Part 30 (1/2)

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

”Ruined?” I said to Joe, easily enough. ”Not at all. We're back in the road, going smoothly ahead--only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe, of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out--clear out--and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread.

And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them--have got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert.”

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

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

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

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

”Galloway and Roebuck?”

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

XXVII. A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ANITA

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

”Mr. Forrester?” I asked

He grew purple to the line of his thick white hair. ”It is, Mr. Blacklock,”

said he. ”I have the honor to wish you good day, sir.” And with that he turned his back on me and gazed out toward Long Island.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”True,” said I. ”She is a Blacklock.”

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

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

Again--we looked full and fixedly each at the other. ”Come to the house, Blacklock,” he said at last in a tone that was the subtlest of compliments.

And he linked his arm in mine. Halfway to the rambling stone house, severe in its lines, yet fine and homelike, quaintly resembling its owner, as a man's house always should, he paused. ”I owe you an apology,” said he.