“Now really, if you won’t ever say I told you—if this can be a little confidence just between ourselves as old friends—I’ll tell you something. The Colonel was never a real colonel at all. But when General Lee started for Chicago by way of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, Pittsburg was terribly frightened, so the old folks say—I wasn’t here, I assure you!—and Colonel Craighill bossed the men who dug entrenchments around the city to keep the Confederates out. He did it well. When your father and I were kids together—doesn’t it seem absurd that you and I can’t be contemporaries, instead?—oh, my, please forget that I began that sentence; it leads clear back to the time when the Indians camped where the Craighill building stands.
“Well, as I was saying, the Colonel was only a sort of home-guard trench-digger and that sort of thing. He helped the women manage fairs and did it very prettily, but ever since the War the Colonel’s stock as a red-handed slayer of his country’s foes has been rising. He ranks with Wellington and Grant, with a little dash of Sheridan thrown in.”
“I sit behind Colonel Craighill in church and it doesn’t seem possible that he would deceive anyone,” remarked the girl, half afraid to yield to her delight in these profane utterances.
“Ah! but he deceives himself; he really believes that he held up the pillars of the Union cause and who are we to question him? And he’s an ardent if cautious reformer; he’d rather cut the ten commandments to a scant six than mutilate the present tariff, which alone is holy to us Pennsylvanians. Do you know, this salad is really edible; I must congratulate Mrs. Blair on her cook. Of course we’re to see you everywhere now. Please don’t be running off all the time; it’s demoralizing. If we good people don’t stay at home, what, may I ask, will become of Pittsburg? We produce everything in Pennsylvania, as you may have noticed—everything but local pride!”
CHAPTER XI
PADDOCK DELIVERS AN INVITATION
IT WAS remarked by the clerical staff in the Craighill offices that in the weeks following Walsh’s removal to the jobbing house, Wayne was unusually attentive to his office duties. Clerks in the habit of leaving reports on his desk found themselves questioned in regard to them before the young man gave his visé, which had been scrawled carelessly heretofore upon anything thrust before him. It should not too lightly be assumed that Wayne had experienced any sudden conversion or that his unwonted diligence was due to the prickings of conscience; but it had occurred to him, at the passing of Walsh, that he really knew little of his father’s affairs.
Roger Craighill’s reputation for business ability was solidly established. Until it became the fashion for trust companies to perform such services, he had often been chosen to administer estates; but in keeping with his wish to give more time to public service he had gradually freed himself of such duties. His marriage, changing necessarily the ultimate distribution of his estate, had piqued Wayne’s curiosity as to his father’s wealth. His long-gathering resentment against his father needed facts with which to fortify and strengthen itself. He was skeptical as to all of his father’s virtues and the marriage had demolished his confidence in his father’s conservatism and caution. He now began to test the outward gilt of the resplendent statue of Roger Craighill already imaginably set up by admiring fellow-citizens in the market place. He had only the vaguest idea of the nature of contracts; but he examined a great number of these documents, affecting the ownership and control of properties whose titles were only names to him. He even began summarizing and tabulating these, the better to study them. His father, as of old, referred to him, day by day, matters whose triviality now struck him with greater force than before in view of his growing grasp of affairs.
Wayne had really believed, like everyone else, that his father was a man whose fortune entitled him to be classed with comfortable millionaires—not, indeed, among the Pittsburg collossi, but among the eminently solid and unspectacular rich. As he pondered his computations and scanned the precis derived from them he reached the startling conclusion that his father’s fortune was in reality a huge and unsupported shell. He had begun studying his father’s affairs in the hope of finding some weapon which, at the fitting moment, he might use to humiliate this proud and self-sufficient parent, who had been so intolerant of his sins and weaknesses. Any trifling error or some badly judged investment would have served; but for the fact that his curiosity had been awakened in the beginning as to the amount of his father’s possessions he would have abandoned his researches long before.
It was now perfectly clear that Roger Craighill had ceased to be a factor in the coal and iron industries; that he had been gradually relinquishing his holdings in the substantial enterprises with which he had earlier been identified and that he had re-invested his money in securities of little or no standing in the market. These reflected, Wayne realized, his father’s large, imaginative way of viewing “world questions”—as Colonel Craighill called them. For example, his faith in American colonial development was represented in large holdings in Philippine and Porto Rican ventures that struck Wayne as being properly a pendant to an address his father had delivered Somewhere before Something on “America’s Duty to Her Colonies.”
Wayne had, during the summer of nineteen hundred and seven, given little heed to the whispered rumours of approaching panic. The Great Prosperity had become an old story, and pessimists had predicted its termination for several years without shaking faith in it. On Saturday, the twenty-sixth of October, business closed confidently; before Monday morning a mysterious stifling fog had stolen over the country. It did not seem possible that any human agency could have so thoroughly diffused the word—whatever it was—that paralyzed the financial energy of the remotest village, for it was paralysis, not panic. The newspapers ignored the situation and suppressed the truth; a few men around mahogany director’s tables alone dealt in facts; the rest of the country groped among rumours. Money went into hiding; banks drew the curtains over paying-tellers’ windows and calmly declared that there was no cause for alarm. Finance whistled in a graveyard and everyone pretended that nothing was the matter. Colonel Craighill, astute student of affairs, fed the journals with optimistic statements affirming the perfect security of the national glory as proved by credible statistics. Everybody was rich, yet nobody had any money; credits were never sounder, but nobody could borrow a cent. The Great Prosperity had been followed by the Great Scare and yet there was no panic in the strict sense of the term. Colonel Craighill was encouraged by his business friends to talk in the newspapers; no one else was so plausible, no one else could so deftly enwreathe the smiling brow of Mammon. His pronouncements soothed the fretful and put to shame those dull persons who had been disposed to question the edicts of the Mahogany Tables. If Colonel Craighill said that Finance is a science not intended to be understanded of the people, it must be so, and mere ignorant mortals did well not to bother their poor heads about it.