“Glad to come,” said I, wishing to be rid of him, now that my point was gained. “We'll let the account stand open for the present—I rather think your stocks are going up. Give my regards to—the ladies, please, especially to Miss Anita.”
He winced, but thanked me graciously; gave me his soft, fine hand to shake and departed, as eager to be off as I to be rid of him. “Sunday next—at eight,” were his last words. “Don't fail us”—that in the tone of a king addressing some obscure person whom he had commanded to court. It may be that old Ellersly was wholly unconscious of his superciliousness, fancied he was treating me as if I were almost an equal; but I suspect he rather accentuated his natural manner, with the idea of impressing upon me that in our deal he was giving at least as much as I.
I recall that I thought about him for several minutes after he was gone—philosophized on the folly of a man's deliberately weaving a net to entangle himself. As if any man was ever caught in any net not of his own weaving and setting; as if I myself were not just then working at the last row of meshes of a net in which I was to ensnare myself.
My petty and inevitable success with that helpless creature added amazingly, ludicrously, to that dangerous elation which, as I can now see, had been growing in me ever since the day Roebuck yielded so readily to my demands as to National Coal. The whole trouble with me was that up to that time I had won all my victories by the plainest kind of straightaway hard work. I was imagining myself victor in contests of wit against wit, when, in fact, no one with any especial equipment of brains had ever opposed me; all the really strong men had been helping me because they found me useful. Too easy success—there is the clue to the wild folly of my performances in those days, a folly that seems utterly inconsistent with the reputation for shrewdness I had, and seemed to have earned.
I can find a certain small amount of legitimate excuse for my falling under Langdon's spell. He had, and has, fascinations, through personal magnetism, which it is hardly in human nature to resist. But for my self-hypnotism in the case of Roebuck, I find no excuse whatever for myself.
He sent for me and told me what share in National Coal they had decided to give me for my Manasquale mines. “Langdon and Melville,” said he, “think me too liberal; far too liberal, my boy. But I insisted—in your case I felt we could afford to be generous as well as just.” All this with an air that was a combination of the pastor and the parent.
I can't even offer the excuse of not having seen that he was a hypocrite. I felt his hypocrisy at once, and my first impulse was to jump for my breastworks. But instantly my vanity got behind me, held me in the open, pushed me on toward him. If you will notice, almost all “confidence” games rely for success chiefly upon enlisting a man's vanity to play the traitor to his judgment. So, instead of reading his liberality as plain proof of intended treachery, I read it as plain proof of my own greatness, and of the fear it had inspired in old Roebuck. Laugh with me if you like; but, before you laugh at me, think carefully—those of you who have ever put yourselves to the test on the field of action—think carefully whether you have never found that your head decoration which you thought a crown was in reality the peaked and belled cap of the fool.
But my vanity was not done with me. Led on by it, I proceeded to have one of those ridiculous “generous impulses”—I persuaded myself that there must be some decency in this liberality, in addition to the prudence which I flattered myself was the chief cause. “I have been unjust to Roebuck,” I thought. “I have been misjudging his character.” And incredible though it seems, I said to him with a good deal of genuine emotion: “I don't know how to thank you, Mr. Roebuck. And, instead of trying, I want to apologize to you. I have thought many hard things against you; have spoken some of them. I had better have been attending to my own conscience, instead of criticizing yours.”
I had often thought his face about the most repulsive, hypocrisy-glozed concourse of evil passions that ever fronted a fiend in the flesh. It had seemed to me the fitting result of a long career which, according to common report, was stained with murder, with rapacity and heartless cruelty, with the most brutal secret sensuality, and which had left in its wake the ruins of lives and hearts and fortunes innumerable. I had looked on the vast wealth he had heaped mountain high as a monument to devil-daring—other men had, no doubt, dreamed of doing the ferocious things he had done, but their weak, human hearts failed when it came to executing such horrible acts, and they had to be content with smaller fortunes, with the comparatively small fruits of their comparatively small infamies. He had dared all, had won; the most powerful bowed with quaking knees before him, and trembled lest they might, by a blundering look or word, excite his anger and cause him to snatch their possessions from them.
Thus I had regarded him, accepting the universal judgment, believing the thousand and one stories. But as his eyes, softened by his hugely generous act, beamed upon me now, I was amazed that I had so misjudged him. In that face which I had thought frightful there was, to my hypnotized gaze, the look of strong, sincere—yes, holy—beauty and power—the look of an archangel.