"Tell me more of these missing faces, and of the 'dead who die,'" I answered. "Who are they, for the most part?—murderers and criminals of the most bestial nature?"
"Not always," he replied excitedly, "not always; and that is the reason why I am so fearful about my own future. Most of them are those who in their lifetime were regarded as belonging to the respectable classes, and who, so far from having come at any time within reach of the law, were looked upon as good citizens and estimable members of society. Shall I tell you what killed the immortal soul in them, and in me, and turned us into mere animated clay, fit only to die out like the beasts which perish? It was money—money, the love of which is often more deadening to the spiritual nature than actual vice or sin.
"I set out in life with one steadfast purpose before me—the purpose of devoting myself body and soul to business and to the making of money. It was not that I was indifferent to the attractions of a profession, and still less that I was wanting in appreciation of higher things, for I liked books and pictures and music. Sometimes, too, when I was listening to my sister's singing of Herrick's lines, 'To Anthea,' or to Ben Jonson's 'Drink to me only with thine eyes,' I felt bitterly the littleness of my aims, and seemed to know, as I never knew at any other time, what it was to love a woman with that high, whole-hearted, and deathless devotion which brings redemption and ennoblement to the soul of the man to whom it comes. But I said to myself: 'Patience; first of all let me grow rich; let me make all the money I can get together, and then, when I have sufficient for all my requirements, I will forsake the money-making, and turn my thoughts to love and poetry and pictures; and through them, perhaps on to religion, for I knew even then that though love and poetry are not religion, that they yet serve, before a higher faith has been called into being, to keep the life of the soul alive, and to open up the way for holier things.
"And so I became what is called a good business man. I made business the motive of my life. I thought of nothing else, and read nothing but the papers, and these I only scanned for the purpose of observing the influence of political or other passing events upon the markets. At last I became rich. And with what result? That when I no longer needed business, I found I could live no longer without it; that it had become my life, and I its slave, and that I could awaken no lasting interest in anything which did not pertain to the making of money. It is true that I had at that time a wife and children (the former of whom I had married chiefly for her fortune), and was not without a certain half-selfish love for them as part and parcel of myself; that I possessed a handsome house and gardens in which I took pride as being of my own acquirement; and that I went into society with enjoyment; and found a certain pompous pleasure in extending my patronage to Sunday-schools, bazaars and Young Men's Christian Associations. But where my treasure was, there my heart was also, and at heart I was a business man, and nothing more. I did not know myself then as I do now, and so far from being in any way dissatisfied, I had no more suspicion that I was other than one of the most enviable of men, than has the grinning savage with his handful of beads. But I know now the thing I am, and what I have missed, and I tell you that the most sorely swindled simpleton in existence is the man whose business capability is so keen, that though he has never been bested in a bargain, he has bartered away his own happiness for a bauble, and (so skilful a schemer to defraud us is old Satan) has become bankrupt of all that makes life worth the living, in order that he may boast a heavy balance at his banker's!
"Yes, I was a good business man—a smart and shrewd business man, as business men go—and I know much of such men and of their transactions; and I tell you that, since the days of Judas Iscariot, the money-lover and grubber who sold his God for thirty pieces of silver, as thousands are selling their infinite souls this day, there have been no more soulless and selfish creatures upon God's earth, than the men who have made what should be a means to an end an end in itself, and who live for business, instead of by it.
"They go to church, many of them, on Sundays, and subscribe liberally to coal clubs and soup kitchens, thinking, poor fools! to offer such acts as those as a set-off to God for the sordid self-seeking which has been the secret of their success in their commercial calling; never suspecting that in their respectable selfishness and sordidness of spirit, they are lower in the scale of being and farther from the kingdom of heaven than is the lurking prostitute shivering at the street corner, or the drunken sot reeling home after a night's debauch.
"That they must die out at their deaths, as do the beasts, I am convinced, for what can God find for such men to do in heaven?—men to whom the earth, its prototype, is nothing but a gigantic shop, and to whom Music, Art, and Song are but as dead letters and foolishness; men who are susceptible to no emotion save the greed for gain; and who have let the infinite soul within them pine away and perish for the want of the wherewithal to keep that soul alive.
"And I, I am one of them, and am of the dead who die! I have bartered away love and life and happiness for such Dead Sea fruit as this; I who once was young, and not altogether, as I now am, a soulless creature of clay! For I can remember the time when flowers, pictures, beautiful faces and music set stirring always some strong emotion within me, in which it seemed that I saw hidden away in a crystal cell in the depths of my own strange heart, the shining form of a white-robed Soul-maiden, who cried out to me, 'Ah! cannot you make your life as pure and beautiful as the flowers and the music, that so you may set me free?'
"But I chose the ignoble part, and gave myself up body and soul to the greed for gain. And often in the hour when, tempted by an evil thought, I turned to do some shameful or selfish action, I seemed to see the white arms of the Soul-maiden uplifted in piteous entreaty to heaven, until at last the time came when her voice was silent, and when I knew that I had thrust her down and down into a darkness whence she would never again come forth!
"And now nor picture, nor poem, nor music moves me more, for the soul of me is dead!—is dead! and I have become like unto the beasts that perish, and know not that at any moment I may flicker out like a spent taper, and become as the dead who die!"