A Message from the Past
Bellingham for the twentieth time consulted his watch, and finding
that it still lacked ten minutes of midnight, he rose, walked over to
the window, and stood looking out into the night. In the distance he
could see the bulk of the stables looming through the darkness, and
near at hand the huge lone pine tree towered in silhouette against the
sky; yet his mind was not fixed upon what was before him, but was
reviewing once again the events of the day, events which had occurred
scarcely twelve hours ago, but which seemed, in retrospect, to have
taken place ages since, in the shadow of some dim and distant past.
He could see himself, a distinct and separate entity, leaving the car
and hurrying toward the garage, alert, expectant, eager to find Nolan
and hear what he had to say. From the same man whom he had seen before
he had sought to discover if Nolan was in, and the man had nodded with
a curt "Yep," but when Bellingham was half way to the elevator his
informant had called him back to explain, "Say, hold on a minute; I
forgot; Nolan's quit his job."
The secretary could feel again the sinking of the heart, the shock of
disappointment the words had caused. "Quit?" he had repeated, and the
man had replied, "Yep. He's quit. New man on the car; a Swede. He's up
there if you want to see him." But Bellingham had muttered something
about its being a personal matter, and still in a daze, had made his
way out of the garage, perplexed and disheartened, and vainly
wondering what could possibly have happened to the chauffeur.
It was not an easy problem to solve. Certainly the money he had
advanced could have been no temptation to Nolan; twenty dollars was
nothing compared with the keeping of a good position. And if the
chauffeur's abandonment of his job had not been voluntary, of
necessity it must have been involuntary; it appeared as though he must
have been detected in his pursuit of his employer, and met with a
summary dismissal. Yet if this were so, why could he not still have
kept his appointment with the secretary. There seemed to be no
satisfactory solution, yet as a practical matter none was necessary;
of what importance were theories when he knew that the actual result
was a complete failure of his plans to gain information through the
instrumentality of Nolan. And as a result he would now be forced to
act himself; no choice was left to him; whether he liked it or not, he
must assume the risk.
Thus, throughout the remainder of the day, he had laid his plans, and
now was decided as to his course. But the hour for action had not yet
arrived; two o'clock in the morning was the time he had chosen; and
thus he lighted his spirit lamp, made and drank two cups of coffee,
and then, setting and muffling his alarm clock, he lay down, fully
clothed, upon the bed, to gain a little rest before setting out upon
his tour of exploration. But before many moments passed, he realized
that the setting of the clock was a needless precaution; the strain he
was under added to the stimulant he had taken made sleep an
impossibility. And curiously enough his brain, which should have been
intent upon the adventure before him, now cast back through the years,
and as he lay there he could see, projected against the curtain of the
dark, pictures long since forgotten, detached and yet connected,
leading with merciless precision to the miserable predicament of his
latter days.
Behind the house lay a broad expanse of meadow, gay with flowers and
traversed by a brook which had its source in the hills adjoining the
farm. Hither, in his boyhood, he made an almost daily pilgrimage, but
not to gather the violets and the buttercups which lined its banks, or
to hunt for blackbirds' nests in the swamp below. The attraction for
him had been altogether different. With his jack-knife he would
fashion boats from shingles, imagine them in his mind to be racing
yachts, under clouds of sail, and starting them, with scrupulous
fairness, amid the ripples of the stream, he would run headlong down
the field, just able to keep pace with the current, and watching with
breathless interest the outcome of the contest, as the tiny craft
swept around promontories, skirted the shallows, and finally crossed
the finish line, to be rescued with a forked stick, and carried back
up the meadow to race and race again. How had he come to play this
game? No one, as far as he could remember, had taught it to him; he
had been only six or seven at the time, but the memory persisted, the
thrill of the struggle, the eager brook and the no less eager boy--
The scene shifted. Some one had given him a game of "steeplechase,"
and a new world was born. As clearly as if it had lain on the bed
beside him, he could see the oval of the board, the horses, bay,
black, white and gray, and he himself, cheeks flushed, heart
throbbing, sitting entranced hour after hour, casting the dice, and
watching and recording the result of every race. Later had come his
college days, with the thrill of real racing; the Futurity, the
Suburban, the scramble of dainty thoroughbreds with the bright silks
of their jockeys gleaming in the sun. But before this he could dimly
recall his first knowledge of the stock market, when his father,
forbidden for a time to use his eyes, had asked his son to read to him
the quotations in the evening paper. Bellingham could remember that he
had made sorry work of it, so that his father, usually the kindest of
men, had lost his temper and had soundly berated him for his
stupidity. Other days, too, he could remember, of alternate exaltation
and depression until the afternoon when he had come home to find his
mother in tears, and his father had taken him by the shoulder and said
gravely, "Hugh, you must promise me one thing. Never, so long as you
live, must you have anything to do with the stock market. It has been
the curse and ruin of my life. It must not ruin yours, too." Boylike,
he had promised, but a dozen years later, when the lure of the Street
had bewitched him, he had not regarded his promise, and with the few
thousands at his command, had started to make his fortune. How he had
despised the men who traded in ten-share lots; "pikers," he had called
them; for it had seemed to him that to deal in hundred and two hundred
share lots, on a slender margin, was evidence of true gameness and
grit. But this period had not lasted long; soon the ten-share lots
became a necessity, and finally an impossibility, until the fatal day
when he had borrowed money on a story that was two-thirds a lie, and a
week later had seen a quiet, lagging market suddenly declined with
incredible rapidity, leaving him hopelessly in debt, and now at the
mercy of his long-suffering creditors.
