the crucial stocks; planning most of the night how to prevent breaks the next day; watching the reserve resources of "The Seven" melt away. Those reserves were vast; also, "The Seven" controlled the United States Treasury, and were using its resources as their own; they were buying securities that would be almost worthless if they lost, but if they won, would be rebought by the public at the old swindling prices, when "confidence" was restored. But there was I, cannonading incessantly from my impregnable position; as fast as they repaired breaches in their walls, my big guns of publicity tore new breaches. No wonder Tavistock had thinner hair and wrinkles and a drawn look about the eyes, nose and mouth.

With the battle thus raging all along the line, on the one side "The Seven" and their armies of money and mercenaries and impressed slaves, on the other side the public, I in command, you will say that my yearning for distraction must have been gratified. If the road from his cell were long enough, the condemned man would be fretting less about the gallows than about the tight shoe that was making him limp and wince at every step. Besides, in human affairs it is the personal, always the personal. I soon got used to the crowds, to the big head-lines in the newspapers, to the routine of cannonade and reply.

But the old thorn, pressing persistently—I could not get used to that. In the midst of the adulation, of the blares upon the trumpets of fame that saluted my waking and were wafted to me as I fell asleep at night—in the midst of all the turmoil, I was often in a great and brooding silence, longing for her, now with the imperious energy of passion, and now with the sad ache of love. What was she doing? What was she thinking? Now that Langdon had again played her false for the old price, with what eyes was she looking into the future?

Alva, settled in a West Side apartment not far from the ancestral white elephant, telephoned, asking me to come. I went, because she could and would give me news of Anita. But as I entered her little drawing-room, I said: "It was curiosity that brought me. I wished to see how you were installed."

"Isn't it nice and small?" cried she. "Billy and I haven't the slightest difficulty in finding each other—as people so often have in the big houses." And it was Billy this and Billy that, and what Billy said and thought and felt—and before they were married, she had called him William, and had declared "Billy" to be the most offensive combination of letters that ever fell from human lips.

"I needn't ask if you are happy," said I presently, with a dismal failure at looking cheerful. "I can't stay but a moment," I added, and if I had obeyed my feelings, I'd have risen up and taken myself and my pain away from surroundings as hateful to me as a summer sunrise in a death-chamber.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, in some confusion. "Then excuse me." And she hastened from the room.

I thought she had gone to order, or perhaps to bring, the tea. The long minutes dragged away until ten had passed. Hearing a rustling in the hall, I rose, intending to take leave the instant she appeared. The rustling stopped just outside. I waited a few seconds, cried, "Well, I'm off. Next time I want to be alone, I'll know where to come," and advanced to the door. It was not Alva hesitating there; it was Anita.

"I beg your pardon," said I coldly.

If there had been room to pass I should have gone. What devil possessed me? Certainly in all our relations I had found her direct and frank, if anything, too frank. Doubtless it was the influence of my associations down town, where for so many months I had been dealing with the "short-card" crowd of high finance, who would hardly play the game straight even when that was the easy way to win. My long, steady stretch in that stealthy and sinuous company had put me in the state of mind in which it is impossible to credit any human being with a motive that is decent or an action that is not a dead-fall. Thus the obvious transformation in her made no impression on me. Her haughtiness, her coldness, were gone, and with them had gone all that had been least like her natural self, most like the repellent conventional pattern to which her mother and her associates had molded her. But I was saying to myself: "A trap! Langdon has gone back to his wife. She turns to me." And I loved her and hated her. "Never," thought I, "has she shown so poor an opinion of me as now."

"My uncle told me day before yesterday that it was not he but you," she said, lifting her eyes to mine. It is inconceivable to me now that I could have misread their honest story; yet I did.

"I had no idea your uncle's notion of honor was also eccentric," said I, with a satirical smile that made the blood rush to her face.

"That is unjust to him," she replied earnestly.

"He says he made you no promise of secrecy. And he confessed to me only because he wished to convince me that he had good reason for his high opinion of you."

"Really!" said I ironically. "And no doubt he found you open wide to conviction—now." This a subtlety to let her know that I understood why she was seeking me.

"No," she answered, lowering her eyes. "I knew—better than he."

For an instant this, spoken in a voice I had long given up hope of ever hearing from her, staggered my cynical conviction. But—"Possibly she thinks she is sincere," reasoned my head with my heart; "even the sincerest women, brought up as was she, always have the calculator underneath; they deny it, they don't know it often, but there it is; with them, calculation is as involuntary and automatic as their pulse." So, I said to her, mockingly: "Doubtless your opinion of me has been improving steadily ever since you heard that Mrs. Langdon had recovered her husband."

