V
A curious kind of cowardice has been growing on me of late. Whenever I feel the slightest pain or ache—a twinge I’d not have given a second thought to a year or so ago—I send post-haste for my doctor, the ridiculous, lying, flattering Hanbury. My intelligence forbids me to put the least confidence in him. I know he’d no more tell me or any other rich man a disagreeable truth than he’d tell one of his rich old women that she was past the age of pleasing men. Yet I send for Hanbury; and I swallow his lies about my health, and urge him on to feed me lies about my youthful appearance that are even more absurd. I’m thinking of employing him exclusively and keeping him by me—forcompanionship. Cress is worse than worthless except for business, Jack is getting stale and repetitive with age, and I badly need some one to amuse me, to take my mind off myself and my affairs and my family.
At this moment I happen to be in my mood for mocking my fears and follies about the end. The End!—I’m not afraid of what comes after. All the horror I’m capable of feeling goes into the thought of giving up my crown and my sceptre, my millions and my dominion over men and affairs. The afterward? I’ve never had either the time or the mind for the speculative and the intangible—at least not since I passed the sentimental period of youth.
Each day my power grows—and my love of power and my impatience of opposition. It seems to me sacrilege for any one to dare oppose me when I have so completely vindicatedmy right to lead and to rule. I understand those tyrants of history who used to be abhorrent to me—much could be said in defence of them. Once the power I now wield would have seemed tremendous. And it is tremendous. But I am so often galled by its limitations, more often still by the absurd obstacles that delay and fret me.
Early last month I found that down at Washington they were about to pass a law “regulating” railway rates, which means, of course, lowering them and cutting my dividends and disarranging my plans in general. I telephoned Senator ——, whom we keep down there to see that that sort of demagoguery is held in check, to come to me in New York at once. He appeared at my house the same evening, full of excuses and apologies. “The public clamour is so great,” said he, “and the arguments of the opposition areso plausible, that we simply have to do something. This bill is the least possible.”
I rarely argue with understrappers. I merely told him to go to my lawyer’s house, get the bill I had ordered drawn, take it back to Washington on the midnight train, and put it through. “You old women down there,” said I, “seem incapable of learning that the mob isn’t appeased, but is made hungrier, by getting what it wants. Humbug’s the only dish for it. Fill it full of humbug and it gets indigestion and wishes it had never asked for anything.”
My substitute was apparently more drastic than the other bill, but I had ordered into it a clause that would send it into the courts where we could keep it shuffling back and forth for years. To throw the demagogues off the scent, Senator —— had it introduced by one of the leaders of the opposition—as clever adealer in humbug as ever took command of a mob in order to set it brawling with itself at the critical moment. Our fellows pretended to yield with great reluctance to this “sweeping and dangerous measure,” and it went through both houses with a whirl.
The President was about to sign it when up started that scoundrel ——, who owes his fortune to me and who got his place on the recommendation of several of us who thought him a safe, loyal, honourable man. The rascal pointed out the saving clause in my bill and made such a stir in the newspapers that our scheme was apparently ruined.
I quietly took a regular express for Washington, keeping close to my drawing-room. By roundabout orders from me a telegram had been sent to a signal tower in the outskirts of Washington, and it halted the train. In the darkness I slipped away, hailed a cab, anddrove to ——’s house. He was taken completely by surprise—I suppose he thought I’d be afraid to come near him, or to try to reach him in any way with those nosing newspapers watching every move. The only excuse he could make for himself was a whine about “conscience.”
“I am taking the retaining fee of the people,” said he; “I must serve their interests just as I served you when I took your retainers.” This was his plea at the end of a two hours’ talk in which I had exhausted argument and inducement. I felt that gentleness and diplomacy were in vain. I released my temper—temper with me is not waste steam, but powder to be saved until it can be exploded to some purpose.
“We put you in office, sir,” I replied, “and we will put you out. You owe your honours to us, not to this mob you’re pandering to nowin the hope of getting something or other. We’ll punish you for your treachery if you persist in it. We’ll drop you back into obscurity, and you’ll see how soon your ‘people’ will forget you.”
He paled and quivered under the lash. “If the people were not so sane and patient,” said he, “they’d act like another Samson. They’d pull the palace down upon themselves for the pleasure of seeing you banqueting Philistines get your deserts.”
“Don’t inflict a stump speech on me,” said I, going to the door—it just occurred to me that he might publicly eject me from his house and so make himself too strong to be dislodged immediately. “Within six months you’ll be out of office—unless you come to your senses.”
