LAPHAM awoke confused, and in a kind of remoteness from the loss of the
night before, through which it loomed mistily. But before he lifted
his head from the pillow, it gathered substance and weight against
which it needed all his will to bear up and live. In that moment he
wished that he had not wakened, that he might never have wakened; but
he rose, and faced the day and its cares.
The morning papers brought the report of the fire, and the conjectured
loss. The reporters somehow had found out the fact that the loss fell
entirely upon Lapham; they lighted up the hackneyed character of their
statements with the picturesque interest OF the coincidence that the
policy had expired only the week before; heaven knows how they knew it.
They said that nothing remained of the building but the walls; and
Lapham, on his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell.
The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down upon the
blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pavement was a sheet of
ice, and the water from the engines had frozen, like streams of tears,
down the face of the house, and hung in icy tags from the window-sills
and copings.
He gathered himself up as well as he could, and went on to his office.
The chance of retrieval that had flashed upon him, as he sat smoking by
that ruined hearth the evening before, stood him in such stead now as a
sole hope may; and he said to himself that, having resolved not to sell
his house, he was no more crippled by its loss than he would have been
by letting his money lie idle in it; what he might have raised by
mortgage on it could be made up in some other way; and if they would
sell he could still buy out the whole business of that West Virginia
company, mines, plant, stock on hand, good-will, and everything, and
unite it with his own. He went early in the afternoon to see
Bellingham, whose expressions of condolence for his loss he cut short
with as much politeness as he knew how to throw into his impatience.
Bellingham seemed at first a little dazzled with the splendid courage
of his scheme; it was certainly fine in its way; but then he began to
have his misgivings.
"I happen to know that they haven't got much money behind them," urged
Lapham. "They'll jump at an offer."
Bellingham shook his head. "If they can show profit on the old
manufacture, and prove they can make their paint still cheaper and
better hereafter, they can have all the money they want. And it will
be very difficult for you to raise it if you're threatened by them.
With that competition, you know what your plant at Lapham would be
worth, and what the shrinkage on your manufactured stock would be.
Better sell out to them," he concluded, "if they will buy."
"There ain't money enough in this country to buy out my paint," said
Lapham, buttoning up his coat in a quiver of resentment. "Good
afternoon, sir." Men are but grown-up boys after all. Bellingham
watched this perversely proud and obstinate child fling petulantly out
of his door, and felt a sympathy for him which was as truly kind as it
was helpless.
But Lapham was beginning to see through Bellingham, as he believed.
Bellingham was, in his way, part of that conspiracy by which Lapham's
creditors were trying to drive him to the wall. More than ever now he
was glad that he had nothing to do with that cold-hearted,
self-conceited race, and that the favours so far were all from his
side. He was more than ever determined to show them, every one of
them, high and low, that he and his children could get along without
them, and prosper and triumph without them. He said to himself that if
Penelope were engaged to Corey that very minute, he would make her
break with him.
He knew what he should do now, and he was going to do it without loss
of time. He was going on to New York to see those West Virginia
people; they had their principal office there, and he intended to get
at their ideas, and then he intended to make them an offer. He managed
this business better than could possibly have been expected of a man in
his impassioned mood. But when it came really to business, his
practical instincts, alert and wary, came to his aid against the
passions that lay in wait to betray after they ceased to dominate him.
He found the West Virginians full of zeal and hope, but in ten minutes
he knew that they had not yet tested their strength in the money
market, and had not ascertained how much or how little capital they
could command. Lapham himself, if he had had so much, would not have
hesitated to put a million dollars into their business. He saw, as
they did not see, that they had the game in their own hands, and that
if they could raise the money to extend their business, they could ruin
him. It was only a question of time, and he was on the ground first.
He frankly proposed a union of their interests. He admitted that they
had a good thing, and that he should have to fight them hard; but he
meant to fight them to the death unless they could come to some sort of
terms. Now, the question was whether they had better go on and make a
heavy loss for both sides by competition, or whether they had better
form a partnership to run both paints and command the whole market.
Lapham made them three propositions, each of which was fair and open:
to sell out to them altogether; to buy them out altogether; to join
facilities and forces with them, and go on in an invulnerable alliance.
