If Hamilton Burton had been one of the most picturesque figures in
finance before, he was now a flaming meteor of public interest. He had
come out of the dark and raided the directorate of a giant corporation,
gathering into his strong hands reins that the world believed to be held
beyond the possibility of filching. Moreover, this corporation was the
keystone and crowning pride in the firmly cemented arch of
Consolidated's power.
The world of business was stunned. It went to bed one night, believing
certain forces immutable, and awoke to find them overthrown and a
ministry changed. Along the chasms and cañons that debouch from lower
Broadway one question was insistently asked--and went unanswered: "What
will he do next?" Perhaps the nearest approach to a reply was the
prophecy of a cynical curb-broker--"Whatever he damn pleases." One thing
was definite. While Hamilton Burton had forced the admiration of his
world, he had forced it by the audacity of a strong grip on its throat
and by bending it to its knees.
Such admiration is accorded a tyrant and carries scant love. When the
gong sounded in the Stock-Exchange it was an alarm and the faces on the
floor were faces that mirrored fear of the day. Yet the first
transactions showed Hamilton Burton's brokers standing like pillars
under the shaky market. As the day wore on these same lieutenants met
and stemmed every tendency toward receding prices. Several banks
announced incipient runs and at once from the Burton treasury came a
tide of gold, so that reassured depositors turned away smiling.
When the actual meeting of Coal and Ore stock-holders was called to
order both Burton and Harrison were present in person.
"Before this vote is taken," said Harrison, rising with a face upon
which was indelibly stamped the grim determination of one so long
victorious that defeat was unspeakably bitter, "I wish to be heard.
Though the registry of transfers tells the story in advance, I know as
Hamilton Burton knows, that it is a victory for traitors. If there is a
chance that some of these may yet turn back from their treason, I want
them to listen to me."
Burton glanced about the table, where the mastery was his own.
"When I attend a meeting of this character," he curtly announced, "we
vote first, and whoever wishes to can talk after I have gone."
Outside, as the two men left the room, waited the batteries of
reporters. On the threshold, the appearance of each was noted and
flashed in first-page stories wherever news went. The new One-man-power
stood slender and strong, and tigerish; an incarnation of dominant youth
and triumph. Harrison might have been passing into exile, but he walked
with his head high and eyes that met every questioning gaze with the
forbidding glitter of a newly trapped and caged lion. There was
something about the man so suggestive of a broken warrior that the
scribes whose duty was to interrogate refrained and stood respectfully
silent as he passed between them.
But they questioned Burton and Burton smiled. "Gentlemen," he said in
that velvety voice that fitted in so charmingly with the winning quality
of his smile, "you know my rule. I am never interviewed--but you may
announce that the Coal and Ore directorate will be reorganized."
At the curb Paul was waiting in the car, and around it pressed an
inquisitive mob, which the police were already beginning to push back
and stir into motion. As they cleared a path for him through the idle
humanity the man who had come from the abandoned farm went to his
machine with an unconcern which took no note of their interest. To his
brother he commented in a low and musical voice. "They aren't so
different from Slivers Martin. I bought those lambs for seven and sold
them for ten. But it's only the first transaction, Paul, that gives one
the real thrill."
When he reached his library he found Mary there. "I have been reading
the papers, Hamilton," she said quietly. "As near as I can make it all
out, 'it was a famous victory,' but why do the papers all call it a
raid?" Her brother looked at her and a flash of pride kindled fondly in
his eyes for the face which a shaft of the sun lighted into vivid
beauty.
"I told you once," he said, "that we should reign together. This is for
me a victorious day. I am glad that you are the woman to whom I come
fresh from the field I have won and the frontier I have pushed forward."
He turned away from her and stood for a moment at the window in a flood
of yellow radiance. The clarity of his eyes and luster of his dark hair
and the hue of his cheeks were all declarations of gladiatorial
perfection of condition. His brow was unclouded.
He began to speak, at first with a modulated voice that mounted with
his words to a fiery eloquence:
"Many marches follow, Mary ... toward vaster victories. To me a certain
memory lives clear in every detail. I see a small girl with her thin
little body shaking with sobs ... because her life seemed doomed to
drudgery and emptiness. I see my mother and my aunt and my father
suffering like beasts of burden under the goad and yoke of poverty. I
see a boy, ragged and rebellious, declaring war on the world and
swearing to wrest from it every good thing that those he loved might
ever covet--and for himself unparalleled power." He paused and spread
his hands apart with a gesture of dismissing the abstract. "I have
proven myself able to realize my dreams. I shall go on. My aspirations
of empire look far ahead: my horizons are limitless. There are few
people to whom I can express my ambitions. But you--" He came across and
took her hand. "You can understand. Tell me, Mary, is there anything in
the world you want? Because, by heaven, if there is it shall be yours."