So I left him. A greater fool I never knew. I can understand the out-in-the-cold fellowsnapping his fangs; but for the life of me I can’t understand a man with even a job as waiter or crumb-scraper at the banquet doing anything to get himself into trouble. He proved not merely a fool, but a weak fool as well; for, after a few days of thinking it over, he switched round, withdrew his objection, and explained it away—and so my bill was signed. But we are done with him. A man may be completely cured of an attack of insanity, but who would ever give him a position of trust afterward? Not I, for one. Too many men who have never gone crazy are waiting, eager to serve us.
Still, looking back over the incident, I am not satisfied with myself. I won, but I played badly. I must be careful—I am becoming too arrogant. If he had been a little stronger and cleverer, he would have had me thrown out of his house, and I don’t care to think what aposition that would have put me in, not only then, but also for the future. As long as I was engaged in hand-to-hand battle and had personally to take what I got, it was well to have an outward bearing that frightened the timid and made the easy-going anxious to conciliate me. But, now that I employ others to retrieve the game I bring down, it is wiser that I show courtesy and consideration. I get better service; I cause less criticism. Enemies are indispensable to a rising man—they put him on his mettle and make people look on him as important. But to a risen man they are either valueless or a hindrance, and, at critical moments, a danger.
It is one of the large ironies of life that when one has with infinite effort gained power, one dares not indulge in the great pleasure of openly exercising it, for fear of losing it. Not even I can eat my cake and have it.Sometimes success seems to me to mean rising to a height where one can more clearly see the things one cannot have.
And now luck, plus strong rowing and right steering, swept me on to another success—this time a brilliant marriage. The element of luck was particularly large in this instance, as in any matter where one of the factors is feminine. Every wise planner reduces the human element in his projects to the minimum, because human nature is as uncertain as chance itself. But while one can always rely, to a certain extent, upon the human element where it is masculine, where it is feminine there’s absolutely no more foundation than in a quicksand. The women not only unsettle the men, but they also unsettle themselves; and, acting always upon impulse, they are as likely as not to fly straight in the face of what is best for them. Women are incapable of cooperation.The only business they understand or take a genuine interest in is the capture of men—a business which each woman must pursue independently and alone.
Fortunately, Aurora, like most of the young women of our upper class, had been thoroughly trained in correct ideas of self-interest.
She was born in the purple. When she came into the world I had been a millionaire several years, and my wife and I had changed our point of view on life from that of the lower middle class in which we were bred (though we didn’t know it at the time, and thought ourselves “as good as anybody”), to that of the upper class, to which my genius forced our admission. Aurora was our first child to have a French nurse, the first to have teachers at home—a French governess and a German one.
James had gone to the public school and then to Phillips Exeter; Walter had gone to public school a little while, and then to ——, where he was prepared for Harvard, not in a mixed and somewhat motley crowd, as James was, but in a company made up exclusively of youths of his own class, the sons of those who are aristocratic by birth or by achievement. Aurora was even more exclusively educated. She—with difficulty, as we were still new to our position—was got into a small class of aristocratic children that met at the house of the parents of two of them. Each day she went there in one of our carriages with her French nursery governess, promoted to be her companion; and, when the class was over for the day, the companion called for her in the carriage and took her home.
All Aurora’s young friends were girls like herself, bred in the strictest ideas of the responsibilitiesof their station, and intent upon making a social success, and, of course, a successful marriage. At the time, my wife, who had not then been completely turned by the adulation my wealth had brought her, used to express to me her doubts whether these children were not too sordid. I was half inclined to agree with her, for it isn’t pleasant to hear mere babies talk of nothing but dresses and jewels, palaces and liveries and carriages, good “catches,” and social position. But I see now that there is no choice between that sort of education and sheer sentimentalism. It is far better that children who are to inherit millions and the responsibilities of high station should be over-sordid than over-sentimental. Sordidness will never lead them into the ruinous mischief of prodigality and bad marriages; sentimentalism is almost certain to do so.
My wife was extremely careful, as the mothers of our class must be, to scan the young men who were permitted to talk with Aurora. Only the eligible had the opportunity to get well acquainted with her—indeed, I believe Horton Kirkby was the first man she really knew well.
It was a surprise to me when Kirkby began to show a preference for her. His mother is one of the leaders of that inner circle of fashionable society which still barred the doors haughtily against us, though it admitted many who were glad to be our friends—perhaps I should saymyfriends. Kirkby himself keenly delighted in the power which his combination of vast wealth, old family, and impregnable social position gave him. Every one supposed he would marry in his own set. But Aurora got a chance at him, and—well, Aurora inherits something of my magnetism and luck.Kirkby’s coldness to me at the outset and his mother’s deliberately snubbing us again and again make me think his intentions were not then serious. But Aurora alternately fired and froze him with such skill that she succeeded in raising in his mind a doubt which had probably never entered it before—a doubt of his ability to marry any woman he might choose. So, she triumphed.