Let them name a figure at which they would buy, a figure at which they
would sell, a figure at which they would combine,--or, in other words,
the amount of capital they needed.
They talked all day, going out to lunch together at the Astor House,
and sitting with their knees against the counter on a row of stools
before it for fifteen minutes of reflection and deglutition, with their
hats on, and then returning to the basement from which they emerged.
The West Virginia company's name was lettered in gilt on the wide low
window, and its paint, in the form of ore, burnt, and mixed, formed a
display on the window shelf Lapham examined it and praised it; from
time to time they all recurred to it together; they sent out for some
of Lapham's paint and compared it, the West Virginians admitting its
former superiority. They were young fellows, and country persons, like
Lapham, by origin, and they looked out with the same amused, undaunted
provincial eyes at the myriad metropolitan legs passing on the pavement
above the level of their window. He got on well with them. At last,
they said what they would do. They said it was nonsense to talk of
buying Lapham out, for they had not the money; and as for selling out,
they would not do it, for they knew they had a big thing. But they
would as soon use his capital to develop it as anybody else's, and if
he could put in a certain sum for this purpose, they would go in with
him. He should run the works at Lapham and manage the business in
Boston, and they would run the works at Kanawha Falls and manage the
business in New York. The two brothers with whom Lapham talked named
their figure, subject to the approval of another brother at Kanawha
Falls, to whom they would write, and who would telegraph his answer, so
that Lapham could have it inside of three days. But they felt
perfectly sure that he would approve; and Lapham started back on the
eleven o'clock train with an elation that gradually left him as he drew
near Boston, where the difficulties of raising this sum were to be over
come. It seemed to him, then, that those fellows had put it up on him
pretty steep, but he owned to himself that they had a sure thing, and
that they were right in believing they could raise the same sum
elsewhere; it would take all OF it, he admitted, to make their paint
pay on the scale they had the right to expect. At their age, he would
not have done differently; but when he emerged, old, sore, and
sleep-broken, from the sleeping-car in the Albany depot at Boston, he
wished with a pathetic self-pity that they knew how a man felt at his
age. A year ago, six months ago, he would have laughed at the notion
that it would be hard to raise the money. But he thought ruefully of
that immense stock of paint on hand, which was now a drug in the
market, of his losses by Rogers and by the failures of other men, of
the fire that had licked up so many thousands in a few hours; he
thought with bitterness of the tens of thousands that he had gambled
away in stocks, and of the commissions that the brokers had pocketed
whether he won or lost; and he could not think of any securities on
which he could borrow, except his house in Nankeen Square, or the mine
and works at Lapham. He set his teeth in helpless rage when he thought
of that property out on the G. L. & P., that ought to be worth so much,
and was worth so little if the Road chose to say so.
He did not go home, but spent most of the day shining round, as he
would have expressed it, and trying to see if he could raise the money.
But he found that people of whom he hoped to get it were in the
conspiracy which had been formed to drive him to the wall. Somehow,
there seemed a sense of his embarrassments abroad. Nobody wanted to
lend money on the plant at Lapham without taking time to look into the
state of the business; but Lapham had no time to give, and he knew that
the state of the business would not bear looking into. He could raise
fifteen thousand on his Nankeen Square house, and another fifteen on
his Beacon Street lot, and this was all that a man who was worth a
million by rights could do! He said a million, and he said it in
defiance of Bellingham, who had subjected his figures to an analysis
which wounded Lapham more than he chose to show at the time, for it
proved that he was not so rich and not so wise as he had seemed. His
hurt vanity forbade him to go to Bellingham now for help or advice; and
if he could have brought himself to ask his brothers for money, it
would have been useless; they were simply well-to-do Western people,
but not capitalists on the scale he required.
Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often seems to
bring men. When its test was applied, practically or theoretically, to
all those who had seemed his friends, there was none who bore it; and
he thought with bitter self-contempt of the people whom he had
befriended in their time of need. He said to himself that he had been
a fool for that; and he scorned himself for certain acts of
scrupulosity by which he had lost money in the past. Seeing the moral
forces all arrayed against him, Lapham said that he would like to have
the chance offered him to get even with them again; he thought he
should know how to look out for himself. As he understood it, he had
several days to turn about in, and he did not let one day's failure
dishearten him. The morning after his return he had, in fact, a gleam
of luck that gave him the greatest encouragement for the moment. A man
came in to inquire about one of Rogers's wild-cat patents, as Lapham
called them, and ended by buying it. He got it, of course, for less
than Lapham took it for, but Lapham was glad to be rid of it for
something, when he had thought it worth nothing; and when the
transaction was closed, he asked the purchaser rather eagerly if he
knew where Rogers was; it was Lapham's secret belief that Rogers had
found there was money in the thing, and had sent the man to buy it.
But it appeared that this was a mistake; the man had not come from
Rogers, but had heard of the patent in another way; and Lapham was
astonished in the afternoon, when his boy came to tell him that Rogers
was in the outer office, and wished to speak with him.
"All right," said Lapham, and he could not command at once the severity
for the reception of Rogers which he would have liked to use. He found
himself, in fact, so much relaxed towards him by the morning's touch of
prosperity that he asked him to sit down, gruffly, of course, but
distinctly; and when Rogers said in his lifeless way, and with the
effect of keeping his appointment of a month before, "Those English
parties are in town, and would like to talk with you in reference to
the mills," Lapham did not turn him out-of-doors.
He sat looking at him, and trying to make out what Rogers was after;
for he did not believe that the English parties, if they existed, had
any notion of buying his mills.
"What if they are not for sale?" he asked. "You know that I've been
expecting an offer from the G. L. & P."
"I've kept watch of that. They haven't made you any offer," said
Rogers quietly.
"And did you think," demanded Lapham, firing up, "that I would turn
them in on somebody else as you turned them in on me, when the chances
are that they won't be worth ten cents on the dollar six months from
now?"
"I didn't know what you would do," said Rogers non-committally. "I've
come here to tell you that these parties stand ready to take the mills
off your hands at a fair valuation--at the value I put upon them when I
turned them in."
"I don't believe you!" cried Lapham brutally, but a wild predatory hope
made his heart leap so that it seemed to turn over in his breast. "I
don't believe there are any such parties to begin with; and in the next
place, I don't believe they would buy at any such figure;
unless--unless you've lied to them, as you've lied to me. Did you tell
them about the G. L. & P.?"
Rogers looked compassionately at him, but he answered, with unvaried
dryness, "I did not think that necessary."
Lapham had expected this answer, and he had expected or intended to
break out in furious denunciation of Rogers when he got it; but he only
found himself saying, in a sort of baffled gasp, "I wonder what your
game is!"
Rogers did not reply categorically, but he answered, with his impartial
calm, and as if Lapham had said nothing to indicate that he differed at
all with him as to disposing of the property in the way he had
suggested: "If we should succeed in selling, I should be able to repay
you your loans, and should have a little capital for a scheme that I
think of going into."
"And do you think that I am going to steal these men's money to help
you plunder somebody in a new scheme?" answered Lapham. The sneer was
on behalf of virtue, but it was still a sneer.
"I suppose the money would be useful to you too, just now."
"Why?"
"Because I know that you have been trying to borrow."
At this proof of wicked omniscience in Rogers, the question whether he
had better not regard the affair as a fatality, and yield to his
destiny, flashed upon Lapham; but he answered, "I shall want money a
great deal worse than I've ever wanted it yet, before I go into such
rascally business with you. Don't you know that we might as well knock
these parties down on the street, and take the money out of their
pockets?"
"They have come on," answered Rogers, "from Portland to see you. I
expected them some weeks ago, but they disappointed me. They arrived
on the Circassian last night; they expected to have got in five days
ago, but the passage was very stormy."
"Where are they?" asked Lapham, with helpless irrelevance, and feeling
himself somehow drifted from his moorings by Rogers's shipping
intelligence.
"They are at Young's. I told them we would call upon them after dinner
this evening; they dine late."
"Oh, you did, did you?" asked Lapham, trying to drop another anchor for
a fresh clutch on his underlying principles. "Well, now, you go and
tell them that I said I wouldn't come."
"Their stay is limited," remarked Rogers. "I mentioned this evening
because they were not certain they could remain over another night.
