The Woman in Black | Page 2

period of his business career which had
been called his early bad manner he had been little more than a gambler
of genius, his hand against every man's, an infant prodigy who brought
to the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than
any opposed to it. At St. Helena it was laid down that war is une belle
occupation, and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous
and complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.
Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was
thirty years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the
god he served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labor in his father's
banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety and financial weight
lifted it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust
founded on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite
plainly a different man. How the change came about none could with
authority say, but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his
father, whom alone he had respected and perhaps loved.
He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of
Manderson called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in
the vast wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of
capital, drew together and centralized industries of continental scope,
financed with unerring judgment the large designs of state or of private
enterprise. Many a time when he "took hold" to smash a strike, or to
federate the ownership of some great field of labor, he sent ruin upon a
multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steel-workers or cattlemen
defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless
than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends.
Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier
and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to
protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the
country. Forcible, cold and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the
national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the

Colossus.
But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little
circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability in
the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the
Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if
Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the
spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out,
the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his hat-band.
During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous raids
upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the
offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never
carried out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within
him and go soberly down to his counting-house--humming a stave or
two of "Spanish Ladies," perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would
allow himself the harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action
had gone by, of pointing out to some Rupert of the markets how a coup
worth a million to the depredator might have been made. "Seems to
me," he would say almost wistfully, "the Street is getting to be a mighty
dull place since I quit." By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the
Colossus became known to the business world, which exulted greatly
in the knowledge.
* * * * *
At the news of his death, panic went through the markets like a
hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed like
towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous
inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever
speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide. In
Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had become
pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them had
never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the
Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps