hideously clear to Jacob Dolph, as he sat in that dark little pen of Van
Riper's and had the history of his son's fall spelled out to him, word
by word. The boy had proved himself apt and clever in his office work.
His education had given him an advantage over all the other clerks, and
he had learned his duties with wonderful ease. And when, six months
before, old Mr. Daw had let himself down from his stool for the last
time, and had muffled up his thin old throat in his great green worsted
scarf, and had gone home to die, young Dolph had been put temporarily in
his place. In those six months he had done his bad work. Even Van Riper
admitted that it must have been a sudden temptation. But--he had
yielded. In those six months fifty thousand dollars of Abram Van Riper's
money had gone into the gulf that yawned in Wall Street; fifty thousand
dollars, not acquired by falsifying the books, but filched outright from
the private safe to which he had access; fifty thousand dollars, in
securities which he had turned into money, acting as the confidential
man of the house.
When Jacob Dolph, looking like a man of eighty, left the private office
of Mr. Van Riper he had two things to do. One was to tell his wife, the
other was to assign enough property to Van Riper to cover the amount of
the defalcation. Both had been done before night.
[Illustration]
V.
It is to be said for society that there was very little chuckling and
smiling when this fresh piece of news about the Dolphs came out. Nor did
the news pass from house to house like wildfire. It rather leaked out
here and there, percolating through barriers of friendly silence,
slipping from discreet lips and repeated in anxious confidence, with all
manner of qualifications and hopeful suppositions and suggestions. As a
matter of fact, people never really knew just what Eustace Dolph had
done, or how far his wrong-doing had carried him. All that was ever
positively known was that the boy had got into trouble down-town, and
had gone to Europe. The exact nature of the trouble could only be
conjectured. The very brokers who had been the instruments of young
Dolph's ruin were not able to separate his authorized speculations from
those which were illegitimate. They could do no more than guess, from
what they knew of Van Riper's conservative method of investment, that
the young man's unfortunate purchases were made for himself, and they
figured these at fifty-five thousand odd hundred dollars.
Somebody, who looked up the deed which Jacob Dolph executed that winter
day, found that he had transferred to Van Riper real estate of more than
that value.
No word ever came from the cold lips of Abram Van Riper's son; and his
office was a piece of all but perfect machinery, which dared not creak
when he commanded silence. And no one save Van Riper and Dolph, and
their two lawyers, knew the whole truth. Dolph never even spoke about it
to his wife, after that first night. It was these five people only who
knew that Mr. Jacob Dolph had parted with the last bit of real estate
that he owned, outside of his own home, and they knew that his other
property was of a doubtful sort, that could yield at the best only a
very limited income--hardly enough for a man who lived in so great a
house, and whose doors were open to all his friends nine months in the
year.
Yet he stayed there, and grew old with an age which the years have not
among their gifts. When his little girl was large enough to sit upon his
knee, her small hands clutched at a snowy-white mustache, and she
complained that his great, dark, hollow eyes never would look "right
into hers, away down deep." Yet he loved her, and talked more to her
perhaps than to any one else, not even excepting Aline.
But he never spoke to her of the elder brother whom she could not
remember. It was her mother who whispered something of the story to her,
and told her not to let papa know that she knew of it, for it would
grieve him. Aline herself knew nothing about the boy save that he lived,
and lived a criminal. Jacob himself could only have told her that their
son was a wandering adventurer, known as a blackleg and sharper in every
town in Europe.
The doors of the great house were closed to all the world, or opened
only for some old friend, who went away very soon out of the presence of
a sadness beyond all solace of words, or kindly look, or hand-clasp. And
so, in something that only the grace of their gentle lives relieved
from absolute poverty, those three dwelt in the old house, and let the
world slip by them.
* * * * *
There was no sleep for any one of the little household in the great
house on the night of the 14th of July, 1863. Doors and blinds were
closed; only a light shone through the half-open slats at a second-story
window, and in that room Aline lay sick, almost unto death, her white
hair loosed from its usual dainty neatness, her dark eyes turning with
an unmeaning gaze from the face of the little girl at her side to the
face of her husband at the foot of her bed. Her hands, wrinkled and
small, groped over the coverlet, with nervous twitchings, as every now
and then the howls or the pistol-shots of the mob in the streets below
them fell on her ear. And at every such movement the lips of the girl by
her pillow twitched in piteous sympathy. About half-past twelve there
was sharp firing in volleys to the southward of them, that threw the
half-conscious sufferer into an agony of supersensitive disturbance.
