Chapter V
TO tie a prominent statesman to her train and to lead him about like a
tame bear, is for a young and vivacious woman a more certain amusement
than to tie herself to him and to be dragged about like an Indian
squaw. This fact was Madeleine Lee's first great political discovery in
Washington, and it was worth to her all the German philosophy she had
ever read, with even a complete edition of Herbert Spencer's works into
the bargain. There could be no doubt that the honours and dignities of
a public career were no fair consideration for its pains. She made a
little daily task for herself of reading in succession the lives and
letters of the American Presidents, and of their wives, when she could
find that there was a trace of the latter's existence. What a melancholy
spectacle it was, from George Washington down to the last incumbent;
what vexations, what disappointments, what grievous mistakes, what very
objectionable manners! Not one of them, who had aimed at high purpose,
but had been thwarted, beaten, and habitually insulted! What a gloom lay
on the features of those famous chieftains, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster;
what varied expression of defeat and unsatisfied desire; what a sense
of self-importance and senatorial magniloquence; what a craving for
flattery; what despair at the sentence of fate! And what did they amount
to, after all?
They were practical men, these! they had no great problems of thought to
settle, no questions that rose above the ordinary rules of common
morals and homely duty. How they had managed to befog the subject!
What elaborate show-structures they had built up, with no result but
to obscure the horizon! Would not the country have done better without
them? Could it have done worse? What deeper abyss could have opened
under the nation's feet, than that to whose verge they brought it?
Madeleine's mind wearied with the monotony of the story. She discussed
the subject with Ratcliffe, who told her frankly that the pleasure of
politics lay in the possession of power. He agreed that the country
would do very well without him. “But here I am,” said he, “and here I
mean to stay.” He had very little sympathy for thin moralising, and a
statesmanlike contempt for philosophical politics. He loved power, and
he meant to be President.
That was enough.
Sometimes the tragic and sometimes the comic side was uppermost in her
mind, and sometimes she did not herself know whether to cry or to laugh.
Washington more than any other city in the world swarms with
simple-minded exhibitions of human nature; men and women curiously out
of place, whom it would be cruel to ridicule and ridiculous to weep
over. The sadder exhibitions are fortunately seldom seen by respectable
people; only the little social accidents come under their eyes. One
evening Mrs. Lee went to the President's first evening reception. As
Sybil flatly refused to face the crowd, and Carrington mildly said that
he feared he was not sufficiently reconstructed to appear at home in
that august presence, Mrs. Lee accepted Mr. French for an escort, and
walked across the Square with him to join the throng that was pouring
into the doors of the White House. They took their places in the line
of citizens and were at last able to enter the reception-room. There
Madeleine found herself before two seemingly mechanical figures, which
might be wood or wax, for any sign they showed of life. These two
figures were the President and his wife; they stood stiff and awkward by
the door, both their faces stripped of every sign of intelligence, while
the right hands of both extended themselves to the column of visitors
with the mechanical action of toy dolls. Mrs. Lee for a moment began
to laugh, but the laugh died on her lips. To the President and his
wife this was clearly no laughing matter. There they stood, automata,
representatives of the society which streamed past them. Madeleine
seized Mr. French by the arm.
“Take me somewhere at once,” said she, “where I can look at it. Here! in
the corner. I had no conception how shocking it was!”
Mr. French supposed she was thinking of the queer-looking men and women
who were swarming through the rooms, and he made, after his own delicate
notion of humour, some uncouth jests on those who passed by. Mrs. Lee,
however, was in no humour to explain or even to listen. She stopped him
short:--
“There, Mr. French! Now go away and leave me. I want to be alone for
half an hour. Please come for me then.” And there she stood, with her
eyes fixed on the President and his wife, while the endless stream of
humanity passed them, shaking hands.
What a strange and solemn spectacle it was, and how the deadly
fascination of it burned the image in upon her mind! What a horrid
warning to ambition!
And in all that crowd there was no one besides herself who felt the
mockery of this exhibition. To all the others this task was a regular
part of the President's duty, and there was nothing ridiculous about
it. They thought it a democratic institution, this droll a ping of
monarchical forms. To them the deadly dulness of the show was as natural
and proper as ever to the courtiers of the Philips and Charleses seemed
the ceremonies of the Escurial. To her it had the effect of a nightmare,
or of an opium-eater's vision, She felt a sudden conviction that this
was to be the end of American society; its realisation and dream at
once. She groaned in spirit.
“Yes! at last I have reached the end! We shall grow to be wax images,
and our talk will be like the squeaking of toy dolls. We shall all
wander round and round the earth and shake hands. No one will have
any object in this world, and there will be no other. It is worse than
anything in the 'Inferno.' What an awful vision of eternity!”
Suddenly, as through a mist, she saw the melancholy face of Lord Skye
approaching. He came to her side, and his voice recalled her to reality.
“Does it amuse you, this sort of thing?” he asked in a vague way.
“We take our amusement sadly, after the manner of our people,” she
replied; “but it certainly interests me.”
They stood for a time in silence, watching the slowly eddying dance of
Democracy, until he resumed:
“Whom do you take that man to be--the long, lean one, with a long woman
on each arm?”
“That man,” she replied, “I take to be a Washington department-clerk, or
perhaps a member of Congress from Iowa, with a wife and wife's sister.
Do they shock your nobility?”
He looked at her with comical resignation. “You mean to tell me
that they are quite as good as dowager-countesses. I grant it. My
aristocratic spirit is broken, Mrs. Lee. I will even ask them to dinner
if you bid me, and if you will come to meet them. But the last time I
asked a member of Congress to dine, he sent me back a note in pencil on
my own envelope that he would bring two of his friends with him, very
respectable constituents from Yahoo city, or some such place; nature's
noblemen, he said.”
“You should have welcomed them.”
“I did. I wanted to see two of nature's noblemen, and I knew they would
probably be pleasanter company than their representative. They came;
very respectable persons, one with a blue necktie, the other with a red
one: both had diamond pins in their shirts, and were carefully brushed
in respect to their hair. They said nothing, ate little, drank less,
and were much better behaved than I am. When they went away, they
unanimously asked me to stay with them when I visited Yahoo city.”
“You will not want guests if you always do that.”
“I don't know. I think it was pure ignorance on their part. They knew
no better, and they seemed modest enough. My only complaint was that I
could get nothing out of them. I wonder whether their wives would have
been more amusing.”
“Would they be so in England, Lord Skye?”
He looked down at her with half-shut eyes, and drawled: “You know my
countrywomen?”
“Hardly at all.”
“Then let us discuss some less serious subject.”
“Willingly. I have waited for you to explain to me why you have to-night
an expression of such melancholy.”
“Is that quite friendly, Mrs. Lee? Do I really look melancholy?”
“Unutterably, as I feel. I am consumed with curiosity to know the
reason.”
The British minister coolly took a complete survey of the whole room,
ending with a prolonged stare at the President and his wife, who were
still mechanically shaking hands; then he looked back into her face, and
said never a word.
She insisted: “I must have this riddle answered. It suffocates me. I
should not be sad at seeing these same people at work or at play, if
they ever do play; or in a church or a lecture-room. Why do they weigh
on me like a horrid phantom here?”
“I see no riddle, Mrs. Lee. You have answered your own question; they
are neither at work nor at play.”
“Then please take me home at once. I shall have hysterics. The sight of
those two suffering images at the door is too mournful to be borne. I am
dizzy with looking at these stalking figures. I don't believe they're
real. I wish the house would take fire. I want an earthquake. I wish
some one would pinch the President, or pull his wife's hair.”
Mrs. Lee did not repeat the experiment of visiting the White House, and
indeed for some time afterwards she spoke with little enthusiasm of the
presidential office. To Senator Ratcliffe she expressed her opinions
strongly. The Senator tried in vain to argue that the people had a right
to call upon their chief magistrate, and that he was bound to receive
them; this being so, there was no less objectionable way of proceeding
than the one which had been chosen. “Who gave the people any such
right?” asked Mrs. Lee. “Where does it come from? What do they want it
for? You know better, Mr. Ratcliffe! Our chief magistrate is a citizen
like any one else. What puts it into his foolish head to cease being a
citizen and to ape royalty? Our governors never make themselves
ridiculous. Why cannot the wretched being content himself with living
like the rest of us, and minding his own business? Does he know what a
figure of fun he is?” And Mrs. Lee went so far as to declare that she
would like to be the President's wife only to put an end to this folly;
nothing should ever induce her to go through such a performance; and if
the public did not approve of this, Congress might impeach her, and
remove her from office; all she demanded was the right to be heard
before the Senate in her own defence.
Nevertheless, there was a very general impression in Washington that
Mrs.
Lee would like nothing better than to be in the White House. Known
to comparatively few people, and rarely discussing even with them the
subjects which deeply interested her, Madeleine passed for a clever,
intriguing woman who had her own objects to gain. True it is, beyond
peradventure, that all residents of Washington may be assumed to be in
office or candidates for office; unless they avow their object, they are
guilty of an attempt--and a stupid one--to deceive; yet there is a small
class of apparent exceptions destined at last to fall within the rule.
