[Illustration]
Trent’s Last Case
THE WOMAN IN BLACK
By E.C. Bentley
To
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON.
My dear Gilbert,
I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble
motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it.
Second: because I owe you a book in return for “The Man Who Was
Thursday.” Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it
to you, surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I
remember the past.
I have been thinking again to-day of those astonishing times when
neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in
the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea, and our elders’
patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves
produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of
Canada’s poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs;
when, in short, we were extremely young. For the sake of that age I
offer you this book.
Yours always,
E. C. BENTLEY
Contents
I. Bad News
II. Knocking the Town Endways
III. Breakfast
IV. Handcuffs in the Air
V. Poking About
VI. Mr. Bunner on the Case
VII. The Lady in Black
VIII. The Inquest
IX. A Hot Scent
X. The Wife of Dives
XI. Hitherto Unpublished
XII. Evil Days
XIII. Eruption
XIV. Writing a Letter
XV. Double Cunning
XVI. The Last Straw
[Illustration]
Chapter I.
Bad News
Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we
know judge wisely?
When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered
by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single
tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity
of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal
friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to
the least honour. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those
living in the great vortices of business as if the earth too shuddered
under a blow.
In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no
figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world.
He had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct
and augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in
millions for their labour, had existed before; but in the case of
Manderson there had been this singularity, that a pale halo of
piratical romance, a thing especially dear to the hearts of his
countrymen, had remained incongruously about his head through the years
when he stood in every eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability,
the stamper-out of manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding
chieftains that infest the borders of Wall Street.
The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those
chieftains on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with
accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly
continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who
had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand,
should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is
steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.
While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich
man’s proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an
instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not
shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
him nevertheless much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his
forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been
called his early bad manner, he had been little more than a gambler of
genius, his hand against every man’s—an infant prodigy—who brought to
the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any
opposed to it. At St Helena it was laid down that war is _une belle
occupation;_ and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and
complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.
Then came his change. At his father’s death, when Manderson was thirty
years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he
served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labour in his father’s
banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety, and financial weight
lifted it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust
founded on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite
plainly a different man. How the change came about none could with
authority say, but there was a story of certain last words spoken by
his father, whom alone he had respected and perhaps loved.
He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of
Manderson called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in
the vast wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of
capital, drew together and centralized industries of continental scope,
financed with unerring judgement the large designs of state or of
private enterprise. Many a time when he “took hold” to smash a strike,
or to federate the ownership of some great field of labour, he sent
ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or
cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and
ruthless than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate
business ends. Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but
the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a
hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of
the country. Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered
to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him
the Colossus.
But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little
circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability
in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when
the Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if
Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the
spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out,
the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his
hatband. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous
raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of
the offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never
carried out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within
him and go soberly down to his counting-house—humming a stave or two of
“Spanish Ladies”, perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow
himself the harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had
gone by, of pointing out to some Rupert of the markets a coup worth a
million to the depredator might have been made. “Seems to me,” he would
say almost wistfully, “the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place
since I quit.” By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus
became known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the
knowledge.
At the news of his death panic went through the markets like a
hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed
like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous
inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever
speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide.
In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had
become pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them
had never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the
Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leapt from the
Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower.
Men stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed
it as the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had
departed from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.
The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came
when Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed “scare”—suppressed,
because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be
actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the
effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his
plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen
at a time when the market had been “boosted” beyond its real strength.
In the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the
corn-lands had not been good, and there had been two or three railway
statements which had been expected to be much better than they were.
But at whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of
the threatened break had been felt, “the Manderson crowd” had stepped
in and held the market up. All through the week the speculator’s mind,
as shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in
this the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar.
Manderson, said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication
with his lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give in
round figures the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone
in the past twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert
operators had been sent down by the Post Office authorities to
Marlstone to deal with the flood of messages. Another revealed that
Manderson, on the first news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon
his holiday and return home by the _Lusitania;_ but that he soon had
the situation so well in hand that he had determined to remain where he
was.
All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the
“finance editors”, consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd
business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better
help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship—knew also that no
word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that
Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organizer of
victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days,
and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the feet
of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Etna-mutterings of
disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm, and
slowly advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out
but thankfully at peace.
In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumour flew round the
sixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as the
lightning comes—a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be
suspected that it was first whispered over the telephone—together with
an urgent selling order by some employee in the cable service. A sharp
spasm convulsed the convalescent share-list. In five minutes the dull
noise of the kerbstone market in Broad Street had leapt to a high note
of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange itself
could be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed hatless in and
out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with
trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous “short”
interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news
came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of “Yankees” in London at the
close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four
hours’ trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson
as the saviour and warden of the markets had recoiled upon its authors
with annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone,
listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had
lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and
falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding
of Manderson’s body, with the inevitable rumour that it was suicide,
was printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached
Wall Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B.
Jeffrey and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its
breath.
All this sprang out of nothing.
Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had
not ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave
power to a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the
herds were unnumbered. Men laboured everywhere in the various
servitudes to which they were born, and chafed not more than usual in
their bonds. Bellona tossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her
uneasy sleep. To all mankind save a million or two of half-crazed
gamblers, blind to all reality, the death of Manderson meant nothing;
the life and work of the world went on. Weeks before he died strong
hands had been in control of every wire in the huge network of commerce
and industry that he had supervised. Before his corpse was buried his
countrymen had made a strange discovery—that the existence of the
potent engine of monopoly that went by the name of Sigsbee Manderson
had not been a condition of even material prosperity. The panic blew
itself out in two days, the pieces were picked up, the bankrupts
withdrew out of sight; the market “recovered a normal tone”.
While the brief delirium was yet subsiding there broke out a domestic
scandal in England that suddenly fixed the attention of two continents.
Next morning the Chicago Limited was wrecked, and the same day a
notable politician was shot down in cold blood by his wife’s brother in
the streets of New Orleans. Within a week of its rising, “the Manderson
story”, to the trained sense of editors throughout the Union, was
“cold”. The tide of American visitors pouring through Europe made
eddies round the memorial or statue of many a man who had died in
poverty; and never thought of their most famous plutocrat. Like the
poet who died in Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was
buried far away from his own land; but for all the men and women of
Manderson’s people who flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery
under the Monte Testaccio, there is not one, nor ever will be, to stand
in reverence by the rich man’s grave beside the little church of
Marlstone.