"Not a word, Jim," he bade me. "In the name of G.o.d and all our friendship, not a word. Beulah Sands will be my wife as soon as I can find a minister to marry us. It is best, best. It is right. It is as G.o.d would have it, or I am not capable of knowing right from wrong. Anyway, it is what will be.
She has no father, no mother, no sister, no one to protect and shield her.
The "System" has robbed her of all in life, even of herself, of everything, Jim, but me. I must try to win her back for herself, or to make her new world a happy one--a happy one for her."
Chapter VII.
An old gambler, whose life had been spent listening to the rattle of the drop-in-bound-out little roulette ball, was told by a fellow victim, as his last dollar went to the relentless tiger"s maw, that the keeper"s foot was upon an electric b.u.t.ton which enabled him to make the ball drop where his stake was not. He simply said, "Thank G.o.d. I thought that prince of cheats, Fate, who all through life has had his foot on the b.u.t.ton of my game, was the one who did the trick." Long suffering had driven the old gambler to the loser"s bible, Philosophy! Cheated by man"s device, he knew he had some chance of getting even; but Fate he could not combat.
Bob Brownley had thought himself in hard luck when his eyes opened to the fact that he had been robbed by means of dice loaded by man, but when Fate pressed the b.u.t.ton he saw that his man-made h.e.l.l was but a feeble imitation, and--was satisfied, as whoever knows the game of life is satisfied, because--he must be. Bob"s strong head bowed, his iron will bent, and meekly his soul murmured, "Thy will be done."
That night he married Beulah Sands. The minister who united the grown-up man and the woman who was as a new-born babe saw nothing extraordinary in the match. He murmured to me, who acted as best man to the groom, maid of honour to the bride, and father and mother to both, "We see strange sights, we ministers of the great city, Mr. Randolph. The sweet little lady appears to be a trifle scared." My explanation that she and Mr.
Brownley were the only survivors of the awful tragedies of the day was sufficient. He was satisfied when he got no other response to his question, "Do you take this man to be your wedded husband?" than a sweet childish smile as she snuggled closer to Bob.
Bob and his bride went South to his mother and sisters the next day. He left to me the settlement of his trades. He instructed me to set aside $3,000,000 profits for Beulah Sands-Brownley, and insisted that I pay from the balance the notes he had given me a few weeks before. There remained something over $5,000,000 for himself.
The leading Wall Street paper, in its preachment on the panic, wound up with:
"Wall Street has lived through many black Fridays. Some of them have been thirteenth-of-the-month Fridays, but no Friday yet marked from the calendar, no Sat.u.r.day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday yet garnered to the storehouse of the past was ever more jubilantly welcomed by his Satanic Majesty than yesterday. We pray heaven no coming day may be ordained to go against yesterday"s record for tigerish cruelty and awful destruction. It is rumoured that Mr.
Brownley of Randolph & Randolph, either for himself or his clients cleared twenty-five millions of profit. We believe that this estimate is low. The losses coming through Robert Brownley"s terrible onslaught must have run over five hundred millions. Wall Street and the country will do well to take the moral of yesterday"s market to their heart. It is this: The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Americans is a menace to our financial structure. It is the unanimous opinion of "the Street" that Robert Brownley could never have succeeded in battering down the price of Sugar in the very teeth of the Camemeyer and Standard Oil support as he did yesterday, without a cash backing of from fifty to one hundred millions. If a vast aggregation of money owners deliberately place themselves behind an onslaught such as was so successfully made yesterday, why can that slaughter not be repeated at any time, on any stock, and against the support of any backing?"
When I read this and listened to talk along the same lines, I was puzzled.
I could not for the life of me see where Bob Brownley could have got five to ten millions" backing for such a raid, much less fifty to a hundred.
Yet I was forced to confess that he must have had some tremendous backing; else how could he have done what I had seen him do?
Bob left his wife at his mother"s house while he went to Sands Landing to the funeral. After the old judge and his victims had been laid away and the relatives had gathered in the library of the great white Sands mansion, he explained their kinswoman"s condition and told them that she was his wife. He insisted upon paying all Judge Sands"s debts, over $500,000 of which was owed to members of the Sands family for whom he had been trustee. Before he went back to his mother"s, Bob had turned a great calamity into an occasion for something near rejoicing. Judge Sands and his family were very dear to the people of the section, but his misfortune had threatened such wide-spread ruin that the unlooked-for recovery of a million and a half was a G.o.dsend that made for happiness.