Mrs. Lee was properly assumed to be a candidate for office. To the
Washingtonians it was a matter of course that Mrs. Lee should marry
Silas P. Ratcliffe. That he should be glad to get a fashionable and
intelligent wife, with twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year, was not
surprising. That she should accept the first public man of the day, with
a flattering chance for the Presidency--a man still comparatively
young and not without good looks--was perfectly natural, and in her
undertaking she had the sympathy of all well-regulated Washington women
who were not possible rivals; for to them the President's wife is of
more consequence than the President; and, indeed, if America only knew
it, they are not very far from the truth.
Some there were, however, who did not assent to this good-natured though
worldly view of the proposed match. These ladies were severe in their
comments upon Mrs. Lee's conduct, and did not hesitate to declare their
opinion that she was the calmest and most ambitious minx who had ever
come within their observation. Unfortunately it happened that the
respectable and proper Mrs. Schuyler Clinton took this view of the case,
and made little attempt to conceal her opinion. She was justly indignant
at her cousin's gross worldliness, and possible promotion in rank.
“If Madeleine Ross marries that coarse, horrid old Illinois politician,”
said she to her husband, “I never will forgive her so long as I live.”
Mr. Clinton tried to excuse Madeleine, and even went so far as to
suggest that the difference of age was no greater than in their own
case; but his wife trampled ruthlessly on his argument.
“At any rate,” said she, “I never came to Washington as a widow on
purpose to set my cap for the first candidate for the Presidency, and
I never made a public spectacle of my indecent eagerness in the very
galleries of the Senate; and Mrs. Lee ought to be ashamed of herself.
She is a cold-blooded, heartless, unfeminine cat.”
Little Victoria Dare, who babbled like the winds and streams, with utter
indifference as to what she said or whom she addressed, used to bring
choice bits of this gossip to Mrs. Lee. She always affected a little
stammer when she said anything uncommonly impudent, and put on a manner
of languid simplicity. She felt keenly the satisfaction of seeing
Madeleine charged with her own besetting sins. For years all Washington
had agreed that Victoria was little better than one of the wicked; she
had done nothing but violate every rule of propriety and scandalise
every well-regulated family in the city, and there was no good in her.
Yet it could not be denied that Victoria was amusing, and had a sort of
irregular fascination; consequently she was universally tolerated. To
see Mrs. Lee thrust down to her own level was an unmixed pleasure to
her, and she carefully repeated to Madeleine the choice bits of dialogue
which she picked up in her wanderings.
“Your cousin, Mrs. Clinton, says you are a ca-ca-cat, Mrs. Lee.”
“I don't believe it, Victoria. Mrs. Clinton never said anything of the
sort.”
“Mrs. Marston says it is because you have caught a ra-ra-rat, and
Senator Clinton was only a m-m-mouse!”
Naturally all this unexpected publicity irritated Mrs. Lee not a little,
especially when short and vague paragraphs, soon followed by longer
and more positive ones, in regard to Senator Ratcliffe's matrimonial
prospects, began to appear in newspapers, along with descriptions of
herself from the pens of enterprising female correspondents for the
press, who had never so much as seen her. At the first sight of one of
these newspaper articles, Madeleine fairly cried with mortification and
anger. She wanted to leave Washington the next day, and she hated the
very thought of Ratcliffe. There was something in the newspaper style so
inscrutably vulgar, something so inexplicably revolting to the sense of
feminine decency, that she shrank under it as though it were a poisonous
spider. But after the first acute shame had passed, her temper was
roused, and she vowed that she would pursue her own path just as she
had begun, without regard to all the malignity and vulgarity in the wide
United States. She did not care to marry Senator Ratcliffe; she liked
his society and was flattered by his confidence; she rather hoped to
prevent him from ever making a formal offer, and if not, she would at
least push it off to the last possible moment; but she was not to be
frightened from marrying him by any amount of spitefulness or gossip,
and she did not mean to refuse him except for stronger reasons than
these. She even went so far in her desperate courage as to laugh at her
cousin, Mrs.
Clinton, whose venerable husband she allowed and even encouraged to pay
her such public attention and to express sentiments of such youthful
ardour as she well knew would inflame and exasperate the excellent lady
his wife.
Carrington was the person most unpleasantly affected by the course which
this affair had taken. He could no longer conceal from himself the fact
that he was as much m love as a dignified Virginian could be. With
him, at all events, she had shown no coquetry, nor had she ever either
flattered or encouraged him. But Carrington, m his solitary struggle
against fate, had found her a warm friend; always ready to assist where
assistance was needed, generous with her money in any cause which he
was willing to vouch for, full of sympathy where sympathy was more than
money, and full of resource and suggestion where money and sympathy
failed. Carrington knew her better than she knew herself. He selected
her books; he brought the last speech or the last report from the
Capitol or the departments; he knew her doubts and her vagaries, and as
far as he understood them at all, helped her to solve them.
Carrington was too modest, and perhaps too shy, to act the part of a
declared lover, and he was too proud to let it be thought that he wanted
to exchange his poverty for her wealth. But he was all the more anxious
when he saw the evident attraction which Ratcliffe's strong will and
unscrupulous energy exercised over her. He saw that Ratcliffe was
steadily pushing his advances; that he flattered all Mrs. Lee's
weaknesses by the confidence and deference with which he treated her;
and that in a very short time, Madeleine must either marry him or find
herself looked upon as a heartless coquette. He had his own reasons for
thinking ill of Senator Ratcliffe, and he meant to prevent a marriage;
but he had an enemy to deal with not easily driven from the path, and
quite capable of routing any number of rivals.
Ratcliffe was afraid of no one. He had not fought his own way in
life for nothing, and he knew all the value of a cold head and dogged
self-assurance.
Nothing but this robust Americanism and his strong will carried him
safely through the snares and pitfalls of Mrs. Lee's society, where
rivals and enemies beset him on every hand. He was little better than a
schoolboy, when he ventured on their ground, but when he could draw
them over upon his own territory of practical life he rarely failed to
trample on his assailants.
It was this practical sense and cool will that won over Mrs. Lee, who
was woman enough to assume that all the graces were well enough
employed in decorating her, and it was enough if the other sex felt her
superiority. Men were valuable only in proportion to their strength and
their appreciation of women. If the senator had only been strong enough
always to control his temper, he would have done very well, but his
temper was under a great strain in these times, and his incessant effort
to control it in politics made him less watchful in private life.
Mrs. Lee's tacit assumption of superior refinement irritated him,
and sometimes made him show his teeth like a bull-dog, at the cost of
receiving from Mrs. Lee a quick stroke in return such as a well-bred
tortoise-shell cat administers to check over-familiarity; innocent to
the eye, but drawing blood. One evening when he was more than commonly
out of sorts, after sitting some time in moody silence, he roused
himself, and, taking up a book that lay on her table, he glanced at its
title and turned over the leaves. It happened by ill luck to be a volume
of Darwin that Mrs. Lee had just borrowed from the library of Congress.
“Do you understand this sort of thing?” asked the Senator abruptly, in a
tone that suggested a sneer.
“Not very well,” replied Mrs. Lee, rather curtly.
“Why do you want to understand it?” persisted the Senator. “What good
will it do you?”
“Perhaps it will teach us to be modest,” answered Madeleine, quite equal
to the occasion.
“Because it says we descend from monkeys?” rejoined the Senator,
roughly.
“Do you think you are descended from monkeys?”
“Why not?” said Madeleine.
“Why not?” repeated Ratcliffe, laughing harshly. “I don't like the
connection. Do you mean to introduce your distant relations into
society?”
“They would bring more amusement into it than most of its present
members,” rejoined Mrs. Lee, with a gentle smile that threatened
mischief. But Ratcliffe would not be warned; on the contrary, the only
effect of Mrs. Lee's defiance was to exasperate his ill-temper, and
whenever he lost his temper he became senatorial and Websterian. “Such
books,” he began, “disgrace our civilization; they degrade and stultify
our divine nature; they are only suited for Asiatic despotisms where men
are reduced to the level of brutes; that they should be accepted by a
man like Baron Jacobi, I can understand; he and his masters have nothing
to do in the world but to trample on human rights. Mr. Carrington, of
course, would approve those ideas; he believes in the divine doctrine
of flogging negroes; but that you, who profess philanthropy and free
principles, should go with them, is astonishing; it is incredible; it is
unworthy of you.”
“You are very hard on the monkeys,” replied Madeleine, rather sternly,
when the Senator's oration was ended. “The monkeys never did you any
harm; they are not in public life; they are not even voters; if they
were, you would be enthusiastic about their intelligence and virtue.
After all, we ought to be grateful to them, for what would men do
in this melancholy world if they had not inherited gaiety from the
monkeys--as well as oratory.”
Ratcliffe, to do him justice, took punishment well, at least when
it came from Mrs. Lee's hands, and his occasional outbursts of
insubordination were sure to be followed by improved discipline; but if
he allowed Mrs. Lee to correct his faults, he had no notion of letting
himself be instructed by her friends, and he lost no chance of telling
them so. But to do this was not always enough. Whether it were that he
had few ideas outside of his own experience, or that he would not
trust himself on doubtful ground, he seemed compelled to bring every
discussion down to his own level. Madeleine puzzled herself in vain to
find out whether he did this because he knew no better, or because he
meant to cover his own ignorance.
“The Baron has amused me very much with his account of Bucharest
society,” Mrs. Lee would say: “I had no idea it was so gay.”
