Because a weak sawney of a long-limbed emigrant had not owned brains enough to see what was under the soil which had been given him, could he blame a keener and stronger man, already on the soil, for having had the wit to know what ore was hidden under the rank grass and the juniper scrub? Clearly, no. Fortune favored those who helped themselves.
“A blackgud in all ways”!
Did a wretched railway hand dare to write this to a colossus of finance whose brain was shrewder and whose pile was bigger than those of any man on the Corporation of London? William Massarene felt as a Burmese Buddha, hung with gold and jewels, may be supposed to feel when a Cook’s tourist pokes at him with the brass ferule of an umbrella.
On a man of breeding the insults of inferiors fall without power to wound; but to a man of low origin and enormous pretension they are the most intolerable of offences. For one brief moment all his greatness seemed to him as ashes in his mouth if these workingmen out in North Dakota did not bow down before his glory. It was delightful to be called “my dear friend” by the proud Premier of England; it was delightful to be complimented on his stables and his dinners by royal princes; it was delightful to be consulted as a financial authority by the Governor of the Bank of England; but all these delights seemed nothing at all if a platelayer and a lamp-cleaner could refuse to acknowledge his godhead. He knew if he drove through Kerosene City next month the whole population of it would turn out in his honor; the governor of the State, the mayor of the town, the sheriff of the county, the members it sent to Congress, its senators, its solicitors, its merchants, its manufacturers, its hotel-keepers, its white men and its black men, would all be in the streets to cheer and welcome him, to feast and flatter him, to hang out the Union Jack and the star-spangled banner side by side in the oily, sooty, reeking air from the ten-storied houses and the towering factories. But in the background there would be two grimy railway hands who would shout “Blackgud!”
This passing weakness was brief; he was not a man of sentiment. The two railway hands might scream what libellous rubbish they liked. Nobody would listen to them. Curses many, loud and deep, had followed him throughout his career; but they were a chorus which attested the success of that career. What he heard now were the cheers of the House of Commons.
His sense of humiliation was momentary; his sense of his fury was lasting. He would have strangled the two men with his own hands if they had been in sight.
Many bones must whiten in the building of a pyramid, and William Massarene had but done what the Pharaohs did. Only their structure was of brick, and his of bullion.
The letter had only moved him to a momentary sense of fear; it passed almost as soon as roused; but his bitter wrath remained, a fire unquenchable.
Temper is always a bad adviser. It advised him badly now. A very small annuity would have quieted Robert Airley, who knew that he had no legal claim, and had not long to live, for he had a tumor in his stomach. But when the manager of the Main Trunk Line gave the reply of its owner to the platelayer, he, who was a gentle and patient man, worn-out with hard work and sorrow, felt a devil enter into him and seize his very soul.
He said nothing, but the manager thought, “The boss might have given the poor fellow a few dollars a week. After all, the Penamunic ore was found on his claim, and he’s been on this line ever since the metals were laid.”