She winced, as if I had struck her. "Oh!" she murmured. If she had been the ordinary woman, who in every crisis with man instinctively resorts to weakness' strongest weakness, tears, I might have a different story to tell. But she fought back the tears in which her eyes were swimming and gathered herself together. "That is brutal," she said, with not a touch of haughtiness, but not humbly, either. "But I deserve it."

"There was a time," I went on, swept in a swift current of cold rage, "there was a time when I would have taken you on almost any terms. A man never makes a complete fool of himself about a woman but once in his life, they say. I have done my stretch—and it is over."

She sighed wearily. "Langdon came to see me soon after I left your house, and went to my uncle," she said. "I will tell you what happened."

"I do not wish to hear," replied I, adding pointedly, "I have been waiting ever since you left for news of your plans."

She grew white, and my heart smote me. She came into the room and seated herself. "Won't you stop, please, for a moment longer?" she said. "I hope that, at, least, we can part without bitterness. I understand now that everything is over between us. A woman's vanity makes her belief that a man cares for her die hard. I am convinced now—I assure you, I am. I shall trouble you no more about the past. But I have the right to ask you to hear me when I say that Langdon came, and that I myself sent him away; sent him back to his wife."

"Touching self-sacrifice," said I ironically.

"No," she replied. "I can not claim any credit. I sent him away only because you and Alva had taught me how to judge him better. I do not despise him as do you; I know too well what has made him what he is. But I had to send him away."

My comment was an incredulous look and shrug. "I must be going," I said.

"You do not believe me?" she asked.

"In my place, would you believe?" replied I. "You say I have taught you. Well, you have taught me, too—for instance, that the years you've spent on your knees in the musty temple of conventionality before false gods have made you—fit only for the Langdon sort of thing. You can't learn how to stand erect, and your eyes can not bear the light."

"I am sorry," she said slowly, hesitatingly, "that your faith in me died just when I might, perhaps, have justified it. Ours has been a pitiful series of misunderstandings."

"A trap! A trap!" I was warning myself. "You've been a fool long enough, Blacklock." And aloud I said: "Well, Anita, the series is ended now. There's no longer any occasion for our lying or posing to each other. Any arrangements your uncle's lawyers suggest will be made."

I was bowing, to leave without shaking hands with her. But she would not have it so. "Please!" she said, stretching out her long, slender arm and offering me her hand.

What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for her, I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile, that was, I doubt not, as mocking as my tone: "By all means let us be friends. And I trust you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel safer in our friendship when we are both on neutral ground."

As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I caught her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. "If I could only trust you, could only believe you!" I cried.

"You cared for me when I wasn't worth it," she said. "Now that I am more like what you once imagined me, you do not care."

Up between us rose Langdon's face—cynical, mocking, contemptuous. "Your heart is his! You told me so! Don't lie to me!" I exclaimed. And before she could reply, I was gone.

Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters and assassins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed again; believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me. "She would have given you a brief fool's paradise," said that devil. "Then what a hideous awakening!" And I cursed the day when New York's insidious snobbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that degrading chase after "respectability."

"If she does not move to free herself soon," said I to myself, "I will put my own lawyer to work. My right eye offends me. I will pluck it out."



XXXV. "WILD WEEK"

"The Seven" made their fatal move on treacherous Updegraff's treacherous advice, I suspect. But they would not have adopted his suggestion had it not been so exactly congenial to their own temper of arrogance and tyranny and contempt for the people who meekly, year after year, presented themselves for the shearing with fatuous bleats of enthusiasm.

"The Seven," of course, controlled directly, or indirectly, all but a few of the newspapers with which I had advertising contracts. They also controlled the main sources through which the press was supplied with news—and often and well they had used this control, and surprisingly cautious had they been not so to abuse it that the editors and the public would become suspicious. When my war was at its height, when I was beginning to congratulate myself that the huge magazines of "The Seven" were empty almost to the point at which they must sue for peace on my own terms, all in four days forty-three of my sixty-seven newspapers—and they the most important—notified me that they would no longer carry out their contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave as their reason, not the real one, fear of "The Seven," but fear that I would involve them in ruinous libel suits. I who had legal proof for every statement I made; I who was always careful to understate! Next, one press association after another ceased to send out my letter as news, though they had been doing so regularly for months. The public had grown tired of the "sensation," they said.

I countered with a telegram to one or more newspapers in every city and large town in the United States:

"'The Seven' are trying to cut the wires between the truth and the public. If you wish my daily letter, telegraph me direct and I will send it at my expense."

The response should have warned "The Seven." But it did not. Under their orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the letter. I got an injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt corporation fashion—they sent my matter, but so garbled that it was unintelligible. I appealed to the courts. In vain.

To me, it was clear as sun in cloudless noonday sky that there could be but one result of this insolent and despotic denial of my rights and the rights of the people, this public confession of the truth of my charges. I turned everything salable or mortgageable into cash, locked the cash up in my private vaults, and waited for the cataclysm.

