________________________________________________
_ The failure of American Match the next morning was one of those
events that stirred the city and the nation and lingered in the
minds of men for years. At the last moment it was decided that
in lieu of calling Cowperwood's loans Hull & Stackpole had best
be sacrificed, the stock-exchange closed, and all trading ended.
This protected stocks from at least a quotable decline and left
the banks free for several days (ten all told) in which to repair
their disrupted finances and buttress themselves against the
eventual facts. Naturally, the minor speculators throughout the
city--those who had expected to make a fortune out of this crash
--raged and complained, but, being faced by an adamantine exchange
directorate, a subservient press, and the alliance between the big
bankers and the heavy quadrumvirate, there was nothing to be done.
The respective bank presidents talked solemnly of "a mere temporary
flurry," Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel went still further
into their pockets to protect their interests, and Cowperwood,
triumphant, was roundly denounced by the smaller fry as a "bucaneer,"
a "pirate," a "wolf"--indeed, any opprobrious term that came into
their minds. The larger men faced squarely the fact that here was
an enemy worthy of their steel. Would he master them? Was he
already the dominant money power in Chicago? Could he thus flaunt
their helplessness and his superiority in their eyes and before
their underlings and go unwhipped?
"I must give in!" Hosmer Hand had declared to Arneel and Schryhart,
at the close of the Arneel house conference and as they stood in
consultation after the others had departed. "We seem to be beaten
to-night, but I, for one, am not through yet. He has won to-night,
but he won't win always. This is a fight to a finish between me
and him. The rest of you can stay in or drop out, just as you wish."
"Hear, hear!" exclaimed Schryhart, laying a fervently sympathetic
hand on his shoulder. "Every dollar that I have is at your service,
Hosmer. This fellow can't win eventually. I'm with you to the end."
Arneel, walking with Merrill and the others to the door, was silent
and dour. He had been cavalierly affronted by a man who, but a
few short years before, he would have considered a mere underling.
Here was Cowperwood bearding the lion in his den, dictating terms
to the principal financial figures of the city, standing up trig
and resolute, smiling in their faces and telling them in so many
words to go to the devil. Mr. Arneel glowered under lowering
brows, but what could he do? "We must see," he said to the others,
"what time will bring. Just now there is nothing much to do.
This crisis has been too sudden. You say you are not through with
him, Hosmer, and neither am I. But we must wait. We shall have
to break him politically in this city, and I am confident that in
the end we can do it." The others were grateful for his courage
even though to-morrow he and they must part with millions to protect
themselves and the banks. For the first time Merrill concluded
that he would have to fight Cowperwood openly from now on, though
even yet he admired his courage. "But he is too defiant, too
cavalier! A very lion of a man," he said to himself. "A man with
the heart of a Numidian lion."
It was true.
From this day on for a little while, and because there was no
immediate political contest in sight, there was comparative peace
in Chicago, although it more resembled an armed camp operating
under the terms of some agreed neutrality than it did anything
else. Schryhart, Hand, Arneel, and Merrill were quietly watchful.
Cowperwood's chief concern was lest his enemies might succeed in
their project of worsting him politically in one or all three of
the succeeding elections which were due to occur every two years
between now and 1903, at which time his franchises would have to
be renewed. As in the past they had made it necessary for him to
work against them through bribery and perjury, so in ensuing
struggles they might render it more and more difficult for him or
his agents to suborn the men elected to office. The subservient
and venal councilmen whom he now controlled might be replaced by
men who, if no more honest, would be more loyal to the enemy, thus
blocking the extension of his franchises. Yet upon a renewal
period of at least twenty and preferably fifty years depended the
fulfilment of all the colossal things he had begun--his art-collection,
his new mansion, his growing prestige as a financier, his
rehabilitation socially, and the celebration of his triumph by a
union, morganatic or otherwise, with some one who would be worthy
to share his throne.
It is curious how that first and most potent tendency of the human
mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating. Here was Cowperwood
at fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man,
celebrated in a local and in some respects in a national way, who
was nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been
achieved. He was not yet all-powerful as were divers Eastern
magnates, or even these four or five magnificently moneyed men
here in Chicago who, by plodding thought and labor in many dreary
fields such as Cowperwood himself frequently scorned, had reaped
tremendous and uncontended profits. How was it, he asked himself,
that his path had almost constantly been strewn with stormy
opposition and threatened calamity? Was it due to his private
immorality? Other men were immoral; the mass, despite religious
dogma and fol-de-rol theory imposed from the top, was generally
so. Was it not rather due to his inability to control without
dominating personally--without standing out fully and clearly in
the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so. The humdrum
conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance,
his constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency
was a taunt and a mockery to many. The hard implication of his
eye was dreaded by the weaker as fire is feared by a burnt child.
Dissembling enough, he was not sufficiently oily and make-believe.
Well, come what might, he did not need to be or mean to be so, and
there the game must lie; but he had not by any means attained the
height of his ambition. He was not yet looked upon as a money
prince. He could not rank as yet with the magnates of the East
--the serried Sequoias of Wall Street. Until he could stand with
these men, until he could have a magnificent mansion, acknowledged
as such by all, until he could have a world-famous gallery, Berenice,
millions--what did it avail?
