For thirty-six hours the fire blazed on before the exhausted New York and Newark firemen and the four hundred Philadelphian reinforcements determined its final boundaries at the wall of exploded buildings. It had been confined at last to the business district and few important homes were touched. But forty-five crowded acres, the richest forty-five acres on this side of the ocean, had been reduced to rubbish. Seventeen million dollars had gone up in smoke and spark. All of the old Dutch realm that had survived the fires of ’76 and ’78 had been consumed forever.
New York had no longer any visible antiquity. Henceforth it was mere American. A fortnight later, when Christmas had passed, the black Brocken was still a sight that drew visitors from the countrysides about. People from Long Island forgot to hunt deer in the wilds there, and came over to stare at the little plumes of smoke that wavered above the jumbled prairie. For weeks there was an all-night sunset above Manhatto’s isle.
After the gigantic debauch of fire came the long days of penalty-paying. The merchants turned to the insurance companies to reimburse their losses. The insurance companies were overwhelmed by the catastrophe. Not one of them could pay ten cents on the dollar. For a time it seemed that all of them must go into one general bankruptcy. But first they called upon their stockholders with disastrous assessments.
Three old-maid cousins of Patty’s were assessed five thousand dollars on account of their stocks, and came to her father’s house weeping to find themselves stripped to poverty. Being respectably bred women, they had no recourse but the charity of relatives. They could not work, of course. But old Jessamine met them with a face of abjection. He was a pauper likewise, and in his own destruction he foresaw a general collapse.
When RoBards, after his three days’ campaign with the Fire Kings, got home at length, he learned that Patty had returned to her father’s house. She left him a note, explaining that her father was almost out of his mind.
Hurrying to Park Place, RoBards found that old Jessamine was indeed maniac with the sudden change in his fortunes. His very prudence had mocked him. He had been a man who combined rigid economy with daring experiment. He had pushed agents into China and chartered ships to bring home his wares. Caution had made him build his warehouse expensively of fireproof materials. He had been extravagant in nothing so much as in the equipment against flames and in the amount of insurance he carried.
Yet fate had made a fool of him. Officials of the city had authorized officers of the navy to set off kegs of powder in his temple and scatter his wealth to the winds.
And the flames had turned aside from the building in front of his! That had been surrendered to the fire, yet it stood now unharmed, mocking the obscene garbage of the Jessamine Company.
And he could collect no fire insurance for his unburned ruins, despite the premiums he had squandered. He was too sick with disgust to attend the mass meeting of citizens called by the mayor, and stirred to courage by James Gore King. His name was left off the Dudley Selden committee of one hundred and twenty-five important men. The city voted a loan of six million dollars to the insurance companies for cash payments, but he received never a cent. He could not even accept a dole from the moneys subscribed by sympathetic Boston, Philadelphia, and other towns.
His very home was no longer his own; creditors who had been proud to honor his notes were now wolves at his door.