Thursday—Friday—Saturday. Apparently all was tranquil; apparently the people accepted the Wall Street theory that I was an "exploded sensation." "The Seven" began to preen themselves; the strain upon them to maintain prices, if no less than for three months past, was not notably greater; the crisis would pass, I and my exposures would be forgotten, the routine of reaping the harvests and leaving only the gleanings for the sowers would soon be placidly resumed.

Sunday. Roebuck, taken ill as he was passing the basket in the church of which he was the shining light, died at midnight—a beautiful, peaceful death, they say, with his daughter reading the Bible aloud, and his lips moving in prayer. Some hold that, had he lived, the tranquillity would have continued; but this is the view of those who can not realize that the tide of affairs is no more controlled by the "great men" than is the river led down to the sea by its surface flotsam, by which we measure the speed and direction of its current. Under that terrific tension, which to the shallow seemed a calm, something had to give way. If the dam had not yielded where Roebuck stood guard, it must have yielded somewhere else, or might have gone all in one grand crash.

Monday. You know the story of the artist and his Statue of Grief—how he molded the features a hundred times, always failing, always getting an anti-climax, until at last in despair he gave up the impossible and finished the statue with a veil over the face. I have tried again and again to assemble words that would give some not too inadequate impression of that tremendous week in which, with a succession of explosions, each like the crack of doom, the financial structure that housed eighty millions of people burst, collapsed, was engulfed. I can not. I must leave it to your memory or your imagination.

For years the financial leaders, crazed by the excess of power which the people had in ignorance and over-confidence and slovenly good-nature permitted them to acquire, had been tearing out the honest foundations on which alone so vast a structure can hope to rest solid and secure. They had been substituting rotten beams painted to look like stone and iron. The crash had to come; the sooner, the better—when a thing is wrong, each day's delay compounds the cost of righting it. So, with all the horrors of "Wild Week" in mind, all its physical and mental suffering, all its ruin and rioting and bloodshed, I still can insist that I am justly proud of my share in bringing it about. The blame and the shame are wholly upon those who made "Wild Week" necessary and inevitable.

In catastrophes, the cry is "Each for himself!" But in a cataclysm, the obvious wise selfishness is generosity, and the cry is, "Stand together, for, singly, we perish." This was a cataclysm. No one could save himself, except the few who, taking my often-urged advice and following my example, had entered the ark of ready money. Farmer and artisan and professional man and laborer owed merchant; merchant owed banker; banker owed depositor. No one could pay because no one could get what was due him or could realize upon his property. The endless chain of credit that binds together the whole of modern society had snapped in a thousand places. It must be repaired, instantly and securely. But how—and by whom?

I issued a clear statement of the situation; I showed in minute detail how the people standing together under the leadership of the honest men of property could easily force the big bandits to consent to an honest, just, rock-founded, iron-built reconstruction. My statement appeared in all the morning papers throughout the land. Turn back to it; read it. You will say that I was right. Well—

Toward two o'clock Inspector Crawford came into my private office, escorted by Joe. I saw in Joe's seamed, green-gray face that some new danger had arisen. "You've got to get out of this," said he. "The mob in front of our place fills the three streets. It's made up of crowds turned away from the suspended banks."

I remembered the sullen faces and the hisses as I entered the office that morning earlier than usual. My windows were closed to keep out the street noises; but now that my mind was up from the work in which I had been absorbed, I could hear the sounds of many voices, even through the thick plate glass.

"We've got two hundred policemen here," said the inspector. "Five hundred more are on the way. But—really, Mr. Blacklock, unless we can get you away, there'll be serious trouble. Those damn newspapers! Every one of them denounced you this morning, and the people are in a fury against you."

I went toward the door.

"Hold on, Matt!" cried Joe, springing at me and seizing me, "Where are you going?"

"To tell them what I think of them," replied I, sweeping him aside. For my blood was up, and I was enraged against the poor cowardly fools.

"For God's sake don't show yourself!" he begged. "If you don't care for your own life, think of the rest of us. We've fixed a route through buildings and under streets up to Broadway. Your electric is waiting for you there."

"It won't do," I said. "I'll face 'em—it's the only way."

I went to the window, and was about to throw up one of the sunblinds for a look at them; Crawford stopped me. "They'll stone the building and then storm it," said he. "You must go at once, by the route we've arranged."

"Even if you tell them I'm gone, they won't believe it," replied I.

"We can look out for that," said Joe, eager to save me, and caring nothing about consequences to himself. But I had unsettled the inspector.

"Send for my electric to come down here," said I. "I'll go out alone and get in it and drive away."

"That'll never do!" cried Joe.

