The Sword of Damocles: A Story of New York Life

"When I entered the Madison Bank as President, I gave up in deference to the wishes of Mr. Stuyvesant all open speculation in Wall Street. But a wife and home such as I then had, are not to be supported on any petty income; and when shortly after your entrance into my home, the opportunity presented itself of investing in a particularly promising silver mine out West, I could not resist the temptation; regarding the affair as legitimate, and the hazard, if such it were, one that I was amply able to bear. But like most enterprises of the kind, one dollar drew another after it, and I soon found that to make available what I had already invested, I was obliged to add to it more and more of my available funds, until – to make myself as intelligible to you as I can – it had absorbed not only all that had remained to me after my somewhat liberal purchase of the Madison Bank stock, but all I could raise on a pledge of the stock itself. But there was nothing in this to alarm me. I had a man at the mine devoted to my interests; and as the present yield was excellent, and the future of more promise still, I went on my way with no special anxiety. But who can trust a silver mine? At the very point where we expected the greatest result, the vein suddenly gave out, and nothing prevented the stock from falling utterly flat on the market, but the discretion of my agent, who kept the fact a secret, while he quietly went about getting another portion of the mine into working order. He was fast succeeding in this, and affairs were looking daily more promising, when suddenly an intimation received by me in a bit of conversation casually overheard at that reception we attended together, convinced me that the secret was transpiring, and that if great care were not taken, we should be swamped before we could get things into working trim again. Filled with this anxiety, I was about to leave the building, in order to telegraph to my agent, when to my great surprise the card of that very person was brought in to me, together with a request for an immediate interview. You remember it, Paula, and how I went out to see him; but what you did not know then, and what I find some difficulty in relating now, is that his message to me was one of total ruin unless I could manage to give into his hand, for immediate use, the sum of a hundred thousand dollars.

"The facts making this demand necessary were not what you may have been led to expect. They had little or nothing to do with the new operations, which were progressing successfully and with every promise of an immediate return, but arose entirely out of a law-suit then in the hands of a Colorado judge for decision, and which, though it involved well-nigh the whole interest of the mine, had never till this hour given me the least uneasiness, my lawyers having always assured me of my ultimate success. But it seems that notwithstanding all this, the decision was to be rendered in favor of the other party. My agent, who was a man to be trusted in these matters, averred that five days before, he had learned from most authentic sources what the decision was likely to be. That the judge's opinion had been seen – he did not tell me how, he dared not, nor did I presume to question, but I have since learned that not only had the copyist employed by the judge turned traitor, but that my own agent had been anything but scrupulous in the use he had made of a willing and corruptible instrument – and that if I wanted to save myself and the others connected with me from total and irremediable loss, I must compromise with the other parties at once, who not being advised of the true state of affairs, and having but little faith in their own case, had long ago expressed their willingness to accept the sum of a hundred thousand dollars as a final settlement of the controversy. My agent, if none too nice in his ideas of right and wrong, was, as I have intimated, not the man to make a mistake; and when to my question as to how long a time he would give me to look around among my friends and raise the required sum, he replied, 'Ten hours and no more,' I realized my position, and the urgent necessity for immediate action.

"The remainder of the night is a dream to me. There was but one source from which I could hope in the present condition of my affairs, to procure a hundred thousand dollars; and that was from the box where I had stowed away the bonds destined for the use of the Japha heirs. To borrow was impossible, even if I had been in possession of proper securities to give. I was considered as having relinquished speculation and dared not risk the friendship of Mr. Stuyvesant by a public betrayal of my necessity. The Japha bonds or my own fortune must go, and it only remained with me to determine which.