But after they were engaged she continued to play fast and loose with him. At first I thought this was only clever manœuvring on her part to keep him uncertain and interested. But I presently began to be uneasy and sent her mother to question her adroitly. “She says,” my wife reported to me, “that she can’t take him and she can’t give him up. She says there’s one thing she’d object to more than to marrying him, and that is to seeing some other girl marry him.”
“What nonsense!” said I; “I thought she was too well brought up for such folly.”
“You must admit Kirkby is—clammy,” replied my wife, always full of excuses for her children.
Before I could move to bring Aurora to her senses, Kirkby did it—by breaking off the engagement and transferring his attentions to Mary Stuyvesant, poor as poverty but beautiful and well born. Within a week Aurora had him back; within a fortnight she had the cards out for the wedding.
The presents began to pour in; two rooms down-stairs were filling with magnificence, and we had sent several van loads to the safety deposit vaults. There must have been close upon half a million dollars’ worth, including my gift of a forty-thousand-dollar tiara. Every one in the house was agitated. I had given my wife and daughtercarte blanche, releasingCress and Jack Ridley from attendance on me to assist them and to see that extravagance did not spread into absolutely wanton waste. But this does not mean that I was not in hearty sympathy with my wife’s efforts to make the full realisation of our social ambition a memorable occasion. On the contrary, I wanted precisely that; and I knew the way to accomplish it was by getting five cents’ worth for every five cents spent, not by imitating the wastefulness of the ignorant poor. I was willing that the dollars should fly; but I was determined that each one should hit the mark.
Jack Ridley said to me once: “Why, to you five hundred dollars is less than one dollar would be to me.”
“Not at all,” I replied; “we cling to five cents more tightly than you would to five dollars. We know the value of money becausewe have it; you don’t know because you haven’t.”
But the happiest, most interested person in all the household was my daughter Helen. She was to be maid of honour, and on the wedding day was to make her first appearance in a long dress. It seemed to me that she suddenly flashed out into wonderful beauty—a strange kind of beauty, all in shades of golden brown and having an air of mystery that moved even me to note and admire and be proud—and a little uneasy. Obviously she would be able to make a magnificent marriage, if she could be controlled. The greater the prize, the greater the anxiety until it is grasped.
When she tried on that first long dress of hers she came in to show herself off to me. She has never been in the least afraid of me—there is a fine, utter courage looking fromher eyes—an assurance that she could not be afraid of any one or anything.
She turned round slowly, that I might get the full effect. “Well, well!” said I, put into a tolerant mood by my pride in her. “Aurora had better keep you out of Horton’s sight until after the ceremony.”
She tossed her head. “He’d be safe from me if there wasn’t another man in the world,” she answered.
I frowned on this. “You’ll have a hard time making as good a marriage as your sister, miss,” said I. “You’ll see, when we begin to look for a husband for you.”
“I shall look for my own husband, thank you,” she replied, pertly.
But her smile was so bright that I only said, “We’ll cross that bridge, miss, when we come to it—we’ll cross it together.”
There was an unpleasant silence—her expressionmade me feel more strongly than ever before that she would be troublesome. I said: “How old are you now?”
“Why, don’t you remember? I was sixteen last Wednesday. You gave methis.” She touched a pearl brooch at her neck.
No, I didn’t remember—Ridley attends to all those little matters for me. But I said, “To be sure,” and patted her on the shoulder—and let her kiss me, and then sent her away. For a moment I envied the men whose humble station enables them to enjoy more of such intercourse as that. I confess I have my moments when all this striving and struggling after money and power seems miserably unsatisfactory, and I picture myself and my fellow strugglers as so many lunatics in a world full of sane people whom we toil for and give a bad quarter of an hour now and then as our lunacy becomes violent.
But that is a passing mood.
The next I heard of Helen she had set the whole house in an uproar. Two days before the wedding she shut herself in her apartment and sent out word by her maid that she would not be maid of honour—would not attend the wedding. “I can do nothing with her,” said my wife; “she’s been beyond my control for two years.”
“I’ll go to her,” I said. “We’ll see who’s master in this house.”
She herself opened her sitting-room door for me. She had a book in her hand and was apparently calm and well prepared. The look in her eyes made me think of what my wife had once said to me: “Be careful how you try to bully her, James. She’s like you—and Jim.”
“What’s this I hear about you refusing to appear in your first long dress?” I asked—avery different remark, I’ll admit, from the one I intended to open with.
She smiled faintly, but did not take her serious eyes from mine. “I can’t go to the wedding,” said she. “Please, father, don’t ask it! I—I hoped they wouldn’t tell you. I told them they might say I was ill.”
I managed to look away from her and collect my thoughts. “You are the youngest,” I began, “and we have been foolishly weak with you. But the time has come to bring you under control and save you from your own folly. Understand me! You will go to the wedding, and you will go as maid of honour.” I was master of myself again and I spoke the last words sternly, and was in the humour for a struggle. She had roused one of my strongest passions—the passion for breaking wills that oppose mine.
There was a long pause, and then she said,quietly: “Very well, father. I shall obey you.”
I was like a man who has flung himself with all his might against what he thinks is a powerful obstacle and finds himself sprawling ridiculously upon vacancy. I lost my temper. “What do you mean,” I exclaimed, angrily, “by making all this fuss about nothing? You will go at once and apologise to your mother and sister.”
She sat silent, her eyes down.
“Do you hear?” I demanded.
She fixed her gaze steadily on mine. “Yes, sir,” she answered, “but I cannot obey.”
“How dare you say that to me?” I said, so furious that I was calm. I had a sense of impotence—as if the irresistible force had struck the immovable body.
“Because what you ask isn’t right.”
“You forget that I am your father.”
“And you forget that I am”—she drew herself up proudly and looked at me unafraid—“your daughter.”
There seems to be some sort of magic in her. I can’t understand it myself, but her answer completely changed my feeling toward her. It had never before occurred to me that the fact of her being my daughter gave her rights and privileges which would be intolerable in another. I saw family pride for the first time and instantly respected it. “If I only had a son like you!” I said, on impulse, for the moment forgetting everything else in this new conception of family line and its meaning.
The tears rushed to her eyes. She leaned forward in her eagerness. “Youhad—youhave,” she said. “Oh, father——”
“Not another word,” I said, sternly; “why did you refuse to go to Aurora’s wedding?”
“Tuesday night she came into my room andgot into my bed. She put her arms round me and said, ‘Helen, Ican’tmarry him! He’s—he’s justawful! It makes me cold all over for him to touch me.’ We talked nearly all night—and—I feel sorry for her—but I felt it would be wrong for me to go to the wedding or have anything to do with it. She wouldn’t break it off—she said she’d go on if it killed her. And I begged her to go to you and ask you to stop it, but she said she wanted to marry him or she wouldn’t. And—but when you said I must go, it seemed to me it’d be wrong to disobey. Only—I can’t apologise to them—I can’t—because—I’ve done nothing to apologise for.”
“Never mind, child,” I said—I felt thoroughly uncomfortable. It is impossible clearly to explain many matters to an innocent mind. “You need not apologise. But pay no attention to Aurora’s hysterics—and enjoyyourself at the wedding. Girls always act absurdly when they’re about to marry. Six months from now she’ll be the happiest woman in New York, and if she didn’t marry him she’d be the most wretched.”
“Poor Aurora!” said Helen, with a long sigh.
But Helen could not have said “poor” Aurora on the great day at St. Bartholomew’s. It was, indeed, an hour of triumph for us all. As she and Kirkby came down from the altar, I glanced round the church and had one of my moments of happiness. There they all were—all the pride and fashion and established wealth of New York—all of them at my feet. I, who had sprung from nothing; I, who had had to fight, fight, fight, staking everything—yes, character, even liberty itself—here was I, enthroned, equal to the highest, able to put my heel upon the necks of those who had regardedme as part of the dirt under their feet. I went down the aisle of the church, drunk with pride and joy. I had not had such happiness since that day when, smarting under Judson’s insults, I suddenly remembered that, if he had honour, I had the million and was a millionaire. As my wife and I drove back to the house for the reception, I caught myself muttering to the crowds pushing indifferently along the sidewalks, intent upon their foolish little business, “Bow! Bow! Don’t you know that one of your masters is passing?”
Just as I was in the full swing of this ecstasy I happened to notice a huge stain on the costly cream-coloured lining of the brougham—I was in my wife’s carriage. “What’s that?” said I, pointing to it.
She told a silly story of how she had carelessly broken a bottle in the carriage a fewdays before and had ruined a seven-hundred-dollar dress and the carriage-lining.
Instantly the routine of my life claimed me—my happiness was over. I made the natural comment upon such criminal indifference to the cost of things; she retorted after her irrational, irresponsible fashion. We were soon quarrelling fiercely upon the all-important subject, money, which she persists in denouncing as vulgar. We could scarcely compose our faces to leave the carriage and make a proper appearance before the crowds without the house and the throngs within. As for me, my day was ruined.
But the reception was, in fact, a failure, though it seemed a success. Aurora, the excitement of the ceremony over, was looking wretched; and, as she came down to go away, her face was tragical. I could feel the hypocritical whisperings of my guests. Exasperated,I turned, only to stumble on Helen, crying as if her heart were breaking. My new son-in-law bade me good-bye with a cold, condescending shake of the hand, and in a voice that made me long to strike him. It set me to gnawing again on what Helen heard at the dancing class three years ago. When every one had gone my wife came to me, her eyes sparkling with anger.
“Did you see old Mrs. Kirkby leave?” she asked.
“No—she must have gone without speaking to me,” I replied.
“She left less than a minute after Aurora and Horton. When I put out my hand to her she just touched it with the tips of her fingers, and all she said was, ‘I hope we’ll run across each other at my son’s, some time.’”
“They’ll change their tune when I get after them!” I exclaimed.
“What canyoudo?” sneered my wife. “They know your money goes to Walter. Besides, it’s all your fault.”
“Myfault?” I said, in disgust—everything is always my fault, according to my wife.
“Yes—it’s your reputation,” she retorted, bitterly. “It’ll take two generations of respectability to live it down.”
I left the room abruptly. The injustice of this was so hideous that reply was impossible. After all my sacrifices, after all my stupendous achievements, after lifting my family from obscurity to the highest dignity—thiswas my reward! Yes, the highest dignity. I know how they sneer. I know how they whisper the ugly word that Helen heard at the dancing class. I see it in their eyes when I take them unawares. But—they cringe before me, they fear me, and they dare not offend me. What more could I ask? Whatdo I care about their cowardly mutterings which they dare not let me hear?
In the upper hall I came upon Helen, sitting in the alcove, sobbing. “Poor Aurora! Poor Aurora!” she said, when I paused before her.
“Poor Aurora!” I retorted, angrily. “Your sister is married to one of the richest men in New York.”
“He tried to kiss me as they were leaving,” she went on, between sobs, “and I drew away and slapped him. When Aurora hugged me she whispered, ‘I don’t blame you—I detest him!’ Poor Aurora!”
I went into my apartment and slammed the door. I knew how it would turn out, and this hysterical nonsense infuriated me.
“I came upon Helen, sitting in the alcove, sobbing.”
When Aurora and Kirkby came back from their trip through the South and burst in on us at lunch [it was a Sunday], probably I wasthe only one at the table who wasn’t surprised by their looks. Helen, I knew, had been expecting Aurora would return with a face like the last scene of the last act of a tragedy. Instead she was radiant, beautifully dressed, and with an assurance of manner that was immensely becoming to her—the assurance of a woman who is conscious of having married brilliantly and is determined to enjoy her good fortune to the uttermost. It was plain that she was on the best possible terms with Kirkby. As for him, he looked foolishly happy and was obviously completely under her control, as I knew he would be. He is certainly in himself not a dignified figure—short and fat and sallow and amazingly ordinary-looking for a man of such birth and breeding. But the instant people hear who he is, they forget his face, figure, and mind. In this world, what things really are is not important; it’s altogetherwhat they seem to be, altogether the valuation agreed upon. I’ve sometimes watched the children at their games, “playing” that pins and rags have fantastic big values; and I’ve thought how ridiculous it was to smile at them and keep serious faces over our own grown-up game of precisely the same kind.
Aurora had been sending home the newspapers of every town in which they had stopped, so we had a pretty good idea of the ovation they had received. But as soon as she was alone with us she went over it all—and we were as proud as was she. “I don’t think Horton liked it particularly, but there wasn’t a place where they didn’t know more about me than about him,” said she. “You noticed, didn’t you, that the papers often said, ‘James Galloway’s daughter and her husband’? Horton was awfully funny about the excitement over us. At first he kept up the pretence withme that he thought it vulgar. But he soon cut that out and fairly devoured the newspapers. Of course we didn’t drop our exclusiveness before people—everywhere they talked about how anxious we were to avoid notoriety. Whenever the reporters came near us, my! but didn’t Horton sit on them.”
She made only one criticism of him—and that a laughing one. “You thought,” said she, “that we started in a private car. Well, we didn’t. When I got to Jersey City he put me into a stuffy old regular Pullman with all sorts of people. And he said, with the grandest air, ‘I took the drawing-room, as I thought you’d like privacy.’ I saw that it was my time to assert myself.” She laughed. “We had a little talk,” she went on, “and at Philadelphia he rushed round and got a private car.”
She soon brought his mother to terms. Mrs. Kirkby called on my wife three days after theygot back, and took her driving the following afternoon. That drive is one of the important events in my career. It marks the completion of my conquest of New York. Thinking it over, I decided to double Aurora’s portion under my will. Next to Judson, she has been the most useful person to me—no, not next to Judson, but without exception. I should have got my million-dollar start somehow, if I had never seen him; but I should have had some difficulty in reaching my climax if I had not had Aurora.
My flood-tide of luck held through one more event—the settlement with Natalie.
Naturally, I had put a good deal of thought upon this problem. The longer I considered it the more clearly I realised that to give her anything at all would be an act of sheer generosity, perhaps of dangerous generosity. As I have said before, it did not take me long toabsolve myself from the impossible letter of my promise. If I had been capable of keeping a promise to give six million dollars—the sum necessary to produce “anincome of a quarter of a million”—to a person whom it was absolutely vital to have financially dependent upon me, I should have accomplished very little in the world. At first my decision to keep the spirit of my promise by giving “theincome of a quarter of a million” seemed as fair as it was liberal. But now that she was safely married to my son, I began to see that to give her anything would be to strike a blow at his domestic happiness, and that would mean striking a blow at her own happiness. It could not fail to unsettle her mind to find herself with an independent income of ten or twelve thousand a year in addition to the five or six thousand she already had. Nothing else is so certain to destroy a husband’s influenceor to unfit a wife contentedly to fill her proper place in the family as for her to be financially independent.
I have never been lacking in the courage to do right, no matter what moral quibble or personal unpleasantness has stood in the way. I resolved not to give her anything outright, but, instead, to provide for her in my will—the income of a quarter of a million, to be hers for life, unless Walter should die and she marry again.
There now remained only the comparatively simple matter of reconciling her to this arrangement when she was expecting at once to receive the equivalent of six millions, free from conditions.
A weak man would have put off the issue until the last moment, through dislike of disagreeable scenes. But I am not one of those who aggravate difficulties by postponing them.The day after Walter and Natalie sailed from the other side for the homeward journey, I sent for her father. “Matt,” said I, “as you probably remember, I made up my mind to do something for your daughter as soon as she decided to become my daughter, too. I finally got round to it this morning. I thought I’d tell you I had made the necessary changes in my will.”
He looked at me narrowly, with an expression between wonder and suspicion. “I don’t understand,” said he.
“I promised your daughter she should have the income of a quarter of a million,” I replied, “and this morning I put the necessary provision into my will.”
His mouth dropped open. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief several times. Then all of a sudden he flushed a violent red and struck the table with his fist. “Why,damn it, Galloway,” he exclaimed, “you promised her you’d settleanincome of a quarter of a million on her at once.”
I looked at him as if I thought him crazy. “Where did you get that notion?” said I. “I never heard of anything so preposterous. Did you think I’d gone stark mad?” I let him see that I was getting angry.
“She told me so—told me within an hour of your promising it,” he replied. “And, by heavens, you’ll stick to your promise!” He banged the table with his fist again.
As I had made clear my intention—which was my only purpose for that first interview—I rose. “I permit no man to talk to me in that fashion,” said I; “not even an old friend who has apparently gone out of his mind. I do not care to discuss the matter further.”
I went into my inner office and shut him out. I knew he was too practical a man everreally to have believed that I intended to give his daughter any such stupendous sum. I was certain he had pretended to her that he believed it, because he was as eager for her to marry Walter as I was. Assuming that he did believe it, he could not but see there was nothing but disaster for him in offending me. Therefore, I had not the slightest fear that he would persist in his anger; I knew he would calm down, would at most cook up some scheme for trying to frighten some sort of a settlement out of me, and would break the news to his daughter at the first opportunity, so that he might caution her against doing anything foolish on impulse.
I heard nothing from him and did not see him again until we all went down to the dock to meet Walter and Natalie. The exchange of greetings between the two families was far from cordial, her father and I barely noddingat each other. Natalie and her mother and Walter went up-town together. I saw that her mother could hardly wait to get her alone so that she could tell her and coach her.
I did not permit her to see me in circumstances in which she could have talked freely until nearly two weeks had passed. Then, her friendly manner was rather strained, but she said nothing about her settlement—and, of course, I’m not the one to poke a sleeping dog. I was delighted to find such a striking confirmation of my good opinion of her. Doubtless she doesn’t feel especially kindly toward me, but she has given no sign—and that is the important fact. A less intelligent woman would not have seen how useless it was to make a fight, or would have given way to her temper just for the pleasure of relieving her feelings.
To these two triumphs was now added a third, which, in its many-sidedness, gave me more satisfaction than either of the others.
It came in the course of my campaign to push out of my industrial combination the minor elements that had to be conciliated when I was forming it. These were the little fellows who were the chief original owners of the various concerns of which it was composed. They were no longer of the slightest use to the industry; they were simply clinging to it, mere parasites fattening upon my brains. I felt that the time had come for shaking them off, and forcing them to give up their holdings. I needed every share either for my own investment purposes or to bind to me the men I had put in direct charge.
Having always had the shaking off of the parasites in mind, I had never let the combination develop its full earning capacity. As myfirst move toward complete possession, I caused it to be given out that I was privately much disappointed with the outlook for the industry and for the combination, and was thinking of disposing of my holdings quietly. When this rumour that I was about to “unload” was brought to my attention, I refused either to confirm or to deny it. I followed this with some slight manipulations of rates, prices, and the stock market. I was, of course, careful to do nothing violent. I never forget, nowadays, that I am one of the bulwarks of conservatism and stability; I and my fellow-occupants of the field of high finance sternly repress all the stock-raiding moves of the little fellows who are struggling to get together in a hurry the millions that would enable them to break into our company.
