第122章

They stepped out from the vestibule.It was already dark.The rain was falling in gentle slants through the odorous, cool air.Across the street in the park the first leaves were beginning to fall; the lake lapped and washed quietly against the stone embankments and a belated bicyclist stole past across the asphalt, with the silent flitting of a bat, his lamp throwing a fan of orange-coloured haze into the mist of rain.

In the street in front of the house the driver, descending from the box, held open the door of the hack.Jadwin handed Laura in, gave an address to the driver, and got in himself, slamming the door after.

They heard the driver mount to his seat and speak to his horses.

"Well," said Jadwin, rubbing the fog from the window pane of the door, "look your last at the old place, Laura.You'll never see it again."But she would not look.

"No, no," she said."I'll look at you, dearest, at you, and our future, which is to be happier than any years we have ever known."Jadwin did not answer other than by taking her hand in his, and in silence they drove through the city towards the train that was to carry them to the new life.Aphase of the existences of each was closed definitely.

The great corner was a thing of the past; the great corner with the long train of disasters its collapse had started.The great failure had precipitated smaller failures, and the aggregate of smaller failures had pulled down one business house after another.For weeks afterward, the successive crashes were like the shock and reverberation of undermined buildings toppling to their ruin.An important bank had suspended payment, and hundreds of depositors had found their little fortunes swept away.The ramifications of the catastrophe were unbelievable.The whole tone of financial affairs seemed changed.Money was "tight"again, credit was withdrawn.The business world began to speak of hard times, once more.

But Laura would not admit her husband was in any way to blame.He had suffered, too.She repeated to herself his words, again and again:

"The wheat cornered itself.I simply stood between two sets of circumstances.The wheat cornered me, not Ithe wheat."

And all those millions and millions of bushels of Wheat were gone now.The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin's fortune and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had intervened like a great torrent to drag her husband from her side and drown him in the roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses from West to East? like a vast Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin in its wake, but bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities and centres of Europe.

For a moment, vague, dark perplexities assailed her, questionings as to the elemental forces, the forces of demand and supply that ruled the world.This huge resistless Nourisher of the Nations--why was it that it could not reach the People, could not fulfil its destiny, unmarred by all this suffering, unattended by all this misery?

She did not know.But as she searched, troubled and disturbed for an answer, she was aware of a certain familiarity in the neighbourhood the carriage was traversing.The strange sense of having lived through this scene, these circumstances, once before, took hold upon her.

She looked out quickly, on either hand, through the blurred glasses of the carriage doors.Surely, surely, this locality had once before impressed itself upon her imagination.She turned to her husband, an exclamation upon her lips; but Jadwin, by the dim light of the carriage lanterns, was studying a railroad folder.

All at once, intuitively, Laura turned in her place, and raising the flap that covered the little window at the back of the carriage, looked behind.On either side of the vista in converging lines stretched the tall office buildings, lights burning in a few of their windows, even yet.Over the end of the street the lead-coloured sky was broken by a pale faint haze of light, and silhouetted against this rose a sombre mass, unbroken by any glimmer, rearing a black and formidable facade against the blur of the sky behind it.

And this was the last impression of the part of her life that that day brought to a close; the tall gray office buildings, the murk of rain, the haze of light in the heavens, and raised against it, the pile of the Board of Trade building, black, monolithic, crouching on its foundations like a monstrous sphinx with blind eyes, silent, grave--crouching there without a sound, without sign of life, under the night and the drifting veil of rain.

THE END