Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/210

 Shrady's daughter, to whom he was so lately married. There was Miss Helen Miller Gould, named after her mother, who had taken her mother's place as head of her father's household. There were Miss Anna and Howard and Frank Gould, the younger children, and there, too, was Dr. John P. Munn, Jay Gould's medical adviser. Mr. Gould's sons and daughters had remained by his side until one o'clock the previous morning. Then he fell asleep, and his children, worn out, went to bed. They were around his bed again very early. There lay the Alexander of speculation, the man who sought new financial worlds to conquer, who founded possessions on ruins and wrecks—there lay that man, helpless, weak as a baby. Always physically frail, the wasting disease with which he had suffered had greatly emaciated him. His nose was pinched, his face, half hidden by his grey-black beard, was almost as white as the pillow on which it rested. His hands were like wax, and his languid eyes, dimmed by the shadows that were falling across his brain, moved lazily here and there. For although he had fallen into a stupor during the night, Jay Gould was conscious in the morning. He knew he was about to die. He knew the moment was near that he had fought to delay, fought not through fear of death, but with a mighty pride that abhorred the thought that even death should overthrow him.

For two years or more the great financial manipulator had been battling with the knowledge that in his system lurked the seeds of man's most insidious