Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel
The awful groaning stopped and an ashen pallor spread over Bob Brownley’s
face. Before I could catch him he rolled backward upon the floor as dead.
Bob Brownley, too, had gone beyond his limit. I bent over him and lifted
his head, while the sweet woman-child knelt and covered his face with
kisses, calling in a voice like that of a tiny girl speaking to her doll,
“Bob, my Bob, wake up, wake up; your Beulah wants you.” As I placed my
hand upon Bob’s heart and felt its beats grow stronger, as I listened to
Beulah Sands’s childish voice, joyously confident, as it called upon the
one thing left of her old world, some of my terror passed. In its place
came a great mellowing sense of God’s marvellous wisdom. I thought
gratefully of my mother’s always ready argument that the law of all laws,
of God and nature, is that of compensation. I had allowed Bob’s head to
sink until it rested in Beulah’s lap, and from his calm and steady
breathing I could see that he had safely passed a crisis, that at least he
was not in the clutches of death, as I had at first feared.
Bob slept. Beulah Sands ceased her calling and with a smile raised her
fingers to her lips and softly said, “Hush, my Bob’s asleep.” Together we
held vigil over our sleeping lover and friend, she with the happiness of a
child who had no fear of the awakening, I with a silent terror of what
should come next. I had seen one mind wafted to the unknown that day. Was
it to have a companion to cheer and solace it on its far journey to the
great beyond? How long we waited Bob’s awakening I could not tell. The
clock’s hands said an hour; it seemed to me an age. At last his
magnificent physique, his unpoisoned blood and splendid brain pulled him
through to his new world of mind and heart torture. His eyelids lifted. He
looked at me, then at Beulah Sands, with eyes so sad, so awful in their
perplexed mournfulness, that I almost wished they had never opened, or had
opened to let me see the childlike look that now shone from the girl’s.
His gaze finally rested on her and his lips murmured “Beulah.”
“There, Bob, I thought you would know it was time to wake up.” She bent
over and kissed him on the eyes again and again with the loving ardour a
child bestows upon its pets.
He slowly rose to his feet. I could see from his eyes and the shudder that
went over him as he caught sight of the paper on the desk that he was
himself; that memory of the happenings of the day had not fled in his
sleep. He rose to his full height, his head went up, and his shoulders
back, but only from habit and for an instant. Then he folded Beulah Sands
to his breast and dropped his head upon her shoulder. He sobbed like a
father with the corpse of his child.
“Why, Bob, my Bob, is this the way you treat your Beulah when she’s let
you sleep so your beautiful eyes would be pretty for the wedding? Is this
the way to act before this kind man who has come to take us to the church?
Naughty, naughty Bob.”
I looked at her, at Bob, in horror. I was beginning to realise the
absolute deadness of this woman. From the first look I had known that her
mind had fled, but knowledge is not always realisation. She did not even
know who I was. Her mind was dead to all but the man she loved, the man
who through all those long days of her suffering she had silently
worshiped. To all but him she was new-born.
At the sound of “wedding,” “church,” Bob’s head slowly rose from her
shoulder. I saw his decision the instant I caught his eye; I realised the
uselessness of opposing it, and, sick at heart and horrified, I listened
as he said in a voice now calm and soothing as that of a father to his
child, “Yes, Beulah, my darling, I have slept too long. Bob has been
naughty, but we will make up for lost time. Get your hat and cloak and
we’ll hurry to the church or we will be late.”
With a laugh of joy she followed him to the closet where hung the little
gray turban and the pretty gray jacket. He took them from their peg and
gave them to her.
“Not a word, Jim,” he bade me. “In the name of God and all our friendship,
not a word. Beulah Sands will be my wife as soon as I can find a minister
to marry us. It is best, best. It is right. It is as God would have it, or
I am not capable of knowing right from wrong. Anyway, it is what will be.
She has no father, no mother, no sister, no one to protect and shield her.
The ‘System’ has robbed her of all in life, even of herself, of
everything, Jim, but me. I must try to win her back for herself, or to
make her new world a happy one—a happy one for her.”
Chapter VII.
An old gambler, whose life had been spent listening to the rattle of the
drop-in-bound-out little roulette ball, was told by a fellow victim, as
his last dollar went to the relentless tiger’s maw, that the keeper’s foot
was upon an electric button which enabled him to make the ball drop where
his stake was not. He simply said, “Thank God. I thought that prince of
cheats, Fate, who all through life has had his foot on the button of my
game, was the one who did the trick.” Long suffering had driven the old
gambler to the loser’s bible, Philosophy! Cheated by man’s device, he knew
he had some chance of getting even; but Fate he could not combat.
Bob Brownley had thought himself in hard luck when his eyes opened to the
fact that he had been robbed by means of dice loaded by man, but when Fate
pressed the button he saw that his man-made hell was but a feeble
imitation, and—was satisfied, as whoever knows the game of life is
satisfied, because—he must be. Bob’s strong head bowed, his iron will
bent, and meekly his soul murmured, “Thy will be done.”