"Paula, nothing but the ingrained principle of a lifetime, the habit of doing the honest thing without thought or hesitation, saves a man at an hour like that. Strong as I believed myself to be in the determination never again to flaw my manhood by the least action unworthy of my position as the guardian of trusts, earnest as I was in my recoil from evil, and sincere as I may have been in my admiration of and desire for the good, I no sooner saw myself tottering between ruin and a compromise with conscience, than I hesitated – hesitated with you under my roof, and with the words we had been speaking still ringing in my ears. Ona's influence, for all the trials of our married life, was still too strong upon me. To think of her as deprived of the splendor which was her life, daunted my very soul. I dared not contemplate a future in which she must stand denuded of everything which made existence dear to her; yet how could I do the evil thing I contemplated, even to save her and preserve my own position! For – and you must understand this – I regarded any appropriation of these funds I had delegated to the use of the Japhas, as a fresh and veritable abuse of trust. They were not mine. I had given them away. Unknown to any one but my own soul and God, I had deeded them to a special purpose, and to risk them as I now proposed doing, was an act that carried me back to the days of my former delinquency, and made the repentance of the last few years the merest mockery. What if I might recover them hereafter and restore them to their place; the chances in favor of their utter loss were also possible, and honesty deals not with chances. I suffered so, I had a momentary temptation towards suicide; but suddenly, in the midst of the struggle, came the thought that perhaps in my estimate of Ona I had committed a gross injustice, that while she loved splendor seemingly more than any woman I had ever known, she might be as far from wishing me to retain her in it at the price of my own self-respect, as the most honest-hearted wife in the world; and struck by the hope, I left my agent at a hotel and hurried home through the early morning to her side. She Was asleep, of course, but I wakened her. It was dark and she had a right to be fretful, but when I whispered in her ear, 'Get up and listen to me, for our fortune is at stake,' she at once rose and having risen, was her clearest, coldest, most implacable self. Paula, I told her my story, my whole story as I have told it to you here. I dropped no thread, I smoothed over no offence. Torturing as it was to my pride, I laid bare my soul before her, and then in a burst of appeal such as I hope never to be obliged to make use of again, asked her as she was a woman and a wife, to save me in this hour of my temptation.

"Paula, she refused. More than that, she expressed the bitterest scorn of my mawkish conscientiousness, as she called it. That I should consider myself as owing anything to the detestable wretch who was the only representative of the Japhas, was bad enough, but that I should go on treasuring the money that would save us, was disgraceful if not worse, and betrayed a weakness of mind for which she had never given me credit.

"'But Ona,' I cried, 'if it is a weakness of mind, it is also an equivalent to my consciousness of right living. Would you have me sacrifice that?'

"'I would have you sacrifice anything necessary to preserve us in our position,' said she; and I stood aghast before an unscrupulousness greater than any I had hitherto been called upon to face.

"'Ona,' repeated I, for her look was cold, 'do you realize what I have been telling you? Most wives would shudder when informed that their husbands had perpetrated a dishonest act in order to win them.'

"A thin strange smile heralded her reply. 'Most wives would,' returned she, 'but most wives are ignorant. Did you suppose I did not know what it cost you to marry me? Papa took care I should miss no knowledge that might be useful to me.'

"'And you married me knowing what I had done!' exclaimed I, with incredulous dismay.

"'I married you, knowing you were too clever, or believing you to be too clever, to run such a risk again.'

"I can say no more concerning that hour. With a horror for this woman such as I had never before experienced for living creature, I rushed out of her presence, loathing the air she breathed, yet resolved to do her bidding. Can you understand a man hating a woman, yet obeying her; despising her, yet yielding? I cannot, now, but that day there seemed no alternative. Either I must kill myself or follow her wishes. I chose to do the latter, forgetting that God can kill, and that, too, whom and when He pleases.

"Going down to the bank, I procured the bonds from my box in the safe. I felt like a thief, and the manner in which it was done was unwittingly suggestive of crime, but with that and the position in which I have since found myself placed by this very action, I need not cumber my present narrative. Handing the bonds to my agent with orders to sell them to the best advantage, I took a short walk to quiet my nerves and realize what I had done, and then went home.