The girl's eyes, as she met his gaze, were deeply grave.
"In all this dream of power, Hamilton," she said softly, "you have never
spoken of any sense of trust or stewardship, and what you call a
victory, the papers call a raid. Has it ever occurred to you, my dear
brother, that perhaps your dream is, after all, one of colossal
selfishness?"
The rippling ease of his muscles stiffened and his smile faded.
"Is it selfishness to give back to those one loves the things of which
life has robbed them?"
She shook her head. "No--but there is such a thing as suffocating the
souls in them with material kindness and bodily luxuries," she answered.
"You have been spending a great deal of time of late with Jefferson
Edwardes." The manner of the man underwent one of its swift changes and
grew cool and acid. "Perhaps he has been talking to you as he undertook
to talk to me last night."
A light as dominant as that in her brother's came to Mary Burton's
pupils.
"Perhaps," she replied.
"I'm not at all sure that I care for this intimate association with Mr.
Edwardes," he curtly announced. "I am not enamored of the vaporings of
visionary and self-ordained preachers."
"Possibly it is not necessary that you should be," the girl suggested.
"Maybe for the purpose of my own friendships, it is enough that I like
him. I hardly think you would understand his type, Hamilton."
Her brother's face reddened dangerously.
"I should call my intelligence human," he declared. "I've been able to
make certain use of it."
"Call it superhuman if you like--or inhuman, yet I hardly think it can
truly gage that type of gallant gentleman who has kept his dreams
untainted and his ideals clean."
The man who had found the world a thing upon which he could stamp his
hall-mark stood for a while without speaking; then his voice came keyed
to a satirical coldness.
"Whatever your estimate may be of my ability to understand this peerless
gentleman and chevalier, one thing I can do. I can crush him into pulp.
If he has poisoned against me the minds of my own family, I swear to
you that I both can and will nail him to the cross of utter ruin. You
had better warn your knightly friend, Mary, that the days of
grail-seeking are ended."
The girl came to her feet and her eyes were stars of scorn as she faced
the man whose sudden anger had brought out the arteries corded on his
temples.
"Such talk," she said, "belongs to the shambles of your cut-throat
finance. I have no wish to listen to it." Gradually the scornful light
in Mary's pupils hardened and brightened into the fighting fire that
might come into those of a tigress whose den has been threatened. Her
delicate nostrils quivered and her cheeks flamed.
"Five minutes ago you were inquiring what costly gifts my heart desired,
that you might buy them for me with your money. Well, there is something
I want that I haven't got--and your millions can't buy it. I want decent
love. You had me schooled into a Circe and you almost killed my soul.
Thank God, some one came in time, some one whose thoughts are above
sordid conquest. Some one who wanted to save me from the legalized
prostitution of a loveless marriage. And because he has said to your
face what all men say in your absence, you talk of crucifying him." She
broke off and her breath came fast.
Hamilton Burton gazed silently for a moment, then he said shortly:
"I'm not such a damn' fool as to try to argue with a woman in a rage.
You have too much brain, Mary, and at times you irritate me. Paul is the
only one in this family who soothes me. I'll go to him."
"Yes," she retorted contemptuously, "Paul will burn incense to your
vanity. Go to him."
She turned to leave the room, but at the door she paused. "Jefferson
Edwardes will dine here this evening," she volunteered. "Any discourtesy
to him will be an insult to me."
* * * * *
A little strange it was, perhaps, and yet true, that Hamilton Burton,
who feared no man and showed consideration to few, discovered himself
standing in something like awe of his imperious sister. At all events
his outbreak of wrath subsided and that evening he gave to the man who
had aroused it no intimation of its recent upflaming.
But in the days and weeks that followed, Hamilton Burton saw much of
Edwardes and that very directness of gaze, that level glance which
concealed nothing and evaded nothing became to him at first a small
annoyance, and then a constantly aggravated irritation. His star of
Destiny rode at its zenith. Every venture turned under his Midas hand to
gold and increased power. He mounted to succeeding heights until it
seemed that like Alexander he must soon brood over the smallness of the
world's opportunity. Colossal mergers grouped themselves into structures
of stupendous strength. His pride was bloated with successes, yet all
the while across his own table he must encounter eyes that withheld
reverence and politely masked something like contempt. Some day he knew
those clean-souled eyes would goad him to an outbreak.
