“But you misunderstand it,” she answered coldly.
“I don't understand it, I don't misunderstand it,” was my reply. “I accept it.”
She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room—you, who love or at least have loved, can imagine how it made me feel to see Her moving about in those rooms of mine.
While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face. “What if 'they' should include Roebuck!” And just as a man begins to defend himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a light-weight coat over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: “I'm going out for a few minutes—perhaps an hour—if any one should ask.” A moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck's.
When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the first excitement of their new wealth—a house with porches and balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said “rich as Roebuck” where they used to say “rich as Croesus,” he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention.
He took advantage of his having to remove to New York where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, for a rich man, even mean house in East Fifty-Second Street—one of a row, and an almost dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. To his few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors he explained that he was seeing with clearer eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful, that no man had a right to waste the Lord's money.
The general theory about him was that advancing years had developed his natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion is he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of assassination—the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that his dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen a convict stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible that any one could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder every moment or so. Roebuck had the same trick—only his dread, I suspect, was not the officers of the law, even of the divine law, but the many, many victims of his merciless execution of “the Lord's will.”
This state of mind is not uncommon among the very rich men, especially those who have come up from poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth, and have always been used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the mass of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn't rich has the same savage hunger that they themselves had, and is ready to use similar desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are nervous and often become morbid on the subject of assassination as they grow richer and richer.
The door of Roebuck's house was opened for me by a maid—a man-servant would have been a “sinful” luxury, a man-servant might be the hireling of plotters against his life. I may add that she looked the cheap maid-of-all-work, and her manners were of the free and fresh sort that indicates a feeling that as high, or higher, wages, and less to do could be got elsewhere.