Two days after the funeral Bob"s dearest hope fled. He had ordered all things at the Sands plantation put in their every-day condition. Beulah Sands"s uncles, aunts, and cousins had arranged to welcome her and to try by every means in their power to coax back her lost mind. They a.s.sured Bob that, barring the absence of Beulah"s father, mother, and sister, there would not be a memory-recaller missing. Bob and his wife landed from the river packet at the foot of the driveway, which led straight from the landing to the vine-covered, white-pillared portico. Bob"s agony must have been awful when his wife clapped her hands in childish joy as she exclaimed, "Oh, Bob, what a pretty place!" She gave no sign that she had ever seen the great entrance, through which she had come and gone from her babyhood. Bob took her to the library, to her mother"s room, to her own, to the nursery where were the dolls and toys of her childhood, but there came no sign of recognition, nothing but childish pleasure. She looked at her aunts and uncles and the cousins with whom she had spent her life, bewildered at finding so many strangers in the otherwise quiet place. As a last hope, they led in her old black foster-mother, who had nursed her in babyhood, who was the companion of her childhood and the pet of her womanhood. There was not a dry eye in the library when she met the old mammy"s outburst of joy with the puzzled gaze of the child who does not understand. The grief of the old negress was pitiful as she realised that she was a stranger to her "honey bird." The child seemed perplexed at her grief. It was plain to all that the Sands home meant nothing to the last of the judge"s family.
Bob brought her back to New York and besought the aid of the medical experts of America and of the Old World to regain that which had been recalled by its Maker. The doctors were fascinated with this new phase of mind blight, for in some particulars Beulah"s case was unlike any known instances, but none gave hope. All agreed that some wire connecting heart and brain had burned out when the cruel "System" threw on a voltage beyond the wire"s capacity to transmit. All agreed that the woman-child wife would never grow older unless through some mental eruption beyond human power to produce. Some of the medical men pointed to one possibility, but that one was too terrible for Bob to entertain.
The first anniversary of their marriage found Bob and his wife settled in their new Fifth Avenue mansion. He had bought and torn down two old houses between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets and had erected a palace, the inside of which was unique among all New York"s unusual structures. The first and second floors were all that refined taste and unlimited expenditure of money could produce. Nothing on those splendid floors told of the strange things above. A sedate luxury pervaded the drawing-rooms, library, and dining-room. Bob said to me, in taking me through them, "Some day, Jim, Beulah may recover, may come back to me, and I want to have everything as she would wish, everything as she would have had it if the curse had never come." The third floor was Beulah"s. A child"s dainty bedroom; two nurses" rooms adjoining; a nursery, with a child"s small schoolroom and a big playroom, with dolls and doll houses, child"s toys of every description in abandon, as though their owner were in fact but a few years old. Across the hall were three offices, exact duplicates of mine, Bob"s, and Beulah Sands"s at Randolph & Randolph"s.
When I first saw them it was with difficulty that I brought myself to realise that I was not where the gruesome happenings of a year before had taken place. Bob had reproduced to the minutest details our down-town workshop. Standing in the door of Beulah Sands"s office I faced the flat desk at which she had sat the afternoon when I first saw that hideous result of the work of the "System." I could almost see the little gray figure holding the afternoon paper. In horror my eyes sought the floor at the side of the chair in search of Bob"s agonised face and uplifted hands.
As I stood for the first time in the middle of Bob"s handiwork, I seemed to hear again those awful groans.
"Jim," Bob said, "I have a haunting idea that some day Beulah will wake and look around and think she has been but a few minutes asleep. If she should, she must have nothing to disabuse her mind until we break the news to her. I have instructed her nurses, one or the other of whom never loses sight of her night or day, to win her to the habit of spending her time at her old desk; I have told them always to be prepared for her awakening, and when it comes they are instantly to shut off the rest of the floor and house until I can get to her. Here comes Beulah now."