But the inspector said: "You're right, Mr. Blacklock. It's a bare chance. You may take 'em by surprise. Again, some fellow may yell and throw a stone and—" He did not need to finish.

Joe looked wildly at me. "You mustn't do it, Matt!" he exclaimed. "You'll precipitate a riot, Crawford, if you permit this."

But the inspector was telephoning for my electric. Then he went into the adjoining room, where he commanded a view of the entrance. Silence between Joe and me until he returned.

"The electric is coming down the street," said he.

I rose. "Good," said I. "I'm ready."

"Wait until the other police get here," advised Crawford.

"If the mob is in the temper you describe," said I, "the less that's done to irritate it the better. I must go out as if I hadn't a suspicion of danger."

The inspector eyed me with an expression that was highly flattering to my vanity.

"I'll go with you," said Joe, starting up from his stupor.

"No," I replied. "You and the other fellows can take the underground route, if it's necessary."

"It won't be necessary," put in the inspector. "As soon as I'm rid of you and have my additional force, I'll clear the streets." He went to the door. "Wait, Mr. Blacklock, until I've had time to get out to my men."

Perhaps ten seconds after he disappeared, I, without further words, put on my hat, lit a cigar, shook Joe's wet, trembling hand, left in it my private keys and the memorandum of the combination of my private vault. Then I sallied forth.

I had always had a ravenous appetite for excitement, and I had been in many a tight place; but for the first time there seemed to me to be an equilibrium between my internal energy and the outside situation. As I stepped from my street door and glanced about me, I had no feeling of danger. The whole situation seemed so simple. There stood the electric, just across the narrow stretch of sidewalk; there were the two hundred police, under Crawford's orders, scattered everywhere through the crowd, and good-naturedly jostling and pushing to create distraction. Without haste, I got into my machine. I calmly met the gaze of those thousands, quiet as so many barrels of gunpowder before the explosion. The chauffeur turned the machine.

"Go slow," I called to him. "You might hurt somebody."

But he had his orders from the inspector. He suddenly darted ahead at full speed. The mob scattered in every direction, and we were in Broadway, bound up town full-tilt, before I or the mob realized what he was about.

I called to him to slow down. He paid not the slightest attention. I leaned from the window and looked up at him. It was not my chauffeur; it was a man who had the unmistakable but indescribable marks of the plain-clothes policeman.

"Where are you going?" I shouted.

"You'll find out when we arrive," he shouted back, grinning.

I settled myself and waited—what else was there to do? Soon I guessed we were headed for the pier off which my yacht was anchored. As we dashed on to it, I saw that it was filled with police, both in uniform and in plain clothes. I descended. A detective sergeant stepped up to me. "We are here to help you to your yacht," he explained. "You wouldn't be safe anywhere in New York—no more would the place that harbored you."

He had both common sense and force on his side. I got into the launch. Four detective sergeants accompanied me and went aboard with me. "Go ahead," said one of them to my captain. He looked at me for orders.

"We are in the hands of our guests," said I. "Let them have their way."

We steamed down the bay and out to sea.

* * * * *

From Maine to Texas the cry rose and swelled:

"Blacklock is responsible! What does it matter whether he lied or told the truth? See the results of his crusade! He ought to be pilloried! He ought to be killed! He is the enemy of the human race. He has almost plunged the whole civilized world into bankruptcy and civil war." And they turned eagerly to the very autocrats who had been oppressing them. "You have the genius for finance and industry. Save us!"

If you did not know, you could guess how those patriots with the "genius for finance and industry" responded. When they had done, when their program was in effect, Langdon, Melville and Updegraff were the three richest men in the country, and as powerful as Octavius, Antony and Lepidus after Philippi. They had saddled upon the reorganized finance and industry of the nation heavier taxes than ever, and a vaster and more expensive and more luxurious army of their parasites.

The people had risen for financial and industrial freedom; they had paid its fearful price; then, in senseless panic and terror, they flung it away. I have read that one of the inscriptions on Apollo's temple at Delphi was, "Man, the fool of the farce." Truly, the gods must have created us for their amusement; and when Olympus palls, they ring up the curtain on some such screaming comedy as was that. It "makes the fancy chuckle, while the heart doth ache."



XXXVI. "BLACK MATT'S" TRIUMPH

My enemies caused it to be widely believed that "Wild Week" was my deliberate contrivance for the sole purpose of enriching myself. Thus they got me a reputation for almost superhuman daring, for satanic astuteness at cold-blooded calculation. I do not deserve the admiration and respect that my success-worshiping fellow countrymen lay at my feet. True, I did greatly enrich myself; but not until the Monday after Wild Week.

Not until I had pondered on men and events with the assistance of the newspapers my detective protectors and jailers permitted to be brought aboard—not until the last hope of turning Wild Week to the immediate public advantage had sputtered out like a lost man's last match, did I think of benefiting myself, of seizing the opportunity to strengthen myself for the future. On Monday morning, I said to Sergeant Mulholland: "I want to go ashore at once and send some telegrams."

