God's rebel

XXIX

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Epilogue -

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CHAPTER L THE GAME BEGINS.

“But,” she urged impatiently to the stolid heavyfaced man at her side, “it’s the second time it has won ! Don’t you see how everyone’s betting on fourteen?”

“And why?” a faint shadow of a smile flitting athwart his dark features. “What’s happened to the sillies now that stampedes them on fourteen?”

“Pshaw!” she began hotly; then paused as her eyes, in company with everyone else’s, became fixed on the magic hand of one who was known as a multi-millionaire whilst he scattered his gold generously over the teens — “You, a Methodist minister’s son, ask me why?”

“My native innocence, you mean,” he answered with amusement. “That’s why I ask, I suppose.”

“No, no ! what’s the good of inbred superstition if it doesn’t tell you that when a number wins twice running it’s just bound to win the third time. But there!” she ended dejectedly, as the croupier called out “ Rien ne va plus;” — “it’s too late now. You’ll never succeed !”

After all, his excess of superstition, his strong biologic impulse, perhaps, which impelled him to a belief in the infallibilities of the past rather

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than to test the uncertainties of the future, saved them, as it had many times before in the brief past of their acquaintance. Still he did not choose at this time meanly to remind her of it. On the contrary, his only expression was one of brute sympathy, as though vainly seeking to know her and sorrowful at the tumbling of her castle, even though he must refuse reverently to shower his gold over the ruins. For the luck had shifted to number thirtythree.

“Twelve hundred francs, Potiphar, and he bet ten thousand !” she said in amazed half-audible tones.

“Humph, a millionaire,” he answered with careless indifference as he reckoned in hard American dollars the amount of the man’s losses. “It’s nothing to him.”

“What did you say?” she asked, but without taking her eyes from the millionaire who, nothing daunted, again sprinkled his gold over the numbers from twelve to fifteen, and carelessly dropped a thousand franc note upon zero.

But again a spiteful three thrust its forked tongue at him, wriggled and curled in electric glee; whilst the croupier raked in the gold, and the millionaire, without a change of expression, rolled on his way swaying in splendid insouciance.

“Who is he, Potiphar ?” she asked.

“The president of the Wheeling Car Works,” answered the solid looking gentleman. “I noticed by the Times yesterday that his workmen are making trouble and threatening to strike. He’s probably trying to forget it.”

“Oh,” and her eyes returned to the game. “But he left too soon,” she expostulated, with feminine irrelevancy. “This is the second time it has skipped

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the teens. And the third time, Potiphar, you know — ” She smiled bewitchingly.

“Yes, my dear, I know / 5 replied he of the Egyptian title, but in a manner to denote his complete indifference to the art of conjury. “I left my purse at the hotel.”

“Oh, if I only had a napoleon !” she pouted, and turned her pretty head, so that the words came as a petition not lightly to be refused, into the ears of a young gentleman standing close behind her.

“If you would oblige me,” he murmured, placing the coin in her hand, causing the splendid dark eyes to open wide with surprise and then dance with mischief as she thanked him, “For good luck,” and placed the coin on the number fourteen.

And this time it won ; there was no disputing it ; third time and all. Even Potiphar was forced to smile in odd amazement, as the crowd drew a deep breath of relief that said audibly, “I told you so,” at this gratifying example of the no-freak of fortune.

“Shall we go now, Enid?” he asked, weariness of the scene manifest in his voice.

“Oh no; impossible! See? we are partners.” And she half closed one eye an instant indicating the young man who had stood behind them and loaned his napoleon, and who was now coolly placing their wager just won over the pair, trio, quartette, and transversal including the number fourteen.

“Rein ne va plus!”

