There is in the western hemisphere one town whose local news is national
news and international news. Its celebrities wear names which the nation
mouths over with gusto, and its own name was, until comparatively
recently, New Amsterdam. The country closely followed the first-column
stories with which the press sought to keep abreast of the affairs of
Hamilton Montagu Burton. It was interesting reading, for it dealt with a
late potentate of power untold; now an invalid whose brain slept like a
child taking its forenoon nap while his millions, counted in scores and
hundreds, went back to their sources as the sun draws water into the
clouds to spill it out again elsewhere. A giant of untold might had
kindled the fires that slept at the heart of a volcano--and then had
fallen asleep upon the slopes down which the lava must flow!
While he slept, Ruin, spelling itself with a capital letter, had
signaled out the one pedestaled figure which had laughed at ruin, and
mocked its potency and bragged of a star which was above menace.
Hamilton Burton lay for weeks in insensibility and delirium and when, in
returned consciousness, he realized his predicament he raved like a
madman against restraint, counting the precious moments, which were
being used against him, bleeding him of vital power. This very fretting
against the inevitable burdened him with a waste of nerve and brain
which should send him forth, depleted in strength and weakened in
resistance, to meet his adversaries.
Nor had the forces aligned against him marked time. When again he took
the field he must take it in a realm of altered and shrunken boundaries,
and the roll-call of his allies would show many missing--and many gone
over to the foe. But greater than all these things was the change in
himself. The cloyed wolf who had gorged too deep of success was no
longer the lean fighting beast with a ravenous light of conquest in his
eyes. That Burton might have met even the present and triumphed. This
was a wolf on the defensive, fating a pack which had turned upon his
leadership. His weakened fangs were against the jaws of all the
rest--and he came scarred and spent from days and nights of physical
feebleness.
Paul sat beside Hamilton in his car as they drove down-town on that
first day when the financier defied the edicts of his physicians.
"Hamilton," questioned the younger brother, voicing for the first time
that deep anxiety which had been clamoring within him for weeks, "will
you be able to drive back your assailants? The papers predict that your
reign is broken and your ruin near at hand."
Hamilton raised his face and smiled. It was the old imperious smile, but
the face over which it spread was thinner and gaunter and between the
hollowed cheekbones the smile lost something of its wonted
illumination--failed somewhat of its old convincing force.
"The papers have had their opportunity to prattle without check. Now I
am back again--we shall see." He broke off and laughed, then he rushed
on fiercely. "They call this St. Helena. They lie." In the weakness
which was still upon him, he gasped a moment for breath. "When Napoleon
left Elba the papers of Paris raved about the escape of the unspeakable
tyrant. When he reached the borders of France they announced, without
comment, the approach of Napoleon Bonaparte, but when he was near the
gates they raised a pæan of triumphal welcome to the Emperor, who had
returned to make France more glorious than ever among nations! I shall
soon be at their city gates, Paul, and, while my star shines, no mortal
power can stop me or stay my progress."
But the Napoleon of the later phases was not the Napoleon of Austerlitz.
Out of the great heart and brain some essential element had gone.
Burton, too, had tasted defeat and knew its bitterness. He was going
back to rally shrunken forces and lead a forlorn hope and his eyes were
grimly defiant--where once they had been regnantly confident. Perhaps
Hamilton Burton during those next few months was after all more worthy
of admiration than he had been since a boy whose dreams burned
city-ward. Feeling each day a day of adversity and giving no hint, he
recognized, yet refused to admit, the dawn of defeat when defeat was far
past its dawning. Upon the world of allied assailants that pressed him
back--back--ever back on dwindling millions and then shrinking hundreds
of thousands he turned a fierce and unsurrendering face. To himself he
said even now that his star was infallible.
But in the privacy of his own bedroom, when no alien eye penetrated his
solitude, his bitterness was epic and terrible. In the consistency of
that egotism which had first made, then unmade him, there was no room
for remorse; no possibility of self-accusation. If his star was to set
it would set on his last terrific stand against the squares of the
enemy, with the old guard about him ... and when the end came, like
another Antony, he would fall on his own sword.
