The Ledger at Dusk: Power Weighed by Dying Hands

Six times during my life has this tomb of my soul led me to the brink of that eternal darkness into which all men sink at last, and six times it has stepped back, as if at the behest of a destiny it could not overmaster. And I have long outlived my friends, in whose lives I existed more fully than in my own. All are dead, those early friends. Julius Caesar died at fifty-eight, nearly twenty years younger than I am now; and I have always believed that his death came as much from that boredom which presages carelessness as from the assassins’ daggers. Salvidienus Rufus died at the age of twenty-three, in his pride and by his own hand, because he thought he had betrayed our friendship. Poor Salvidienus. Of all my early friends, he was most like me. I wonder if he ever knew that the betrayal was my own, that he was the innocent victim of an infection that he caught from me. Vergil died at fifty-one, and I was at his bedside; in his delirium, he thought he died a failure, and made me promise to destroy his great poem on the founding of Rome. And then Marcus Agrippa, at the age of fifty, who had never had a day of illness in his life, died suddenly, at the height of his powers, before I could reach him to bid him farewell. And a few years later—in my memory, the years dissolve into one another, like the notes of tambour and lute and trumpet, to make a single sound—within a month of each other, Maecenas and Horace were dead. Except for you, my dear Nicolaus, they were the last of my old friends.

I sat upon the chair, and saw them beneath me; a breeze came up, and I could hear it rustle among the cypresses and plane trees as it touched my silken tunic like a caress. The dancers danced, and the oiled flesh of the men rippled in the torchlight; and I remembered Ilium and Lesbos, where once I had been more than a mortal. Sempronius reclined beside my throne, on the grass; and for a moment I was as happy as I had been, and was myself.

But in this happiness, I became aware of someone standing beside me, bowing, attempting to get my attention; I recognized him as a servant from my father’s household, and motioned for him to wait until the dance was over.

When the dancers had finished, and after the languorous applause of the guests, I allowed the servant to approach me.

“What does my father require of me?” I asked him.

“I am Priscus,” he said. “It is your husband. He is ill. Your father leaves within the hour for Puteoli, and asks you to follow.”

“Is it a serious matter, do you think?”

Priscus nodded. “Your father leaves this night. He is concerned.”

To-morrow we the favouring gods implore;

Then shall you see our parting vessels crown’d, And hear with oars the Hellespont resound.

The third day hence shall Pythia greet our sails, [208]

If mighty Neptune send propitious gales;

Pythia to her Achilles shall restore The wealth he left for this detested shore: Thither the spoils of this long war shall pass, The ruddy gold, the steel, and shining brass: My beauteous captives thither I’ll convey, And all that rests of my unravish’d prey.

One only valued gift your tyrant gave, And that resumed—the fair Lyrnessian slave.

Then tell him: loud, that all the Greeks may hear, And learn to scorn the wretch they basely fear;

(For arm’d in impudence, mankind he braves, And meditates new cheats on all his slaves;

Though shameless as he is, to face these eyes Is what he dares not: if he dares he dies;)

Tell him, all terms, all commerce I decline, Nor share his council, nor his battle join;

For once deceiv’d, was his; but twice were mine, No—let the stupid prince, whom Jove deprives Of sense and justice, run where frenzy drives;

Around this time he performed a ceremony that he had contemplated for some time. He asked Fred to compose a letter requesting a future president of the United States to appoint his grandson Ulysses (Fred’s son) as a West Point cadet. Grant summoned family members and doctors as witnesses before he affixed his signature to the document. It was such a solemn gesture for him that as he folded the paper, a hush gripped the room. In 1898 President William McKinley would honor the request by appointing Ulysses S. Grant III, later a major general, to the academy.

Easter Day that year dawned bright and clear, and large crowds promenaded along Fifth Avenue, many pausing at the corner of East Sixty-Sixth Street to gaze concernedly at Grant’s town house. From the bay window, Dr. Shrady observed the swelling crowd mingling on the sidewalk below. The scene abounded with reporters, but ordinary citizens also gathered there, often weeping. Grant took his cane, shuffled to the window, and, screened by curtains, pondered the multitude. “I am very grateful to them,” he told the doctor, who suggested, “Why not tell them so, General?”

Returning that night to my room at the ranch, making notes on what he had said, I asked myself a question I would ask many times in the years to follow: Why was he telling me all these things? Why was he allowing me to see his vulnerability and sorrow? Perhaps it was because I was a young woman and aspired to become a historian, two constituencies he badly wanted to reach, to persuade, to shape, and to inspire. Perhaps, to a lesser extent, it was because I possessed an Ivy League pedigree, which he both held in contempt and coveted. Or maybe it was simply that I listened with sleepless intensity as he strove to come to terms with the meaning of his life.

William lay upon his death-bed, and again he thought of what would become of his sons when he was gone. Then he re-mem-bered what the wise men had told him; and so he de-clared that Robert should have the lands which he held in France, that William should be the King of England, and that Henry should have no land at all, but only a chest of gold.

So it hap-pened in the end very much as the wise men had fore-told.

Robert, the Short Stocking, was bold and reckless, like the hawk which he so much admired. He lost all the lands that his father had left him, and was at last shut up in prison, where he was kept until he died.

William Rufus was so over-bear-ing and cruel that he was feared and hated by all his people. He led a wicked life, and was killed by one of his own men while hunting in the forest.

And Henry, the Handsome Scholar, had not only the chest of gold for his own, but he became by and by the King of England and the ruler of all the lands that his father had had in France.

Pretty soon, knots of anxious New Yorkers gathered on street corners to discuss the still fragmentary reports. As the hours passed, the frenetic life of the city that Hamilton had enriched so immeasurably ground to a halt. “This is indeed a sad day,” wrote Hamilton’s associate David Ogden. “All business seems to be suspended in the city and a solemn gloom hangs on every countenance.”

Throughout the day came bulletins on the dying man’s state, and a mass of people congregated before the Bayard mansion. Some French ships anchored in New York harbor sent surgeons specially trained in treating gunshot wounds to see if they could resuscitate Hamilton.

itself.

“Ha, ha!” laughed the same woman, when old Joe, producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their several gains upon the ground. “This is the end of it, you see! He frightened every one away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!”

“Spirit!” said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot.

“I see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is this!”

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which, beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up, which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful language.

The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it was. A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell straight upon the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this man.

know, he asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity, ‘what it was that had induced him to go out there?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, and forthwith handed him the famous Report for publication, if he thought fit. He glanced through it hurriedly, mumbling all the time, judged ‘it would do,’ and took himself off with this plunder.

“Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters and the girl’s portrait. She struck me as beautiful—I mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie, too, yet one felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features. She seemed ready to listen without mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought for herself. I concluded I would go and give her back her portrait and those letters myself.

palaces and houses, and which without the twenty millions and the legacies to my servants, may still amount to sixty millions."

He was finishing the last line when a cry behind him made him start, and the pen fell from his hand. "Haidee," said he, "did you read it?"

"Oh, my lord," said she, "why are you writing thus at such an hour? Why are you bequeathing all your fortune to me? Are you going to leave me?"

"I am going on a journey, dear child," said Monte Cristo, with an expression of infinite tenderness and melancholy;

"and if any misfortune should happen to me"

The count stopped. "Well?" asked the young girl, with an authoritative tone the count had never observed before, and which startled him. "Well, if any misfortune happen to me," replied Monte Cristo, "I wish my daughter to be happy."

Haidee smiled sorrowfully, and shook her head. "Do you think of dying, my lord?" said she.

"The wise man, my child, has said, `It is good to think of death.'"