So passed the pictures before his eyes, from the boy running beside
the brook to the desperate, harried man. Inheritance or not, here had
been the keynote of his life--the love of a contest, a race, a
struggle, the thrill of the unknown gamble, the possible chance. And
in other ways he had been sane and normal; as men go, a decent sort of
man. A sense of injustice surged within him. Was it fair? If a good
God ruled the world, why did he implant these fierce desires in the
breasts of his children? Why did he change a world of joy and beauty
into a hell of discontent? Why did he--
With a start, he came to himself. How long, he wondered, had he been
dreaming? The flashlight showed ten minutes of two, and silencing the
alarm, he rose, and in his stocking feet crept cautiously to the door
of his room and out into the hall. For good or ill, his hour had come.
The 'house was absolutely still. And suddenly, oppressed with the
strain of the day, unnerved by the strangeness of his errand, he
seemed to himself to be moving in some fantastic nightmare, and he was
seized with a panic of fear, so that he could scarcely control his
impulse to return as he had come and to abandon his reckless quest.
But after an instant, he managed to conquer his quivering nerves, and
concentrating all his energies upon his task, he stole down the
hallway like a shadow, entered the gallery, and found himself standing
before the portrait through which the banker had made his unexpected
exit three days before. Copying, as well as he could recall it, the
posture of his employer, he pressed with his forefinger here and there
upon the canvas, but without result until he reached the hilt of the
pictured sword, when almost before he realized what was taking place,
the portrait, as before, swung back, and the gateway of adventure lay
open before him.
A hundred times, during the day, the secretary had made his plans, and
thus, without losing an instant, he entered the orifice, drew his
knife from his pocket, and wedging the narrow space between the
portrait and the wall so that his retreat would not be closed to him,
turned to examine the staircase that lay at his feet.
It was a slender spiral of steel, apparently extending downward for an
indefinite distance, and so narrow that there was scarcely an inch of
superfluous space on either hand. Without hesitation, Bellingham
started to descend, listening from time to time and hearing nothing,
until at length he reached the bottom and found himself in a low
passageway, with a door at the end. The secretary's heart sank.
"Locked," he thought to himself, but equally to his surprise and his
delight, the knob turned in his hand, and he entered a small chamber,
with a second door at the further end. This additional exit, however,
was securely barred, and finding his progress cut off in that
direction, Bellingham turned his attention to the room itself.
A first glance afforded him small encouragement. To open the massive
safe was clearly impossible; the sideboard was empty; and the desk in
the corner, though it appeared, at first sight, to be a promising
hiding place, proved, on closer examination, to contain nothing. The
secretary's heart sank. Evidently his hopes were vain; his dream of
romance gave place to prosaic reality; and with a pang of keenest
disappointment he stood ready to admit defeat. Yet since he had risked
so much, he decided that before leaving he would make one final
search, an investigation of the room so careful and minute that he
would be certain that he had overlooked nothing.
Accordingly, he first approached the sideboard, hunting around, behind
and under it, removing and replacing each drawer in turn. Yet his
efforts were in vain, and when he next transferred his attentions to
the desk and began a similar exploration there, he met with no better
success until he had removed the last drawer of all, and then, for the
first time since he had entered the chamber, he experienced a
momentary thrill as the flashlight revealed a crumpled paper which had
fallen between the back of the drawer and the rear wall of the desk.