Again the monotonous chant closing the lists; the sing-song creak of the hinges of Fortune’s door in the strained faces of the multitude; the same faces, forsooth, that have looked on or taken part

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in our universal gamble since the world began — princes and lords who, though they possess nothing else, at least display splendid breeding, secure in success or defeat; suave statesmen, men of affairs, greedy gamblers in blackball carelessly rubbing elbows; the poet and musician with rapt expression and long hair, together with sexless creatures in transitional clothes, with a business expression and short hair. And lastly, women ; rosebuds and lilies, the flesh of white arms and flashing shoulders in the glaring lights and the stare of men ; the good, the sinful, the spotless, the guilty ; fair frail women whom men love for their very frailty, together with stark sufficient women — bereft of frailty, but as yet possessing nothing quite so sweet or feminine to fill its place — whom men are trying to learn to love; women pure and pale, painted and wanton, but nevertheless, women as they have always been and will probably never be found wanting.

Nor is the game itself in any sense different from what it has ever been; no, merely the same old round wherein the grand croupier dykes in the vast ocean of gold, sprinkling now and then a few drops from the tips of his fingers upon the heads of the grateful but clamorous populace; sometimes, it is true, to the accompaniment of religious ceremonies and the tune of “it is better to give than to receive,” and sometimes without this mockery. Yet the splendid perspective of the roulette table never grows tiresome, either to player or to' the onlooking historian. A vast green sea freighted with golden ships, now quiet, now tempest-tossed, and anon swept clean by a gale ; and then again placable, calm, aye, grandly pacific, so that the mind gropes instinctively backward into the past and the eye peers far out over the moonlit sea, till lo ! Charlemagne himself comes sailing into view, and we behold him not unjustly

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S in the guise of the first grand croupier of Monaco. Yet another turn of the wheel and the Saracens come up, with flashing scimitars, scattering the early Christians to the four winds. Then the clouds lower, as the rocky stronghold becomes lost and won in turn by Germany, Genoa, Milan — the prey and the home alike of pirate and despot ; but ever smiling with the sunrise, singing through the day with the music at her feet, and blushing like a maiden in the rose light of sunset, until France, passionate wooer of nations, by obtaining Nice and Savoy, embraces her with a protecting. arm.

Still the game never ceases ; and as there are no gamblers like women, so too there is none like Monaco, the gem and the bride of France. With the advent of Honore V. and his calculating croupier, Francois Chappon, fresh zest is lent to the play. Grain is the stake, and Honore V. keeps it well locked up in his own granaries. Nor must the housewife bake her own bread save under fear of dire penalty, for Honore is a thoughtful despot and has his own bakers employed to bake bread for his people ; sometimes, it is true, out of condemned flour bought at Genoa and Marseilles. Whilst, still provident, he compels his bakers to keep an official register of their families and report whether or not they are eating the proper number of loaves. If perchance they are not, they must either be fined or imprisoned; for Honore must sell his bread, poor fellow! it being his only means of subsistence.

One time, so it is rumoured, a ship came sailing into the harbour with a fat' captain and a well fed crew. At once the croupier’s suspicions were inflamed ; therefore a search was made, and lo ! deep down in the hold of the vessel was found an ancient loaf that everyone had overlooked when throwing the ship’s bread overboard, as all vessels were com-

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pelled to do before entering harbor. The stale loaf was confiscated, conveyed ashore, exhibited to Honore — the ship was seized, and the fat captain barely escaped imprisonment in the dungeon by paying a fine of five hundred francs.

In this manner Honore V. started in life a poor boy, with only a common-school education and naught but a barren rock for inheritance; but by dint of push, hard work, and infinite attention to details, at the end of five years he had accumulated a fortune of six million francs out of a population of less than six thousand people. It reads almost like a romance, as our newspapers would say; so that one instinctively thrills to the regretful thought of what a success he might have achieved had his fortunes only been cast in a happier land, under the shade, let us say, of that famous buttonhole — no, buttonwood! — tree in Wall street.*

But regrets, after all, are idle whilst the play continues ; chances still abound, it is alleged, though to some it is strangely pleasing to muse upon the antecedents of the game as the wheel clicks.

“Rein ne va plus!”

The slowing whirr of the wheel under the heavy atmosphere grows fainter and fainter till it stops with a sharp click. Then the murmur of voices begins again amid the clinking of gold, as it flows in a constantly swelling current towards the croupier.

“Why, he has taken it all!”