"Paula, had God in his righteous anger seen fit to strike me down that day, it would have been no more than my due and aroused in me, perhaps, no more than a natural repentence. But when I saw her for whose sake I had ostensibly committed this fresh abuse of trust, lying cold and dead before me, the sword of the Almighty pierced me to the soul, and I fell prostrate beneath a remorse to which any regret I had hitherto experienced, was as the playing of a child with shadows. Had I by the losing of my right arm been able to recall my action, I would have done it; indeed I made an effort to recover myself; had my agent followed up with an order to return me the bonds I had given him, but it was too late, the compromise had already been effected by telegraph and the money was out of our hands. The deed was done and I had made myself unworthy of your presence and your smile at the very hour when both would have been inestimable to me. You remember those days; remember our farewell. Let me believe you do not blame me now for what must have seemed harsh and unnecessary to you then.

"There is but little more to write, but in that little is compressed the passion, longing, hope and despair of a lifetime. When I told you as I did a few hours ago that my sin was dead and its consequences at an end, I repeat that I fully and truly believed it. The hundred thousand dollars I had sent West, had been used to advantage, and only day before yesterday I was enabled to sell out my share in the mine, for a large sum that leaves me free and unembarrassed, to make the fortune of more than one Japha, should God ever see fit to send them across my pathway. More than that, Mr. Delafield, of whose discretion I had sometimes had my fears, was dead, having perished of a fever some months before in San Francisco; and of all men living, there were none as I believed, who knew anything to the discredit of my name. I was clear, or so I thought, in fortune and in fame; and being so, dreamed of taking to my empty and yearning arms, the loveliest and the purest of mortal women. But God watched over you and prevented an act whose consequences might have been so cruel. In an hour, Paula, in an hour, I had learned that the foul thing was not dead, that a witness had picked up the words I had allowed to fall in my interview with my father-in-law in the restaurant two years before; an unscrupulous witness who had been on my track ever since, and who now in his eagerness for a victim, had by mistake laid his clutch upon our Bertram. Yes, owing to the similarity of our voices and the fact that we both make use of a certain tell-tale word, this patient and upright nephew of mine stands at this moment under the charge of having acknowledged in the hearing of this person, to the committal of an act of dishonesty in the past. A foolish charge you will say, and one easily refuted. Alas, a fresh act of dishonesty lately perpetrated in the bank, complicates matters. A theft has been committed on some of Mr. Stuyvesant's effects, and that, too, under circumstances that involuntarily arouse suspicion against some one of the bank officials; and Bertram, if not sustained in his reputation, must suffer from the doubts which naturally have arisen in Mr. Stuyvesant's breast. The story which this man could tell, must of course shake the faith of any one in the reputation of him against whom it is directed, and the man intends to repeat his story, and that, too, in the very ears of him upon whose favor Bertram depends for his life's happiness and the winning of the woman he adores. I adore you, Paula, but I cannot clasp you to my heart across another sin. If the detectives whom we shall call in to-morrow, cannot exonerate those connected with the bank from the theft lately committed there – and the fact that you have been allowed to read this letter, prove they have not – I must do what I can to relieve Bertram from his painful position, by taking upon myself the onus of that past transgression which of right belongs to my account; and this once done, let the result be for good or ill, any bond between you and me is cut loose forever. I have not learned to love at this late hour, to wrong the precious thing I cherish. Death as it is to me to say good-bye to the one last gleam of heavenly light that has shot across my darkened way, it must be done, dear heart, if only to hold myself worthy of the tender and generous love you have designed to bestow upon me. Bertram, who is all generosity, may guess but does not know, what I am about to do. Go down to him, dear; tell him that at this very moment, perhaps, I am clearing his name before the wretch who has so ruthlessly fastened his fang upon him; that his love and Cicely's shall prosper, as he has been loyal, and she trusting, all these years of effort and probation; that I give him my blessing, and that if we do not meet again, I delegate to him the trust of which I so poorly acquitted myself. But before you go, stop a moment and in this room, which has always symbolized to my eyes the poverty which was my rightful due, kneel and pray for my soul; for if God grants me the wish of my heart, he will strike me with sudden death after I have taken upon myself the disgrace of my past offences. Life without love can be borne, but life without honor never. To come and go amongst my fellow-men with a shadow on the fame they have always believed spotless! Do not ask me to attempt it! Pray for my soul, but pray too, that I may perish in some quick and sudden way before ever your dear eyes rest upon my face again.