But if to-morrow would suit you better----"
"Tell 'em I shan't come at all," roared Lapham, as much in terror as
defiance, for he felt his anchor dragging. "Tell 'em I shan't come at
all! Do you understand that?"
"I don't see why you should stickle as to the matter of going to them,"
said Rogers; "but if you think it will be better to have them approach
you, I suppose I can bring them to you."
"No, you can't! I shan't let you! I shan't see them! I shan't have
anything to do with them. NOW do you understand?"
"I inferred from our last interview," persisted Rogers, unmoved by all
this violent demonstration of Lapham's, "that you wished to meet these
parties. You told me that you would give me time to produce them; and
I have promised them that you would meet them; I have committed myself."
It was true that Lapham had defied Rogers to bring on his men, and had
implied his willingness to negotiate with them. That was before he had
talked the matter over with his wife, and perceived his moral
responsibility in it; even she had not seen this at once. He could not
enter into this explanation with Rogers; he could only say, "I said I'd
give you twenty-four hours to prove yourself a liar, and you did it. I
didn't say twenty-four days."
"I don't see the difference," returned Rogers. "The parties are here
now, and that proves that I was acting in good faith at the time.
There has been no change in the posture of affairs. You don't know now
any more than you knew then that the G. L. & P. is going to want the
property. If there's any difference, it's in favour of the Road's
having changed its mind."
There was some sense in this, and Lapham felt it--felt it only too
eagerly, as he recognised the next instant.
Rogers went on quietly: "You're not obliged to sell to these parties
when you meet them; but you've allowed me to commit myself to them by
the promise that you would talk with them."
"'Twan't a promise," said Lapham.
"It was the same thing; they have come out from England on my guaranty
that there was such and such an opening for their capital; and now what
am I to say to them? It places me in a ridiculous position." Rogers
urged his grievance calmly, almost impersonally, making his appeal to
Lapham's sense of justice. "I CAN'T go back to those parties and tell
them you won't see them. It's no answer to make. They've got a right
to know why you won't see them."
"Very well, then!" cried Lapham; "I'll come and TELL them why. Who
shall I ask for? When shall I be there?"
"At eight o'clock, please," said Rogers, rising, without apparent alarm
at his threat, if it was a threat. "And ask for me; I've taken a room
at the hotel for the present."
"I won't keep you five minutes when I get there," said Lapham; but he
did not come away till ten o'clock.
It appeared to him as if the very devil was in it. The Englishmen
treated his downright refusal to sell as a piece of bluff, and talked
on as though it were merely the opening of the negotiation. When he
became plain with them in his anger, and told them why he would not
sell, they seemed to have been prepared for this as a stroke of
business, and were ready to meet it.
"Has this fellow," he demanded, twisting his head in the direction of
Rogers, but disdaining to notice him otherwise, "been telling you that
it's part of my game to say this? Well, sir, I can tell you, on my
side, that there isn't a slipperier rascal unhung in America than
Milton K. Rogers!"
The Englishmen treated this as a piece of genuine American humour, and
returned to the charge with unabated courage. They owned now, that a
person interested with them had been out to look at the property, and
that they were satisfied with the appearance of things. They developed
further the fact that they were not acting solely, or even principally,
in their own behalf, but were the agents of people in England who had
projected the colonisation of a sort of community on the spot, somewhat
after the plan of other English dreamers, and that they were satisfied,
from a careful inspection, that the resources and facilities were those
best calculated to develop the energy and enterprise of the proposed
community. They were prepared to meet Mr. Lapham--Colonel, they begged
his pardon, at the instance of Rogers--at any reasonable figure, and
were quite willing to assume the risks he had pointed out. Something
in the eyes of these men, something that lurked at an infinite depth
below their speech, and was not really in their eyes when Lapham looked
again, had flashed through him a sense of treachery in them. He had
thought them the dupes of Rogers; but in that brief instant he had seen
them--or thought he had seen them--his accomplices, ready to betray the
interests of which they went on to speak with a certain comfortable
jocosity, and a certain incredulous slight of his show of integrity.