Then there came a silence that seemed unnaturally deep, yet it was only
the silence of a summer night in the deserted city streets.
Through it they heard, sharp and sudden, with something inexplicably
fearful about it, the patter of running feet. They had heard that sound
often enough that night and the night before; but these feet stopped at
their own door, and came up the steps, and the runner beat and pounded
on the heavy panels.
Father and child looked in each other's eyes, and then Jacob Dolph left
his post at the foot of the bed, and, passing out of the room, went down
the stairs with deliberate tread, and opened the door.
A negro's face, almost gray in its mad fear, stared into his with a
desperate appeal which the lips could not utter. Dolph drew the man in,
and shut the door behind him. The negro leaned, trembling and exhausted,
against the wall.
"I knowed you'd take me in, Mist' Dolph," he panted; "I'm feared they
seen me, though--they was mighty clost behind."
[Illustration]
They were close behind him, indeed. In half a minute the roar of the
mob filled the street with one terrible howl and shriek of animal rage,
heard high above the tramp of half a thousand feet; and the beasts of
disorder, gathered from all the city's holes and dens of crime, wild for
rapine and outrage, burst upon them, sweeping up the steps, hammering at
the great doors, crying for the blood of the helpless and the
innocent.
[Illustration: "Have you got a nigger here?"]
Foreign faces, almost all! Irish, mostly; but there were heavy, ignorant
German types of feature uplifted under the gas-light; sallow,
black-mustached Magyar faces; thin, acute, French faces--all with the
stamp of old-world ignorance and vice upon them.
The door opened, and the white-haired old gentleman, erect, haughty,
with brightening eyes, faced the leader of the mob--a great fellow,
black-bearded, who had a space to himself on the stoop, and swung his
broad shoulders from side to side.
"Have you got a nigger here?" he began, and then stopped short, for
Jacob Dolph was looking upon the face of his son.
Vagabond and outcast, he had the vagabond's quick wit, this leader of
infuriate crime, and some one good impulse stirred in him of his
forfeited gentlehood. He turned savagely upon his followers.
"He ain't here!" he roared. "I told you so--I saw him turn the corner."
"Shtap an' burrn the bondholder's house!" yelled a man behind. Eustace
Dolph turned round with a furious, threatening gesture.
"You damned fool!" he thundered; "he's no bondholder--he's one of _us_.
Go on, I tell you! Will you let that nigger get away?"
He half drove them down the steps. The old man stepped out, his face
aflame under his white hair, his whole frame quivering.
"You lie, sir!" he cried; but his voice was drowned in the howl of the
mob as it swept around the corner, forgetting all things else in the
madness of its hideous chase.
When Jacob Dolph returned to his wife's chamber, her feeble gaze was
lifted to the ceiling. At the sound of his footsteps she let it fall
dimly upon his face. He was thankful that, in that last moment of
doubtful quickening, she could not read his eyes; and she passed away,
smiling sweetly, one of her white old hands in his, and one in her
child's.
* * * * *
Age takes small account of the immediate flight of time. To the young, a
year is a mighty span. Be it a happy or an unhappy year that youth
looks forward to, it is a vista that stretches far into the future. And
when it is done, this interminable year, and youth, just twelve months
older, looks back to the first of it, what a long way off it is! What
tremendous progress we have made! How much more we know! How
insufficient are the standards by which we measured the world a poor
three hundred and sixty-five days back!
But age has grown habituated to the flight of time. Years? we have seen
so many of them that they make no great impression upon us. What! is it
ten years since young Midas first came to the counting-room, asking
humbly for an entry-clerk's place--he who is now the head of the firm?
Bless us! it seems like yesterday. Is it ten years since we first put on
that coat? Why, it must be clean out of the fashion by this time.
But age does not carry out the thought, and ask if itself be out of the
fashion. Age knows better. A few wrinkles, a stoop in the back, a
certain slowness of pace, do not make a man old at sixty--nor at
seventy, neither; for now you come to think of it, the ten years we were
speaking of is gone, and it is seventy now, and not sixty. Seventy! Why,
'tis not to be thought of as old age--save when it may be necessary to
rebuke the easy arrogance of youth.
