CHAPTER XV

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Something had gone wrong again with the head of that office in the Wall Street skyscraper where George Washington watched the stock-ticker and where the windows looked down on filmy streets full of figures bobbing like entangled flies: the plump man in brown, the man with the pointed teeth and the beady eyes, was once more absent. The slight cold that the doctors mentioned, the catarrhal affection, had returned; the mucous membranes of the throat were re-inflamed; the malady that no newspaper gave a name to renewed its war.

As always, the office work proceeded with silent regularity. Simpson, the almoner, saw callers. Atwood, the chief broker, telephoned for orders uptown. Conover, the confidential clerk, traveled several times a day between his master's house and his master's place of business in one of his master's motor-cars. At the brown man's home, the famous physicians issued their non-committal bulletins; L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett came in and went out, the former worried and elliptical, the latter loud in denial. And directly across the street the relays of reporters resumed their watching, asked hourly the same questions and received always the same replies. Rumor once more hinted dark things about a ruined digestion and an overworked brain.

Nevertheless, there was a difference between this occasion and its predecessors, and the delicate nerves of the financial world quivered with their subtle and sure appreciation of it. The interval of good health had been briefer than ever before. Simpson looked grave. Atwood received few orders. Conover more often than not failed to see whom he sought. The famous physicians called other famous physicians into consultation. Rivington and Hallett were sometimes denied audience. The reporters sent their chiefs a word that made every newspaper-office in the country hunt up a certain long-prepared obituary, set it in type and keep it standing on the bank with a slug-line that read, "Hold for Orders." Rumor shook its thousand heads, and this time rumor was right: the thumbs of the gods were turned down.

No more rising early and working late for the man with the beady eyes and hairy hands. No more gluttony. No more scheming. All hours are alike in the sickroom; his only food was tepid broth, and about a brain too tired to scheme for itself, the only scheming was how to drag forward from minute to minute its life that was death-in-life.

In the street straw had one day been strewn to quiet the noise of traffic, and the next day commands from City Hall closed that street to traffic. Outside was silence, and silence was inside, behind the brownstone walls and shuttered windows, over the rich rugs, among the pictures by the great dead artists.

In a darkened room, in a big Louis XV. bed, bought from the poor descendant of a Provencal marquis for whose mistress it was made, the patient lay. His legs were beneath the covers, but an upholstered bed-rest propped him so that his trunk was almost upright, wrapped in a house-jacket of French flannel, russet brown. Freshly shaven and carefully brushed, he was as neat as if he were about to go to business; but his cheeks hung like folds of dough over his heavy jaw-bone; his short-sighted eyes were fixed on the tapestried canopy above him, which showed the rape of Europa; his lips, turned pale, were pulled back tightly over his yellow fangs. On the edge of the coverlet, high-drawn, his hairy hands gave the only sign of life in all his body: the rounded tips of their stumpy fingers moved constantly as if they were spinning ... spinning...

He would not go to business any more.

It was the day on which Luke's month of promised suppression was to expire. In the sick-room of the man in russet-brown two doctors stood at one side of the bed now, with a nurse between them. L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett were admitted to the room, and Rivington stood at the foot of the bed with his trembling hand before his face, while Hallett, beside him, squared his jaw and looked at the dying man, who did not look at him. Some servants that had worked in the house for twenty years hovered in the shadows and sobbed, because they loved their master and had long cause to love him. A clergyman, in his vestments, knelt at the side of the bed opposite the doctors and read from a little book.

"O Almighty God," read the clergyman, his voice sounding loud in the quiet of the room--"with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons; we humbly commend the soul of thy servant, our dear brother, into thy hands..."

One doctor quietly reached out and placed a seeking finger on the dying man's wrist.

"... that it may be precious in thy sight..."

The doctor looked over his shoulder at his colleague. The colleague's eyes asked a question. The examining doctor nodded.

"... it may be presented pure and without spot before thee."

Then the man on the bed died. He died silently, speedily, grimly. The stumpy fingers stopped their weaving motion; they shot into the palms of the hands, and the hands clenched until only their hairy backs were visible. The lips tightened for a moment until the pointed fangs seemed to have bitten through them; the beady eyes protruded still farther from their sockets; the crooked arms curved stiffly toward the belly; the crooked knees shot toward the chest; the whole figure seemed to curl up; the mouth fell open.

The clergyman looked, hesitated and continued:

"... teach us who survive, in this and other like daily spectacles of mortality, to see how frail and uncertain our own condition is; and so to number our days, that we may seriously apply our hearts to that holy and heavenly wisdom, whilst we live here, which may in the end bring us to life everlasting, through the merits of Jesus Christ, thine only Son our Lord. Amen."

Far down in the offices on the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, everything was going on as usual. Only one room of the suite was empty, and even in it, under the solemn Washington, the stock-ticker was weaving out its yards and yards of tape by the windows that looked to the web of streets on which the people buzzed always like entangled flies.

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