But impulse is the menace to a strong man's strength, and no one save
Hamilton Burton himself suspected that this antipathy was growing into
an obsession.
Besides, there were more important matters to consider, and a hundred
active enemies to watch. Any such moment of relaxed vigilance as he
himself had seized to overthrow the preëminence of others would be used
to overthrow his own.
While he rode on the highest crest of Fortune's wave the one member of
his family who had remained unchanged fell ill. For a week all else was
forgotten while the Burton family waited the outcome in Aunt Hannah's
bedroom.
That austere old spinster talked in her delirium of other days and
denied that they had altered. In broken rambling words she took them all
back with her to a life they had put behind them. The names of cows and
horses in whose care Hamilton had so many hundred times taken down and
put up the panel of stable-lot bars dwelt on her trembling lips and she
smiled contentedly over simple things. Finally, she told them that she
was sleepy and would talk no longer, because tomorrow morning she must
be up early and give the house a thorough cleaning. With that
announcement she turned her seamed face to the wall and slept. It was a
placid sleep which no clamor of an alarm clock would ever disturb.
Because she had always insisted upon it with the childish pertinacity of
the simple-souled, the Burton family went back with her to the ragged
slopes of the White Mountains. They saw again, for the first time since
they had turned away from their padlocked door, the hills and rocks and
rutted roads that had once been their own country.
Jefferson Edwardes went with them, and when the funeral was ended and
the little cortège left the churchyard, he and Mary Burton remained a
while among the graves. Most of the trees were stark and naked, but to
one or two still clung shreds of departed autumn brilliancy. A maple
still boasted a few scarlet tatters of the banner with which it had
done honor to the Frost King. By the decaying wall of the little church
a scrub oak rattled its tenacious leafage of russet brown.
About the two tilted and careened the neglected tombstones of those who
slept humbly but restfully here. The gaunt hills, too, tilted and
careened in heaped-up barriers of dilapidation to the distance where the
autumn veiled them in a smoky purple. But above them was the glow of
crimson and rose-ash, where the sunset burned.
Mary's beautiful eyes were bright with tears and as she stood there slim
and straight, the man came close and his arm slipped about her. For a
moment she seemed unconscious of his presence, then she turned and her
eyes looked steadfastly into his, and, as they looked, they smiled
through their mistiness.
"Thank God," she said in a low voice into which a tremor stole; "thank
God, you came to me and woke me up--in time."
After a little she spoke again hastily as though in fright.
"Dearest," she declared tensely, "as I stood here today a fear came over
me: a fear and a premonition. It seemed to me that every hill and every
tree was accusing us. Silent voices were calling out, 'Why did you go
away?'" She broke off, and then, as though from the strength of his
embrace, she drew reassurance, she went on: "Suppose it was all a
ghastly mistake? Suppose Hamilton's overvaulting ambition with all its
vast egotism should totter and fall? What would become of us in that
world down there? I have, since we left here, seen only one look of
serene and utterly calm peace on any face in our family. It was her
face--" The girl nodded toward the grave and shivered.
The man drew her closer.
"Loved faces in death always wear a peace that life does not know," he
told her. Then whimsically he smiled as he voiced a fantastic
suggestion:
"Maybe, dearest, there's some land beyond the stars where all the
mistakes we make here can be remedied ... where we can take up our
marred lives and live them afresh, as we have dreamed them. Perhaps in
that other world we can go back to the turning of the road where we lost
our ways ... and choose the other path."
* * * * *
Constancy and fixedness belong to strong characters. The granite crag
stands unchanging, but the waters at its base lash themselves into a
thousand shapes and colors and semblances. Hamilton had in him the
firmness of the hills, but Paul's nature was as fluid as the waters that
whirl or lilt along the easiest channels, and that turn aside to avoid
obstacles. On his table stood a photograph of Loraine Haswell in a gold
frame. It was a photograph of which there was no duplicate, and one
which her husband had not seen. When it had been taken the sitter had
selected a pose of graceful ease, as though the photographer had
ambushed her and caught her in a moment of almost sacred privacy, a
moment when she had relaxed into an attitude of intimate and somewhat
melancholy thought.