The character of Cowperwood's New York house, which proved one of
the central achievements of his later years, was one of those
flowerings--out of disposition which eventuate in the case of men
quite as in that of plants. After the passing of the years neither
a modified Gothic (such as his Philadelphia house had been), nor
a conventionalized Norman-French, after the style of his Michigan
Avenue home, seemed suitable to him. Only the Italian palaces of
medieval or Renaissance origin which he had seen abroad now appealed
to him as examples of what a stately residence should be. He was
really seeking something which should not only reflect his private
tastes as to a home, but should have the more enduring qualities
of a palace or even a museum, which might stand as a monument to
his memory. After much searching Cowperwood had found an architect
in New York who suited him entirely--one Raymond Pyne, rake,
raconteur, man-about-town--who was still first and foremost an
artist, with an eye for the exceptional and the perfect. These
two spent days and days together meditating on the details of this
home museum. An immense gallery was to occupy the west wing of
the house and be devoted to pictures; a second gallery should
occupy the south wing and be given over to sculpture and large
whorls of art; and these two wings were to swing as an L around
the house proper, the latter standing in the angle between them.
The whole structure was to be of a rich brownstone, heavily carved.
For its interior decoration the richest woods, silks, tapestries,
glass, and marbles were canvassed. The main rooms were to surround
a great central court with a colonnade of pink-veined alabaster,
and in the center there would be an electrically lighted fountain
of alabaster and silver. Occupying the east wall a series of
hanging baskets of orchids, or of other fresh flowers, were to
give a splendid glow of color, a morning-sun effect, to this richly
artificial realm. One chamber--a lounge on the second floor--was
to be entirely lined with thin-cut transparent marble of a peach-blow
hue, the lighting coming only through these walls and from without.
Here in a perpetual atmosphere of sunrise were to be racks for
exotic birds, a trellis of vines, stone benches, a central pool
of glistening water, and an echo of music. Pyne assured him that
after his death this room would make an excellent chamber in which
to exhibit porcelains, jades, ivories, and other small objects of
value.
Cowperwood was now actually transferring his possessions to New
York, and had persuaded Aileen to accompany him. Fine compound
of tact and chicane that he was, he had the effrontery to assure
her that they could here create a happier social life. His present
plan was to pretend a marital contentment which had no basis solely
in order to make this transition period as undisturbed as possible.
Subsequently he might get a divorce, or he might make an arrangement
whereby his life would be rendered happy outside the social pale.
Of all this Berenice Fleming knew nothing at all. At the same
time the building of this splendid mansion eventually awakened her
to an understanding of the spirit of art that occupied the center
of Cowperwood's iron personality and caused her to take a real
interest in him. Before this she had looked on him as a kind of
Western interloper coming East and taking advantage of her mother's
good nature to scrape a little social courtesy. Now, however, all
that Mrs. Carter had been telling her of his personality and
achievements was becoming crystallized into a glittering chain of
facts. This house, the papers were fond of repeating, would be a
jewel of rare workmanship. Obviously the Cowperwoods were going
to try to enter society. "What a pity it is," Mrs. Carter once
said to Berenice, "that he couldn't have gotten a divorce from his
wife before he began all this. I am so afraid they will never be
received. He would be if he only had the right woman; but she--"
Mrs. Carter, who had once seen Aileen in Chicago, shook her head
doubtfully. "She is not the type," was her comment. "She has
neither the air nor the understanding."
"If he is so unhappy with her," observed Berenice, thoughtfully,
"why doesn't he leave her? She can be happy without him. It is
so silly--this cat-and-dog existence. Still I suppose she values
the position he gives her," she added, "since she isn't so interesting
herself."
"I suppose," said Mrs. Carter, "that he married her twenty years
ago, when he was a very different man from what he is to-day. She
is not exactly coarse, but not clever enough. She cannot do what
he would like to see done. I hate to see mismatings of this kind,
and yet they are so common. I do hope, Bevy, that when you marry
it will be some one with whom you can get along, though I do believe
I would rather see you unhappy than poor."
This was delivered as an early breakfast peroration in Central
Park South, with the morning sun glittering on one of the nearest
park lakes. Bevy, in spring-green and old-gold, was studying the
social notes in one of the morning papers.
"I think I should prefer to be unhappy with wealth than to be
without it," she said, idly, without looking up.
Her mother surveyed her admiringly, conscious of her imperious
mood. What was to become of her? Would she marry well? Would she
marry in time? Thus far no breath of the wretched days in Louisville
had affected Berenice. Most of those with whom Mrs. Carter had
found herself compelled to deal would be kind enough to keep her
secret. But there were others. How near she had been to drifting
on the rocks when Cowperwood had appeared!
"After all," observed Berenice, thoughtfully, "Mr. Cowperwood isn't
a mere money-grabber, is he? So many of these Western moneyed men
are so dull."
"My dear," exclaimed Mrs. Carter, who by now had become a confirmed
satellite of her secret protector, "you don't understand him at
all. He is a very astonishing man, I tell you. The world is
certain to hear a lot more of Frank Cowperwood before he dies.
You can say what you please, but some one has to make the money
in the first place. It's little enough that good breeding does
for you in poverty. I know, because I've seen plenty of our friends
come down."
In the new house, on a scaffold one day, a famous sculptor and his
assistants were at work on a Greek frieze which represented dancing
nymphs linked together by looped wreaths. Berenice and her mother
happened to be passing. They stopped to look, and Cowperwood
joined them. He waved his hand at the figures of the frieze, and
said to Berenice, with his old, gay air, "If they had copied you
they would have done better."
"How charming of you!" she replied, with her cool, strange, blue
eyes fixed on him. "They are beautiful." In spite of her earlier
prejudices she knew now that he and she had one god in common--Art;
and that his mind was fixed on things beautiful as on a shrine.
He merely looked at her.
"This house can be little more than a museum to me, he remarked,
simply, when her mother was out of hearing; "but I shall build it
as perfectly as I can. Perhaps others may enjoy it if I do not."
She looked at him musingly, understandingly, and he smiled. She
realized, of course, that he was trying to convey to her that he
was lonely. _
Read next: chapter LI - The Revival of Hattie Starr
Read previous: chapter XLIX - Mount Olympus
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