The sergeant is one of the detective bureau's "dress-suit men." He is by nature phlegmatic and cynical. His experience has put over that a veneer of weary politeness. We had become great friends during our enforced inseparable companionship. For Joe, who looked on me somewhat as a mother looks on a brilliant but erratic son, had, as I soon discovered, elaborated a wonderful program for me. It included a watch on me day and night, lest, through rage or despondency, I should try to do violence to myself. A fine character, that Joe! But, to return, Mulholland answered my request for shore-leave with a soothing smile. "Can't do it, Mr. Blacklock," he said. "Our orders are positive. But when we put in at New London and send ashore for further instructions, and for the papers, you can send in your messages."

"As you please," said I. And I gave him a cipher telegram to Joe—an order to invest my store of cash, which meant practically my whole fortune, in the gilt-edged securities that were to be had for cash at a small fraction of their value.

This on the Monday after Wild Week, please note. I would have helped the people to deliver themselves from the bondage of the bandits. They would not have it. I would even have sacrificed my all in trying to save them in spite of themselves. But what is one sane man against a stampeded multitude of maniacs? For confirmation of my disinterestedness, I point to all those weeks and months during which I waged costly warfare on "The Seven," who would gladly have given me more than I now have, could I have been bribed to desist. But, when I was compelled to admit that I had overestimated my fellow men, that the people wear the yoke because they have not yet become intelligent and competent enough to be free, then and not until then did I abandon the hopeless struggle.

And I did not go over to the bandits; I simply resumed my own neglected personal affairs and made Wild Week at least a personal triumph.

There is nothing of the spectacular in my make-up. I have no belief in the value of martyrs and martyrdom. Causes are not won—and in my humble opinion never have been won—in the graveyards. Alive and afoot and armed, and true to my cause, I am the dreaded menace to systematic and respectable robbery. What possible good could have come of mobs killing me and the bandits dividing my estate?

But why should I seek to justify myself? I care not a rap for the opinion of my fellow men. They sought my life when they should have been hailing me as a deliverer; now, they look up to me because they falsely believe me guilty of an infamy.

My guards expected to be recalled on Tuesday. But Melville heard what Crawford had done about me, and straightway used his influence to have me detained until the new grip of the old gang was secure. Saturday afternoon we put in at Newport for the daily communication with the shore. When the launch returned, Mulholland brought the papers to me, lounging aft in a mass of cushions under the awning. "We are going ashore," said he. "The order has come."

I had a sudden sense of loneliness. "I'll take you down to New York," said I. "I prefer to land my guests where I shipped them."

As we steamed slowly westward I read the papers. The country was rapidly readjusting itself, was returning to the conditions before the upheaval. The "financiers"—the same old gang, except for a few of the weaker brethren ruined and a few strong outsiders, who had slipped in during the confusion—were employing all the old, familiar devices for deceiving and robbing the people. The upset milking-stool was righted, and the milker was seated again and busy, the good old cow standing without so much as shake of horn or switch of tail. "Mulholland," said I, "what do you think of this business of living?"

"I'll tell you, Mr. Blacklock," said he. "I used to fuss and fret a good deal about it. But I don't any more. I've got a house up in the Bronx, and a bit of land round it. And there's Mrs. Mulholland and four little Mulhollands and me—that's my country and my party and my religion. The rest is off my beat, and I don't give a damn for it. I don't care which fakir gets to be president, or which swindler gets to be rich. Everything works out somehow, and the best any man can do is to mind his own business."

"Mulholland—Mrs. Mulholland—four little Mulhollands," said I reflectively. "That's about as much as one man could attend to properly. And—you are 'on the level,' aren't you?"

"Some say honesty's the best policy," replied he. "Some say it isn't. I don't know, and I don't care, whether it is or it isn't. It's my policy. And we six seem to have got along on it so far."

I sent my "guests" ashore the next morning.

"No, I'll stay aboard," said I to Mulholland, as he stood aside for me to precede him down the gangway from the launch. I went into the watch-pocket of my trousers and drew out the folded two one-thousand-dollar bills I always carried—it was a habit formed in my youthful, gambling days. I handed him one of the bills. He hesitated.

"For the four little Mulhollands," I urged.

He put it in his pocket. I watched him and his men depart with a heavy heart. I felt alone, horribly alone, without a tie or an interest. Some of the morning papers spoke respectfully of me as one of the strong men who had ridden the flood and had been landed by it on the heights of wealth and power. Admiration and envy lurked even in sneers at my "unscrupulous plotting." Since I had wealth, plenty of wealth, I did not need character. Of what use was character in such a world except as a commodity to exchange for wealth?

