Project Gutenberg's Trent's Last Case, by E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

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Title: Trent's Last Case
The Woman in Black

Author: E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

Release Date: 2001
Posting Date: November 14, 2009 [EBook #2568]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRENT'S LAST CASE ***

Produced by Stuart E. Thiel

TRENT'S LAST CASE

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

By E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

CHAPTER I: Bad News

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 honour. 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 their labour, 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 altoget