That night he married Beulah Sands. The minister who united the grown-up
man and the woman who was as a new-born babe saw nothing extraordinary in
the match. He murmured to me, who acted as best man to the groom, maid of
honour to the bride, and father and mother to both, “We see strange
sights, we ministers of the great city, Mr. Randolph. The sweet little
lady appears to be a trifle scared.” My explanation that she and Mr.
Brownley were the only survivors of the awful tragedies of the day was
sufficient. He was satisfied when he got no other response to his
question, “Do you take this man to be your wedded husband?” than a sweet
childish smile as she snuggled closer to Bob.
Bob and his bride went South to his mother and sisters the next day. He
left to me the settlement of his trades. He instructed me to set aside
$3,000,000 profits for Beulah Sands-Brownley, and insisted that I pay from
the balance the notes he had given me a few weeks before. There remained
something over $5,000,000 for himself.
The leading Wall Street paper, in its preachment on the panic, wound up
with:
“Wall Street has lived through many black Fridays. Some of them have
been thirteenth-of-the-month Fridays, but no Friday yet marked from the
calendar, no Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday yet
garnered to the storehouse of the past was ever more jubilantly
welcomed by his Satanic Majesty than yesterday. We pray heaven no
coming day may be ordained to go against yesterday’s record for
tigerish cruelty and awful destruction. It is rumoured that Mr.
Brownley of Randolph & Randolph, either for himself or his clients
cleared twenty-five millions of profit. We believe that this estimate
is low. The losses coming through Robert Brownley’s terrible onslaught
must have run over five hundred millions. Wall Street and the country
will do well to take the moral of yesterday’s market to their heart. It
is this: The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Americans is
a menace to our financial structure. It is the unanimous opinion of
‘the Street’ that Robert Brownley could never have succeeded in
battering down the price of Sugar in the very teeth of the Camemeyer
and Standard Oil support as he did yesterday, without a cash backing of
from fifty to one hundred millions. If a vast aggregation of money
owners deliberately place themselves behind an onslaught such as was so
successfully made yesterday, why can that slaughter not be repeated at
any time, on any stock, and against the support of any backing?”
When I read this and listened to talk along the same lines, I was puzzled.
I could not for the life of me see where Bob Brownley could have got five
to ten millions’ backing for such a raid, much less fifty to a hundred.
Yet I was forced to confess that he must have had some tremendous backing;
else how could he have done what I had seen him do?
Bob left his wife at his mother’s house while he went to Sands Landing to
the funeral. After the old judge and his victims had been laid away and
the relatives had gathered in the library of the great white Sands
mansion, he explained their kinswoman’s condition and told them that she
was his wife. He insisted upon paying all Judge Sands’s debts, over
$500,000 of which was owed to members of the Sands family for whom he had
been trustee. Before he went back to his mother’s, Bob had turned a great
calamity into an occasion for something near rejoicing. Judge Sands and
his family were very dear to the people of the section, but his misfortune
had threatened such wide-spread ruin that the unlooked-for recovery of a
million and a half was a godsend that made for happiness.
Two days after the funeral Bob’s dearest hope fled. He had ordered all
things at the Sands plantation put in their every-day condition. Beulah
Sands’s uncles, aunts, and cousins had arranged to welcome her and to try
by every means in their power to coax back her lost mind. They assured Bob
that, barring the absence of Beulah’s father, mother, and sister, there
would not be a memory-recaller missing. Bob and his wife landed from the
river packet at the foot of the driveway, which led straight from the
landing to the vine-covered, white-pillared portico. Bob’s agony must have
been awful when his wife clapped her hands in childish joy as she
exclaimed, “Oh, Bob, what a pretty place!” She gave no sign that she had
ever seen the great entrance, through which she had come and gone from her
babyhood. Bob took her to the library, to her mother’s room, to her own,
to the nursery where were the dolls and toys of her childhood, but there
came no sign of recognition, nothing but childish pleasure. She looked at
her aunts and uncles and the cousins with whom she had spent her life,
bewildered at finding so many strangers in the otherwise quiet place. As a
last hope, they led in her old black foster-mother, who had nursed her in
babyhood, who was the companion of her childhood and the pet of her
womanhood. There was not a dry eye in the library when she met the old
mammy’s outburst of joy with the puzzled gaze of the child who does not
understand. The grief of the old negress was pitiful as she realised that
she was a stranger to her “honey bird.” The child seemed perplexed at her
grief. It was plain to all that the Sands home meant nothing to the last
of the judge’s family.
Bob brought her back to New York and besought the aid of the medical
experts of America and of the Old World to regain that which had been
recalled by its Maker. The doctors were fascinated with this new phase of
mind blight, for in some particulars Beulah’s case was unlike any known
instances, but none gave hope. All agreed that some wire connecting heart
and brain had burned out when the cruel “System” threw on a voltage beyond
the wire’s capacity to transmit. All agreed that the woman-child wife
would never grow older unless through some mental eruption beyond human
power to produce. Some of the medical men pointed to one possibility, but
that one was too terrible for Bob to entertain.