"Any orders, sir?" interrupted my captain.

I looked round that vast and vivid scene of sea and land activities. I looked along the city's titanic sky-line—the mighty fortresses of trade and commerce piercing the heavens and flinging to the wind their black banners of defiance. I felt that I was under the walls of hell itself.

"To get away from this," replied I to the waiting captain. "Go back down the Sound—to Dawn Hill."

Yes, I would go to the peaceful, soothing country, to my dogs and horses and those faithful servants bound to me by our common love for the same animals. "Men to cross swords with, to amuse oneself with," I mused; "but dogs and horses to live with." I pictured myself at the kennels—the joyful uproar the instant instinct warned the dogs of my coming; how they would leap and bark and tremble in a very ecstasy of delight as I stood among them; how jealous all the others would be, as I selected one to caress.

"Send her ahead as fast as she'll go," I called to the captain.

As the Albatross steamed into the little harbor, I saw Mowbray Langdon's Indolence at anchor. I glanced toward Steuben Point—where his cousins, the Vivians, lived—and thought I recognized his launch at their pier. We saluted the Indolence; the Indolence saluted us. My launch was piped away and took me ashore. I strolled along the path that wound round the base of the hill toward the kennels. At the crossing of the path down from the house, I paused and lingered on the glimpse of one of the corner towers of the great showy palace. I was muttering something—I listened to myself. It was: "Mulholland, Mrs. Mulholland and the four little Mulhollands." And I felt like laughing aloud, such a joke was it that I should be envying a policeman his potato patch and his fat wife and his four brats, and that he should be in a position to pity me.

You may be imagining that, through all, Anita had been dominating my mind. That is the way it is in the romances; but not in life. No doubt there are men who brood upon the impossible, and moon and maunder away their lives over the grave of a dead love; no doubt there are people who will say that, because I did not shoot Langdon or her, or myself, or fly to a desert or pose in the crowded places of the world as the last scene of a tragedy, I therefore cared little about her. I offer them this suggestion: A man strong enough to give a love worth a woman's while is strong enough to live on without her when he finds he may not live with her.

As I stood there that summer day, looking toward the crest of the hill, at the mocking mausoleum of my dead dream, I realized what the incessant battle of the Street had meant to me. "There is peace for me only in the storm," said I. "But, thank God, there is peace for me somewhere."

Through the foliage I had glimpses of some one coming slowly down the zigzag path. Presently, at one of the turnings half-way up the hill, appeared Mowbray Langdon. "What is he doing here," thought I, scarcely able to believe my eyes. "Here of all places!" And then I forgot the strangeness of his being at Dawn Hill in the strangeness of his expression. For it was apparent, even at the distance which separated us, that he was suffering from some great and recent blow. He looked old and haggard; he walked like a man who neither knows nor cares where he is going.

He had not seen me, and my impulse was to avoid him by continuing on toward the kennels. I had no especial feeling against him; I had not lost Anita because she cared for him or he for her, but because she did not care for me—simply that to meet would be awkward, disagreeable for us both. At the slight noise of my movement to go on, he halted, glanced round eagerly, as if he hoped the sound had been made by some one he wished to see. His glance fell on me. He stopped short, was for an instant disconcerted; then his face lighted up with devilish joy. "You!" he cried. "Just the man!" And he descended more rapidly.

At first I could make nothing of this remark. But as he drew nearer and nearer, and his ugly mood became more and more apparent, I felt that he was looking forward to provoking me into giving him a distraction from whatever was tormenting him. I waited. A few minutes and we were face to face, I outwardly calm, but my anger slowly lighting up as he deliberately applied to it the torch of his insolent eyes. He was wearing his old familiar air of cynical assurance. Evidently, with his recovered fortune, he had recovered his conviction of his great superiority to the rest of the human race—the child had climbed back on the chair that made it tall and had forgotten its tumble. And I was wondering again that I, so short a time before, had been crude enough to be fascinated and fooled by those tawdry posings and pretenses. For the man, as I now saw him, was obviously shallow and vain, a slave to those poor "man-of-the-world" passions—ostentation and cynicism and skill at vices old as mankind and tedious as a treadmill, the commonplace routine of the idle and foolish and purposeless. A clever, handsome fellow, but the more pitiful that he was by nature above the uses to which he prostituted himself.

He fought hard to keep his eyes steadily on mine; but they would waver and shift. Not, however, before I had found deep down in them the beginnings of fear. "You see, you were mistaken," said I. "You have nothing to say to me—or I to you."

He knew I had looked straight to the bottom of his real self, and had seen the coward that is in every man who has been bred to appearances only. Up rose his vanity, the coward's substitute for courage.

"You think I am afraid of you?" he sneered, bluffing and blustering like the school bully.