Out of the nursery came a laughing, happy child-woman. In spite of her finely developed, womanly figure, which had lost nothing of its wonderful beauty, and the exquisite face and golden-brown hair and great blue eyes, which were as fascinating as on the day she first entered the offices of Randolph & Randolph; in spite of the close-fitting gray gown with dainty turned-over lace collar, I could hardly bring myself to believe that she was anything but a young child. With an eager look and a happy laugh she went to Bob and throwing her arms about his neck, covered his face with kisses.
"Good Bob has come back to play with Beulah," she said, "She knew he would. They told Beulah Bob had gone away to the woods to gather pretty flowers. Beulah knew if Bob had gone to the woods he would have taken Beulah with him. Now Bob must play school with Beulah." She sat at her desk and opened her child"s school-book. With mock severity she said, "Bob, c-a-t. What does it spell?" For half an hour Bob sat and played scholar and teacher by turns with all the patience of a fond father. With difficulty I kept back the tears the sad sight brought to my eyes.
For the first year of Bob"s marriage we saw but little of him at the office. The Exchange saw less. He had wandered in upon the floor two or three times, but did no business and seemed to take but little interest.
"The Street" knew Bob had married the daughter of Judge Lee Sands, the victim of Tom Reinhart"s cold-blooded Seaboard Air Line deal. Otherwise it knew nothing of the affair. His friends never met his wife. Occasionally they would pa.s.s the Brownley carriage on the avenue or in the park and, taking it for granted that the beautiful woman was Mrs. Brownley, they thought Bob a lucky fellow. It seemed quite natural that his wife should choose seclusion after the awful tragedy at her home in Virginia. But they could not understand why, with such cause for mourning, the exquisite figure beside Bob in the victoria should always be garbed in gray. After a while it was whispered that there was something wrong in Bob"s household.
Then his friends and acquaintances ceased to whisper or to think of his affairs. With all New York"s bad points--and they are as plentiful as her church spires and charity bazaars--she has one offsetting virtue. If a dweller in her midst chooses to let New York alone, New York is willing to reciprocate. In her most crowded fashionable districts a person may come and go for a lifetime, and none in the block in which he dwells will know when his coming and going ceases. When a New Yorker reads in his newspaper of the man who lives next door to him, "murdered and his body discovered by the gas man" or the tax collector, the butcher or the baker, as the case may be, he never thinks he may have been remiss in his neighbourly duties. There is no such word as "neighbour" in the New York City dictionary. It may have been there once, but, if so, it was long ago used as a stake for the barbed-wire fence of exclusive keep-your-distance-we-keep-our-distance-until-we-know-youness. It is told of a minister from the rural districts, an old-fashioned American, who came to New York to take charge of a parish, that he started out to make his calls and was seized in the hall of what in civilisation would have been his next-door neighbour. He was rushed away to Bellevue for examination as to sanity. The verdict was: "Insane. Had no letter of introduction and was not in the set."
Shortly after the first anniversary of his wedding Bob gave up his office with Randolph & Randolph and opened one for himself. He explained that he was giving up his commission business to devote all his time to personal trading. With the opening of his new office he again became the most active man on the floor. His trading was intermittent. For weeks he would not be seen at the Exchange or on "the Street." Then he would return and, after executing a series of brilliant trades, which were invariably successful, he would again disappear. He soon became known as the luckiest operator in Wall Street, and the beginning of his every new deal was the signal for his fast-growing following to tag on.
From time to time I learned that Beulah Sands was making no real improvement, though in some details she had learned as a child learns. But there was no indication that she would ever regain her lost mind.
Strange stories of Bob"s doings began to seep into my office. For long periods he would disappear. Neither the nurses in charge of his wife, nor his brother, mother, and sisters, for whom he had purchased a mansion a few blocks above his own, would hear a word from him. Then he would return as suddenly as he had disappeared, and his wild eyes and haggard face would tell of a prolonged and desperate soul struggle. He drank often now, a habit he had never before indulged in.