The slender hands rested with fingers loosely interlocked in her lap,
holding a drooping rose. The splendid slenderness of her figure was
enhanced by the veiling of delicate negligée, and the face under its
night-dark profusion of hair looked out wistfully with a sad half-smile
on something that her heart chose to hold before her gaze. Certainly,
had it not been that such excellence of the photographer's craft could
only have been attained by careful posing, one might have said that he
had taken an unfair advantage and had permitted his lens to spy upon a
lovely lady in the secrecy of her boudoir, whose sole companions were
emotions which must remain locked in her beautiful breast.
She had told Paul when she gave him the picture, and the same ghost of
pathos had flickered into her eyes and the droop of her lips, that the
flower was one from a box of his giving, and that she had been thinking
of him when the camera clicked, forgetting for a moment the pose she had
meant to assume. Often, she whispered, she sat like that thinking of
him.
So Paul kept flowers on each side of the frame, and made of it a sort of
shrine.
And yet, sometimes, when he had said good-bye to her after a luncheon or
tea together, he would turn his car southward and find himself driving
down the avenue to Washington square and the old house on the south
side, to invite Marcia Terroll for a spin beside him. And sometimes he
would call her on the telephone and they would meet for a walk.
To himself alone, he confessed his love for Loraine, for a specter of
timidity rose often and marred their meetings. How was it to end? He
could no more escape the realization of the husband's existence and
possible ire than can the quail in the open grain-field forget the
shadow of a soaring hawk. And Paul was not the most daring cock quail in
the stubble. He saw shadows of proprietary wings where the sky held only
wisps of fleecy cloud.
With Marcia, there was the security of safe companionship, and a
combination of stimulus and soothing.
That this interest was tinctured with an essence of the enthusiastic,
which to other eyes than his own--even to her eyes--might seem to hold a
stronger personal note, he did not admit to himself. That would have
meant another complication and a fresh alarm, so if the idea came he
laughed it away as preposterous. But in a fashion those were very good
days. He was discovering New York.
There are quaint places about the square, where insurgency reigns and
finds expression, where existing conditions are denounced, where freedom
is verbally fought for and capital and conventions are vocally
annihilated. In some of them food is served at prices which astonished
his training at the expensive restaurants. There the musician and the
girl went, he as explorer, fastidiously critical, yet enduring what he
regarded as squalor and anarchy, for the new experience of feeling that
he was penetrating Bohemia.
She acted as guide, and since she knew the world of ease and the world
of necessity and could walk alike with the aristocratic and the
commonalty--and remain equally herself--she sat amused, watching him as
he watched the rest. The twinkle that sought to flash into her eye
flashed only in her mind, but the play of keen humor and wit quaintly
expressed sparkled through her conversation, so that when they were
together they laughed a great deal.
Acquaintanceship which is nourished in the sunlight of laughter blooms
rapidly into intimacy, and Paul Burton would have been surprised had he
known how often his eyes wakened into a tell-tale glow of delight and
admiration, and how easily any one looking on might have fallen into
the egregious error of construing his attitude into one distinctly
loverlike. All this while she continued to pique his curiosity by a
sustained reserve as to herself.
She spoke quite frankly of her failures to get employment, making
deliciously laughable stories out of disappointing and disheartening
experiences, but it was only in incidental comments that she referred to
things in the past which made him know that her life had once held in
abundance those things which it now lacked.
One day when Paul had selected with great care a mass of roses of a new
and particularly exotic variety to be sent to Loraine, the florist
inquired, "Will that be all today, Mr. Burton?"
The musician had nodded, then suddenly he said, "No, I think there is
something else I want." It suddenly came to him that he had never given
Marcia any sort of present. Of course she would have no use for a small
cart-load of expensive flowers. One had to send gifts of that sort to
Loraine, because she was herself so gorgeously expensive, but Marcia
might like some violets. Violets would look rather well on the blue suit
she most often wore. He was to meet her in a half-hour, though he had
not mentioned the appointment to Loraine. So he had the violets wrapped
up, feeling somehow a sort of diffidence such as he had never felt
before when giving flowers to women, and took them with him.
It was crisp afternoon and as he reached the square a small hand waved
to him and he saw her walking briskly along by the arch, so he ordered
the car stopped, and jumped out.
"I was just coming over for you," he said. "It would have been a
disaster to have missed you. Barola is giving a violin recital at
Carnegie Hall. Shall we run up? There's just time."
"You weren't going to miss me," she laughed. "I had no intention of
letting you, but the afternoon was too utterly delectable to stay
indoors, so I waylaid you here." Then after a moment, as she stepped
lightly through the car door which he had opened, she added delightedly,
"Barola! And I was just crying for some music. Did you hear my wails
from the Flatiron building down?"
