The Ball of Fire

by George Randolph Chester; Lillian Chester

At eleven Peabody came in again, to see if Allison were not ready to go to bed; but Allison sent him away as soon as he had fixed the fire. The tray was untouched, and out there in the dim moonlight, which peered now and then through the shifting clouds, the long-armed willow beckoned and beckoned.

Morning came, cold and grey and damp as the night had been. Allison had fallen asleep towards the dawn, sitting at his desk with his heavy head on his arms, and not even the clatter of the building of the fire roused him. At seven when Peabody came, Allison raised up with a start at the opening of the door, but before he glanced at Peabody, he looked out of the window at the willow.

“Good morning,” said Peabody with a cheerfulness which sounded oddly in that dim, bare room. “I brought you the paper, and some fresh eggs. There was a little touch of frost this morning, but it went away about time for sun-up. How will you have your eggs? Fried, I suppose, after the steak. Seems like you don’t have much appetite,” and he scrutinised the untouched tray with mingled regret and resentment. Since Allison paid no attention to him, he decided on eggs fried after the steak, and started for the door.

Allison had picked up the paper mechanically. It had lain with the top part downwards, but his own picture was in the centre. He turned the paper over, so that he could see the headlines.

“Peabody!” No longer the dead tones of a man in a mental stupor, a man who can not think, but in the sharp tones of a man who can feel.

“Yes-sir.” Sharp and crisp, like the snap of a whip. Allison had scared it out of him.

“Don’t come in again until I call you.”

“Yes-sir.” Grieved this time. Darn it, wasn’t he doing his best for the man!

So it had come; the time when his will was not God! A God should be omnipotent, impregnable, unassailable, absolute. He was surprised at the calmness with which he took this blow. It was the very bigness of the hurt which left it so little painful. A man with his leg shot off suffers not one-tenth so much as a man who tears his fingernail to the quick. Moreover, there was that other big horror which had left him stupefied and numb. He had not known that in his ruthlessness there was any place for remorse, or for terror of himself at anything he might choose to do. But there was. He entered into no ravings now, no writhings, no outcries. He realised calmly and clearly all he had done, and all which had happened to him in retribution. He saw the downfall of his stupendous scheme of worldwide conquest. He saw his fortune, to the last penny, swept away, for he had invested all that he could raise on his securities and his business and his prospects, in the preliminary expenses of the International Transportation Company, bearing this portion of the financial burden himself, as part of the plan by which he meant to obtain ultimate control and command of the tremendous consolidation, and become the king among kings, with the whole world in his imperious grasp, a sway larger than that of any potentate who had ever sat upon a throne, larger than the sway of all the monarchs of earth put together, as large terrestrially as the sway of God himself! All these he saw crumbled away, fallen down around him, a wreck so complete that no shred or splinter of it was worth the picking up; saw himself disgraced and discredited, hated and ridiculed throughout the length and breadth and circumference of the very earth he had meant to rule; saw himself discarded by the strong men whom he had inveigled into this futile scheme and saw himself forced into commercial death as wolves rend and devour a crippled member of their pack; last, he saw himself loathed in the one pure breast he had sought to make his own; and that was the deepest hurt of all; for now, in the bright blaze of his own conflagration, he saw that, beneath his grossness, he had loved her, after all, loved her with a love which, if he had shorn it of his dross, might perhaps have won her.

Through all that day he sat at the desk, and when the night-time came again, he walked out of the house, and across the field, and over the tiny foot-bridge, under the willow tree with the still beckoning arms; and the world, his world, the world he had meant to make his own, never saw him again.