“I don't think you can see Mr. Roebuck,” she said.
“Take my card to him,” I ordered, “and I'll wait in the parlor.”
“Parlor's in use,” she retorted with a sarcastic grin, which I was soon to understand.
So I stood by the old-fashioned coat and hat rack while she went in at the hall door of the back parlor. Soon Roebuck himself came out, his glasses on his nose, a family Bible under his arm. “Glad to see you, Matthew,” said he with saintly kindliness, giving me a friendly hand. “We are just about to offer up our evening prayer. Come right in.”
I followed him into the back parlor. Both it and the front parlor were lighted; in a sort of circle extending into both rooms were all the Roebucks and the four servants. “This is my friend, Matthew Blacklock,” said he, and the Roebucks in the circle gravely bowed. He drew up a chair for me, and we seated ourselves. Amid a solemn hush, he read a chapter from the big Bible spread out upon his lean lap. My glance wandered from face to face of the Roebucks, as plainly dressed as were their servants. I was able to look freely, mine being the only eyes not bent upon the floor.
It was the first time in my life that I had witnessed family prayers. When I was a boy at home, my mother had taken literally the Scriptural injunction to pray in secret—in a closet, I think the passage of the Bible said. Many times each day she used to retire to a closet under the stairway and spend from one to twenty minutes shut in there. But we had no family prayers. I was therefore deeply interested in what was going on in those countrified parlors of one of the richest and most powerful men in the world—and this right in the heart of that district of New York where palaces stand in rows and in blocks, and where such few churches as there are resemble social clubs for snubbing climbers and patronizing the poor.
It was astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old lady, looked like Roebuck himself—the same smug piety, the same underfed appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than a starved body. One difference—where his face had the look of power that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless strength relentlessly used, the expressions of the others were simply small and mean and frost-nipped. And that is the rule—the second generation of a plutocrat inherits, with his money, the meanness that enabled him to hoard it, but not the scope that enabled him to make it.
So absorbed was I in the study of the influence of his terrible master-character upon those closest to it, that I started when he said: “Let us pray.” I followed the example of the others, and knelt. The audible prayer was offered up by his oldest daughter, Mrs. Wheeler, a widow. Roebuck punctuated each paragraph in her series of petitions with a loudly-whispered amen. When she prayed for “the stranger whom Thou has led seemingly by chance into our little circle,” he whispered the amen more fervently and repeated it. And well he might, the old robber and assassin by proxy! The prayer ended and, us on our feet, the servants withdrew; then, awkwardly, all the family except Roebuck. That is, they closed the doors between the two rooms and left him and me alone in the front parlor.
“I shall not detain you long, Mr. Roebuck,” said I. “A report reached me this evening that sent me to you at once.”
“If possible, Matthew,” said he, and he could not hide his uneasiness, “put off business until to-morrow. My mind—yours, too, I trust—is not in the frame for that kind of thoughts now.”