The time had come to Jacob Dolph when he could not feel that he was
growing old. He was old, of course, in one sense. He was sixty-one when
the war broke out; and they had not allowed him to form a regiment and
go to the front at its head. But what was old for a soldier in active
service was not old for a well-preserved civilian. True, he could never
be the same man again, now that poor Aline was gone. True, he was
growing more and more disinclined for active exercise, and he regretted
he had led so sedentary a life. But though '64 piled itself up on '63,
and '65 on top of that, these arbitrary divisions of time seemed to him
but trivial.
Edith was growing old, perhaps; getting to be a great girl, taller than
her mother and fairer of complexion, yet not unlike her, he sometimes
thought, as she began to manage the affairs of the house, and to go
about the great shabby mansion with her mother's keys jingling at her
girdle. For the years went on crawling one over the other, and soon it
was 1873, and Edith was eighteen years old.
One rainy day in this year found Jacob Dolph in Wall Street. Although he
himself did not think so, he was an old man to others, and kindly hands,
such as were to be found even in that infuriate crowd, had helped him up
the marble steps of the Sub-Treasury and had given him lodgment on one
of the great blocks of marble that dominate the street. From where he
stood he could see Wall Street, east and west, and the broad plaza of
Broad Street to the south, filled with a compact mass of men, half
hidden by a myriad of umbrellas, rain-soaked, black, glinting in the dim
light. So might a Roman legion have looked, when each man raised his
targum above his head and came shoulder to shoulder with his neighbor
for the assault.
There was a confused, ant-like movement in the vast crowd, and a dull
murmur came from it, rising, in places, into excited shouts. Here and
there the fringe of the mass swelled up and swept against the steps of
some building, forcing, or trying to force, an entry. Sometimes a narrow
stream of men trickled into the half-open doorway; sometimes the great
portals closed, and then there was a mad outcry and a low groan, and the
foremost on the steps suddenly turned back, and in some strange way
slipped through the throng and sped in all directions to bear to hushed
or clamorous offices the news that this house or that bank had
"suspended payment." "Busted," the panting messengers said to
white-faced merchants; and in the slang of the street was conveyed the
message of doom. The great panic of 1873 was upon the town--the outcome
of long years of unwarranted self-confidence, of selfish extravagance,
of conscienceless speculation--and, as hour after hour passed by,
fortunes were lost in the twinkling of an eye, and the bread was taken
out of the mouths of the helpless.
After Jacob Dolph had stood for some time, looking down upon the
tossing sea of black umbrellas, he saw a narrow lane made through the
crowd in the wake of a little party of clerks and porters, bearing aid
perhaps to some stricken bank. Slipping down, he followed close behind
them. Perhaps the jostling hundreds on the sidewalk were gentle with
him, seeing that he was an old man; perhaps the strength of excitement
nerved him, for he made his way down the street to the flight of steps
leading to the door of a tall white building, and he crowded himself up
among the pack that was striving to enter. He had even got so far that
he could see the line pouring in above his head, when there was a sudden
cessation of motion in the press, and one leaf of the outer iron doors
swung forward, meeting the other, already closed to bar the crush, and
two green-painted panels stood, impassable, between him and the last of
the Dolph fortune.
One howl and roar, and the crowd turned back on itself, and swept him
with it. In five minutes a thousand offices knew of the greatest failure
of the day; and Jacob Dolph was leaning--weak, gasping, dazed--against
the side wall of a hallway in William Street, with two stray office-boys
staring at him out of their small, round, unsympathetic eyes.
Let us not ask what wild temptation led the old man back again to risk
all he owned in that hellish game that is played in the narrow street.
We may remember this: that he saw his daughter growing to womanhood in
that silent and almost deserted house, shouldered now by low tenements
and wretched shops and vile drinking-places; that he may have pictured
for her a brighter life in that world that had long ago left him behind
it in his bereaved and disgraced loneliness; that he had had some vision
of her young beauty fulfilling its destiny amid sweeter and fairer
surroundings. And let us not forget that he knew no other means than
these to win the money for which he cared little; which he found
absolutely needful.
After Jacob Dolph had yielded for the last time to the temptation that
had conquered him once before, and had ruined his son's soul; after that
final disastrous battle with the gamblers of Wall Street, wherein he
lost the last poor remnant of the great Dolph fortune, giving up with it
his father's home forever, certain old bread of his father's casting
came back to him upon strange waters.
