“And for which millions you never paid taxes,” added another.
“Taxes? Bah! Let the poor people pay taxes. Why should railroad magnates pay taxes when they have money to fight the law? Absurd!” said a fourth. “Let us go and take ices; the brilliancy of our host's oration makes me thirsty.”
And while all this went on in the brilliantly lighted mansion, Doña Josefa sat at her window in the dark, thinking of what “might have been” if those railroad men had not blighted San Diego's prosperity. Her husband would have been alive, and Mr. Mechlin, also, and her sons would not have been driven to poverty and distress, and perhaps lost their health forever.
“God of Justice, is this right, that so many should be sacrificed because a few men want more millions? Our family is one of the many who have suffered so much. Oh! so much! And all to what end? For what? Ah! the same answer again, because a few heartless men want more millions,” said she, with her face bathed in tears.
Doña Josefa evidently did not believe that because “misery there must always be in the world, no matter who causes it,” that she was called upon to stoically submit to unmerited infliction. In a mild and dignified way, her mind rebelled. She regarded the acts of the men who caused her husband's ruin and death with genuine abhorrence. To her, rectitude and equity had a clear meaning impossible to pervert. No subtle sophistry could blur in her mind the clear line dividing right from wrong. She knew that among men the word business means inhumanity to one another; it means justification of rapacity; it means the freedom of man to crowd and crush his fellow-man; it means the sanction of the Shylockian principle of exacting the pound of flesh. She knew all this, but the illustration, the ocular demonstration, had never been before her until now in that gay house, in that brightly illuminated mansion, and she sadly contrasted her sorrow with their gayety, and continued her soliloquy: “No doubt those people think they have a right to rejoice and feast with the money extorted in crushing so many people—the killing of my darling. Doubtless they say that they earned the money in BUSINESS, and that allegation is all-sufficient; that one word justifies in the pursuit of riches everything mean, dishonest, rapacious, unfair, treacherous, unjust, and fraudulent. After a man makes his money no one cares how he made it, and so those people dance while I mourn for my beloved.”
For hours Doña Josefa sat at that window, weeping sadly, while the others danced gayly.
Afterwards, when she had been for some time in San Francisco, she had yet stronger demonstrations, and her sense of justice and her ideas of moral adjustment of men's actions with principle, received additional shocks, quite as painful as seeing the millionaire's palace illuminated, while the humble houses he had desolated must remain dark.
Doña Josefa frankly spoke to the ladies who had called on her, of the cause of her husband's death. She did so in answer to their inquiries. She, on two or three occasions, mentioned how painful it had been to sit by the window looking at that house of rejoicing, while thinking that if those rich men had had more sense of justice and less greed of money, that her husband could have been spared to her.
“Don't say that, my dear lady, for you will give great offense,” said an old friend, who having heard that Clarence was worth twelve million dollars, had called on her, suddenly remembering that she used to know the Alamares years ago.
“Why should I give offense? It is the truth,” Doña Josefa replied.