For ten days before the second anniversary of his marriage he had been missing. On the morning of the anniversary he appeared at the Exchange, wild-eyed and dare-devil reckless. The market had been advancing for weeks and was at a high level. Tom Reinhart and his branch of the "System" were working out a new fleecing of the public in Union and Northern Pacific. At the strike of the gong Bob took possession of the Union Pacific pole and in thirty minutes had precipitated a panic by his merciless selling. Our house was heavily interested in the Pacifics, although not in connection with Reinhart and his crowd. As soon as I got word that Bob was the cause of the slaughter, I rushed over to the Exchange and working my way into the crowd, I begged a word with him. He had broken both stocks over fifty points a share and the panic was raging through the room. He glared at me, but finally followed me out into the lobby. At first he would not heed my appeal, but finally he said, "Jim, it is too bad to let up. I had determined to rub this devilish inst.i.tution off the map, but if it really is a case of injury to the house, it"s my opportunity to do something for you who have done so much for me, so here goes." He threw himself into the Union Pacific crowd, first giving an order to a group of his brokers, who jumped for a number of other poles. Almost instantly the panic was stayed and stocks were bounding upward two to five points at a leap. Bob continued buying Union Pacific and his brokers other stocks in unlimited quant.i.ties. Nothing like such a quick turn of the market had been seen before. His power to absorb stocks seemed to be boundless. It was estimated that personally and through his brokers he bought over half a million shares before he joined me and left the Exchange.
I looked at him in wonderment. "Bob, I cannot understand you," I said at last as we turned out of Broad Street into Wall. "It seems as if you work with magic. Everything you touch turns to gold."
He wheeled on me. "Yes, Jim, you are right. Gold, heartless, soulless gold. But what is the dross good for? What is it good for to me? To-day I suppose I have made the biggest one-man killing in the history of "the Street." I must be an easy twenty-five millions richer in gold than I was this morning, and I had enough then to dam the East River and a good section of the North. But tell me, Jim, tell me, what can it buy in this world that I have not got? I had health and happiness, perfect health, pure happiness, when I did not have a thousand all told. Now I have fifty millions, and I know how to get fifty or five hundred and fifty more any time I care to take them, and I have only physical and mental h.e.l.l. No beggar in all the world is so poor in happiness as I. Tell me, tell me, Jim, in the name of G.o.d, if there is one--for already the game of gold is robbing me of my faith in G.o.d--where can I buy a little, just a little happiness with all this cursed yellow dirt? What will it get me in the next world, Jim Randolph, what will it get me? If I had died when I was poor, I think you will agree with me that, if there is a heaven, I should have stood an even chance of getting there. Now on a day like to-day, when you see the results of my work, the results of my handling of unlimited gold, you must agree that if I were taken off I should stand more than an even show of landing in h.e.l.l where the sulphur is thickest and the flames are hottest."
We were at the entrance of Randolph & Randolph"s office as he poured out this terrible torrent of bitterness. He glared at me as a dungeon prisoner might glare at his keeper for his answer to "Where can I find liberty?" I had no words to answer him. As I noted the awful changes his new life was making in every line of his face, the rigid hardness, the haunted, nervous look of desperation, which seemed a forerunner of madness, I could not see, either, where his millions brought any happiness. His hair, which once was smooth and orderly, hung over his forehead in an unparted ma.s.s of tangled curls, and here and there showed a streak of white. Bob Brownley was still handsome, even more fascinating than before the mercury entered his soul, but it was that wild, awful beauty of the caged lion, lashing himself into madness with memories of his lost freedom.
"Jim," he went on, when he saw I could not answer, "I guess you don"t know where I can swap the yellow mud for balm of Gilead. I won"t bother you with my troubles any longer. I will go up-town and see the little girl whose happiness Tom Reinhart needed in his business. I will go up and show her the pictures in this week"s _Collier"s_ of the fine hospital for incurables that Reinhart has so generously and n.o.bly built at a cost of two and a half millions! The little girl may think better of Reinhart when she knows that her father"s money was put to such good use. Who knows but the great finance king may dedicate it as the "Judge Lee Sands Home" and carve over the entrance a bas-relief of her father, mother, and sister with Hope, Faith, and Charity coming from the mouths of their hanging severed heads?"
Bob Brownley laughed a horrible ringing laugh as he uttered these awful words. Then he beat his hand down on my shoulders as he said in a hoa.r.s.e voice, "Jim, but for you I should have had crimps in that jackal philanthropist"s soul by now and in the souls of his kind. But never mind.