[Illustration]
Abram Van Riper came to the daughter of the house of Dolph, a little
before it became certain that the house must be sold, and told her, in
his dry way, that he had to make a business communication to her, for he
feared that her father was hardly capable of understanding such matters
any longer. She winced a little; but he took a load off her heart when
he made his slow, precise explanation. The fact was, he said, that the
business transactions between her father and himself, consequent upon
the defalcation of her brother Eustace, had never been closed, in all
these seventeen years. (Edith Dolph trembled.) It was known at the time
that the property transferred by her father rather more than covered the
amount of her brother's--peculation. But her father's extreme
sensitiveness had led him to avoid a precise adjustment, and as the
property transferred was subject to certain long leases, he, Mr. Van
Riper, had thought it best to wait until the property was sold and the
account closed, to settle the matter with Mr. Dolph. This had lately
been done, and Mr. Van Riper found that, deducting charges, and interest
on his money at seven per cent., he had made by the transaction six
thousand three hundred and seventy dollars. This sum, he thought,
properly belonged to Mr. Dolph. And if Miss Dolph would take the counsel
of an old friend of her father's, she would leave the sum in charge of
the house of Abram Van Riper's Son. The house would invest it at ten per
cent.--he stopped and looked at Edith, but she only answered him with
innocent eyes of attention--and would pay her six hundred and
thirty-seven dollars annually in quarterly payments. It might be of
assistance to Mr. Dolph in his present situation.
It was of assistance. They lived on it, father and daughter, with such
aid as Decorative Art--just introduced to this country--gave in
semi-remunerative employment for her deft fingers.
Abram Van Riper, when he left the weeping, grateful girl, marched out
into the street, turned his face toward what was once Greenwich Village,
and said to his soul:
"I think that will balance any obligation my father may have put himself
under in buying that State Street house too cheap. Now then, old
gentleman, you can lie easy in your grave. The Van Ripers ain't beholden
to the Dolphs, that's sure."
* * * * *
A few years ago--shall we say as many as ten?--there were two small
rooms up in a quiet street in Harlem, tenanted by an old gentleman and a
young gentlewoman; and in the front room, which was the young woman's
room by night, but a sort of parlor or sitting-room in the daytime, the
old gentleman stood up, four times a year, to have his collar pulled up,
and his necktie set right, and his coat dusted off by a pair of small
white hands, so that he might be presentable when he went down town to
collect certain moneys due him.
[Illustration]
They were small rooms, but they were bright and cheerful, being
decorated with sketches and studies of an artistic sort, which may have
been somewhat crude and uncertain as to treatment, but were certainly
pleasant and feminine. Yet few saw them save the young woman and the old
man. The most frequent visitor was a young artist from the West, who
often escorted Miss Dolph to and from the Art League rooms. His name was
Rand; he had studied in Munich; he had a future before him, and was
making money on his prospects. He might just as well have lived in
luxurious bachelor quarters in the lower part of the city; but, for
reasons of his own, he preferred to live in Harlem.
Old Mr. Dolph insisted on going regularly every quarter-day to the
office of the Van Riper Estate, "to collect," as he said, "the interest
due him." Four times a year he went down town on the Eighth Avenue cars,
where the conductors soon learned to know him by his shiny black
broadcloth coat and his snow-white hair. His daughter was always uneasy
about these trips; but her father could not be dissuaded from them. To
him they were his one hold on active life--the all-important events of
the year. It would have broken his tender old heart to tell him that he
could not go to collect his "interest." And so she set his necktie
right, and he went.
When he got out of the car at Abingdon Square he tottered, in his slow,
old way, to a neat structure which combined modern jauntiness with
old-time solidity, and which was labelled simply: "Office of the Van
Riper Estate," and there he told the smilingly indulgent clerk that he
thought he would "take it in cash, this time," and, taking it in cash,
went forth.
And then he walked down through Greenwich Village into New York city,
and into the street where stood the house that his father had built.
Thus he had gone to view it four times a year, during every year save
the first, since he had given it up.