“I would like to show him our society in Peonia,” was Ratcliffe's reply;
“he would find a very brilliant circle there of nature's true noblemen.”
“The Baron says their politicians are precious sharp chaps,” added Mr.
French.
“Oh, there are politicians in Bulgaria, are there?” asked the Senator,
whose ideas of the Roumanian and Bulgarian neighbourhood were vague,
and who had a general notion that all such people lived in tents,
wore sheepskins with the wool inside, and ate curds: “Oh, they have
politicians there! I would like to see them try their sharpness in the
west.”
“Really!” said Mrs. Lee. “Think of Attila and his hordes running an
Indiana caucus?”
“Anyhow,” cried French with a loud laugh, “the Baron said that a set of
bigger political scoundrels than his friends couldn't be found in all
Illinois.”
“Did he say that?” exclaimed Ratcliffe angrily.
“Didn't he, Mrs. Lee? but I don't believe it; do you? What's your candid
opinion, Ratcliffe? What you don't know about Illinois politics isn't
worth knowing; do you really think those Bulgrascals couldn't run an
Illinois state convention?”
Ratcliffe did not like to be chaffed, especially on this subject, but he
could not resent French's liberty which was only a moderate return
for the wooden nutmeg. To get the conversation away from Europe, from
literature, from art, was his great object, and chaff was a way of
escape.
Carrington was very well aware that the weak side of the Senator lay in
his blind ignorance of morals. He flattered himself that Mrs. Lee must
see this and be shocked by it sooner or later, so that nothing more was
necessary than to let Ratcliffe expose himself. Without talking very
much, Carrington always aimed at drawing him out. He soon found,
however, that Ratcliffe understood such tactics perfectly, and instead
of injuring, he rather improved his position. At times the man's
audacity was startling, and even when Carrington thought him hopelessly
entangled, he would sweep away all the hunter's nets with a sheer effort
of strength, and walk off bolder and more dangerous than ever.
When Mrs. Lee pressed him too closely, he frankly admitted her charges.
“What you say is in great part true. There is much in politics that
disgusts and disheartens; much that is coarse and bad. I grant you there
is dishonesty and corruption. We must try to make the amount as small as
possible.”
“You should be able to tell Mrs. Lee how she must go to work,” said
Carrington; “you have had experience. I have heard, it seems to me, that
you were once driven to very hard measures against corruption.”
Ratcliffe looked ill-pleased at this compliment, and gave Carrington one
of his cold glances that meant mischief. But he took up the challenge on
the spot:--
“Yes, I was, and am very sorry for it. The story is this, Mrs. Lee;
and it is well-known to every man, woman, and child in the State of
Illinois, so that I have no reason for softening it. In the worst days
of the war there was almost a certainty that my State would be carried
by the peace party, by fraud, as we thought, although, fraud or not, we
were bound to save it. Had Illinois been lost then, we should certainly
have lost the Presidential election, and with it probably the Union. At
any rate, I believed the fate of the war to depend on the result. I
was then Governor, and upon me the responsibility rested. We had entire
control of the northern counties and of their returns. We ordered the
returning officers in a certain number of counties to make no returns
until they heard from us, and when we had received the votes of all the
southern counties and learned the precise number of votes we needed to
give us a majority, we telegraphed to our northern returning officers
to make the vote of their districts such and such, thereby overbalancing
the adverse returns and giving the State to us. This was done, and as I
am now senator I have a right to suppose that what I did was approved. I
am not proud of the transaction, but I would do it again, and worse than
that, if I thought it would save this country from disunion. But of
course I did not expect Mr. Carrington to approve it. I believe he was
then carrying out his reform principles by bearing arms against the
government.”
“Yes!” said Carrington drily; “you got the better of me, too. Like the
old Scotchman, you didn't care who made the people's wars provided you
made its ballots.”
Carrington had missed his point. The man who has committed a murder for
his country, is a patriot and not an assassin, even when he receives a
seat in the Senate as his share of the plunder. Women cannot be expected
to go behind the motives of that patriot who saves his country and his
election in times of revolution.
Carrington's hostility to Ratcliffe was, however, mild, when compared
with that felt by old Baron Jacobi. Why the baron should have taken so
violent a prejudice it is not easy to explain, but a diplomatist and a
senator are natural enemies, and Jacobi, as an avowed admirer of
Mrs. Lee, found Ratcliffe in his way. This prejudiced and immoral old
diplomatist despised and loathed an American senator as the type
which, to his bleared European eyes, combined the utmost pragmatical
self-assurance and overbearing temper with the narrowest education and
the meanest personal experience that ever existed in any considerable
government. As Baron Jacobi's country had no special relations with that
of the United States, and its Legation at Washington was a mere job to
create a place for Jacobi to fill, he had no occasion to disguise his
personal antipathies, and he considered himself in some degree as having
a mission to express that diplomatic contempt for the Senate which his
colleagues, if they felt it, were obliged to conceal. He performed his
duties with conscientious precision. He never missed an opportunity to
thrust the sharp point of his dialectic rapier through the joints of the
clumsy and hide-bound senatorial self-esteem. He delighted in skilfully
exposing to Madeleine's eyes some new side of Ratcliffe's ignorance.
His conversation at such times sparkled with historical allusions,
quotations in half a dozen different languages, references to well-known
facts which an old man's memory could not recall with precision in all
their details, but with which the Honourable Senator was familiarly
acquainted, and which he could readily supply. And his Voltairian
face leered politely as he listened to Ratcliffe's reply, which showed
invariable ignorance of common literature, art, and history. The climax
of his triumph came one evening when Ratcliffe unluckily, tempted by
some allusion to Moli;re which he thought he understood, made reference
to the unfortunate influence of that great man on the religious opinions
of his time. Jacobi, by a flash of inspiration, divined that he had
confused Moli;re with Voltaire, and assuming a manner of extreme
suavity, he put his victim on the rack, and tortured him with affected
explanations and interrogations, until Madeleine was in a manner forced
to interrupt and end the scene. But even when the senator was not to be
lured into a trap, he could not escape assault. The baron in such a
case would cross the lines and attack him on his own ground, as on one
occasion, when Ratcliffe was defending his doctrine of party allegiance,
Jacobi silenced him by sneering somewhat thus:
“Your principle is quite correct, Mr. Senator. I, too, like yourself,
was once a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was
ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church;
your National Convention is our OEcumenic Council; you abdicate reason,
as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself, Mr. Ratcliffe, you are
a Cardinal. They are able men, those cardinals; I have known many; they
were our best friends, but they were not reformers. Are you a reformer,
Mr. Senator?”
Ratcliffe grew to dread and hate the old man, but all his ordinary
tactics were powerless against this impenetrable eighteenth century
cynic. If he resorted to his Congressional practise of browbeating
and dogmatism, the Baron only smiled and turned his back, or made some
remark in French which galled his enemy all the more, because, while
he did not understand it, he knew well that Madeleine did, and that she
tried to repress her smile.
Ratcliffe's grey eyes grew colder and stonier than ever as he gradually
perceived that Baron Jacobi was carrying on a set scheme with malignant
ingenuity, to drive him out of Madeleine's house, and he swore
a terrible oath that he would not be beaten by that monkey-faced
foreigner. On the other hand Jacobi had little hope of success: “What
can an old man do?” said he with perfect sincerity to Carrington; “If
I were forty years younger, that great oaf should not have his own way.
Ah! I wish I were young again and we were in Vienna!” From which it was
rightly inferred by Carrington that the venerable diplomatist would, if
such acts were still in fashion, have coolly insulted the Senator, and
put a bullet through his heart.
Chapter VI
IN February the weather became warmer and summer-like. In Virginia there
comes often at this season a deceptive gleam of summer, slipping in
between heavy storm-clouds of sleet and snow; days and sometimes weeks
when the temperature is like June; when the earliest plants begin to
show their hardy flowers, and when the bare branches of the forest trees
alone protest against the conduct of the seasons. Then men and women are
languid; life seems, as in Italy, sensuous and glowing with colour; one
is conscious of walking in an atmosphere that is warm, palpable, radiant
with possibilities; a delicate haze hangs over Arlington, and softens
even the harsh white glare of the Capitol; the struggle of existence
seems to abate; Lent throws its calm shadow over society; and youthful
diplomatists, unconscious of their danger, are lured into asking foolish
girls to marry them; the blood thaws in the heart and flows out into the
veins, like the rills of sparkling water that trickle from every lump
of ice or snow, as though all the ice and snow on earth, and all the
hardness of heart, all the heresy and schism, all the works of the
devil, had yielded to the force of love and to the fresh warmth of
innocent, lamb-like, confiding virtue. In such a world there should be
no guile--but there is a great deal of it notwithstanding. Indeed, at
no other season is there so much. This is the moment when the two whited
sepulchres at either end of the Avenue reek with the thick atmosphere of
bargain and sale. The old is going; the new is coming. Wealth, office,
power are at auction. Who bids highest? who hates with most venom? who
intrigues with most skill? who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the
darkest, and the most, political work? He shall have his reward.
Senator Ratcliffe was absorbed and ill at ease. A swarm of applicants
for office dogged his steps and beleaguered his rooms in quest of his
endorsement of their paper characters. The new President was to arrive
on Monday. Intrigues and combinations, of which the Senator was the
soul, were all alive, awaiting this arrival. Newspaper correspondents
pestered him with questions. Brother senators called him to conferences.