"And now, as though this were to be the end, let me take my last farewell of you. I have loved you, Paula, loved you with my heart, my mind and my soul. You have been my angel of inspiration and the source of all my comfort. I kneel before you in gratitude, and I stand above you in blessing. May every pang I suffer this hour, redound to you in some sweet happiness hereafter. I do not quarrel with my fate, I only ask God to spare you from its shadow. And He will. Love will flow back upon your young life, and in regions where our eye now fails to pierce, you will taste every joy which your generous heart once thought to bestow on

"Edward Sylvester."

XL
HALF-PAST SEVEN

"I would it were midnight, Hal, and all well." – Henry IV.

The library was dim; Bertram, who had felt the oppressive influence of the great empty room, had turned down the lights, and was now engaged in pacing the floor, with restless and uneven steps, asking himself a hundred questions, and wishing with all the power of his soul, that Mr. Sylvester would return, and by his appearance cut short a suspense that was fast becoming unendurable.

He had just returned from his third visit to the front door, when the curtain between him and the hall was gently raised, and Paula glided in and stood before him. She was dressed for the street, and her face where the light touched it, shone like marble upon which has fallen the glare of a lifted torch.

"Paula!" burst from the young man's lips in surprise.

"Hush!" said she, her voice quavering with an emotion that put to defiance all conventionalities, "I want you to take me to the place where Mr. Sylvester is gone. He is in danger; I know it, I feel it. I dare not leave him any longer alone. I might be able to save him if – if he meditates anything that – " she did not try to say what, but drew nearer to Bertram and repeated her request. "You will take me, won't you?"

He eyed her with amazement, and a shudder seized his own strong frame. "No," cried he, "I cannot take you; you do not know what you ask; but I will go myself if you apprehend anything serious. I remember where it is. I studied the address too closely, to readily forget it."

"You shall not go without me," returned Paula with steady decision. "If the danger is what I fear, no one else can save him. I must go," she added, with passionate importunity as she saw him still looking doubtful. "Darkness and peril are nothing to me in comparison with his safety. He holds my life in his hand," she softly whispered, "and what will not one do for his life!" Then quickly, "If you go without me I shall follow with Aunt Belinda. Nothing shall keep me in the house to-night."

He felt the uselessness of further objection, yet he ventured to say, "The place where he has gone is one of the worst in the city; a spot which men hesitate to enter after dark. You don't know what you ask in begging me to take you there."

"I do, I realize everything."

With a sudden awe of the great love which he thus beheld embodied before him, Bertram bowed his head and moved towards the door. "I may consider it wise to obtain the guidance of a policeman through the quarter into which we are about to venture. Will you object to that?"

"No," was her quick reply, "I object to nothing but delay."

And with a last look about the room, as if some sensation of farewell were stirring in her breast, she laid her hand on Bertram's arm, and together they hurried away into the night.

BOOK V
WOMAN'S LOVE

XLI
THE WORK OF AN HOUR

Base is the slave that pays." – Henry V.

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." – Congreve.

Mr. Sylvester upon leaving the bank, had taken his usual route up town. But after an aimless walk of a few blocks, he suddenly paused, and with a quiet look about him, drew from his pocket the small slip of paper which Bertram had laid on his table the night before, and hurriedly consulted its contents. Instantly an irrepressible exclamation escaped him, and he turned his face to the heavens with the look of one who recognizes the just providence of God. The name which he had just read, was that of the old lover of Jacqueline Japha, Roger Holt, and the address given, was 63 Baxter Street.

Twilight comes with different aspects to the broad avenues of the rich, and the narrow alleys of the poor. In the reeking slums of Baxter Street, poetry would have had to search long for the purple glamour that makes day's dying hour fair in open fields and perfumed chambers. Even the last dazzling gleam of the sun could awaken no sparkle from the bleared windows of the hideous tenement houses that reared their blank and disfigured walls toward the west. The chill of the night blast and the quick dread that follows in the steps of coming darkness, were all that could enter these regions, unless it was the stealthy shades of vice and disease.