Inserting his arm, he brought it forth to find that it was torn, faded
and yellow with age, with some words quite illegible and others
missing altogether. Yet piecing it together as best he could, he made
an attempt to decipher its contents, and the next moment, so intense
was the shock, so overpowering the revulsion from despair to
exaltation, that he found himself staggering backward as if from a
blow, grasping at the table behind him to save himself from actual
physical collapse. But the next moment, as his heart once more sent
the blood coursing through his veins, he rallied, and without losing a
second he returned the drawer to its place, glanced hastily around to
make sure that he had left no traces of his visit, and then made his
way as quickly as possible up the staircase, through the opening in
the wall, and once more regaining his room, he locked the door, lit
his reading lamp, and began a systematic study of his prize.
It took only a few moments to make him realize that the task of
deciphering the document was to be one of almost insuperable
difficulty, but at the same time it became increasingly evident that
he had made a discovery the importance of which could scarcely be
exaggerated. The paper was a plain sheet of foolscap, apparently a
rough draft of a final copy,--torn into eight pieces, of which to
Bellingham's chagrin it now appeared that two--the lower rectangle on
the right and the third from the top on the left--were missing. In the
upper right-hand corner of the paper was the date, January 1, 1882,
and beneath, in the middle of the sheet was a heading of which the
first word was almost wholly obliterated, but the remaining four, "of
the Money Gods," were comparatively clear and distinct. Under this
heading were five sub-divisions, the numerals 1, 2, 3, and 5 showing
plainly at the left, while the missing 4 would evidently have been
written on the first of the two pieces which were lacking. And now,
patiently and with infinite effort, straining his eyes over the dull,
discolored paper and the faded ink, Bellingham succeeded in bringing
out a word here and there until under the first numeral he had an
actual sentence, though still with gaps where the wished-for word
stubbornly resisted his search. "Most men ---- fools ----blers by
nature ---- easiest way ---- to ---- in stocks."
The second sentence, for some reason or other, was much more
distinctly written, and in a short time the secretary had produced,
"Fundamental plan; bull market, sell ---- top; depress; bear ----ket;
buy at bottom; give shorts ----."
But it was the third sentence which proved to be the most startling
of all. It was very brief, containing only eight words, of which part
of the first and the last four were all that the secretary could
read. But they were quite sufficient to make him gasp. "Communi----
---- signals on the tape." The letters, pregnant with meaning, stared
him in the face, and made his breath come quick and fast as he threw
an apprehensive glance into the darkness behind him, as though
dreading the wrath and vengeance of some ghost from another world.
Almost beside himself with excitement, he toiled on. But the fourth
sentence, with its missing fragment, told him little, for while the
words were clear enough to the eye, they conveyed no message to his
brain. On the upper line were the words, "On the watch," and directly
beneath them, "for these signals," but the loss of the left hand
paper, and the absolute impossibility of conjecturing what other words
completed the sentence, made this portion of the message apparently
valueless.
Equally tantalizing was the message under the figure five. The
sentence began clearly enough, "The basis will be 1/4 3/8 1/4 if ----"
and then came the blank occasioned by the second missing fragment of
paper; while the sentence, resumed on the left-hand portion of the
document, continued, "5/8 1/2 5/8 if down. Buying and selling ----"
then once more the inevitable hiatus, and finally the three words, "on
a scale." And this was the end.
The secretary sat gazing straight before him, his brain in a tumult.
Coincidence well nigh incredible had led to this discovery, and now
left no doubt in his mind that rumors which had been current in the
Street for years, but always laughed to scorn by the whole fraternity
of brokers, were true, after all. And suddenly, with irresistible
conviction, facts, remarks, events, never before understood, now
crowded to his mind, clear as crystal in the light of his present
knowledge. Signals on the tape. More than once he had heard the story,
told with bated breath under pledge of strictest secrecy. But here was
proof. And for him, individually, this ancient document revealed all
the glories of a new world. And thus, bending once more over the
paper, Bellingham toiled until the first light of the dawn crept in at
the windows, and rising unsteadily from his desk, he saw staring at
him from the mirror a worn and haggard face which he could scarcely
recognize as his own.