His mind was pre-occupied with his own interests. One might have
supposed that, at this instant, nothing could have drawn him away from
the political gaming-table, and yet when Mrs. Lee remarked that she was
going to Mount Vernon on Saturday with a little party, including the
British Minister and an Irish gentleman staying as a guest at the
British Legation, the Senator surprised her by expressing a strong wish
to join them. He explained that, as the political lead was no longer
in his hands, the chances were nine in ten that if he stirred at all
he should make a blunder; that his friends expected him to do something
when, in fact, nothing could be done; that every preparation had already
been made, and that for him to go on an excursion to Mount Vernon, at
this moment, with the British Minister, was, on the whole, about the
best use he could make of his time, since it would hide him for one day
at least.
Lord Skye had fallen into the habit of consulting Mrs. Lee when his own
social resources were low, and it was she who had suggested this party
to Mount Vernon, with Carrington for a guide and Mr. Gore for variety,
to occupy the time of the Irish friend whom Lord Skye was bravely
entertaining.
This gentleman, who bore the title of Dunbeg, was a dilapidated peer,
neither wealthy nor famous. Lord Skye brought him to call on Mrs. Lee,
and in some sort put him under her care. He was young, not ill-looking,
quite intelligent, rather too fond of facts, and not quick at humour.
He was given to smiling in a deprecatory way, and when he talked, he
was either absent or excited; he made vague blunders, and then smiled
in deprecation of offence, or his words blocked their own path in their
rush. Perhaps his manner was a little ridiculous, but he had a good
heart, a good head, and a title. He found favour in the eyes of Sybil
and Victoria Dare, who declined to admit other women to the party,
although they offered no objection to Mr.
Ratcliffe's admission. As for Lord Dunbeg, he was an enthusiastic
admirer of General Washington, and, as he privately intimated, eager to
study phases of American society. He was delighted to go with a small
party, and Miss Dare secretly promised herself that she would show him a
phase.
The morning was warm, the sky soft, the little steamer lay at the quiet
wharf with a few negroes lazily watching her preparations for departure.
Carrington, with Mrs. Lee and the young ladies, arrived first, and stood
leaning against the rail, waiting the arrival of their companions. Then
came Mr. Gore, neatly attired and gloved, with a light spring overcoat;
for Mr.
Gore was very careful of his personal appearance, and not a little vain
of his good looks. Then a pretty woman, with blue eyes and blonde hair,
dressed in black, and leading a little girl by the hand, came on board,
and Carrington went to shake hands with her. On his return to Mrs. Lee's
side, she asked about his new acquaintance, and he replied with a
half-laugh, as though he were not proud of her, that she was a client,
a pretty widow, well known in Washington. “Any one at the Capitol would
tell you all about her. She was the wife of a noted lobbyist, who died
about two years ago. Congressmen can refuse nothing to a pretty face,
and she was their idea of feminine perfection. Yet she is a silly little
woman, too. Her husband died after a very short illness, and, to my
great surprise, made me executor under his will. I think he had an idea
that he could trust me with his papers, which were important and
compromising, for he seems to have had no time to go over them and
destroy what were best out of the way. So, you see, I am left with his
widow and child to look after. Luckily, they are well provided for.”
“Still you have not told me her name.”
“Her name is Baker--Mrs. Sam Baker. But they are casting off, and Mr.
Ratcliffe will be left behind. I'll ask the captain to wait.” About a
dozen passengers had arrived, among them the two Earls, with a footman
carrying a promising lunch-basket, and the planks were actually hauled
in when a carriage dashed up to the wharf, and Mr. Ratcliffe leaped out
and hurried on board. “Off with you as quick as you can!” said he to
the negro-hands, and in another moment the little steamer had begun her
journey, pounding the muddy waters of the Potomac and sending up its
small column of smoke as though it were a newly invented incense-burner
approaching the temple of the national deity. Ratcliffe explained in
great glee how he had barely managed to escape his visitors by telling
them that the British Minister was waiting for him, and that he would
be back again presently. “If they had known where I was going,” said
he, “you would have seen the boat swamped with office-seekers. Illinois
alone would have brought you to a watery grave.” He was in high spirits,
bent upon enjoying his holiday, and as they passed the arsenal with
its solitary sentry, and the navy-yard, with its one unseaworthy wooden
war-steamer, he pointed out these evidences of national grandeur to Lord
Skye, threatening, as the last terror of diplomacy, to send him home in
an American frigate. They were thus indulging in senatorial humour on
one side of the boat, while Sybil and Victoria, with the aid of Mr. Gore
and Carrington, were improving Lord Dunbeg's mind on the other.
Miss Dare, finding for herself at last a convenient seat where she could
repose and be mistress of the situation, put on a more than usually
demure expression and waited with gravity until her noble neighbour
should give her an opportunity to show those powers which, as she
believed, would supply a phase in his existence. Miss Dare was one of
those young persons, sometimes to be found in America, who seem to have
no object in life, and while apparently devoted to men, care nothing
about them, but find happiness only in violating rules; she made no
parade of whatever virtues she had, and her chief pleasure was to make
fun of all the world and herself.
“What a noble river!” remarked Lord Dunbeg, as the boat passed out upon
the wide stream; “I suppose you often sail on it?”
“I never was here in my life till now,” replied the untruthful Miss
Dare; “we don't think much of it; it s too small; we're used to so much
larger rivers.”
“I am afraid you would not like our English rivers then; they are mere
brooks compared with this.”
“Are they indeed?” said Victoria, with an appearance of vague surprise;
“how curious! I don't think I care to be an Englishwoman then. I could
not live without big rivers.”
Lord Dunbeg stared, and hinted that this was almost unreasonable.
“Unless I were a Countess!” continued Victoria, meditatively, looking
at Alexandria, and paying no attention to his lordship; “I think I could
manage if I were a C-c-countess. It is such a pretty title!”
“Duchess is commonly thought a prettier one,” stammered Dunbeg, much
embarrassed. The young man was not used to chaff from women.
“I should be satisfied with Countess. It sounds well. I am surprised
that you don't like it.” Dunbeg looked about him uneasily for some means
of escape but he was barred in. “I should think you would feel an awful
responsibility in selecting a Countess. How do you do it?”
Lord Dunbeg nervously joined in the general laughter as Sybil
ejaculated:
“Oh, Victoria!” but Miss Dare continued without a smile or any elevation
of her monotonous voice:
“Now, Sybil, don't interrupt me, please. I am deeply interested in Lord
Dunbeg's conversation. He understands that my interest is purely
scientific, but my happiness requires that I should know how Countesses
are selected. Lord Dunbeg, how would you recommend a friend to choose a
Countess?”
Lord Dunbeg began to be amused by her impudence, and he even tried to
lay down for her satisfaction one or two rules for selecting Countesses,
but long before he had invented his first rule, Victoria had darted off
to a new subject.
“Which would you rather be, Lord Dunbeg? an Earl or George Washington?”
“George Washington, certainly,” was the Earl's courteous though rather
bewildered reply.
“Really?” she asked with a languid affectation of surprise; “it is
awfully kind of you to say so, but of course you can't mean it.
“Indeed I do mean it.”
“Is it possible? I never should have thought it.”
“Why not, Miss Dare?”
“You have not the air of wishing to be George Washington.”
“May I again ask, why not?”
“Certainly. Did you ever see George Washington?”
“Of course not. He died fifty years before I was born.”
“I thought so. You see you don't know him. Now, will you give us an idea
of what you imagine General Washington to have looked like?”
Dunbeg gave accordingly a flattering description of General Washington,
compounded of Stuart's portrait and Greenough's statue of Olympian Jove
with Washington's features, in the Capitol Square. Miss Dare listened
with an expression of superiority not unmixed with patience, and then
she enlightened him as follows:
“All you have been saying is perfect stuff--excuse the vulgarity of the
expression. When I am a Countess I will correct my language. The
truth is that General Washington was a raw-boned country farmer, very
hard-featured, very awkward, very illiterate and very dull; very bad
tempered, very profane, and generally tipsy after dinner.”
“You shock me, Miss Dare!” exclaimed Dunbeg.
“Oh! I know all about General Washington. My grandfather knew him
intimately, and often stayed at Mount Vernon for weeks together. You
must not believe what you read, and not a word of what Mr. Carrington
will say. He is a Virginian and will tell you no end of fine stories and
not a syllable of truth in one of them. We are all patriotic about
Washington and like to hide his faults. If I weren't quite sure you
would never repeat it, I would not tell you this. The truth is that even
when George Washington was a small boy, his temper was so violent that
no one could do anything with him. He once cut down all his father's
fruit-trees in a fit of passion, and then, just because they wanted to
flog him, he threatened to brain his father with the hatchet. His aged
wife suffered agonies from him. My grandfather often told me how he had
seen the General pinch and swear at her till the poor creature left the
room in tears; and how once at Mount Vernon he saw Washington, when
quite an old man, suddenly rush at an unoffending visitor, and chase him
off the place, beating him all the time over the head with a great stick
with knots in it, and all just because he heard the poor man stammer; he
never could abide s-s-stammering.”
