CHAPTER XXVIII.
AT THE DEAD COAL KING'S MANSION.
Along the Esplanade the hurrying thousands begin to move in the direction of the Terrace; miners who have been in the shafts for eighteen hours; yard-hands from the railroads; iron founders, naked save for their breeches, have quit their furnaces; townspeople whom fear impels to see what the night will bring forth; this heterogeneous horde presses on to the scene of the murder.
It is a night that lends an appropriate setting to so strange and uncanny an event. The sky is leaden except for a streak on the western horizon where the fading, sinister light of the sun gives token of a stormy morrow. Through the walled banks, the river rushes turbulently, swollen by recent rains; its waters tinged by the dyes and other refuse from the city above.
On the further bank, the groups of breakers and foundries loom up as vague shadow creations. From fifty chimney mouths thick black smoke curls unceasingly; now soaring to a considerable height, now driven down to earth by fitful gusts of wind. In their sinuous course these smoke-clouds resemble the genii of fable, who spread over the earth carrying death and devastation.
In sharp contrast to this picture is the Avenue of Opulence on the side of the river which boasts of the Esplanade. Here is a line of fifty palatial residences; the homes of the owners of a hundred mines and factories and the task-masters of fifty thousand men, their wives and their progeny.
Clustered about the breakers and furnaces are the squalid huts and ramshackle cottages of the operatives; there too, a little removed from the river are the caves in which the Huns and Scandinavians dwell, even as their prehistoric ancestors dwelt before the light of civilization dawned.
Nero thrumming his violin from the vantage point of the crowning hill of Rome, had no such portraiture of the degradation of humanity as that which the Magnates nightly view from their balconies. A stranger would be struck with surprise that the thousands should be huddled in dens that wild animals would find uninhabitable, while the sons of greed and avarice flaunt their trappings of mammon from the hilltops.
This is the arena in which is to be enacted a scene of this great drama.
The actors, the audience are gathering.
Mingled sounds of strange nature are on the air. The murmur always present where multitudes are assembled runs as an undertone; the sharp notes of frightened women and terrified children rise as the tones of an oratorio; steady, full, vibrant are the sounds of the men's voices.