He will keep; he will surely keep until I get to him. Every day he lives he will be fitter for the crimping. Within the short two years since he finished grilling Judge Sands"s soul, he has put himself in better form to appreciate his reward. I see by the press that at last his aristocratic wife has gold-cured Newport of its habit of dating back the name Reinhart to her scullionhood, and it has taken her into the high-instep circle. I read the other day of his daughter"s marriage to some English n.o.b, and of the discovery of the ancient Reinhart family tree and crest with the mailed hand and two-edged dirk and the vulture rampant, and the motto, "Who strikes in the back strikes often.""
He left me with his laugh still ringing in my ears. I shuddered as I pa.s.sed under the old black-and-gold sign my uncle and my father had nailed over the office entrance in an age now dead, an age when Wall Street men talked of honour and gold, not gold and more gold.
In telling my wife of the day"s happenings I could not refrain from giving vent to the feelings that consumed me. "Kate, Bob will surely do something awful one of these days. I can see no hope for him. He grows more and more the madman as he broods over his horrible situation. The whole thing seems incredible to me. Never was a human being in such perpetual living purgatory--unlimited, absolute power on the one hand, unfathomable, never-cool-down h.e.l.l on the other."
"Jim, how does he do what he does? I cannot make out from anything I have read or you have told me, how he creates those panics and makes all that money."
"No one has ever been able to figure it out," I answered. "I understand the stock business, but I cannot for the life of me see how he does it. He has none of the money powers in league with him, that"s sure, for in the mood he has been in during the past two years it would be impossible for him to work with them, even if his salvation depended on it. The mention of any of the big "System" men drives him to a fury. He has to-day made more money than any one man ever made in a day since the world began, and he had only commenced his work when he quit to please me. As I stand in the Exchange and watch him do it, it seems commonplace and simple.
Afterward it is beyond my comprehension. At the gait he is going, the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Gould fortunes combined will look tiny in comparison with the one he will have in a few years. It is beyond my power of figuring out, and it gives me a headache every time I try to see through it."
Chapter VIII.
A number of times during the following year, and finally on the anniversary of the Sands tragedy, Bob carried the Exchange to the verge of panic, only to turn the market and save "the Street" in the end. His profits were fabulous. Already his fortune was estimated to be between two and three hundred millions, one of the largest in the world. His name had become one of terror wherever stocks were dealt in. Wall Street had come to regard his every deal, from the moment that he began operations, as inevitably successful. Now and again he would jump into the market when some of the plunging cliques had a bear raid under way, and would put them to rout by buying everything in sight and bidding up prices until it looked as though he intended to do as extraordinary work on the up-side as he was wont to do on the down. At such times he was the idol of the Exchange, which worships the man who puts prices up as it hates him who pulls them down. Once when war news flashed over the wires from Washington and rumour had the Cabinet members, Senators, and Congressmen selling the market short on advance information, when the "Standard Oil" banks had put up money rates to 150 per cent, and a crash seemed inevitable, Bob suddenly smashed the loan market by offering to lend one hundred millions at four per cent.; and by buying and bidding up prices at the same time, he put the whole Washington crowd and its New York accomplices to disastrous rout and caused them to lose millions. He continued his operations with increasing violence and increasing profits up to the fourth anniversary of the tragedy. On the intervening anniversary I had been compelled by self-interest and fear that he would really pull down the entire Wall Street structure, to rush in and fairly drag him off. But with his growing madness my influence was waning. Each raid it was with greater difficulty that I got his ear.
Finally, on the fourth anniversary, in a panic that seemed to be running into something more terrible than any previous, he savagely refused to accede to my appeal, telling me that he would not stop, even if Randolph & Randolph were doomed to go down in the crash. It had become known on the floor that I was the only one who could do anything with him in his frenzies, and my pleading with him in the lobby was watched by the members of the Exchange with triple eyed suspense. When it was clear from his emphatic gestures and raised voice--for he was in a reckless mood from drink and madness and took no pains to disguise his intentions--that I could not prevail upon him, there was a frantic rush for the poles to throw over stocks in advance of him. Suddenly, after I had turned from him in despair, there flashed into my mind an idea. The situation was desperate. I was dealing with a madman, and I decided that I was justified in making this last try. I rushed back to him. "Bob, good-bye," I whispered in his ear, "good-bye. In ten minutes you will get word that Jim Randolph has cut his throat!" He stopped as though I had plunged a knife into him, struck his forehead a resounding blow, and into his wild brown eyes came a sickening look of fear.
"Stop, Jim, for G.o.d"s sake, don"t say that to me. My cup is full now.
Don"t tell me I am to have that crime on my soul." He thought a moment.
"I don"t know whether you mean it, Jim, but I can take no chances, not for all the money in the world, not even for revenge. Wait here, Jim." He yelled for his brokers, and several rushed to him from different parts of the room. He sent them back into the crowd while he dashed for the Amalgamated-pole. The day was saved.
Presently he came back to me. "Jim, I must have a talk with you. Come over to my office." When we got there he turned the key and stood in front of me. His great eyes looked full into mine. In college days, gazing into their brown depths, by some magic I seemed to see the heroes and heroines of always happy-ending tales, as the child sees enchanted creatures far back in the burning Yule log flames. But there were no joyous beings in the haunted depths of Bob"s eyes that day.
"Jim, you gave me an awful scare," he said brokenly. "Don"t ever do it again. I have little left to live for. To be sure I have some feeling for mother, Fred, and sisters. But for you I have a love second only to that I should have felt for Beulah had I been allowed to have her. The thought, Jim, that I had wrecked your life, with all you have to live for, would have been the last straw. My life is purgatory. Beulah is only an ever-present curse to me--a ghost that rends my heart and soul, one minute with a blind frenzy to revenge her wrongs, the next with an icy remorse that I have not already done so. If I did not have her, perhaps in time I could forget; perhaps I might lay out some scheme to help poor devils whose poverty makes life unendurable, and with the millions I have taken from that main shaft of h.e.l.l I might do things that would at least bring quiet to my soul; but it is impossible with the living corpse of Beulah Sands before me every minute and that devil machinery whirling in my brain all the time the song, "Revenge her and her father, revenge yourself." It is impossible to give it up, Jim. I must have revenge. I must stop this machinery that is smashing up more American hearts and souls each year than all the rest of earth"s grinders combined. Every day I delay I become more fiendish in my desires. Jim, don"t think I do not know that I have literally turned into a fiend. Whenever of late I see myself in the mirror, I shudder. When I think of what I was when your father stood us up in his office and started us in this heart-shrivelling, soul-callousing business, and what I am now, I cannot keep the madness down except with rum. You know what it means for me to say this, me who started with all the pride of a Brownley; but it is so, Jim. The other night I went home with my soul frozen with thoughts of the past and with my brain ablaze with rum, intending to end it all. I got out my revolver, and woke Beulah, but as I said, "Bob is going to kill Beulah and himself," she laughed that sweet child"s laugh and clapping her hands said, "Bob is so good to play with Beulah," and then I thought of that devil Reinhart and the other fiends of the "System" being left to continue their work unhindered and I could not do it. I must have revenge; I must smash that heart-crushing machinery. Then I can go, and take Beulah with me. Now, Jim, let us have it clearly understood once and for all."
Remorse and softness were past; he was the Indian again. "I am going to wreck that h.e.l.l-annex some day, and that some day will be the next time I start in. Don"t argue with me, don"t misunderstand me. To-day you stopped me. I don"t know whether you meant what you threatened; I don"t care now.
It is just as well that I stopped, for the "System"s" machine will be there whenever I start in again. It loses nothing of its fiendishness, none of its destructive powers by grinding, but, on the contrary, as you know, it increases its speed every day it runs. Now, Jim Randolph, I want to tell you that you must get yours and the house"s affairs in such shape that you won"t be hurt when I go into that human rat-pit the next time, for when I come from it the New York Stock Exchange and the "System" will have had their spines unjointed. Yes, and I"ll have their hearts out, too.
Neither will ever again be able to take from the American people their savings and their manhood and womanhood and give them in exchange unadulterated torment. I am going to be fair with you, Jim; this is the last time I will discuss the subject. After this you must take your chance with the rest of those who have to do with the cursed business. When I strike again, none will be spared. I will wreck "the Street", and the innocent will go down with the guilty, if they have any stocks on hand at that time.