Carrington and Gore burst into shouts of laughter over this description
of the Father of his country, but Victoria continued in her gentle drawl
to enlighten Lord Dunbeg in regard to other subjects with information
equally mendacious, until he decided that she was quite the most
eccentric person he had ever met. The boat arrived at Mount Vernon while
she was still engaged in a description of the society and manners of
America, and especially of the rules which made an offer of marriage
necessary. According to her, Lord Dunbeg was in imminent peril;
gentlemen, and especially foreigners, were expected, in all the States
south of the Potomac, to offer themselves to at least one young lady in
every city: “and I had only yesterday,” said Victoria, “a letter from a
lovely girl in North Carolina, a dear friend of mine, who wrote me that
she was right put out because her brothers had called on a young English
visitor with shot guns, and she was afraid he wouldn't recover, and,
after all, she says she should have refused him.”
Meanwhile Madeleine, on the other side of the boat, undisturbed by the
laughter that surrounded Miss Dare, chatted soberly and seriously with
Lord Skye and Senator Ratcliffe. Lord Skye, too, a little intoxicated
by the brilliancy of the morning, broke out into admiration of the noble
river, and accused Americans of not appreciating the beauties of their
own country.
“Your national mind,” said he, “has no eyelids. It requires a broad
glare and a beaten road. It prefers shadows which you can cut out with a
knife. It doesn't know the beauty of this Virginia winter softness.”
Mrs. Lee resented the charge. America, she maintained, had not worn her
feelings threadbare like Europe. She had still her story to tell; she
was waiting for her Burns and Scott, her Wordsworth and Byron, her
Hogarth and Turner. “You want peaches in spring,” said she. “Give us
our thousand years of summer, and then complain, if you please, that our
peach is not as mellow as yours. Even our voices may be soft then,” she
added, with a significant look at Lord Skye.
“We are at a disadvantage in arguing with Mrs. Lee,” said he to
Ratcliffe; “when she ends as counsel, she begins as witness. The famous
Duchess of Devonshire's lips were not half as convincing as Mrs. Lee's
voice.”
Ratcliffe listened carefully, assenting whenever he saw that Mrs. Lee
wished it. He wished he understood precisely what tones and half-tones,
colours and harmonies, were.
They arrived and strolled up the sunny path. At the tomb they halted,
as all good Americans do, and Mr. Gore, in a tone of subdued sorrow,
delivered a short address--
“It might be much worse if they improved it,” he said, surveying its
proportions with the ;sthetic eye of a cultured Bostonian. “As it
stands, this tomb is a simple misfortune which might befall any of us;
we should not grieve over it too much. What would our feelings be if
a Congressional committee reconstructed it of white marble with Gothic
pepper-pots, and gilded it inside on machine-moulded stucco!”
Madeleine, however, insisted that the tomb, as it stood, was the only
restless spot about the quiet landscape, and that it contradicted all
her ideas about repose in the grave. Ratcliffe wondered what she meant.
They passed on, wandering across the lawn, and through the house. Their
eyes, weary of the harsh colours and forms of the city, took pleasure in
the worn wainscots and the stained walls. Some of the rooms were still
occupied; fires were burning in the wide fire-places. All were tolerably
furnished, and there was no uncomfortable sense of repair or newness.
They mounted the stairs, and Mrs. Lee fairly laughed when she was shown
the room in which General Washington slept, and where he died.
Carrington smiled too. “Our old Virginia houses were mostly like this,”
said he; “suites of great halls below, and these gaunt barracks above.
The Virginia house was a sort of hotel. When there was a race or a
wedding, or a dance, and the house was full, they thought nothing of
packing half a dozen people in one room, and if the room was large, they
stretched a sheet a cross to separate the men from the women. As for
toilet, those were not the mornings of cold baths. With our ancestors a
little washing went a long way.”
“Do you still live so in Virginia?” asked Madeleine.
“Oh no, it is quite gone. We live now like other country people, and try
to pay our debts, which that generation never did. They lived from hand
to mouth. They kept a stable-full of horses. The young men were always
riding about the country, betting on horse-races, gambling, drinking,
fighting, and making love. No one knew exactly what he was worth until
the crash came about fifty years ago, and the whole thing ran out.”
“Just what happened in Ireland!” said Lord Dunbeg, much interested and
full of his article in the Quarterly; “the resemblance is perfect, even
down to the houses.”
Mrs. Lee asked Carrington bluntly whether he regretted the destruction
of this old social arrangement.
“One can't help regretting,” said he, “whatever it was that produced
George Washington, and a crowd of other men like him. But I think we
might produce the men still if we had the same field for them.”
“And would you bring the old society back again if you could?” asked
she.
“What for? It could not hold itself up. General Washington himself could
not save it. Before he died he had lost his hold on Virginia, and his
power was gone.”
The party for a while separated, and Mrs. Lee found herself alone in the
great drawing-room. Presently the blonde Mrs. Baker entered, with her
child, who ran about making more noise than Mrs. Washington would have
permitted.
Madeleine, who had the usual feminine love of children, called the girl
to her and pointed out the shepherds and shepherdesses carved on the
white Italian marble of the fireplace; she invented a little story
about them to amuse the child, while the mother stood by and at the end
thanked the story-teller with more enthusiasm than seemed called for.
Mrs. Lee did not fancy her effusive manner, or her complexion, and was
glad when Dunbeg appeared at the doorway.
“How do you like General Washington at home?” asked she.
“Really, I assure you I feel quite at home myself,” replied Dunbeg, with
a more beaming smile than ever. “I am sure General Washington was an
Irishman. I know it from the look of the place. I mean to look it up and
write an article about it.”
“Then if you have disposed of him,” said Madeleine, “I think we will
have luncheon, and I have taken the liberty to order it to be served
outside.”
There a table had been improvised, and Miss Dare was inspecting the
lunch, and making comments upon Lord Skye's cuisine and cellar.
“I hope it is very dry champagne,” said she, “the taste for sweet
champagne is quite awfully shocking.”
The young woman knew no more about dry and sweet champagne than of the
wine of Ulysses, except that she drank both with equal satisfaction, but
she was mimicking a Secretary of the British Legation who had provided
her with supper at her last evening party. Lord Skye begged her to try
it, which she did, and with great gravity remarked that it was about
five per cent. she presumed. This, too, was caught from her Secretary,
though she knew no more what it meant than if she had been a parrot.
The luncheon was very lively and very good. When it was over, the
gentlemen were allowed to smoke, and conversation fell into a sober
strain, which at last threatened to become serious.
“You want half-tones!” said Madeleine to Lord Skye: “are there not
half-tones enough to suit you on the walls of this house?”
Lord Skye suggested that this was probably owing to the fact that
Washington, belonging, as he did, to the universe, was in his taste an
exception to local rules.
“Is not the sense of rest here captivating?” she continued. “Look at
that quaint garden, and this ragged lawn, and the great river in front,
and the superannuated fort beyond the river! Everything is peaceful,
even down to the poor old General's little bed-room. One would like to
lie down in it and sleep a century or two. And yet that dreadful Capitol
and its office-seekers are only ten miles off.”
“No! that is more than I can bear!” broke in Miss Victoria in a stage
whisper, “that dreadful Capitol! Why, not one of us would be here
without that dreadful Capitol! except, perhaps, myself.”
“You would appear very well as Mrs. Washington, Victoria.”
“Miss Dare has been so very obliging as to give us her views of General
Washington's character this morning,” said Dunbeg, “but I have not yet
had time to ask Mr. Carrington for his.”
“Whatever Miss Dare says is valuable,” replied Carrington, “but her
strong point is facts.”
“Never flatter! Mr. Carrington,” drawled Miss Dare; “I do not need it,
and it does not become your style. Tell me, Lord Dunbeg, is not Mr.
Carrington a little your idea of General Washington restored to us in
his prime?”
“After your account of General Washington, Miss Dare, how can I agree
with you?”
“After all,” said Lord Skye, “I think we must agree that Miss Dare is in
the main right about the charms of Mount Vernon. Even Mrs. Lee, on the
way up, agreed that the General, who is the only permanent resident
here, has the air of being confoundedly bored in his tomb. I don't
myself love your dreadful Capitol yonder, but I prefer it to a bucolic
life here. And I account in this way for my want of enthusiasm for your
great General. He liked no kind of life but this. He seems to have been
greater in the character of a home-sick Virginia planter than as General
or President. I forgive him his inordinate dulness, for he was not a
diplomatist and it was not his business to lie, but he might once in a
way have forgotten Mount Vernon.”
Dunbeg here burst in with an excited protest; all his words seemed to
shove each other aside in their haste to escape first. “All our greatest
Englishmen have been home-sick country squires. I am a home-sick country
squire myself.”
“How interesting!” said Miss Dare under her breath.
Mr. Gore here joined in: “It is all very well for you gentlemen to
measure General Washington according to your own private twelve-inch
carpenter's rule. But what will you say to us New Englanders who never
were country gentlemen at all, and never had any liking for Virginia?
What did Washington ever do for us? He never even pretended to like us.
He never was more than barely civil to us. I'm not finding fault with
him; everybody knows that he never cared for anything but Mount Vernon.
For all that, we idolize him. To us he is Morality, Justice, Duty,
Truth; half a dozen Roman gods with capital letters. He is austere,
solitary, grand; he ought to be deified. I hardly feel easy, eating,
drinking, smoking here on his portico without his permission, taking
liberties with his house, criticising his bedrooms in his absence.