"I don't in the least care whether you are or not," replied I. "What are you doing here, anyhow?"

It was as if I had thrown off the cover of a furnace. "I came to get the woman I love," he cried. "You stole her from me! You tricked me! But, by God, Blacklock, I'll never pause until I get her back and punish you!" He was brave enough now, drunk with the fumes from his brave words. "All my life," he raged arrogantly on, "I've had whatever I wanted. I've let nothing interfere—nothing and nobody. I've been too forbearing with you—first, because I knew she could never care for you, and, then, because I rather admired your pluck and impudence. I like to see fellows kick their way up among us from the common people."

I put my hand on his shoulder. No doubt the fiend that rose within me, as from the dead, looked at him from my eyes. He has great physical strength, but he winced under that weight and grip, and across his face flitted the terror that must come to any man at first sense of being in the angry clutch of one stronger than he. I slowly released him—I had tested and realized my physical superiority; to use it would be cheap and cowardly.

"You can't provoke me to descend to your level," said I, with the easy philosophy of him who clearly has the better of the argument.

He was shaking from head to foot, not with terror, but with impotent rage. How much we owe to accident! The mere accident of my physical superiority had put him at hopeless disadvantage; had made him feel inferior to me as no victory of mental or moral superiority could possibly have done. And I myself felt a greater contempt for him than the discovery of his treachery and his shallowness had together inspired.

"I shan't indulge in flapdoodle," I went on. "I'll be frank. A year ago, if any man had faced me with a claim upon a woman who was married to me, I'd probably have dealt with him as your vanity and what you call 'honor' would force you to try to deal with a similar situation. But I live to learn, and I'm, fortunately, not afraid to follow a new light. There is the vanity of so-called honor; there as also the demand of justice—of fair play. As I have told her, so I now tell you—she is free to go. But I shall say one thing to you that I did not say to her. If you do not deal fairly with her, I shall see to it that there are ten thorns to every rose in that bed of roses on which you lie. You are contemptible in many ways—perhaps that's why women like you. But there must be some good in you, or possibilities of good, or you could not have won and kept her love."

He was staring at me with a dazed expression. I rather expected him to show some of that amused contempt with which men of his sort always receive a new idea that is beyond the range of their narrow, conventional minds. For I did not expect him to understand why I was not only willing, but even eager, to relinquish a woman whom I could hold only by asserting a property right in her. And I do not think he did understand me, though his manner changed to a sort of grudging respect. He was, I believe, about to make some impulsive, generous speech, when we heard the quick strokes of iron-shod hoofs on the path from the kennels and the stables—is there any sound more arresting? Past us at a gallop swept a horse, on his back—Anita. She was not in riding-habit; the wind fluttered the sleeves of her blouse, blew her uncovered hair this way and that about her beautiful face. She sped on toward the landing, though I fancied she had seen us.

Anita at Dawn Hill—Langdon, in a furious temper, descending from the house toward the landing—Anita presently, riding like mad—"to overtake him," thought I. And I read confirmation in his triumphant eyes. In another mood, I suppose my fury would have been beyond my power to restrain it. Just then—the day grew dark for me, and I wanted to hide away somewhere. Heart-sick, I was ashamed for her, hated myself for having blundered into surprising her.

She reappeared at the turn round which she had vanished. I now tooted that she was riding without saddle or bridle, with only a halter round the horse's neck—then she had seen us, had stopped and come back as soon as she could. She dropped from the horse, looked swiftly at me, at him, at me again, with intense anxiety.

"I saw your yacht in the harbor only a moment ago," she said to me. She was almost panting. "I feared you might meet him. So I came."

"As you see, he is quite—intact," said I. "I must ask that you and he leave the place at once." And I went rapidly along the path toward the kennels.

An exclamation from Langdon forced me to turn in spite of myself. He was half-kneeling, was holding her in his arms. At that sight, the savage in me shook himself free. I dashed toward them with I knew not what curses bursting from me. Langdon, intent upon her, did not realize until I sent him reeling backward to the earth and snatched her up. Her white face, her closed eyes, her limp form made my fury instantly collapse. In my confusion I thought that she was dead. I laid her gently on the grass and supported her head, so small, so gloriously crowned, the face so still and sweet and white, like the stainless entrance to a stainless shrine. How that horrible fear changed my whole way of looking at her, at him, at her and him, at everything!

Her eyelids were quivering—her eyes were opening—her bosom was rising and falling slowly as she drew long, uncertain breaths. She shuddered, sat up, started up. "Go! go!" she cried. "Bring him back! Bring him back! Bring him—"

There she recognized me. "Oh," she said, and gave a great sigh of relief. She leaned against a tree and looked at Langdon. "You are still here? Then tell him."