My moves against my combination sent its stock slowly down. The minority stockholdersunloaded—the most timid upon the least timid; then, as fear spread and infected the most hopeful among them, all unloaded upon the public. Finally, I gave the stock a hard blow that sent it tumbling—almost openly I sold ten thousand shares, and the sale was regarded by the public as ominously significant, because it was known that I no longer speculated, and that I frowned upon speculation and speculators. When I had gathered in what I wanted, at bottom prices, I came to the rescue, put up the price with a strong hand, denounced those who had attacked it, expressed my great faith in the future of the industry and of my combination—and caught in the net, along with a lot ofbona fidesellers, a vast shoal of wriggling and gasping speculators in “shorts.”
The one of these fish that peculiarly interested me was—my son Walter. I knew hewould be there, and had known it since the third week of my campaign. As I have never permitted him to see into the machinery of my financial plant, he fancied that he could operate without my finding it out. But one of my spies had brought the news to my chief brokers when he placed his second selling order. I was astonished that another son of mine had gone into such low and stupid and even dishonourable business—yes, dishonourable. My own speculative operations were never of the petty character and for the petty purposes that constitute gambling. I sent at once for a transcript of his bank account—a man in my position must have at his command every possible source of inside information and I have made getting at bank accounts one of my specialties. My astonishment became amazement when I learned that four cash items in that account, making in the total nearly the whole of hisgambling capital, were four checks for fifty thousand dollars each—from his mother!
I had tried many times to get hold of her bank account; but she, partly through craft, partly through the perversity of luck, did business with one of the banks into whose secrets I had never been able to penetrate. I understand at a glance where the two hundred thousand had come from. They were her “commissions” got from me by stealth, by juggling household and personal accounts. I saw that I had the opportunity to give Walter a vivid lesson, to get back my money, and to reduce my wife once more to a proper complete dependence. So I talked business with Walter a great deal during those three months, taking always a gloomy view of prospects of my combination. From time to time through my spies I learned that he was eagerly taking advantage of these “tips,” was plunging deeperand deeper in his betting that the stock of my industrial would continue to fall. When I suddenly put up the price of the stock, he was on the wrong side of the market to the extent of all his cash, and, like scores of other fools, far beyond.
I went home to lunch on the day I hauled in my net, for I wished to be where I could brand the lesson indelibly upon my wife. I had ordered my men to give out my strong statement and to rocket the market not earlier than a quarter past one and not later than half past—our lunch hour. We had been at table about ten minutes when my wife was called away to the telephone. She was in high good-humour as she left the room; indeed, for nearly two months her confident hopes of profits that would give her a million or more in her own right had made her almost youthful in looks and in spirits. She was gone a longtime, so long that I was just sending for her when she entered. The change in her was shocking. For a moment I was alarmed lest my lesson had been too severe.
Helen started up, upsetting her chair in her fright at her mother’s grey old face. “Mother!” she exclaimed, “what is it?”
Her mother tried to smile, but gave me a frightened, cowed glance. “I—I—I’m not well all of a sudden,” she said. Then she abruptly left the room, Helen following her.
As I and Ridley and Cress were smoking our after-lunch cigars, she sent for me. I found her alone in her darkened sitting-room, lying on the lounge. She asked me to sit, and then she began: “I wish to speak to you about—about Walter.”
“About his gambling?” said I.
She did not move or speak for fully a minute. It was so dark in her corner that I couldnot see her distinctly; besides, when I spoke, she had quickly covered her face. At length she said: “So you knew all the time? You set this trap for——”
“Both of you,” I said, as I saw that she did not intend to complete her sentence.
Presently she went on: “Then I needn’t explain. What I want to say is—it’s all my fault that Walter did it. He’s down at your office now. He didn’t have a chance to cover, the stock went up so fast. He’s lost everything, and—but I suppose it’s to you that he’s in debt. I’m sick—sick in body, and sick in mind. I give up. I’ve made my last fight. All I ask is—don’t punish him for what’s all my fault.”
“Your fault?” said I, my curiosity roused.
“I wished to be free,” she replied. “I wished them to be free. I tried through James when I saw how certain it was he couldnever get on with you. Then I tried through Walter when I saw how you were crushing him and Natalie.”
“So you set James to gambling?”
“Yes—and I’d have confessed, but there were the other children just at the age when they most needed me to protect them from you. And—I—I—couldn’t. Besides, he begged me not to—and there was his forgery. I never thought he had it in him to do that.”
