"Good morning," said Anthony. He pushed open the door, passed through the wareroom, and so out upon the waterfront, among the trundling drays, and the wilderness of spars and rigging.
II
Anthony, with tight-set lips and brow gathered in a frown, turned north along the wharves. But at Girard's warehouse the way was quite narrow, because of the lengthening of the docks to accommodate the French merchant's great ships; and just now this was a sort of vortex of travel filled with sweating horses and bawling men. So, rather than risk his bones by venturing by, Anthony faced about and walked toward High Street.
Here the fish-market, familiar to the eyes of his boyhood, was roaring with trade; the trays gleamed with the catch fresh from the bay; bare-armed women cried their wares, shrilly; men in aprons and with bloody hands, scaled, and gutted, and beheaded at slate-topped tables; the fishing-sloops were still tied up at the wharf, their decks being deluged with water and lustily scrubbed by their crews.
Anthony paused. In the block below stood the warehouse of Rufus Stevens' Sons, huge, square, and with many windows. He had had no thought of going there just yet; but now a sudden impulse took him, and he walked toward it. There was no rutted road here, with its scum of foul, black mud; stones were set in, smoothly and solidly. The row of brick arches opening into the warehouse were high enough to admit a laden dray; Anthony stood in the mouth of one, and looked in. The place was like a dim, vast cavern, packed with riches and filled with aromatic smells; porters, draymen, and clerks moved about in the half-light, like gnomes; never before had Anthony been so impressed with the complete meaning of order, routine, spaciousness, wealth.
The wharves of the firm were heaped with cargo; three square-riggers were tied there; windlasses turned; seamen chanted as they threw their weight against the bars, and swung the merchandise up from the holds. Anthony looked from the ships with their abundance and ordered labor to the warehouse and its repletion, and the words of Magruder came back to his mind:
"Great as is his house, it will be that weak," Magruder had said. "Rich as it is, it will be that poor. Splendid as are its adventures on the sea, they will be that defenseless."
For all he'd kept a set face while the words were being spoken, the young man had felt the cold drench of them; but now, with Rufus Stevens' Sons before him, he jeered at the saying. After all, the man's brain must be touched in some way, for one glance was enough to show the fatness of this house, the solidity, the reality of everything it had to do with. It would take much more than a thing which never showed itself to bring downfall here.
"Misers," said Anthony, "have mental antennæ that warn them of peril to their hoards; but, like most morbid things, they probably are not to be depended upon."