For a series of turns the two had been steadily winning, and, as success at business invariably begets

*“In 1792,” writes an apologist in a well-known magazine, “twenty-seven respectable citizens of New York met under a buttonwood tree in Wall Street and formed an association for the buyiftg and selling of stocks, of whose widespread beneficence they could at that time have had no adequate conception.”

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good feeling among the gamblers, they had been chatting together gaily, brilliantly. Now, however, there was a ring of remonstrance in her tone; she looked up at her partner, her face still flushed, but this time with indignation. Whilst he, with a heedless laugh and keeping his eyes intent upon her face as though bewildered and fascinated with its beauty, replied :

“No, not all. See? He has left us our wager — from courtesy, perhaps and he held up a napoleon. “Shall we continue ?”

“But our five thousand francs ?” she began, fervently, then faltered, and flashed him a smile. “Oh dear ! It seemed so real. Thank you ; I don’t care to play again.” And, turning to the man behind her, she added, “Potiphar, give him our cards. Don’t you see he’s an American?”

The free-masonry of their country’s name fetched a smile and an informal word as they exchanged cards ; then, the men lifting their hats, they parted and passed on in the moving throng.

The younger man had not taken many steps, however, ere he felt a friendly hand on his shoulder and a familiar “Hello, old man!” close to his ear, which caused him to look up and reply, “Ah, Henry, is that you? I was just about to go in search of you.”

“Yes, I saw you were longing for me,” said his friend. “I stepped in here a quarter of an hour ago, but found you were pleasantly occupied, and so went out for a stroll. By Jove ! but she was a stunner. Where did you pick her up, Kenneth?”

“Who? pick who up?” Kenneth protested quietly as they stepped out into the gardens.

“Why, Delilah; the person I saw you playing with, of course. However, I don’t suppose you know her name.”

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“No, that’s right; I don’t,” Kenneth admitted, pausing to light a cigar. “They gave me their cards, but I’ve not looked at the names. I know her husband’s, though; it’s Potiphar.”

“Potiphar? Ha! ha! then I wasn’t so far off in my name after all.”

“No,” the other conceded fairly, “Potiphar’s wife and Delilah were somewhat closely related, I fancy. However, here it is,” and, pausing under the glare of an electric light, he read the card:

“Mr. and Mrs. Potiphar Phillips, Chicago, U. S. A.”

“Odd name, very,” his companion commented. “Wonder what he does with it?”

“Well, at least he doesn’t conjure with it, Henry. For the life of me I can’t understand how a man who hasn’t sufficient imagination to enjoy gambling can find any pleasure in the society of such a beautiful woman as that wife of his.”

“Perhaps he is poor.”

“Impossible. Didn’t you see what she had on?”

“Had on ! No, I confess that I wasn’t struck by that exactly.” He laughed. “But have you actually observed that it is the imaginative man who gambles?”

“Oh, yes, I think so ; the imaginative faculty that permits a few men to get inordinately rich almost always implies the possession in a marked degree of those higher qualities which might have made such men equally famous as poets, astronomers, or in the higher mathematics, had their environment not been limited by ledgers and accounts. Whereas, take a man like this Potiphar, why ! he could never become very rich if he tried. He’s only a plodder ; he has no imagination. Obviously, his wife is a misfit.”

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“Humph ! And the specific cause for this sad state of so many wives is, I suppose ”

“Oh, it’s a question of economics, of course. That’s the cause of everything bad.”

They had strolled to the top of the terraces and now stood gazing a moment out over the glinting sea. The steel-blue light of the waning moon played over the water’s superficial restlessness and lit with a tender softness the distant castle of Monaco — the selfsame light that softens the Past, that glorifies the Present, and causes the dark, uncertain sea to forget its treacherous depths in a mirror of loveliness ; the mellow glow of romance, sacred in its very superstitions and wrapping the world in a warm mantle of conservatism wherein we sleep, and dream, and protest vigorously against all who dare rudely disturb or awake us.

