It had been Vreeland’s secret self-appointed task to follow out all the details of the Hathorn & Wolfe failure, whose echoes still reverberated in the curses of the defrauded customers.
Wolfe was left alone to face the music, and the whole financial world knew that the great sums paid in to the firm’s coffers by customers in the sudden Sugar flurry had been all diverted by the fugitive Hathorn to margin those enormous private deals of his own plunging, which, even criminal in their character, had been made dead against the rising market. The “double or quits” had been “quits” with him. His disgraced name was off the club lists, the VanSittart town mansion was closed, the deserted Oakwood place was garrisoned for a long foreign stay of the unhappy heiress, and “lightly they spoke of the spirit” which had fled with Hathorn’s good luck.
There was little left for the plundered creditors to divide but “experience.”
Wolfe, the luckless partner, was sullen and crushed, and a new champion, Mr. James Potter, alertly moved around town gathering up loose ends in the interest of the absent wife.
Wyman, beyond a cold comment that Hathorn’s “pace had been a killing one,” never referred to the utter crash of their natural enemies, and the social world was beginning to forget Mr. Frederick Hathorn, having relegated him to the “Limbo” of failure, and marked him off as a “has been.” The mad rush of New York life soon tramples the forgotten graves to a dead level.
In the avoidance of any question as to his regular morning absence, Vreeland knew that Wyman had been evidently posted by Judge Endicott as to Vreeland’s sidereal duties under the orders of Mrs. Willoughby.
It was wormwood to the man who still aspired to read every hidden secret of Elaine Willoughby’s life to know that Wyman and Endicott now frequently spent the long evenings with the Queen of the Street at the “Circassia,” and that vouchers, schedules and papers covered the great table where only the three sat, well out of reach of Justine’s eaves-dropping.
“Cool old file is Endicott,” growled Vreeland. “Cased in steel armor of proof. Nor passion, pride, nor weakness ever leaves him open to the enemy a moment.”
And then his habitual sneer returned. “Bah! He is too old for all of man’s follies. It is only the young and ardent who burn with fond hopes and bravely take the chances of life in the open.
“He has nothing left to gain, why should he disquiet himself? Man delights him not, no—nor woman either.”