It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately and institute a monopoly.
There was no alternative he must market his mountain in secret. He sent South for his younger brother and put him in charge of his colored following darkies who had never realized that slavery was abolished. To make sure of this, he read them a proclamation[30] that he had composed, which announced that General Forrest had reorganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated the North in one pitched battle. The negroes believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring it a good thing and held revival services immediately.
Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with one hundred thousand dollars and two trunks filled with rough diamonds of all sizes. He sailed for Russia in a Chinese junk and six months after his departure from Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller, announcing that he had a diamond for the Czar. He remained in St. Petersburg for two weeks, in constant danger of being murdered, living from lodging to lodging, and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or four times during the whole fortnight.
On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer stones, he was allowed to leave for India. Before he left, however, the Court Treasurers had deposited to his credit, in American banks, the sum of fifteen million dollars under four different aliases.[31]
He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a little over two years. He had visited the capitals of twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan. At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the disclosure of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire.[32]
From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman Washington was a long epic in gold. There were side issues, of course he evaded the surveys, he married a Virginia lady, by whom he had a single son, and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate habit of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had several times endangered their safety. But very few other murders stained these happy years of progress and expansion.
Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all but a few million dollars of his outside wealth bought up rare minerals in bulk, which he deposited in the safety vaults of banks all over the world, marked as bric-à-brac.[33] His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed this policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals were converted into the rarest of all elements radium so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box.
When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his son, Braddock, decided that the business had gone far enough. The amount of wealth that he and his father had taken out of the mountain was beyond all exact computation. He kept a note-book in cipher in which he set down the approximate quantity of radium in each of the thousand banks he patronized, and recorded the alias under which it was held. Then he did a very simple thing he sealed up the mine.
He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of it would support all the Washingtons yet to be born in unparalleled luxury for generations. His one care must be the protection of his secret, lest in the possible panic attendant on its discovery he should be reduced with all the property-holders in the world to utter poverty.
This was the family among whom John T. Unger was staying. This was the story he heard in his silver-walled living-room the morning after his arrival.
V
After breakfast, John found his way out the great marble entrance and looked curiously at the scene before him. The whole valley, from the diamond mountain to the steep granite cliff five miles away, still gave off a breath of golden haze which hovered idly above the fine sweep of lawns and lakes and gardens. Here and there clusters of elms made delicate groves of shade, contrasting strangely with the tough masses of pine forest that held the hills in a grip of dark-blue green. Even as John looked he saw three fawns in single file patter out from one clump about a half mile away and disappear with awkward gayety into the black-ribbed half-light of another. John would not have been surprised to see a goat-foot piping his way among the trees or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph[34] -skin and flying yellow hair between the greenest of the green leaves.
In some such cool hope he descended the marble steps, disturbing faintly the sleep of two silky Russian wolfhounds at the bottom, and set off along a walk of white and blue brick that seemed to lead in no particular direction.
He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It is youths felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.
John rounded a soft corner where the massed rose-bushes filled the air with heavy scent, and struck off across a park toward a patch of moss under some trees. He had never lain upon moss, and he wanted to see whether it was really soft enough to justify the use of its name as an adjective. Then he saw a girl coming toward him over the grass. She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.
She was dressed in a white little gown that came just below her knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink bare feet scattered the dew before them as she came. She was younger than John not more than sixteen.
Hello, she cried softly, Im Kismine.
She was much more than that to John already. He advanced toward her, scarcely moving as he drew near lest he should tread on her bare toes.
You havent met me, said her soft voice. Her blue eyes added, Oh, but youve missed a great deal! You met my sister, Jasmine, last night. I was sick with lettuce poisoning, went on her soft voice, and her eyes continued, and when Im sick Im sweet and when Im well.
You have made an enormous impression on me, said Johns eyes, and Im not so slow myself How do you do? said his voice. I hope youre better this morning. You darling, added his eyes tremulously.
John observed that they had been walking along the path. On her suggestion they sat down together upon the moss, the softness of which he failed to determine.
He was critical about women. A single defect a thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye was enough to make him utterly indifferent. And here for the first time in his life he was beside a girl who seemed to him the incarnation of physical perfection.
Are you from the East? asked Kismine with charming interest.
No, answered John simply. Im from Hades.
He was critical about women. A single defect a thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye was enough to make him utterly indifferent. And here for the first time in his life he was beside a girl who seemed to him the incarnation of physical perfection.
Are you from the East? asked Kismine with charming interest.
No, answered John simply. Im from Hades.
Either she had never heard of Hades, or she could think of no pleasant comment to make upon it, for she did not discuss it further.
Im going East to school this fall, she said. Dyou think Ill like it? Im going to New York to Miss Bulges. Its very strict, but you see over the weekends Im going to live at home with the family in our New York house, because father heard that the girls had to go walking two by two.
Your father wants you to be proud, observed John.
