The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Following my sight of that gallows mark, I sat for a long time collecting myself. It was a dreadful thing to think upon; the more, since it seemed to me that Blossom suffered in my stead. It was as if that halter, which I defeated, had taken my child for a revenge.

“What can we do?” said I, at last.

I spoke more from an instinct of conversation, and because I would have the company of Anne's sympathy, than with the thought of being answered to any purpose. I was set aback, therefore, by her reply.

“Let Blossom take the veil,” said Anne. “A convent, and the good work of it, would give her peace.”

At that, I started resentfully. To one of my activity, I, who needed the world about me every moment—struggling, contending, succeeding—there could have come no word more hateful. The cell of a nun! It was as though Anne advised a refuge in the grave. I said as much, and with no special choice of phrases.

“Because Heaven in its injustice,” I cried, “has destroyed half her life, she is to make it a meek gift of the balance? Never, while I live! Blossom shall stay by me; I will make her happy in the teeth of Heaven!” Thus did I hurl my impious challenge. What was to be the return, and the tempest it drew upon poor Blossom, I shall unfold before I am done. I have a worm of conscience whose slow mouth gnaws my nature, and you may name it superstition if you choose. And by that I know, when now I sit here, lonesome save for my gold, and with no converse better than the yellow mocking leer of it, that it was this, my blasphemy, which wrought in Heaven's retort the whole of that misery which descended to dog my girl and drag her down. How else shall I explain that double darkness which swallowed up her innocence? It was the bolt of punishment, which those skies I had outraged, aimed at me.

Back to my labors of politics I went, with a fiercer heat than ever. My life, begun in politics, must end in politics. Still, there was a mighty change. I was not to look upon that strangling mark and escape the scar of it. I settled to a savage melancholy; I saw no pleasant moment. Constantly I ran before the hound-pack of my own thoughts, a fugitive, flying from myself.

Also, there came the signs visible, and my hair was to turn and lose its color, until within a year it went as white as milk. Men, in the idleness of their curiosity, would notice this, and ask the cause. They were not to know; nor did Blossom ever learn how, led by Anne, I had crept upon her secret. It was a sorrow without a door, that sorrow of the hangman's mark; and because we may not remedy it, we will leave it, never again to be referred to until it raps for notice of its own black will.

The death of the Widow Van Flange did not remove from before me the question of young Van Flange and his degenerate destinies. The Reverend Bronson took up the business where it fell from the nerveless fingers of his mother on that day she died.

“Not that I believe he can be saved,” observed the Reverend Bronson; “for if I am to judge, the boy is already lost beyond recall. But there is such goods as a pious vengeance—an anger of righteousness!—and I find it in my heart to destroy with the law, those rogues who against the law destroy others. That Barclay Street nest of adders must be burned out; and I come to you for the fire.”