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 button which enabled him to make the ball drop where

his stake was not. He simply said, “Thank God. I thought that prince of

cheats, Fate, who all through life has had his foot on the button 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 button he saw that his man-made hell 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 Saturday, 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 godsend 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 assured 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 pass 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 institution 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

quantities. 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 hell. No

beggar in all the world is so poor in happiness as I. Tell me, tell me,

Jim, in the name of God, if there is one—for already the game of gold is

robbing me of my faith in God—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 hell 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 mass 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 nobly 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 hoarse

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 nob, 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

passed 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 hell 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.”