Читать книгу The Substitute Millionaire - Footner Hulbert - Страница 7

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Jack as an instinctive precaution returned to close the vault door, and the inner steel door. The latter was provided with a handle on the closet side to draw it to. When Jack closed it the irritating little bell stopped ringing.

"That was to warn him if any one opened it while he was inside," thought Jack. "And the band of soot on the floor was to inform him if his stronghold had been entered during his absence. What a queer old boy to take so much trouble to hide himself!"

Silas Gyde's room in its architectural features was exactly like thousands of second floor backs in the endless rows of houses built from forty to fifty years ago. As Jack stood inside the closet door by which he had entered, two windows faced him, looking out on the back yards he knew, though they were closely curtained. At his right was a fireplace with a composition mantel, at his left was the door leading to the stair hall. The bed was below the hall door: it is always there. And adjoining the room on that side would be the bath room. Jack had lived in many such houses.

The air in the room was heavy, but less foul than might have been expected. Jack found behind the curtains that ventilators had been ingeniously contrived, which could be opened and shut without one's showing oneself at the window. For that matter the glass of the windows was well-nigh opaque with the accumulation of years of dust. The bed was tumbled but clean. Jack suspected that the old man had changed linen with the bed in the hotel. There was a similar oil lamp and oil heater in here.

"Those outside were a plant while these got the oil he carried in," thought Jack.

The room was hideously cheerless. Rubbish was piled everywhere. There was an old flat-topped desk with its back to the windows, and a sort of path had been cleared from the desk to the closet door with a branch to the bed midway. Elsewhere the litter had swamped everything. It was principally newspapers. Jack had never seen so many old newspapers in his life. One corner of the room was filled by a small mountain of scrap books containing faded clippings. When Jack came to examine them he found that all the items related to Silas Gyde, and most of them were abusive.

Yet from the walls of this unlovely room looked down a few rarely beautiful old pictures, and, as Jack was to learn later, they were of almost priceless value. Evidently at some period of his career the old miser had had generous stirrings. One of these pictures caused Jack a great start. It occupied the space next to the closet door, hence he did not see it until he had come into the room and had turned around.

It was his mother. An enlargement by a talented hand of the wistful girlhood picture Delamare had given him that morning. She looked down on the fusty disarray with pitying eyes: she was startlingly young and alive in that dark place. The tears welled up in Jack's eyes again.

"Think of her presiding over a den like this! I'll give her a sunnier prospect. But he must have loved her well! I'll credit him with that."

A tour of the rest of the house from cellar to garret revealed only emptiness, darkness and a smell of must.

Returning to Silas Gyde's room, Jack went to his desk. This spot alone of all the room was in good order. On it lay a book open and face down at the page where the dead man had left off reading. It was the Ordeal of Richard Feveril, and it was open at the page describing the first meeting of Richard and Lucy. Jack read a few lines and wondered that Silas Gyde could have cared for that sort of thing. It didn't seem to go with the rest of him. Jack slipped the book in his pocket, against an opportunity to make its better acquaintance.

There was also a fat red leather note book, a sort of journal, in which Silas Gyde had entered the details of his financial transactions. Jack saved that for his lawyer. Finally there was a manuscript which Death had interrupted in the middle of a sheet. Turning back to the first page Jack was not a little astonished to find that it was a sort of letter addressed to himself. From the dates upon it, it had been started five years before and added to from time to time.

Jack sat down to read it. The little dog, making it clear that he had adopted a new master, lay at his feet.

"To John Farrow Norman:

"Dear Jack:

"Everybody knows old Silas Gyde—or thinks he does. Miser, usurer, skinflint, champion tightwad—I quote from the collection of clippings I have made. What everybody says must be true, I suppose, but it is not the whole truth. There is another Silas Gyde—or there was once, and it is he who writes to you.

"Little did you guess that I have been keeping track of you since you were quite a small boy. I have always from that time intended to make you my heir. I suppose you wonder why I never made myself known to you. There were several reasons. For one thing I have noticed that the relations between a rich man and his heir are seldom happy. I didn't care to read in your eyes that you wished the old fool would hurry up and die and be done with it.