Suppose I heard his horse now trotting up on the other side, and he
suddenly appeared at this door and looked at us. I should abandon you to
his indignation. I should run away and hide myself on the steamer. The
mere thought unmans me.”
Ratcliffe seemed amused at Gore's half-serious notions. “You recall
to me,” said he, “my own feelings when I was a boy and was made by my
father to learn the Farewell Address by heart. In those days General
Washington was a sort of American Jehovah. But the West is a poor
school for Reverence. Since coming to Congress I have learned more about
General Washington, and have been surprised to find what a narrow
base his reputation rests on. A fair military officer, who made many
blunders, and who never had more men than would make a full army-corps
under his command, he got an enormous reputation in Europe because he
did not make himself king, as though he ever had a chance of doing it.
A respectable, painstaking President, he was treated by the Opposition
with an amount of deference that would have made government easy to a
baby, but it worried him to death. His official papers are fairly done,
and contain good average sense such as a hundred thousand men in the
United States would now write. I suspect that half of his attachment to
this spot rose from his consciousness of inferior powers and his dread
of responsibility. This government can show to-day a dozen men of equal
abilities, but we don't deify them. What I most wonder at in him is
not his military or political genius at all, for I doubt whether he
had much, but a curious Yankee shrewdness in money matters. He thought
himself a very rich man, yet he never spent a dollar foolishly. He was
almost the only Virginian I ever heard of, in public life, who did not
die insolvent.”
During this long speech, Carrington glanced across at Madeleine, and
caught her eye. Ratcliffe's criticism was not to her taste. Carrington
could see that she thought it unworthy of him, and he knew that it would
irritate her.
“I will lay a little trap for Mr. Ratcliffe,” thought he to himself;
“we will see whether he gets out of it.” So Carrington began, and all
listened closely, for, as a Virginian, he was supposed to know much
about the subject, and his family had been deep in the confidence of
Washington himself.
“The neighbours hereabout had for many years, and may have still, some
curious stories about General Washington's closeness in money matters.
They said he never bought anything by weight but he had it weighed over
again, nor by tale but he had it counted, and if the weight or number
were not exact, he sent it back. Once, during his absence, his steward
had a room plastered, and paid the plasterer's bill. On the General's
return, he measured the room, and found that the plasterer had charged
fifteen shillings too much. Meanwhile the man had died, and the General
made a claim of fifteen shillings on his estate, which was paid. Again,
one of his tenants brought him the rent. The exact change of fourpence
was required. The man tendered a dollar, and asked the General to credit
him with the balance against the next year's rent. The General refused
and made him ride nine miles to Alexandria and back for the fourpence.
On the other hand, he sent to a shoemaker in Alexandria to come and
measure him for shoes. The man returned word that he did not go to any
one's house to take measures, and the General mounted his horse and rode
the nine miles to him. One of his rules was to pay at taverns the same
sum for his servants' meals as for his own. An inn-keeper brought him a
bill of three-and-ninepence for his own breakfast, and three shillings
for his servant. He insisted upon adding the extra ninepence, as he did
not doubt that the servant had eaten as much as he. What do you say to
these anecdotes? Was this meanness or not?”
Ratcliffe was amused. “The stories are new to me,” he said. “It is just
as I thought. These are signs of a man who thinks much of trifles; one
who fusses over small matters. We don't do things in that way now that
we no longer have to get crops from granite, as they used to do in New
Hampshire when I was a boy.”
Carrington replied that it was unlucky for Virginians that they had not
done things in that way then: if they had, they would not have gone to
the dogs.
Gore shook his head seriously; “Did I not tell you so?” said he. “Was
not this man an abstract virtue? I give you my word I stand in awe
before him, and I feel ashamed to pry into these details of his life.
What is it to us how he thought proper to apply his principles to
nightcaps and feather dusters? We are not his body servants, and we
care nothing about his infirmities. It is enough for us to know that he
carried his rules of virtue down to a pin's point, and that we ought,
one and all, to be on our knees before his tomb.”
Dunbeg, pondering deeply, at length asked Carrington whether all this
did not make rather a clumsy politician of the father of his country.
“Mr. Ratcliffe knows more about politics than I. Ask him,” said
Carrington.
“Washington was no politician at all, as we understand the word,”
replied Ratcliffe abruptly. “He stood outside of politics. The thing
couldn't be done to-day. The people don't like that sort of royal airs.”
“I don't understand!” said Mrs. Lee. “Why could you not do it now?”
“Because I should make a fool of myself;” replied Ratcliffe, pleased to
think that Mrs. Lee should put him on a level with Washington. She had
only meant to ask why the thing could not be done, and this little touch
of Ratcliffe's vanity was inimitable.
“Mr. Ratcliffe means that Washington was too respectable for our time,”
interposed Carrington.
This was deliberately meant to irritate Ratcliffe, and it did so all
the more because Mrs. Lee turned to Carrington, and said, with some
bitterness:
“Was he then the only honest public man we ever had?”
“Oh no!” replied Carrington cheerfully; “there have been one or two
others.”
“If the rest of our Presidents had been like him,” said Gore, “we should
have had fewer ugly blots on our short history.”
Ratcliffe was exasperated at Carrington's habit of drawing discussion to
this point. He felt the remark as a personal insult, and he knew it to
be intended. “Public men,” he broke out, “cannot be dressing themselves
to-day in Washington's old clothes. If Washington were President now, he
would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and
theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long
poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our
purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office,
and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will
be.”
“Come,” said Lord Skye, who was beginning to fear an open quarrel; “the
conversation verges on treason, and I am accredited to this government.
Why not examine the grounds?”
A kind of natural sympathy led Lord Dunbeg to wander by the side of Miss
Dare through the quaint old garden. His mind being much occupied by the
effort of stowing away the impressions he had just received, he was more
than usually absent in his manner, and this want of attention irritated
the young lady. She made some comments on flowers; she invented some
new species with startling names; she asked whether these were known in
Ireland; but Lord Dunbeg was for the moment so vague in his answers that
she saw her case was perilous.
“Here is an old sun-dial. Do you have sun-dials in Ireland, Lord
Dunbeg?”
“Yes; oh, certainly! What! sun-dials? Oh, yes! I assure you there are a
great many sun-dials in Ireland, Miss Dare.”
“I am so glad. But I suppose they are only for ornament. Here it is just
the other way. Look at this one! they all behave like that. The wear and
tear of our sun is too much for them; they don't last. My uncle, who has
a place at Long Branch, had five sun-dials in ten years.”
“How very odd! But really now, Miss Dare, I don't see how a sun--dial
could wear out.”
“Don't you? How strange! Don't you see, they get soaked with sunshine so
that they can't hold shadow. It's like me, you know. I have such a
good time all the time that I can't be unhappy. Do you ever read the
Burlington Hawkeye, Lord Dunbeg?”
“I don't remember; I think not. Is it an American serial?” gasped
Dunbeg, trying hard to keep pace with Miss Dare in her reckless dashes
across country.
“No, not serial at all!” replied Virginia; “but I am afraid you would
find it very hard reading. I shouldn't try.”
“Do you read it much, Miss Dare?”
“Oh, always! I am not really as light as I seem. But then I have an
advantage over you because I know the language.”
By this time Dunbeg was awake again, and Miss Dare, satisfied with her
success, allowed herself to become more reasonable, until a slight shade
of sentiment began to flicker about their path.
The scattered party, however, soon had to unite again. The boat rang
its bell for return, they filed down the paths and settled themselves
in their old places. As they steamed away, Mrs. Lee watched the sunny
hill-side and the peaceful house above, until she could see them no
more, and the longer she looked, the less she was pleased with herself.
Was it true, as Victoria Dare said, that she could not live in so pure
an air? Did she really need the denser fumes of the city? Was she,
unknown to herself; gradually becoming tainted with the life about her?
or was Ratcliffe right in accepting the good and the bad together, and
in being of his time since he was in it? Why was it, she said bitterly
to herself; that everything Washington touched, he purified, even down
to the associations of his house? and why is it that everything we touch
seems soiled? Why do I feel unclean when I look at Mount Vernon? In
spite of Mr. Ratcliffe, is it not better to be a child and to cry for
the moon and stars?
The little Baker girl came up to her where she stood, and began playing
with her parasol.
“Who is your little friend?” asked Ratcliffe.
Mrs. Lee rather vaguely replied that she was the daughter of that pretty
woman in black; she believed her name was Baker.
“Baker, did you say?” repeated Ratcliffe.
“Baker--Mrs. Sam Baker; at least so Mr. Carrington told me; he said she
was a client of his.”
In fact Ratcliffe soon saw Carrington go up to her and remain by her
side during the rest of the trip. Ratcliffe watched them sharply and
grew more and more absorbed in his own thoughts as the boat drew nearer
and nearer the shore.
Carrington was in high spirits. He thought he had played his cards with
unusual success. Even Miss Dare deigned to acknowledge his charms that
day.
She declared herself to be the moral image of Martha Washington, and she
started a discussion whether Carrington or Lord Dunbeg would best suit
her in the r;le of the General.
“Mr. Carrington is exemplary,” she said, “but oh, what joy to be Martha
Washington and a Countess too!”