Langdon gazed sullenly at the ground. "I can't," he answered. "I don't believe it. Besides—he has given you to me. Let us go. Let me take you to the Vivians." He threw out his arms in a wild, passionate gesture; he was utterly unlike himself. His emotion burst through and shattered pose and cynicism and hard crust of selfishness like the exploding powder bursting the shell. "I can't give you up, Anita!" he exclaimed in a tone of utter desperation. "I can't! I can't!"

But her gaze was all this time steadily on me, as if she feared I would go, should she look away. "I will tell you myself," she said rapidly, to me. "We—uncle Howard and I—read in the papers how they had all turned against you, and he brought me over here. He has been telegraphing for you. This morning he went to town to search for you. About an hour ago Langdon came. I refused to see him, as I have ever since the time I told you about at Alva's. He persisted, until at last I had the servant request him to leave the house."

"But now there's no longer any reason for your staying, Anita," he pleaded. "He has said you are free. Why stay when you would really no more be here than if you were to go, leaving one of your empty dresses?"

She had not for an instant taken her gaze from me; and so strange were her eyes, so compelling, that I seemed unable to move or speak.

But now she released me to blaze upon him—and never shall I forget any detail of her face or voice as she said to him: "That is false, Mowbray Langdon. I told you the truth when I told you I loved him!"

So violent was her emotion that she had to pause for self-control. And I? I was overwhelmed, dazed, stunned. When she went on, she was looking at neither of us. "Yes, I loved him, almost from the first—from the day he came to the box at the races. I was ashamed, poor creature that my parents had made me! I was ashamed of it. And I tried to hate him, and thought I did. And when he showed me that he no longer cared, my pride goaded me into the folly of trying to listen to you. But I loved him more than ever. And as you and he stand here, I am ashamed again—ashamed that I was ever so blind and ignorant and prejudiced as to compare him with"—she looked at Langdon—"with you. Do you believe me now—now that I humble myself before him here in your presence?"

I should have had no heart at all if I had not felt pity for him. His face was gray, and on it were those signs of age that strong emotion brings to the surface after forty. "You could have convinced me in no other way," he replied, after a silence, and in a voice I should not have recognized.

Silence again. Presently he raised his head, and with something of his old cynicism bowed to her.

"You have avenged much and many," said he. "I have often had a presentiment that my day of wrath would come."

He lifted his hat, bowed to me without looking at me, and, drawing the tatters of his pose still further over his wounds, moved away toward the landing.

I, still in a stupor, watched him until he had disappeared. When I turned to her, she dropped her eyes. "Uncle Howard will be back this afternoon," said she. "If I may, I'll stay at the house until he comes to take me."

A weary, half-suppressed sigh escaped from her. I knew how she must be reading my silence, but I was still unable to speak. She went to the horse, browsing near by; she stroked his muzzle. Lingeringly she twined her fingers in his mane, as if about to spring to his back! That reminded me of a thousand and one changes in her—little changes, each a trifle in itself, yet, taken all together, making a complete transformation.

"Let me help you," I managed to say. And I bent, and made a step of my hand.

She touched her fingers to my shoulder, set her narrow, graceful foot upon my palm. But she did not rise. I glanced up; she was gazing wistfully down at me.

"Women have to learn by experience just as do men," said she forlornly. "Yet men will not tolerate it."

I suppose I must suddenly have looked what I was unable to put into words—for her eyes grew very wide, and, with a cry that was a sigh and a sob, and a laugh and a caress all in one, she slid into my arms and her face was burning against mine.

"Do you remember the night at the theater," she murmured, "when your lips almost touched my neck?—I loved you then—Black Matt—Black Matt!"

And I found voice; and the horse wandered away.

* * * * *

What more?

How Langdon eased his pain and soothed his vanity? Whenever an old Babylonian nobleman had a misfortune, he used to order all his slaves to be lashed, that their shrieks and moans might join his in appeasing the god who was punishing him. Langdon went back to Wall Street, and for months he made all within his power suffer; in his fury he smashed fortunes, lowered wages, raised prices, reveled in the blasts of a storm of impotent curses. But you do not care to hear about that.

As for myself, what could I tell that you do not know or guess? Now that all men, even the rich, even the parasites of the bandits, groan under their tyranny and their taxes, is it strange that the resentment against me has disappeared, that my warnings are remembered, that I am popular? I might forecast what I purpose to do when the time is ripe. But I am not given to prophecy. I will only say that I think I shall, in due season, go into action again—profiting by my experience in the futility of trying to hasten evolution by revolution. Meanwhile—

As I write, I can look up from the paper, and out upon the lawn, at a woman—what a woman!—teaching a baby to walk. And, assisting her, there is a boy, himself not yet an expert at walking. I doubt if you'd have to glance twice at that boy to know he is my son. Well—I have borrowed a leaf from Mulholland's philosophy. I commend it to you.

THE END