CHAPTER IX
Nowthat love had bridged another of the abysses that kept opening in the solid ground of their union, they fell a prey to curiosity. They decided simultaneously to go visit the scene of the ruins.
The streets were a-crawl with men, women, and children hurrying to the crater of the volcano. Many of the hasteners were persons who had slept through the night and set out to open their shops at the usual hour, only to find them fuming heaps of refuse. People who dwelt as far out as Bleecker or Houston Street had been generally unaware of the disaster.
Some of the late arrivals were still able to drag from their cellars, or from the jumbled streets in front of them, a certain portion of their stocks. A coffee merchant salvaged cartloads of well-roasted bean; a dealer in chewing tobacco shoveled up wagonloads of dried weed and sold it later; drygoods men rescued scorched bolts of calico and worsted to furnish forth bankrupt sales. Patty wailed aloud to see heaps of fine lace blackening on the ground and bolts of silk still blazing. One china shop was melted into ludicrous clusters, as of grapes from a devil’s vineyard. Zinc and copper roofs had formed cascades that were hardened as if a god had petrified a flood.
From toppling ruins whence the floors were stripped, iron safes hung in their crannies, their warped doors having long since betrayed the guarded records and securities to destruction. Incessant salvos of thunder shook the air, as walls fell in mountain-slides and sent up new flurries of smoke and flame.
Poking about wherever the ashes were cool enough, were beggars and thieves and harrowed owners. Little boys and girls and drunken hags from the slums paraded in lace andsilk. Cavalry and infantry and marines went here and there, trying to drive back the dishonest, and to distinguish between the owners of the ruins and those who merely hoped to steal a profit from the disaster.
Caravans of weary cart-horses staggered drunkenly out of the fallen city, dragging forth dripping wains of merchandise. Dog-tired firemen were returning to their engine-houses for rest, and RoBards felt that he was a shirker. Before long he restored Patty to her home and returned to duty, warmed by her farewell embrace and the dewy rose of a perfect kiss.
For thirty-six hours the fire blazed on before the exhausted New York and Newark firemen and the four hundred Philadelphian reinforcements determined its final boundaries at the wall of exploded buildings. It had been confined at last to the business district and few important homes were touched. But forty-five crowded acres, the richest forty-five acres on this side of the ocean, had been reduced to rubbish. Seventeen million dollars had gone up in smoke and spark. All of the old Dutch realm that had survived the fires of ’76 and ’78 had been consumed forever.
New York had no longer any visible antiquity. Henceforth it was mere American. A fortnight later, when Christmas had passed, the black Brocken was still a sight that drew visitors from the countrysides about. People from Long Island forgot to hunt deer in the wilds there, and came over to stare at the little plumes of smoke that wavered above the jumbled prairie. For weeks there was an all-night sunset above Manhatto’s isle.
After the gigantic debauch of fire came the long days of penalty-paying. The merchants turned to the insurance companies to reimburse their losses. The insurance companies were overwhelmed by the catastrophe. Not one of them could pay ten cents on the dollar. For a time it seemed that all of them must go into one general bankruptcy. But first they called upon their stockholders with disastrous assessments.
Three old-maid cousins of Patty’s were assessed five thousand dollars on account of their stocks, and came to her father’s house weeping to find themselves stripped to poverty. Being respectably bred women, they had no recourse but the charity of relatives. They could not work, of course. But old Jessamine met them with a face of abjection. He was a pauper likewise, and in his own destruction he foresaw a general collapse.
When RoBards, after his three days’ campaign with the Fire Kings, got home at length, he learned that Patty had returned to her father’s house. She left him a note, explaining that her father was almost out of his mind.
Hurrying to Park Place, RoBards found that old Jessamine was indeed maniac with the sudden change in his fortunes. His very prudence had mocked him. He had been a man who combined rigid economy with daring experiment. He had pushed agents into China and chartered ships to bring home his wares. Caution had made him build his warehouse expensively of fireproof materials. He had been extravagant in nothing so much as in the equipment against flames and in the amount of insurance he carried.
Yet fate had made a fool of him. Officials of the city had authorized officers of the navy to set off kegs of powder in his temple and scatter his wealth to the winds.
And the flames had turned aside from the building in front of his! That had been surrendered to the fire, yet it stood now unharmed, mocking the obscene garbage of the Jessamine Company.
And he could collect no fire insurance for his unburned ruins, despite the premiums he had squandered. He was too sick with disgust to attend the mass meeting of citizens called by the mayor, and stirred to courage by James Gore King. His name was left off the Dudley Selden committee of one hundred and twenty-five important men. The city voted a loan of six million dollars to the insurance companies for cash payments, but he received never a cent. He could not even accept a dole from the moneys subscribedby sympathetic Boston, Philadelphia, and other towns.
His very home was no longer his own; creditors who had been proud to honor his notes were now wolves at his door.
In his frenzy he cast all the blame on RoBards, and roared that his own son-in-law had led the vandals into his warehouse. Such excuses as RoBards could improvise were but turpentine to his flaming wrath.
When RoBards offered the old man the shelter of his home in St. John’s Park, Jessamine was a very Lear of white-haired ire. But he accepted the proffer of Tuliptree Farm, because it would take him far from the scene of his downfall; it would afford him a wintry asylum where he could gnaw on his own bitterness.
Before he set forth into the snowy hills of Westchester, he made one stern demand upon RoBards:
“You call yourself a lawyer. Well, prove it, sir, by suing this diabolic city for its wanton destruction of my property!”
To appease him RoBards consented to undertake the case. He entered suit against the mayor and the aldermen in the Superior Court for two hundred thousand dollars.