Chapter VII
WHEN he reached his rooms that afternoon, Senator Ratcliffe found
there, as he expected, a choice company of friends and admirers, who had
beguiled their leisure hours since noon by cursing him in every variety
of profane language that experience could suggest and impatience
stimulate. On his part, had he consulted his own feelings only, he would
then and there have turned them out, and locked the doors behind them.
So far as silent maledictions were concerned, no profanity of theirs
could hold its own against the intensity and deliberation with which,
as he found himself approaching his own door, he expressed between his
teeth his views in respect to their eternal interests. Nothing could be
less suited to his present humour than the society which awaited him in
his rooms. He groaned in spirit as he sat down at his writing-table and
looked about him. Dozens of office-seekers were besieging the house;
men whose patriotic services in the last election called loudly for
recognition from a grateful country.
They brought their applications to the Senator with an entreaty that he
would endorse and take charge of them. Several members and senators who
felt that Ratcliffe had no reason for existence except to fight their
battle for patronage, were lounging about his room, reading newspapers,
or beguiling their time with tobacco in various forms; at long
intervals making dull remarks, as though they were more weary than their
constituents of the atmosphere that surrounds the grandest government
the sun ever shone upon.
Several newspaper correspondents, eager to barter their news for
Ratcliffe's hints or suggestions, appeared from time to time on the
scene, and, dropping into a chair by Ratcliffe's desk, whispered with
him in mysterious tones.
Thus the Senator worked on, hour after hour, mechanically doing what was
required of him, signing papers without reading them, answering remarks
without hearing them, hardly looking up from his desk, and appearing
immersed in labour. This was his protection against curiosity and
garrulity.
The pretence of work was the curtain he drew between himself and the
world.
Behind this curtain his mental operations went on, undisturbed by what
was about him, while he heard all that was said, and said little or
nothing himself. His followers respected this privacy, and left him
alone. He was their prophet, and had a right to seclusion. He was their
chieftain, and while he sat in his monosyllabic solitude, his ragged
tail reclined in various attitudes about him, and occasionally one man
spoke, or another swore. Newspapers and tobacco were their resource in
periods of absolute silence.
A shade of depression rested on the faces and the voices of Clan
Ratcliffe that evening, as is not unusual with forces on the eve of
battle. Their remarks came at longer intervals, and were more pointless
and random than usual. There was a want of elasticity in their bearing
and tone, partly coming from sympathy with the evident depression of
their chief; partly from the portents of the time. The President was to
arrive within forty-eight hours, and as yet there was no sign that
he properly appreciated their services; there were signs only too
unmistakeable that he was painfully misled and deluded, that his
countenance was turned wholly in another direction, and that all their
sacrifices were counted as worthless. There was reason to believe that
he came with a deliberate purpose of making war upon Ratcliffe and
breaking him down; of refusing to bestow patronage on them, and of
bestowing it wherever it would injure them most deeply. At the thought
that their honestly earned harvest of foreign missions and consulates,
department-bureaus, custom-house and revenue offices, postmasterships,
Indian agencies, and army and navy contracts, might now be wrung from
their grasp by the selfish greed of a mere accidental intruder--a man
whom nobody wanted and every one ridiculed--their natures rebelled, and
they felt that such things must not be; that there could be no more hope
for democratic government if such things were possible. At this point
they invariably became excited, lost their equanimity, and swore. Then
they fell back on their faith in Ratcliffe: if any man could pull them
through, he could; after all, the President must first reckon with him,
and he was an uncommon tough customer to tackle.
Perhaps, however, even their faith in Ratcliffe might have been shaken,
could they at that moment have looked into his mind and understood what
was passing there. Ratcliffe was a man vastly their superior, and he
knew it. He lived in a world of his own and had instincts of refinement.
Whenever his affairs went unfavourably, these instincts revived, and for
the time swept all his nature with them. He was now filled with disgust
and cynical contempt for every form of politics. During long years
he had done his best for his party; he had sold himself to the devil,
coined his heart's blood, toiled with a dogged persistence that no
day-labourer ever conceived; and all for what? To be rejected as its
candidate; to be put under the harrow of a small Indiana farmer who
made no secret of the intention to “corral” him, and, as he elegantly
expressed it, to “take his hide and tallow.” Ratcliffe had no great fear
of losing his hide, but he felt aggrieved that he should be called
upon to defend it, and that this should be the result of twenty years'
devotion. Like most men in the same place, he did not stop to cast
up both columns of his account with the party, nor to ask himself the
question that lay at the heart of his grievance: How far had he served
his party and how far himself? He was in no humour for self-analysis:
this requires more repose of mind than he could then command. As for
the President, from whom he had not heard a whisper since the insolent
letter to Grimes, which he had taken care not to show, the Senator felt
only a strong impulse to teach him better sense and better manners. But
as for political life, the events of the last six months were calculated
to make any man doubt its value. He was quite out of sympathy with it.
He hated the sight of his tobacco-chewing, newspaper-reading satellites,
with their hats tipped at every angle except the right one, and their
feet everywhere except on the floor. Their conversation bored him and
their presence was a nuisance. He would not submit to this slavery
longer. He would have given his Senatorship for a civilized house like
Mrs. Lee's, with a woman like Mrs. Lee at its head, and twenty thousand
a year for life. He smiled his only smile that evening when he thought
how rapidly she would rout every man Jack of his political following out
of her parlours, and how meekly they would submit to banishment into a
back-office with an oil-cloth carpet and two cane chairs.
He felt that Mrs. Lee was more necessary to him than the Presidency
itself; he could not go on without her; he needed human companionship;
some Christian comfort for his old age; some avenue of communication
with that social world, which made his present surroundings look cold
and foul; some touch of that refinement of mind and morals beside which
his own seemed coarse. He felt unutterably lonely. He wished Mrs.
Lee had asked him home to dinner; but Mrs. Lee had gone to bed with a
headache. He should not see her again for a week. Then his mind turned
back upon their morning at Mount Vernon, and bethinking himself of Mrs.
Sam Baker, he took a sheet of note-paper, and wrote a line to Wilson
Keen, Esq., at Georgetown, requesting him to call, if possible, the
next morning towards one o'clock at the Senator's rooms on a matter
of business. Wilson Keen was chief of the Secret Service Bureau in the
Treasury Department, and, as the depositary of all secrets, was often
called upon for assistance which he was very good-natured in furnishing
to senators, especially if they were likely to be Secretaries of the
Treasury.
This note despatched, Mr. Ratcliffe fell back into his reflective mood,
which led him apparently into still lower depths of discontent until,
with a muttered oath, he swore he could “stand no more of this,” and,
suddenly rising, he informed his visitors that he was sorry to leave
them, but he felt rather poorly and was going to bed; and to bed he
went, while his guests departed, each as his business or desires might
point him, some to drink whiskey and some to repose.
On Sunday morning Mr. Ratcliffe, as usual, went to church. He always
attended morning service--at the Methodist Episcopal Church--not wholly
on the ground of religious conviction, but because a large number of his
constituents were church-going people and he would not willingly shock
their principles so long as he needed their votes. In church, he kept
his eyes closely fixed upon the clergyman, and at the end of the sermon
he could say with truth that he had not heard a word of it, although the
respectable minister was gratified by the attention his discourse had
received from the Senator from Illinois, an attention all the more
praiseworthy because of the engrossing public cares which must at
that moment have distracted the Senator's mind. In this last idea,
the minister was right. Mr. Ratcliffe's mind was greatly distracted by
public cares, and one of his strongest reasons for going to church at
all was that he might get an hour or two of undisturbed reflection.
During the entire service he was absorbed in carrying on a series
of imaginary conversations with the new President. He brought up in
succession every form of proposition which the President might make to
him; every trap which could be laid for him; every sort of treatment he
might expect, so that he could not be taken by surprise, and his frank,
simple nature could never be at a loss. One object, however, long
escaped him. Supposing, what was more than probable, that the
President's opposition to Ratcliffe's declared friends made it
impossible to force any of them into office; it would then be necessary
to try some new man, not obnoxious to the President, as a candidate for
the Cabinet. Who should this be? Ratcliffe pondered long and deeply,
searching out a man who combined the most powerful interests, with the
fewest enmities. This subject was still uppermost at the moment when
service ended. Ratcliffe pondered over it as he walked back to his
rooms. Not until he reached his own door did he come to a conclusion:
Carson would do; Carson of Pennsylvania; the President had probably
never heard of him.
Mr. Wilson Keen was waiting the Senator's return, a heavy man with a
square face, and good-natured, active blue eyes; a man of few words and
those well-considered. The interview was brief. After apologising for
breaking in upon Sunday with business, Mr. Ratcliffe excused himself on
the ground that so little time was left before the close of the session.
A bill now before one of his Committees, on which a report must soon
be made, involved matters to which it was believed that the late Samuel
Baker, formerly a well-known lobby-agent in Washington, held the only
clue. He being dead, Mr. Ratcliffe wished to know whether he had left
any papers behind him, and in whose hands these papers were, or whether
any partner or associate of his was acquainted with his affairs.
Mr. Keen made a note of the request, merely remarking that he had been
very well acquainted with Baker, and also a little with his wife, who
was supposed to know his affairs as well as he knew them himself; and
who was still in Washington. He thought he could bring the information
in a day or two. As he then rose to go, Mr. Ratcliffe added that entire
secrecy was necessary, as the interests involved in obstructing the
search were considerable, and it was not well to wake them up. Mr. Keen
assented and went his way.