"Another thing, and this is the real reason: as the years pass it becomes more and more difficult for me to make overtures to anybody. It sounds silly for an old fellow of near sixty to confess that he is shy, but such is the fact. And shyness in the old is a torturing thing. They call me queer, cranky, crazy, and the truth is simply that I am shy. I never could run with the herd.

"It is true what they say, that I have not a friend in the world, and now I would not know how to set about making one. Especially a young one. I am afraid of you, my boy; afraid of your terrible, pitiless youthfulness. And so I just imagine you are my friend. I have long talks with you, and give you quantities of good advice, to which you give dutiful heed.

"At the same time I have always kept a sort of watch over you. And if actual misfortune had overtaken you I would have found a way to come to your assistance. A little poverty and hard work will enable you to appreciate riches later.

"By this time you have learned that I was once your mother's suitor. She refused me for the first Jack Norman, your father. I wonder if your mother ever talked to you about me. Probably not. She was never a talker. Well, I hope you will never have such a blow as that was to me. I don't think you will. You have a certain grace (I have seen you), Phoebe's grace, that will endear you to your chosen maiden. As for me, even as a youth I was a dry stick.

"What made it harder for me was that I despised your father as a weaker man than myself. When I let this out to your mother in my anger and bitterness, she retorted that if he was less strong he was certainly more lovable.

"I left Cartonsville in my bitterness. My one idea, like so many galled young men before me, was to do something that would force Phoebe Farrow to acknowledge to herself that she had chosen the wrong man. I resolved to make myself a rich man, the richest in America. To gain this end I was prepared to deny myself everything above the barest necessities of life. Every cent was to be set to work to earn five.

"I succeeded, as every man must, who is bent on a thing so determinedly as I was. I did not return to Cartonsville for fifteen years. Fifteen years of slavery they were. Those were the years that formed me for life—deformed me I should say. I was already a rich man when I went back.

"I found the situation much as I had imagined it. Your mother was the hard-working wife of a poor man—a man destined to die poor. She lived in a small inconvenient house without any servant, and her pretty hands were red and rough. And I was a millionaire. You were five years old at that time and your parents' only child. Both your elder brothers had died in an epidemic.

"But my triumph did not come off as I had pictured. Phoebe pitied me.

"'No wife nor chick?' she said, with her rare soft smile. 'Poor Silas! How useless your wealth must seem to you!'

"Then I saw as in a great white light that I had only been a fool for my pains. I returned to New York and automatically resumed the business of making money. I could not stop. It was all I knew. It filled my days and kept me from thinking.

"I often wished to change my way of life, but it was too late then. I was already known as Silas Gyde the usurer, and men had hardened their hearts against me. My diffident attempts to make friends were rebuffed. I was forced back into the rut I had worn for myself. There was nothing for me to do but earn the reputation the world had given me.

"I have told you that in fancy I often gave you advice. But it is not as a good example that I desire to hold myself up to you. I urge you to avoid my example. Never let money get the upper hand of you. Old Silas Gyde the miser tells you money is no good except to spend. I have succeeded in creating the incubus of wealth, and in so doing lost my soul. I leave you the harder task of ridding yourself of it, without losing yours.

"Your well-wisher,

"Silas Gyde."

Under a date two years later the letter was resumed:

"I have opened this to add a warning. When you inherit my money, you are bound to inherit my cares also. Ever since I became rich enough to be notorious, I have been a target for men's envy and hate. I expected it. Indeed, I enjoyed it in a way. I gloated over my books of clippings. Their hatred gave me a sense of being somebody in the world.

"In my daily mail I received, and still receive, hundreds of letters, appealing, threatening, abusive; letters from every kind of crank. I ignore them. But lately a real danger has begun to threaten me in the spread of anarchistic doctrines among the people. And there are not lacking those to turn the justifiable discontent of the people to their own blackguardly advantage. My threatening missives now have an organized hatred behind them.