Mr. Sylvester standing before the darkest and most threatening of the many dark and threatening houses that cumbered the street, was a sight to draw more than one head from the neighboring windows. Had it been earlier, he would have found himself surrounded by a dozen ragged and importunate children; had it been later, he would have run the risk of being garroted by some skulking assassin; as it was, he stood there unmolested, eying the structure that held within its gloomy recesses the once handsome and captivating lover of Jacqueline Japha. He was not the only man who would have hesitated before entering there. Low and insignificant as the building appeared – and its two stories certainly looked dwarfish enough in comparison with the two lofty tenement houses that pressed it upon either side – there was something in its quiet, almost uninhabited aspect that awakened a vague apprehension of lurking danger. A face at a window would have been a relief; even the sight of a customer in the noisome groggery that occupied the ground floor. From the dwellings about, came the hum of voices and now and then the sound of a shrill laugh or a smothered cry, but from this house came nothing, unless it was the slow ooze of a stream of half-melted snow that found its way from under the broken-down door-way to the gutter beyond.

Stepping bravely forward, Mr. Sylvester entered the open door. A flight of bare and rickety steps met his eye. Ascending them, he found himself in a hall which must have been poorly lighted at any time, but which at this late hour was almost dark. It was not very encouraging, but pressing on, he stopped at a door and was about to knock, when his eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, he detected standing at the foot of the stairs leading to the story above, the tall and silent figure of a woman. It was no common apparition. Like a sentinel at his post, or a spy on the outskirts of the enemy's camp, she stood drawn up against the wall, her whole wasted form quivering with eagerness or some other secret passion; darkness on her brow and uncertainty on her lip. She was listening, or waiting, or both, and that with an entire absorption that prevented her from heeding the approach of a stranger's step. Struck by so sinister a presence in a place so dark and desolate, Mr. Sylvester unconsciously drew back. As he did so, the woman thrilled and looked up, but not at him. A lame child's hesitating and uneven step was heard crossing the floor above, and it was towards it she turned, and for it she composed her whole form into a strange but evil calmness.

"Ah, he let you come then!" Mr. Sylvester heard her exclaim in a low smothered tone, whose attempted lightness did not hide the malevolent nature of her interest.

"Yes," came back in the clear and confiding tones of childhood. "I told him you loved me and gave me candy-balls, and he let me come."

A laugh quick and soon smothered, disturbed the surrounding gloom. "You told him I loved you! Well, that is good; I do love you; love you as I do my own eyes that I could crush, crush, for ever having lingered on the face of my betrayer!"

The last phrase was muttered, and did not seem to convey any impression to the child. "Hold out your arms and catch me," cried he; "I am going to jump."

She appeared to comply; for he gave a little ringing laugh that was startlingly clear and fresh.

"He asked me what your name was," babbled he, as he nestled in her arms. "He is always asking what your name is; Dad forgets, Dad does; or else it's because he's never seen you."

"And what did you tell him?" she asked, ignoring the last remark with an echo of her sarcastic laugh.

"Mrs. Smith, of course."

She threw back her head and her whole form acquired an aspect that made Mr. Sylvester shudder. "That's good," she cried, "Mrs. Smith by all means." Then with a sudden lowering of her face to his – "Mrs. Smith is good to you, isn't she; lets you sit by her fire when she has any, and gives you peanuts to eat and sometimes spares you a penny!"

"Yes, yes," the boy cried.

"Come then," she said, "let's go home."

She put him down on the floor, and gave him his little crutch. Her manner was not unkind, and yet Mr. Sylvester trembled as he saw the child about to follow her.

"Didn't you ever have any little boys?" the child suddenly asked.

The woman shrank as if a burning steel had been plunged against her breast. Looking down on the frightened child, she hissed out from between her teeth, "Did he tell you to ask me that? Did he dare – " She stopped and pressed her arms against her swelling heart as if she would smother its very beats. "Oh no, of course he didn't tell you; what does he know or care about Mrs. Smith!" Then with a quick gasp and a wild look into the space before her, "My child dead, and her child alive and beloved! What wonder that I hate earth and defy heaven!"