He had seen it go through one stage of decadence after another. First it
was rented, by its new owner, to the Jewish pawnbroker, with his
numerous family. Good, honest folk they were, who tried to make the
house look fine, and the five daughters made the front stoop resplendent
of summer evenings. But they had long ago moved up-town. Then it was a
cheap boarding-house, and vulgar and flashy men and women swarmed out in
the morning and in at eventide. Then it was a lodging-house, and shabby
people let themselves out and in at all hours of the day and night. And
last of all it had become a tenement-house, and had fallen into line
with its neighbors to left and right, and the window-panes were broken,
and the curse of misery and poverty and utter degradation had fallen
upon it.
But still it lifted its grand stone front, still it stood, broad and
great, among all the houses in the street. And it was the old man's
custom, after he had stood on the opposite sidewalk and gazed at it for
a while, to go to a little French _cafe_ a block to the eastward, and
there to take a glass of _vermouth gomme_--it was a mild drink, and
pleasing to an old man. Sometimes he chanced to find some one in this
place who would listen to his talk about the old house--he was very
grand; but they were decent people who went to that _cafe_, and perhaps
would go back with him a block and look at it. We would not have talked
to chance people in an east-side French _cafe_. But then we have never
owned such a house, and lost it--and everything else.
* * * * *
Late one hot summer afternoon young Rand sat in his studio, working
enthusiastically on a "composition." A new school of art had invaded New
York, and compositions were everything, for the moment, whether they
composed anything or nothing. He heard a nervous rattling at his
door-knob, and he opened the door. A young woman lifted a sweet,
flushed, frightened face to his.
"Oh, John," she cried, "father hasn't come home yet, and it's five
o'clock, and he left home at nine."
John Rand threw off his flannel jacket, and got into his coat.
"We'll find him; don't worry, dear," he said.
They found him within an hour. The great city, having no further use for
the old Dolph house, was crowding it out of existence. With the crashing
of falling bricks, and the creaking of the tackle that swung the great
beams downward, the old house was crumbling into a gap between two high
walls. Already you could see through to where the bright new bricks
were piled at the back to build the huge eight-story factory that was to
take its place. But it was not to see this demolition that the crowd was
gathered, filling the narrow street. It stood, dense, ugly, vulgar,
stolidly intent, gazing at the windows of the house opposite--a poor
tenement house.
As they went up the steps they met the young hospital surgeon, going
back to his ambulance.
"You his folks?" he inquired. "Sorry to tell you so, but I can't do any
good. Sunstroke, I suppose--may have been something else--but it's
collapse now, and no mistake. You take charge, sir?" he finished,
addressing Rand.
Jacob Dolph was lying on his back in the bare front room on the first
floor. His daughter fell on her knees by his side, and made as though
she would throw her arms around him; but, looking in his face, she saw
death quietly coming upon him, and she only bent down and kissed him,
while her tears wet his brow.
Meanwhile a tall Southerner, with hair halfway down his neck, and
kindly eyes that moved in unison with his broad gestures, was talking to
Rand.
[Illustration]
"I met the ol' gentleman in the French _cafe_, neah heah," he said, "and
he was jus' honing to have me come up and see his house, seh--house he
used to have. Well, I came right along, an' when we got here, sure
'nough, they's taihin' down that house. Neveh felt so bad in all my
life, seh. He wasn't expectin' of it, and I 'lowed 'twuz his old home
like, and he was right hahd hit, fo' a fact. He said to me, 'Good-day,
seh,' sezee; 'good-day, seh,' he says to me, an' then he starts across
the street, an' first thing I know, he falls down flat on his face, seh.
Saw that theah brick an' mortar comin' down, an' fell flat on his face.
This hyeh pill-man 'lowed 'twuz sunstroke; but a Southern man like I am
don't need to be told what a gentleman's feelings are when he sees his
house a-torn down--no, seh. If you ever down oweh way, seh, I'd be right
glad----"
But Rand had lifted Edith from the floor, for her father would know her
no more, and had passed out of this world, unconscious of all the
squalor and ruin about him; and the poor girl was sobbing on his
shoulder.
He was very tender with her, very sorry for her--but he had never known
the walls that fell across the way; he was a young man, an artist, with
a great future before him, and the world was young to him, and she was
to be his wife.
Still, looking down, he saw that sweetly calm, listening look, that
makes beautiful the faces of the dead, come over the face of Jacob
Dolph, as though he, lying there, heard the hammers of the workmen
breaking down his father's house, brick by brick--and yet the sound
could no longer jar upon his ear or grieve his gentle spirit.
[Illustration]