“But he wasyourson,” said I, “and he hadyourexample. He knew how you got the money you gave him——”
“Oh, don’t! don’t—please don’t!” she wailed, breaking down altogether. “If you could see yourself as others, as my children and I see you, you’d understand—No! No! I don’t mean that. Forgive me—and don’t punish Walter for my sins.” She burst intosuch a wild passion of sobs and tears that I rang for her maid, and, when she came, left to go down-town.
In my office sat Walter, looking dejected, but far from the sorry figure I had expected to see. He followed me into my inside room and stood near my desk, his eyes down.
“Well, sir!” said I, sternly. In fact, I was not the least bit angry; my complete victory, and the recovery of my control over my family had put me in a serene frame of mind. “Your mother has told me everything,” I added, not wishing him to irritate me with any lies.
“But she doesn’t know everything,” said he, “I risked half of Natalie’s money—and—I—her father loaned me two hundred thousand.”
I frowned still more heavily to conceal thesatisfaction this news gave me. “Did Bradish know what you were going to do with the money?” I demanded.
“Yes,” replied Walter, in a voice that must have come out of a desert-dry throat. “He—he went twenty thousand shares short on his own account.”
This was better and better. For the first time in years I felt like laughing aloud. “You didn’t by any chance draw Kirkby in?” I asked, with a pretence of sarcasm.
Walter shook his head. “No—Kirkby doesn’t care about stocks.”
That gave me a chance to laugh. But it wasn’t a kind of laughter that Walter found contagious. If anything, he got a few shades whiter. “I’ve known you were in this for two months and a half,” said I. “I wished to give you an object-lesson that would make you appreciate why Kirkby doesn’t care about stocks.I’ve known every move you made—we who rule down here always know about the small people, about the idiots like you. We are rarely able to fool each other; what chance have you and your kind got? I told you all this, and now I’ve taught it to you. I’ve not decided on your punishment yet. But one thing I can tell you: if you ever go into the market again, you will—join your ex-brother!”
He was silent for a moment, then began: “Mother——”
“I know about her,” I interrupted. “I wish to hear nothing from you.”
He straightened himself and looked at me for the first time. “She telephoned me she was going to take all the blame,” he said, resolutely. “It isn’t true that she led me into this. I started with my own money, then added Natalie’s, then some from Mr. Bradish, and itwasn’t until then that I went to mother and induced her to risk her money.”
I was astonished at the manliness of his look and tone—as unlike him as possible. “Marriage seems to have improved you,” said I.
“Yes—it’s Natalie,” he replied, his face taking on the foolish look a man gets when he is under the thumb of some woman. “She’s very different from what we thought—or from what she thought herself. She’s made me into a new sort of man.”
“A stock gambler?” said I.
He reddened, but knew better than to show his teeth at me, when he was, if possible, more dependent than ever before.
“A fine story you tell for your mother,” I went on; “but she told me everything—about James, too.”
“If she says she led James into speculating, that wasn’t so, either,” he replied, and againhis voice was honest. “Jim was deep in the hole, and she tried to help him out.”
“And how do you happen to know so much about James and his speculating?” I asked, sharply.
His eyes dropped and he began to shift from leg to leg in his old despicable fashion. “I—know,” he said, doggedly.
But I wasn’t interested in James—or, for that matter, in the comparative guilt of Walter and his mother. I had no more time to give to the affair. I sent Walter away, after repeating my warning as to the consequences of another lapse, and then I gave my whole attention to business—to punishing the other wretched “shorts” and to putting on full steam throughout my combination, mine now in its entirety and therefore ready for the utmost development of its earning power.
Six months later—that is, last week—Idoubled the outstanding capital stock and at the same time increased the dividend from five per cent. to six. It is now earning forty-two per cent. on my total actual investment—a satisfactory property, quite up to my expectations.
My wife has gone abroad with Helen. Poor woman! She has never been the same since her dream collapsed. However, she no longer irritates or opposes me. And Natalie is the most satisfactory of daughters-in-law, and Walter the most docile of sons. As for Aurora, I have been unexpectedly able to get a hold upon her, and through her upon Kirkby. She rules him in every matter except one. He keeps her on short, absurdly short, supplies for the household and her personal expenses. “When I found that he carried a change purse, I had a foreboding,” said she to me the other day. “And when I saw howhe looked as he opened it, took a nickel out and closed it, I knew what I had to look forward to.” I have raised her hopes for a large allowance from me in the near future, and a fortune under my will. Presently, through my efforts, combined with hers, I think I shall have Kirkby for a colossal undertaking I am working out.
Altogether, my affairs are in a thoroughly satisfactory condition. If it weren’t for old age, and certain pains at times in the back of my head—though they may be largely imaginary. Then there is the matter of sleep. I haven’t had a night’s sleep in seven years, and for the last year I have had only three hours’, pieced out with a nap in my carriage on the way up-town.
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” But—it wears a crown!