It was a deeper game than Lapham was used to, and he sat looking with a
sort of admiration from one Englishman to the other, and then to
Rogers, who maintained an exterior of modest neutrality, and whose air
said, "I have brought you gentlemen together as the friend of all
parties, and I now leave you to settle it among yourselves. I ask
nothing, and expect nothing, except the small sum which shall accrue to
me after the discharge of my obligations to Colonel Lapham."
While Rogers's presence expressed this, one of the Englishmen was
saying, "And if you have any scruple in allowin' us to assume this
risk, Colonel Lapham, perhaps you can console yourself with the fact
that the loss, if there is to be any, will fall upon people who are
able to bear it--upon an association of rich and charitable people.
But we're quite satisfied there will be no loss," he added savingly.
"All you have to do is to name your price, and we will do our best to
meet it."
There was nothing in the Englishman's sophistry very shocking to
Lapham. It addressed itself in him to that easy-going, not evilly
intentioned, potential immorality which regards common property as
common prey, and gives us the most corrupt municipal governments under
the sun--which makes the poorest voter, when he has tricked into place,
as unscrupulous in regard to others' money as an hereditary prince.
Lapham met the Englishman's eye, and with difficulty kept himself from
winking. Then he looked away, and tried to find out where he stood, or
what he wanted to do. He could hardly tell. He had expected to come
into that room and unmask Rogers, and have it over. But he had
unmasked Rogers without any effect whatever, and the play had only
begun. He had a whimsical and sarcastic sense of its being very
different from the plays at the theatre. He could not get up and go
away in silent contempt; he could not tell the Englishmen that he
believed them a pair of scoundrels and should have nothing to do with
them; he could no longer treat them as innocent dupes. He remained
baffled and perplexed, and the one who had not spoken hitherto
remarked--
"Of course we shan't 'aggle about a few pound, more or less. If
Colonel Lapham's figure should be a little larger than ours, I've no
doubt 'e'll not be too 'ard upon us in the end."
Lapham appreciated all the intent of this subtle suggestion, and
understood as plainly as if it had been said in so many words, that if
they paid him a larger price, it was to be expected that a certain
portion of the purchase-money was to return to their own hands. Still
he could not move; and it seemed to him that he could not speak.
"Ring that bell, Mr. Rogers," said the Englishman who had last spoken,
glancing at the annunciator button in the wall near Rogers's head, "and
'ave up something 'of, can't you? I should like TO wet me w'istle, as
you say 'ere, and Colonel Lapham seems to find it rather dry work."
Lapham jumped to his feet, and buttoned his overcoat about him. He
remembered with terror the dinner at Corey's where he had disgraced and
betrayed himself, and if he went into this thing at all, he was going
into it sober. "I can't stop," he said, "I must be going."
"But you haven't given us an answer yet, Mr. Lapham," said the first
Englishman with a successful show of dignified surprise.
"The only answer I can give you now is, NO," said Lapham. "If you want
another, you must let me have time to think it over."
"But 'ow much time?" said the other Englishman. "We're pressed for
time ourselves, and we hoped for an answer--'oped for a hanswer," he
corrected himself, "at once. That was our understandin' with Mr.
Rogers."
"I can't let you know till morning, anyway," said Lapham, and he went
out, as his custom often was, without any parting salutation. He
thought Rogers might try to detain him; but Rogers had remained seated
when the others got to their feet, and paid no attention to his
departure.
He walked out into the night air, every pulse throbbing with the strong
temptation. He knew very well those men would wait, and gladly wait,
till the morning, and that the whole affair was in his hands. It made
him groan in spirit to think that it was. If he had hoped that some
chance might take the decision from him, there was no such chance, in
the present or future, that he could see. It was for him alone to
commit this rascality--if it was a rascality--or not.
He walked all the way home, letting one car after another pass him on
the street, now so empty of other passing, and it was almost eleven
o'clock when he reached home. A carriage stood before his house, and
when he let himself in with his key, he heard talking in the
family-room. It came into his head that Irene had got back
unexpectedly, and that the sight of her was somehow going to make it
harder for him; then he thought it might be Corey, come upon some
desperate pretext to see Penelope; but when he opened the door he saw,
with a certain absence of surprise, that it was Rogers. He was
standing with his back to the fireplace, talking to Mrs. Lapham, and he
had been shedding tears; dry tears they seemed, and they had left a
sort of sandy, glistening trace on his cheeks. Apparently he was not
ashamed of them, for the expression with which he met Lapham was that
of a man making a desperate appeal in his own cause, which was
identical with that of humanity, if not that of justice.