We are, she answered, her eyes shining with dignity. None of us has ever been punished. Father said we never should be. Once when my sister Jasmine was a little girl she pushed him downstairs and he just got up and limped away.
Mother was well, a little startled, continued Kismine, when she heard that you were from from where you are from, you know. She said that when she was a young girl but then, you see, shes a Spaniard and old-fashioned.
Do you spend much time out here? asked John, to conceal the fact that he was somewhat hurt by this remark. It seemed an unkind allusion to his provincialism.
Percy and Jasmine and I are here every summer, but next summer Jasmine is going to Newport.[35] Shes coming out in London a year from this fall. Shell be presented at court.
Do you know, began John hesitantly, youre much more sophisticated than I thought you were when I first saw you?
Oh, no, Im not, she exclaimed hurriedly. Oh, I wouldnt think of being. I think that sophisticated young people are terribly common, dont you? Im not at all, really. If you say I am, Im going to cry.
She was so distressed that her lip was trembling. John was impelled to protest:
I didnt mean that; I only said it to tease you.
Because I wouldnt mind if I were, she persisted. but Im not. Im very innocent and girlish. I never smoke, or drink, or read anything except poetry. I know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry. I dress very simply in fact, I scarcely dress at all. I think sophisticated is the last thing you can say about me. I believe that girls ought to enjoy their youths in a wholesome way.
I do, too, said John, heartily.
Kismine was cheerful again. She smiled at him, and a still-born tear dripped from the corner of one blue eye.
I like you, she whispered, intimately. Are you going to spend all your time with Percy while youre here, or will you be nice to me? Just think Im absolutely fresh ground. Ive never had a boy in love with me in all my life. Ive never been allowed even to see boys alone except Percy. I came all the way out here into this grove hoping to run into you, where the family wouldnt be around.
Deeply flattered, John bowed from the hips as he had been taught at dancing school in Hades.
Wed better go now, said Kismine sweetly. I have to be with mother at eleven. You havent asked me to kiss you once. I thought boys always did that nowadays.
John drew himself up proudly.
Some of them do, he answered, but not me. Girls dont do that sort of thing in Hades.
Side by side they walked back toward the house.
VI
John stood facing Mr. Braddock Washington in the full sunlight. The elder man was about forty with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single large opal for a grip. He and Percy were showing John around.
The slaves quarters are there. His walking-stick indicated a cloister of marble on their left that ran in graceful Gothic along the side of the mountain. In my youth I was distracted for a while from the business of life by a period of absurd idealism. During that time they lived in luxury. For instance, I equipped every one of their rooms with a tile bath.
I suppose, ventured John, with an ingratiating laugh, that they used the bathtubs to keep coal in. Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy told me that once he
The opinions of Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy are of little importance, I should imagine, interrupted Braddock Washington, coldly. My slaves did not keep coal in their bathtubs. They had orders to bathe every day, and they did. If they hadnt I might have ordered a sulphuric acid shampoo. I discontinued the baths for quite another reason. Several of them caught cold and died. Water is not good for certain races except as a beverage.
John laughed, and then decided to nod his head in sober agreement. Braddock Washington made him uncomfortable.
All these negroes are descendants of the ones my father brought North with him. There are about two hundred and fifty now. You notice that theyve lived so long apart from the world that their original dialect has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We bring a few of them up to speak English my secretary and two or three of the house servants.
This is the golf course, he continued, as they strolled along the velvet winter grass. Its all a green, you see no fairway, no rough, no hazards.
He smiled pleasantly at John.
Many men in the cage, father? asked Percy suddenly.
Braddock Washington stumbled, and let forth an involuntary curse.
One less than there should be, he ejaculated darkly and then added after a moment, Weve had difficulties.
Mother was telling me, exclaimed Percy, that Italian teacher
A ghastly error, said Braddock Washington angrily. But of course theres a good chance that we may have got him. Perhaps he fell somewhere in the woods or stumbled over a cliff. And then theres always the probability that if he did get away his story wouldnt be believed. Nevertheless, Ive had two dozen men looking for him in different towns around here.
And no luck?
Some. Fourteen of them reported to my agent that theyd each killed a man answering to that description, but of course it was probably only the reward they were after
He broke off. They had come to a large cavity in the earth about the circumference of a merry-go-round and covered by a strong iron grating. Braddock Washington beckoned to John, and pointed his cane down through the grating. John stepped to the edge and gazed. Immediately his ears were assailed by a wild clamor from below.
Come on down to Hell!
Hello, kiddo, hows the air up there?
Hey! Throw us a rope!
Got an old doughnut, Buddy, or a couple of second-hand sandwiches?
Say, fella, if youll push down that guy youre with, well show you a quick disappearance scene.
Paste him one for me, will you?
It was too dark to see clearly into the pit below, but John could tell from the coarse optimism and rugged vitality of the remarks and voices that they proceeded from middle-class Americans of the more spirited type. Then Mr. Washington put out his cane and touched a button in the grass, and the scene below sprang into light.