But ah ! ’tis only a borrowed glow after all. We forget that the grim, vulgar reality of yesterday becomes the alleged romance of to-day. We forget that this soft light playing over the moon’s scarred face covers naught save a scabrous sepulchre, making all life, all present humanity, seem but an empty dream.

“Win anything, Henry?” asked Kenneth, returning again to the play.

“No; the fact is, old man, now that my time is up in Vienna, and we have had our little excursion, I begin to feel more anxious about the future than I should really care to confess.”

“Don’t. What’s the use?”

“Well, for one thing,” he explained, “I met Dr. Blodgett here this very evening — the registrar, you know, of the university’s medical department — and he gave me to understand that most of the men who graduated during the past three years have failed to obtain a living practice. Naturally, I don’t feel

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like gambling, and wish to get home and settle down now quickly as possible.”

“Yes, but you forget,” Kenneth urged, with laudable conceit, perhaps, “none of these men have had your advantages — besides, the personal equation.”

“No, I don’t forget it; but it remains to be seen whether the public will care to consider it. Of course, it is different with you. Your place is waiting for you in the university, and every word that you utter in your lecture-room will mark you for what you are from the first. There’s no hocus-pocus or quackery in your profession; either what you practice is the truth or it is not; and the general public is at present interested enough to discover it immediately.”

“Thank you ; I confess that I trust so ; only don’t be cast down, Henry, by what that old codger said to you. Why, I’d wager ten years of my life that you will succeed. As for starting home, I’m ready whenever you say.”

“Suppose we sail Wednesday, then; or, no, we should have to leave here on the first train in the morning, and I wish to see Blodgett again.”

“Very well,” his friend answered, “I’ll go on the early train and complete all arrangements, and you can come later. Will that be satisfactory?”

The following morning, accordingly, found Kenneth Moore off for Paris by the early express. Yet was there something incongruous in the hasty flight of the train back into the world of everyday thought and affairs, considering that nearly three months had elapsed in which he had heard nothing by telegraph, letter, or newspaper of the world at large. But long absence — six months in Gottingen, followed by a year in Berlin in active study in his profession — had served somewhat to silence the old

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it yearning and impatience for home, so that upon joining his friend, Dr. Henry Holden, in Vienna some three months ago, they had hastily made arrangements for a trip to the Orient before returning to America. It scarcely seemed worth while to cable home of their newly formed plans; accordingly they merely wrote advising their correspondents to direct letters to Paris, where they would pick them up on their return.

Arriving in Paris, he went direct to his bankers, where he was given a bundle of letters, which, the clerk stated, had been accumulating for several weeks. Thence, hurrying along the boulevard, he entered a cafe and found a seat at a table in a remote alcove. Opening the first letter that came to hand, which was addressed in a familiar hand, “Dr. Kenneth Moore, Paris,” he read:

“Dearest Kenneth : Still we hear from you from Rome, Athens, Constantinople, yet you might be dropping your letters to us from Mars so far as the hopeless task of trying to make you hear our replies is concerned. We have cabled; we have written; we have prayed; and there is something strangely pathetic to us in reading your enthusiastic accounts of the sights you have seen and the adventures you are having, whilst at your home has occurred that which would have robbed them of all their pleasure. For, Kenneth — dear Kenneth !”

He paused ; a veil came over his vision, and, though he completed the sentence and groped blindly ahead for a line or two, he was conscious only of a sob at the heart and the mute appeal of his unuttering lips, “My father.” A waiter appeared and stood bowing politely. Kenneth did not see him, and the boy disappeared and returned directly with a newspaper. Yes, though monsieur had not granted him the extreme happiness of noticing him,

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yet he had obviously performed his part by guessing his country and fetching him his whole kingdom in miniature. Monsieur was sad; homesick, quite probably. See, he could now be at home again. There was the great strike among the starving workingmen; the great scandal in Congress; and the great — what you call it — the choke? no, the lynching; and the equally great railway accident that the Americans seem never to tire of. What a vivid imagination these Americans had, that they should persist in trying to make two trains pass each other at full speed on the same track! Sometimes they passed; yes, he admitted it; but sometimes — Mon Dieu! it was a queer country where men’s lives were cheaper than steel rails. And Jacques, who spoke four languages as fluently as a native, shrugged his shoulders yet more fluently, and told himself positively for the hundredth time, that no ! much as he should like to go to America and become ver’ rich, there was no satisfaction — no satis factshiong, in running so many chances against violent and sudden death among a barbarous and incomprehensible people.