"I some expected," began Rogers, "to find you here----"
"No, you didn't," interrupted Lapham; "you wanted to come here and make
a poor mouth to Mrs. Lapham before I got home."
"I knew that Mrs. Lapham would know what was going on," said Rogers
more candidly, but not more virtuously, for that he could not, "and I
wished her to understand a point that I hadn't put to you at the hotel,
and that I want you should consider. And I want you should consider me
a little in this business too; you're not the only one that's
concerned, I tell you, and I've been telling Mrs. Lapham that it's my
one chance; that if you don't meet me on it, my wife and children will
be reduced to beggary."
"So will mine," said Lapham, "or the next thing to it."
"Well, then, I want you to give me this chance to get on my feet again.
You've no right to deprive me of it; it's unchristian. In our dealings
with each other we should be guided by the Golden Rule, as I was saying
to Mrs. Lapham before you came in. I told her that if I knew myself, I
should in your place consider the circumstances of a man in mine, who
had honourably endeavoured to discharge his obligations to me, and had
patiently borne my undeserved suspicions. I should consider that man's
family, I told Mrs. Lapham."
"Did you tell her that if I went in with you and those fellows, I
should be robbing the people who trusted them?"
"I don't see what you've got to do with the people that sent them here.
They are rich people, and could bear it if it came to the worst. But
there's no likelihood, now, that it will come to the worst; you can see
yourself that the Road has changed its mind about buying. And here am
I without a cent in the world; and my wife is an invalid. She needs
comforts, she needs little luxuries, and she hasn't even the
necessaries; and you want to sacrifice her to a mere idea! You don't
know in the first place that the Road will ever want to buy; and if it
does, the probability is that with a colony like that planted on its
line, it would make very different terms from what it would with you or
me. These agents are not afraid, and their principals are rich people;
and if there was any loss, it would be divided up amongst them so that
they wouldn't any of them feel it."
Lapham stole a troubled glance at his wife, and saw that there was no
help in her. Whether she was daunted and confused in her own
conscience by the outcome, so evil and disastrous, of the reparation to
Rogers which she had forced her husband to make, or whether her
perceptions had been blunted and darkened by the appeals which Rogers
had now used, it would be difficult to say. Probably there was a
mixture of both causes in the effect which her husband felt in her, and
from which he turned, girding himself anew, to Rogers.
"I have no wish to recur to the past," continued Rogers, with growing
superiority. "You have shown a proper spirit in regard to that, and
you have done what you could to wipe it out."
"I should think I had," said Lapham. "I've used up about a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars trying."
"Some of my enterprises," Rogers admitted, "have been unfortunate,
seemingly; but I have hopes that they will yet turn out well--in time.
I can't understand why you should be so mindful of others now, when you
showed so little regard for me then. I had come to your aid at a time
when you needed help, and when you got on your feet you kicked me out
of the business. I don't complain, but that is the fact; and I had to
begin again, after I had supposed myself settled in life, and establish
myself elsewhere."
Lapham glanced again at his wife; her head had fallen; he could see
that she was so rooted in her old remorse for that questionable act of
his, amply and more than fully atoned for since, that she was helpless,
now in the crucial moment, when he had the utmost need of her insight.
He had counted upon her; he perceived now that when he had thought it
was for him alone to decide, he had counted upon her just spirit to
stay his own in its struggle to be just. He had not forgotten how she
held out against him only a little while ago, when he asked her whether
he might not rightfully sell in some such contingency as this; and it
was not now that she said or even looked anything in favour of Rogers,
but that she was silent against him, which dismayed Lapham. He
swallowed the lump that rose in his throat, the self-pity, the pity for
her, the despair, and said gently, "I guess you better go to bed,
Persis. It's pretty late."
She turned towards the door, when Rogers said, with the obvious
intention of detaining her through her curiosity--
"But I let that pass. And I don't ask now that you should sell to
these men."