And always to the sunken-eyed anxiety of his mother, and the puffy-eyed
misgivings of his father and the quaking terror of his brother, he gave
back laughing assurances of his unquenchable power. To them he treated
as technicalities, which he would casually brush aside. Federal
prosecutions and Congressional investigations and the solid phalanx of
financial interests that constantly drew their strangling cordons around
him. He never admitted to others or to himself as a possibility the
reckoning which was sure beyond question. Yet except for a detail of
months--or weeks--he was as irremediably ruined as though already the
tape of the stock-ticker had spelled out its unemotional announcement,
"Hamilton Burton cannot meet his obligations." He had been wounded
through the one vulnerable joint of his armor: his great self-pride and
unquestioning assurance were struck to the quick of the heart. His day
was done.
Since he had lost in dozens and scores of millions and could return to
his preëminence only by mighty leaps, he plunged again in dozens and
scores of millions, as befitted a mighty gambler. And in scores he lost
and in scores again he plunged--to his ruinous and total undoing.
* * * * *
As the Burton fortunes were dwindling, Loraine Haswell, who had come now
from the Riviera to Paris, found her state of mind reaching an anxiety
that threatened first her composure, then almost her reason. She knew of
her husband's ruin, and had written him a letter of condolence rather
more human than any of her other communications to him had been of late.
But that the shattering of such a moderate financier as Len Haswell
should foreshadow the total ruin of a money czar like Hamilton Burton
and impoverish his parasite brother, was an idea too colossal to grasp
in its entirety. Yet in the news from America it slowly dawned. In the
Paris edition of the _Herald_ it was convincingly chronicled, and the
beautiful dark-haired woman who had thrown away her husband began to see
that she had no reserve upon which to fall back. Had Len's modest
fortune survived that tempest, it would have been easy to put back into
port. A little contrition, a confession that she had tried living
without him and found it impossible, would have won his forgiveness,
because his heart had been too sore to calculate. But now Len was
bankrupt and Paul would be likewise.
In these days Carlos de Metuan was no longer a speaker of veiled
phrases. He was playing the rôle of the generous Platonic friend,
watching her moods and seeking to comfort her.
There was no strain of iron in this woman's soul, and that suited his
purpose. Just now he would gain more by merely standing by. Her
increasing alarm would one day turn to panic and she would lose her
head. For that day he could afford to wait.
Loraine was undergoing an agony, and when the time came which the duke
regarded as the psychological moment, and he baldly offered her his
proposition, she made a lovely picture of a woman in distress converted
into a righteous fury.
She sent him away with blazing eyes and words that should have scorched,
and he went with a shrug of the shoulders and smiled when he was out of
sight. "It is not for long," he told himself.
In that cynical conviction Carlos de Metuan was correct. Loraine tried
poverty and loneliness for a while in Paris, and because she was still a
creature of rare beauty, several other men with greater or less degree
of skilled language suggested similar solutions.
At last she met the duke again. He had been in Andalusia and had
returned once more to Paris--alone. He was driving in a motor car and
came upon her walking near the Arc de Triomphe. He halted the car and
asked her to let him drive her home. At first she demurred, but in the
end consented to let him drop her at her _pension_, provided he would
promise to leave her immediately at her door.
"Assuredly," agreed the man gravely. "But in return, you will do me a
favor also? You will let me call for you tonight and will dine with me?"
For a moment Loraine hesitated, then she slowly nodded her head.
Carlos de Metuan arrived promptly that evening.
Loraine had made her fight and regarded herself as a defeated martyr.
The hour and a half before his coming she had not devoted to tears, but
to beautifying herself. She met him radiant, and from her eyes and lips
all the disfigurement of distress was banished. She laughed and chatted
throughout dinner, and over the coffee, leaning forward a little, she
asked, "Where do you mean to take me from here?"
"To a comedy perhaps, wherever you like."
There was a brief pause, then she looked up and put a second question.
She put it with the best nonchalance that she could assume. It did not
sound like unconditional surrender.
"And after that?"
Carlos de Metuan lighted a cigarette.
"I have leased for you a very good apartment not far from the Champs
Elysées. I think you will find it comfortable."
For an instant the woman's eyes hardened.
"You appear to have taken matters rather much for granted, Carlos."
He shook his head and smiled.
"I merely hoped," he assured her.