But monsieur was ver’ tired. See, his head was resting on the table. Ah, monsieur was sleepy ; he would come and wait on him later.

And Jacques vanished, drawing the curtains softly behind him.

Chapter II. Childhood

There come moments of pause in the headlong hurry of youth that send the mind groping swiftly backward into the past, seeking wildly amidst the

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storm for that dim, nearly forgotten beginning of first- remembered things, until Time, the victorious, is at last forced to take the retreating step, the while immediate scenes and voices become strangely silenced in the swell of the more remote. Lo ! again one stands absorbed in the olden play, seeing the curtain rise and fall, with gladness, a smile upon the lips, as a child : the world and its fair unfolding all as at first, ere Ulysses had journeyed a mile.

“Kenneth! O Kenneth !”

Out of the vanished years the voice commanded, fetching scene and all fresh in his memory as though twenty odd years had not flown, whilst yet he answered, the lad of six.

“Yes, papa.”

“Well, come and jump in if you want to ride this morning. No, never mind the school, my lad; there's time enough for that and to spare.” And the doctor lifted his hitching-weight into the phaeton, stepped in and drew the reins taut.

“Whoa! wait a moment,” he added. “Run into the house, Kenneth, and tell Jennie I’m called out to Mr. Anthony’s and that we may not be back to lunch.”

“You mean Enid’s father’s, papa?” asked the boy.

“Yes, run along; be lively.” And, beholding the child’s eagerness at mention of Enid’s name, the doctor laughed, then sighed: “Ah, the course of true love. Dear me !”

Of his mother the child knew nothing at all save what he had learned in later years, she having died at his birth. Knew little, that is, save that she was of foreign extraction, but whether Basque, Spanish, or gypsy, doubtless she herself could not truly have said; indeed, some of the doctor’s old neighbors might have told him that his father had practically

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married the girl off the street. One night, so it was remembered, Dr. Moore was called to see a patient living in a dingy, dirty apartment over a noisy saloon at the corner of the business street a couple of blocks from his residence. Entering the room, he discovered a girl moaning and lying on the dirty bed, dressed in a soiled and faded silk gown with short sleeves that disclosed one arm lying limp and helpless. A couple of rascallylooking street musicians stood near the bed, one of them still holding his violin by its neck, whilst the other had dropped his flute on the floor and was now attempting to quiet the girl. Replying to the doctor’s command to have all particulars, the violinist, after much parleying in Spanish with his companion, put aside his instrument and picked up the flute. “Een zees way, senor,” he stammered. “Him her fader ; ver’ good fader. See ? She playa harp, senor, ah ! so beautiful ; but zees night, no ! she no playa mucha good. So her ver’ good fader, he taka za flute een zees way, see ?” * And the rascal took it by one end and fetched the ivory joint down over his extended arm in a manner that left no doubt.

The doctor’s eyes flashed. He uttered something abrupt and decisive about “damned dagoes,” glanced meaningly at an open window, and the pair fled precipitately down the back stairway. Then, taking the girl in his arms he carried her gently to his own home, mended her broken arm, and for full two years afterwards he would listen with all of a child’s delight to that sweetly pathetic voice born of the South and generations of oppression, watching with infinite joy the beautiful arms and tapering fingers caressing the strings of that now silent harp into a song or a chant — and paid for it all with a broken heart when she died. Nor had he chosen to marry again; the balance of his life was given solely to

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his practice and the rearing of the son she had left him.