"The culmination was reached a month ago in the shocking death of Ames Benton, the first tragedy of the kind that has occurred in America—but not the last I fear. I knew the man; I did business with him; I had talked to him the day before his death. What brought it closer home to me was the fact that Benton was what you'd call a popular man; openhanded, affable, of a kindly nature. If they did this to him, what will my fate be!

"The affair may be forgotten by the time you read this, so I will say Benton was a prominent and wealthy man—though not so rich as I—president and director in many corporations. He was blown to pieces in his bed at night by an anarchist's bomb. The man that threw it likewise lost his life in the explosion. How he succeeded in reaching Mr. Benton's bedroom will always remain a mystery. Among Mr. Benton's effects were found threatening letters similar to those I have received. The assassin's accomplices—it is believed that he must have had accomplices—have never been found.

"This affair has not helped me to sleep better of nights. My courage is of the daylight variety. So long as I can have my eyes open and my wits about me, I am willing to take my chances, but at the thought of being attacked in my bed I confess my heart turns to water. So I have taken my measures.

"The Madagascar Hotel which I was building was all but complete. To secure light and air on the West I had already bought the adjoining dwelling on Forty——th street. I got it cheap because it had been a private insane asylum and was in bad odor in the neighborhood. The transaction had been effected through agents, and it was not known that I was the owner.

"I had an opening cut between the hotel and this dwelling. By distributing the work among many hands I was able to conceal my eventual purpose from all. The people who put in the steel doors thought that the rear door was to give on a shallow cupboard in the wall. When the doors were in I knocked out this cupboard myself and had a clear way through. Nobody who knew thought it at all out of the way that Silas Gyde should put in a steel vault in connection with his suite in the hotel.

"I have installed myself in a rear room of the old dwelling. The front of the house which has been boarded up for years I was careful not to disturb. Here I can sleep in peace. If the ghosts of the poor insane patients stalk through the halls, they do not trouble me.

"But they may get me yet, of course, and I am writing to put you in possession of all the particulars. I am sure now, that there is a devilishly able brain using the anarchistic agitation to further a blackmailing scheme on a gigantic scale.

"For instance, immediately after poor Benton's death I received a letter threatening me with the same fate, and I have reason to believe that many other rich men received similar letters. I promptly put mine in the hands of the police, as did others, with what result? None, except that I instantly received another letter apprising me that my act was known, and that if I did not immediately cease all dealings with the police I would be shot down in the street.

"I ignored this letter, and three days later I got a bullet through my hat in City Hall Square. The newspapers seemed to take the attitude that it was no more than my due. But the other rich men appreciated the significance of the act, and I have no doubt the blackmailing business was much stimulated thereby. Still the police did nothing, and I resolved to have no more to do with those gentry, but to protect myself.

"Now observe. A week after the attack on me I was called upon in my office by a polite young man who handed me the card of the 'Eureka Protective Association.' His proposition in brief was, that for a stated sum paid every month (four hundred dollars was the amount named) his organization would guarantee to protect me against all threats from Anarchists, and would warn me in advance of any plans that were laid to attempt my life. Since the police had failed to suppress the Reds, he said, his people had succeeded in placing their agents in every circle of anarchists, to take note of and report on all their activities.

"Ingenious, was it not? I could well imagine that many of my timorous wealthy acquaintances would fall for it eagerly after all the agitations of the past few weeks. But to me it smelled rank of blackmail. It seemed to me that if I once submitted, the impost would promptly be doubled, trebled, quadrupled, and instead of securing peace I would be letting myself in for a life of continuous alarms. I might as well die at once. Anyhow, I thought, it wasn't possible that every rich man would submit, and they couldn't very well assassinate us all. My chance was as good as another's.

"So I turned the polite young man down, and took my own measures. I closed my office down-town, and carried my business under my hat, as they say. I traded impartially through every broker in town. I have moved into my retreat in the old house, and venture out only by daylight, keeping to the crowded streets. The secret of my sleeping-place is still a secret I am sure. I have had no more threatening letters, and I hope they have crossed me off their lists as a hopeless prospect. But if they do get me, you will know all the circumstances."