published

XI Evil Days

XII Eruption

XIII Writing a Letter

XIV Double Cunning

XV The Last Straw

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

PROLOGUE

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we
know judge wisely?

When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered
by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single
tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of
such wealth as this dead man had piled up--without making one loyal
friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to
the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those
living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered
under a blow.

In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no
figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He
had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and
augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions
for so doing, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had
been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing
especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained
incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every
eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of
manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest the
borders of Wall Street.

The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those
chieftains, on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with
accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly
continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who
had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand,
should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is
steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.
While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich
man's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an
instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not
shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
him, nevertheless, much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his
forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been
called his early bad manner he had been little more than a gambler