"I was too busy crying to see you," he laughed back. "My agonized sobs
drowned the traffic whistles."
As the car turned, he held out the box, which proclaimed its contents,
as violet boxes always do. A man may have a bottle of rum or a chest of
stolen gold wrapped up so it looks as innocent as a pair of socks, but
no swain bearing violets can deceive the eye of the most casual
observer. Marcia was not deceived.
"Violets!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean they are for me?"
"Of course," he answered, and, for no reason at all, colored like a
schoolboy.
Marcia opened the box and sat gazing at the flowers.
Into her face came a sudden gravity and the delicate features seemed
almost sad. She said, "Thank you," in a low voice and continued to gaze
at her gift. Then she buried her face in their fragrance and for a
moment held it there. When she raised it to him again it was smiling,
though still gravely.
"They are lovely," she told him. "I'm glad you thought of them."
"You seemed almost sad," Paul spoke with a voice of deep solicitude.
"Did I make a mistake? Do violets stand for something you don't want to
be reminded of?"
She shook her head and laughed, and this time with the old note of
merriment.
"Violets stand for everything that's nice," she assured him. "It was
just that--I hardly know--just that it suddenly occurred to me how long
a time it's been since anyone gave me flowers."
"Someone is going to--often," the words came quickly, and impulsively he
laid his hand over hers for just a moment.
"Do you know, I have the instincts of a sybarite?" she informed him.
"When I go to sleep tonight, I shall put these violets near the head of
my bed, and whenever I wake up I'll smell them."
* * * * *
Despite his strong defensive preparations and his almost clairvoyant
foresight, in Hamilton Burton an insidious change was taking place and
the brain which so astutely coördinated many things was totally
unconscious of its own transitions. Egotism had made him. A self-faith
which took no account of difficulties, had carried him to the apex of
his ambitions. Now it was blinding him with its own brilliance. Hamilton
Burton was drunk, drunk to the core of his soul, with the strong
intoxicant of self-confidence. He looked on life through a mirror--and
saw only himself.
So, while he intrenched and safeguarded his destiny, he failed to
realize that he was being lulled into a reckless faith in the star he
believed shone over him and for him. He did not pause to reflect that
the wolf, gaunt and powerful, who by the courage in his shaggy breast
and the strength of his fanged jaws, runs unchallenged at the pack head,
may change.
He took no account of the fact that the wolf gorged is the wolf
weakened.
As his plans grew his methods became more unscrupulous and his scorn for
forms of law increased.
One day he sat in his mother's house showing her, with the enthusiastic
glee of a child for new toys, several freshly acquired miniatures of the
First Napoleon.
Mrs. Burton turned one of the priceless trinkets over in her hand and
gazed at it wonderingly. It was a small thing, wrought on ivory by Jean
Baptiste Jacques Augustin and framed in pearls. She thought she had seen
more flattering portrayals of the round head which stared out from the
jewelled circlet.
"I suppose," she said with such a sigh as mothers utter when they fail
to understand with full sympathy the enthusiasms of their children, "I
ought to rave over this. From your eyes I realize that it is
treasure-trove and yet to me it is meaningless. Of course," she naïvely
added, "the pearls are very pretty."
Tenderly, Hamilton stooped and kissed her forehead, then he took the
miniature from her hand and stood looking at the painted face. He stood
straight and lithe, and he spoke slowly:
"Sometimes I wonder if the belief in reincarnation is not the truest
faith, mother. Sometimes, I seem to look back on the career of this man
as on something in an unforgotten past. To me it is all more vital than
history; more real than chronicle. It is memory!" He paused and his eyes
were altogether grave.
"As I reflect on Austerlitz, I find myself saying, 'I did well there,'
and for Waterloo and St. Helena my chagrin and misery are personal. Why
should I doubt that once my own spirit dwelt in another body--in his,
perhaps?" His voice mounted, and he continued, "But this time the
spirit must go further. It must never taste defeat. Its triumph must
grow to the end, and surrender its scepter and baton only to Death."
The mother looked up at the exalted fantasy which glowed in her son's
face and her head shook uncomprehendingly. "It seems only yesterday,"
she said "that I held you, a soft little morsel of pink flesh, close to
my breast. I dreamed of no great triumphs for you. Only goodness and
health. Perhaps it was as well that way. I sometimes wonder if any woman
could face her responsibilities if she knew she was giving birth to one
of the masters of the world. My only vanity was to name you Hamilton.
And Paul I named for the great apostle." She laughed very low--and her
son knelt beside her chair and drew her into his embrace.