Trents Last Case | Page 3

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TRENT'S LAST CASE
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 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 of genius, his hand against every man's--an infant prodigy-
who brought to the