Mrs. Lapham paused, irresolute.
"What are you making this bother for, then?" demanded Lapham. "What DO
you want?"
"What I've been telling your wife here. I want you should sell to me.
I don't say what I'm going to do with the property, and you will not
have an iota of responsibility, whatever happens."
Lapham was staggered, and he saw his wife's face light up with eager
question.
"I want that property," continued Rogers, "and I've got the money to
buy it. What will you take for it? If it's the price you're standing
out for----"
"Persis," said Lapham, "go to bed," and he gave her a look that meant
obedience for her. She went out of the door, and left him with his
tempter.
"If you think I'm going to help you whip the devil round the stump,
you're mistaken in your man, Milton Rogers," said Lapham, lighting a
cigar. "As soon as I sold to you, you would sell to that other pair of
rascals. I smelt 'em out in half a minute."
"They are Christian gentlemen," said Rogers. "But I don't purpose
defending them; and I don't purpose telling you what I shall or shall
not do with the property when it is in my hands again. The question
is, Will you sell, and, if so, what is your figure? You have got
nothing whatever to do with it after you've sold."
It was perfectly true. Any lawyer would have told him the same. He
could not help admiring Rogers for his ingenuity, and every selfish
interest of his nature joined with many obvious duties to urge him to
consent. He did not see why he should refuse. There was no longer a
reason. He was standing out alone for nothing, any one else would say.
He smoked on as if Rogers were not there, and Rogers remained before
the fire as patient as the clock ticking behind his head on the mantel,
and showing the gleam of its pendulum beyond his face on either side.
But at last he said, "Well?"
"Well," answered Lapham, "you can't expect me to give you an answer
to-night, any more than before. You know that what you've said now
hasn't changed the thing a bit. I wish it had. The Lord knows, I want
to be rid of the property fast enough." "Then why don't you sell to me?
Can't you see that you will not be responsible for what happens after
you have sold?"
"No, I can't see that; but if I can by morning, I'll sell."
"Why do you expect to know any better by morning? You're wasting time
for nothing!" cried Rogers, in his disappointment. "Why are you so
particular? When you drove me out of the business you were not so very
particular."
Lapham winced. It was certainly ridiculous for man who had once so
selfishly consulted his own interests to be stickling now about the
rights of others.
"I guess nothing's going to happen overnight," he answered sullenly.
"Anyway, I shan't say what I shall do till morning."
"What time can I see you in the morning?"
"Half-past nine."
Rogers buttoned his coat, and went out of the room without another
word. Lapham followed him to close the street-door after him.
His wife called down to him from above as he approached the room again,
"Well?"
"I've told him I'd let him know in the morning."
"Want I should come down and talk with you?"
"No," answered Lapham, in the proud bitterness which his isolation
brought, "you couldn't do any good." He went in and shut the door, and
by and by his wife heard him begin walking up and down; and then the
rest of the night she lay awake and listened to him walking up and
down. But when the first light whitened the window, the words of the
Scripture came into her mind: "And there wrestled a man with him until
the breaking of the day.... And he said, Let me go, for the day
breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."
She could not ask him anything when they met, but he raised his dull
eyes after the first silence, and said, "I don't know what I'm going to
say to Rogers."
She could not speak; she did not know what to say, and she saw her
husband when she followed him with her eyes from the window, drag
heavily down toward the corner, where he was to take, the horse-car.
He arrived rather later than usual at his office, and he found his
letters already on his table. There was one, long and
official-looking, with a printed letter-heading on the outside, and
Lapham had no need to open it in order to know that it was the offer of
the Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad for his mills. But he went
mechanically through the verification of his prophetic fear, which was
also his sole hope, and then sat looking blankly at it.
Rogers came promptly at the appointed time, and Lapham handed him the
letter. He must have taken it all in at a glance, and seen the
impossibility of negotiating any further now, even with victims so
pliant and willing as those Englishmen.
"You've ruined me!" Rogers broke out. "I haven't a cent left in the
world! God help my poor wife!"
He went out, and Lapham remained staring at the door which closed upon
him. This was his reward for standing firm for right and justice to
his own destruction: to feel like a thief and a murderer.