Part 27 (1/2)

I waited.

”She said: 'In a few days more he'--that meant you--'he will be ruined. He imagines the worst is over for him, when in fact they've only begun.'”

”They!” I repeated. ”Who are 'they'? The Langdons?”

”I think so,” she replied with an effort. ”She did not say--I've told you her exact words--as far as I can.”

”Well,” said I, ”and why didn't you go?”

She pressed her lips firmly together. Finally, with a straight look into my eyes, she replied: ”I shall not discuss that. You probably misunderstand, but that is your own affair.”

”You believed what she said about me, of course,” said I.

”I neither believed nor disbelieved,” she answered indifferently, as she rose to go. ”It does not interest me.”

”Come here,” said I.

I waited until she reluctantly joined me at the window. I pointed to the steeple of the church across the way. ”You could as easily throw down that steeple by pus.h.i.+ng against it with your bare hands,” I said to her, ”as 'they,' whoever they are, could put me down. They might take away my money.

But if they did, they would only be giving me a lesson that would teach me how more easily to get it back. I am not a bundle of stock certificates or a bag of money. I am--here,” and I tapped my forehead.

She forced a faint, scornful smile. She did not wish me to see her belief of what I said.

”You may think that is vanity,” I went on. ”But you will learn, sooner or later, the difference between boasting and simple statement of fact. You will learn that I do not boast. What I said is no more a boast than for a man with legs to say, 'I can walk.' Because you have known only legless men, you exaggerate the difficulty of walking. It's as easy for me to make money as it is for some people to spend it.”

It is hardly necessary for me to say I was not insinuating anything against her people. But she was just then supersensitive on the subject, though I did not suspect it. She flushed hotly. ”You will not have any cause to sneer at my people on that account hereafter,” she said. ”I settled _that_ to-day.”

”I was not sneering at them,” I protested. ”I wasn't even thinking of them.

And--you must know that it's a favor to me for anybody to ask me to do anything that will please you--Anita!”

She made a gesture of impatience. ”I see I'd better tell you why I did not go with them to-day. I insisted that they give back all they have taken from you. And when they refused, I refused to go.”

”I don't care why you refused, or imagined you refused,” said I. ”I am content with the fact that you are here.”

”But you misunderstand it,” she answered coldly.

”I don't understand it, I don't misunderstand it,” was my reply. ”I accept it.”

She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room--you, who love or at least have loved, can imagine how it made me feel to see _Her_ moving about in those rooms of mine.

While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face.

”What if 'they' should include Roebuck!” And just as a man begins to defend himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a light-weight coat over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: ”I'm going out for a few minutes--perhaps an hour--if any one should ask.” A moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck's.

When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the first excitement of their new wealth--a house with porches and balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the pa.s.ser-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said ”rich as Roebuck” where they used to say ”rich as Croesus,” he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention.

He took advantage of his having to remove to New York where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, for a rich man, even mean house in East Fifty-Second Street--one of a row, and an almost dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. To his few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors he explained that he was seeing with clearer eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful, that no man had a right to waste the Lord's money.

The general theory about him was that advancing years had developed his natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion is he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of a.s.sa.s.sination--the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that his dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen a convict stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible that any one could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder every moment or so.

Roebuck had the same trick--only his dread, I suspect, was not the officers of the law, even of the divine law, but the many, many victims of his merciless execution of ”the Lord's will.”

This state of mind is not uncommon among the very rich men, especially those who have come up from poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth, and have always been used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the ma.s.s of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn't rich has the same savage hunger that they themselves had, and is ready to use similar desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are nervous and often become morbid on the subject of a.s.sa.s.sination as they grow richer and richer.