Now, all of this happened before the time of the great fire, which is the way all time is reckoned in the city of Chicago. Before the fire Dr. William Moore was reputed to be wealthy; being one of a considerable number who held approved securities that were shortly to vanish as completely as though never created. The source of wealth, however, remained ; not capital, nor schemes of importing such from abroad, but labour and natural resources; that couple which God hath joined, and which man in his infinite foolishness hath temporarily parted — labour that was grand, willing, diversified; of the kind that is able to convert a marsh into a teeming city, or the uninhabited prairie into great fields of ripening grain, though the primitive curse of gold or silver never were known. That capital was in any sense necessary to labour was after the great fire clearly disproved; but that capital took advantage of this superstition in order to multiply itself was not only widely evidenced in Chicago, but in hundreds of other western cities to-day.

But, however these things may be, whether it was because of vast capital or giant labour — which latter shortly created its own capital — that population multiplied, that productivity doubled and trebled, that costly buildings were erected and beautiful boulevards were extended outward over the prairie, Dr. Moore and hundreds of others were never afterwards able to regain their fortunes. And, though the newspapers joyfully stated at the beginning of every new year how rapidly wealth had increased because the price of land had doubled, the only effect that he had been able to grasp was that with every new year his patients seemed to have less and less to pay for medical services. At any rate his colleci6

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tions had fallen off by ten, thirty, fifty per cent; whilst charity work, which was becoming more and more fashionable among well-meaning people, kept him busier and harder worked than ever; though ever in a spirit of cheerful and good-natured mystery. For to create wealth by the mere arbitrary doubling of land prices, or to expect anything good to result out of the giving of charity to able-bodied people, seemed to him about as senseless in the one case and as purposeless in the other as for him to try to raise his portly person into the air by pulling at his bootstraps.

But Dr. Moore was no specialist in economics, his life being so absorbed in the daily routine of his profession that it had rarely occurred to him that he as an individual must help solve the riddle of the industrial sphinx or be devoured. Yet he had religiously tried to keep pace with the lightning speed of modern industrial society in order to be able to guide Kenneth more truly towards an early and substantial success in life. For success was truly the great desideratum of the age, nor was there any longer the shadow of a doubt as to the strict significance of the term; in sooth, in this day of plutocracy in church and university, for any one to insist that Galileo and Bruno were successful despite their splendid scientific achievements, when the one was burnt at the stake and the other spent the final ten years of his life in prison, were as untenable and as wholly unwarrantable proof of success to-day as then: the power that rules, whether monarch or dollar, or however subtle and chameleon-like be its form, being as ready as ever to crucify or offer the goblet of hemlock to whatsoever priest, poet, or painter that dares to dispute its divinity.

Hence the good doctor had puzzled himself from the days when Kenneth was a mere child in trying to

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decide upon the lad’s fitness for various careers, though what to make of him only became more urgent and difficult of solution as the days went by. For the lad was peculiar, impressionable to the last degree, and candid to the core; nor did his contact with others in school or college ever serve to stifle such feelings, or to develop those other qualities that young men commonly wear upon their- sleeves and that compel the world to remark : ‘‘He is smart ; he will succeed.” On the contrary, aside from a certain pugnacity of disposition which was oddly at variance with his dreamy nature, the lad grew up wedded to books and to music.

A picture of him taken at about the age of fifteen would have shown a striking resemblance to that portrait of Keats; the eyes large, luminous with truth, and somewhat wide apart ; the forehead pale and beautiful, and caressed with a cluster of dark red curls; the nose straight and perfect; the mouth sensitive and a trifle large. Some of these features the doctor saw whenever he chanced to look in the glass; others were only a memory to him, causing him to glance at the lad, to turn away, and gaze again. As for his height, it may have added somewhat to the boy’s pugnacious spirit, and it certainly tormented him not a little to find, as he grew to manhood, that he was below the medium, being, in fact, scarcely five feet eight. However, the doctor merely smiled at this conceit, telling him that it was a fine thing to be short, as biology would some day prove. “Less legs and more brain, my lad.” Yet when walking with his father and being invariably told to “step lively,” he had sometimes protested earnestly, and, as he thought, with great cogency. “No, Kenneth,” his father corrected, “you have simply to let your legs swing the faster,” and referred him to the law governing pendulums.