She caught the boy by the hand and drew him quickly away. "You will be good to me," he cried, frightened by her manner yet evidently fascinated too, perhaps on account of the faint sparks of kindness that alternated with gusts of passion he did not understand. "You won't hurt me; you'll let me sit by the fire and get warm?"

"Yes, yes."

"And eat a bit of bread with butter on it?"

"Yes, yes."

"Then I'll go."

She drew him down the hall. "Why do you like to have me come to your house?" he prattled away.

She turned on him with a look which unfortunately Mr. Sylvester could not see. "Because your eyes are so blue and your skin is so white; they make me remember her!"

"And who is her?"

She laughed and seemed to hug herself in her rage and bitterness. "Your mother!" she cried, and in speaking it, she came upon Mr. Sylvester.

He at once put out his hand.

"I don't know who you are," said he, "but I do not think you had better take the child out to-night. From what you say, his father is evidently upstairs; if you will give the boy to me, I will take him back and leave him where he belongs."

"You will?" The slow intensity of her tone was indescribable. "Know that I don't bear interference from strangers." And catching up the child, she rushed by him like a flash. "You are probably one of those missionaries who go stealing about unasked into respectable persons' rooms," she called back. "If by any chance you wander into his, tell him his child is in good hands, do you hear, in good hands!" And with a final burst of her hideous laugh, she dashed down the stairs and was gone.

Mr. Sylvester stood shocked and undecided. His fatherly heart urged him to search at once for the parent of this lame boy, and warn him of the possible results of entrusting his child to a woman with so little command over herself. But upon taking out his watch and finding it later by a good half-hour than he expected, he was so struck with the necessity of completing his errand, that he forgot everything else in his anxiety to confront Holt. Knocking at the first door he came to, he waited. A quick snarl and a surprised, "Come in!" announced that he had scared up some sort of a living being, but whether man or woman he found it impossible to tell, even after the door opened and the creature, whoever it was, rose upon him from a pile of rags scattered in one corner.

"I want Mr. Holt; can you tell me where to find him?"

"Upstairs," was the only reply he received, as the creature settled down again upon its heap of tattered clothing.

Fain to be content with this, he went up another flight and opened another door. He was more successful this time; one glance of his eye assured him that the man he was in search of, sat before him. He had never seen Mr. Holt; but the regular if vitiated features of the person upon whom he now intruded, his lank but not ungraceful form, and free if not airy manners, were not so common among the denizens of this unwholesome quarter, that there could be any doubt as to his being the accomplished but degenerate individual whose once attractive air had stolen the heart of Colonel Japha's daughter.

He was sitting in front of a small pine table, and when Mr. Sylvester's eyes first fell upon him, was engaged in watching with a somewhat sinister smile, the final twirl of a solitary nickle which he had set spinning on the board before him. But at the sound of a step at the door, a lightning change passed over his countenance, and rising with a quick anticipatory "Ah!" he turned with hasty action to meet the intruder. A second exclamation and a still more hasty recoil were the result. This was not the face or the form of him whom he had expected.

"Mr. Holt, I believe?" inquired Mr. Sylvester, advancing with his most dignified mien.

The other bowed, but in a doubtful way that for a moment robbed him of his usual air of impudent self-assertion.

"Then I have business with you," continued Mr. Sylvester, laying the man's own card down on the table before him. "My name is Sylvester," he proceeded, with a calmness that surprised himself; "and I am the uncle of the young man upon – whom you are at present presuming to levy blackmail."

The assurance which for a moment had deserted the countenance of the other, returned with a flash. "His uncle!" reëchoed he, with a low anomalous bow; "then it is from you I may expect the not unreasonable sum which I demand as the price of my attentions to your nephew's interest. Very good, I am not particular from what quarter it comes, so that it does come and that before the clock has struck the hour which I have set as the limit of my forbearance."

"Which is seven o'clock, I believe?"