All this was natural enough and entirely proper, at least so far as
appeared on the surface. Had Mr. Keen been so curious in other people's
affairs as to look for the particular legislative measure which lay at
the bottom of Mr.
Ratcliffe's inquiries, he might have searched among the papers of
Congress a very long time and found himself greatly puzzled at last. In
fact there was no measure of the kind. The whole story was a fiction.
Mr. Ratcliffe had scarcely thought of Baker since his death, until the
day before, when he had seen his widow on the Mount Vernon steamer and
had found her in relations with Carrington. Something in Carrington's
habitual attitude and manner towards himself had long struck him as
peculiar, and this connection with Mrs. Baker had suggested to the
Senator the idea that it might be well to have an eye on both. Mrs.
Baker was a silly woman, as he knew, and there were old transactions
between Ratcliffe and Baker of which she might be informed, but which
Ratcliffe had no wish to see brought within Mrs. Lee's ken. As for
the fiction invented to set Keen in motion, it was an innocent one.
It harmed nobody. Ratcliffe selected this particular method of inquiry
because it was the easiest, safest, and most effectual. If he were
always to wait until he could afford to tell the precise truth, business
would very soon be at a standstill, and his career at an end.
This little matter disposed of; the Senator from Illinois passed his
afternoon in calling upon some of his brother senators, and the first
of those whom he honoured with a visit was Mr. Krebs, of Pennsylvania.
There were many reasons which now made the co-operation of that
high-minded statesman essential to Mr. Ratcliffe. The strongest of them
was that the Pennsylvania delegation in Congress was well disciplined
and could be used with peculiar advantage for purposes of “pressure.”
Ratcliffe's success in his contest with the new President depended
on the amount of “pressure” he could employ. To keep himself in the
background, and to fling over the head of the raw Chief Magistrate a web
of intertwined influences, any one of which alone would be useless, but
which taken together were not to be broken through; to revive the lost
art of the Roman retiarius, who from a safe distance threw his net over
his adversary, before attacking with the dagger; this was Ratcliffe's
intention and towards this he had been directing all his manipulation
for weeks past. How much bargaining and how many promises he found it
necessary to make, was known to himself alone. About this time Mrs. Lee
was a little surprised to find Mr. Gore speaking with entire confidence
of having Ratcliffe's support in his application for the Spanish
mission, for she had rather imagined that Gore was not a favourite with
Ratcliffe. She noticed too that Schneidekoupon had come back again and
spoke mysteriously of interviews with Ratcliffe; of attempts to unite
the interests of New York and Pennsylvania; and his countenance took on
a dark and dramatic expression as he proclaimed that no sacrifice of the
principle of protection should be tolerated. Schneidekoupon disappeared
as suddenly as he came, and from Sybil's innocent complaints of
his spirits and temper, Mrs. Lee jumped to the conclusion that Mr.
Ratcliffe, Mr. Clinton, and Mr.
Krebs had for the moment combined to sit heavily upon poor
Schneidekoupon, and to remove his disturbing influence from the scene,
at least until other men should get what they wanted. These were merely
the trifling incidents that fell within Mrs. Lee's observation. She felt
an atmosphere of bargain and intrigue, but she could only imagine how
far it extended. Even Carrington, when she spoke to him about it, only
laughed and shook his head:
“Those matters are private, my dear Mrs. Lee; you and I are not meant to
know such things.”
This Sunday afternoon Mr. Ratcliffe's object was to arrange the little
manoeuvre about Carson of Pennsylvania, which had disturbed him in
church.
His efforts were crowned with success. Krebs accepted Carson and
promised to bring him forward at ten minutes' notice, should the
emergency arise.
Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was
marvellous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man who had ever
been in politics in this country, could--his admirers said--have brought
together so many hostile interests and made so fantastic a combination.
Some men went so far as to maintain that he would “rope in the President
himself before the old man had time to swap knives with him.” The beauty
of his work consisted in the skill with which he evaded questions of
principle. As he wisely said, the issue now involved was not one of
principle but of power.
The fate of that noble party to which they all belonged, and which had
a record that could never be forgotten, depended on their letting
principle alone. Their principle must be the want of principles. There
were indeed individuals who said in reply that Ratcliffe had made
promises which never could be carried out, and there were almost
superhuman elements of discord in the combination, but as Ratcliffe
shrewdly rejoined, he only wanted it to last a week, and he guessed his
promises would hold it up for that time.
Such was the situation when on Monday afternoon the President-elect
arrived in Washington, and the comedy began. The new President was,
almost as much as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Pierce, an unknown
quantity in political mathematics. In the national convention of the
party, nine months before, after some dozens of fruitless ballots in
which Ratcliffe wanted but three votes of a majority, his opponents had
done what he was now doing; they had laid aside their principles and
set up for their candidate a plain Indiana farmer, whose political
experience was limited to stump-speaking in his native State, and to one
term as Governor. They had pitched upon him, not because they thought
him competent, but because they hoped by doing so to detach Indiana from
Ratcliffe's following, and they were so successful that within fifteen
minutes Ratcliffe's friends were routed, and the Presidency had fallen
upon this new political Buddha.
He had begun his career as a stone-cutter in a quarry, and was, not
unreasonably, proud of the fact. During the campaign this incident had,
of course, filled a large space in the public mind, or, more exactly,
in the public eye. “The Stone-cutter of the Wabash,” he was sometimes
called; at others “the Hoosier Quarryman,” but his favourite appellation
was “Old Granite,” although this last endearing name, owing to an
unfortunate similarity of sound, was seized upon by his opponents, and
distorted into “Old Granny.” He had been painted on many thousand yards
of cotton sheeting, either with a terrific sledge-hammer, smashing the
skulls (which figured as paving-stones) of his political opponents, or
splitting by gigantic blows a huge rock typical of the opposing party.
His opponents in their turn had paraded illuminations representing the
Quarryman in the garb of a State's-prison convict breaking the heads
of Ratcliffe and other well-known political leaders with a very feeble
hammer, or as “Old Granny” in pauper's rags, hopelessly repairing with
the same heads the impossible roads which typified the ill-conditioned
and miry ways of his party. But these violations of decency and good
sense were universally reproved by the virtuous; and it was remarked
with satisfaction that the purest and most highly cultivated newspaper
editors on his side, without excepting those of Boston itself; agreed
with one voice that the Stone-cutter was a noble type of man, perhaps
the very noblest that had appeared to adorn this country since the
incomparable Washington.
That he was honest, all admitted; that is to say, all who voted for him.
This is a general characteristic of all new presidents. He himself took
great pride in his home-spun honesty, which is a quality peculiar to
nature's noblemen. Owing nothing, as he conceived, to politicians,
but sympathising through every fibre of his unselfish nature with the
impulses and aspirations of the people, he affirmed it to be his first
duty to protect the people from those vultures, as he called them,
those wolves in sheep's clothing, those harpies, those hyenas, the
politicians; epithets which, as generally interpreted, meant Ratcliffe
and Ratcliffe's friends.
His cardinal principle in politics was hostility to Ratcliffe, yet he
was not vindictive. He came to Washington determined to be the Father of
his country; to gain a proud immortality and a re-election.
Upon this gentleman Ratcliffe had let loose all the forms of “pressure”
which could be set in motion either in or out of Washington. From the
moment when he had left his humble cottage in Southern Indiana, he had
been captured by Ratcliffe's friends, and smothered in demonstrations
of affection. They had never allowed him to suggest the possibility
of ill-feeling. They had assumed as a matter of course that the most
cordial attachment existed between him and his party. On his arrival
in Washington they systematically cut him off from contact with any
influences but their own. This was not a very difficult thing to do, for
great as he was, he liked to be told of his greatness, and they made him
feel himself a colossus. Even the few personal friends in his company
were manipulated with the utmost care, and their weaknesses put to use
before they had been in Washington a single day.
Not that Ratcliffe had anything to do with all this underhand
and grovelling intrigue. Mr. Ratcliffe was a man of dignity and
self-respect, who left details to his subordinates. He waited calmly
until the President, recovered from the fatigues of his journey, should
begin to feel the effect of a Washington atmosphere. Then on Wednesday
morning, Mr. Ratcliffe left his rooms an hour earlier than usual on his
way to the Senate, and called at the President's Hotel: he was ushered
into a large apartment in which the new Chief Magistrate was holding
court, although at sight of Ratcliffe, the other visitors edged away
or took their hats and left the room. The President proved to be a
hard-featured man of sixty, with a hooked nose and thin, straight,
iron-gray hair. His voice was rougher than his features and he received
Ratcliffe awkwardly. He had suffered since his departure from Indiana.
Out there it had seemed a mere flea-bite, as he expressed it, to brush
Ratcliffe aside, but in Washington the thing was somehow different.
Even his own Indiana friends looked grave when he talked of it, and
shook their heads. They advised him to be cautious and gain time; to
lead Ratcliffe on, and if possible to throw on him the responsibility of
a quarrel. He was, therefore, like a brown bear undergoing the process
of taming; very ill-tempered, very rough, and at the same time very much
bewildered and a little frightened. Ratcliffe sat ten minutes with him,
and obtained information in regard to pains which the President had
suffered during the previous night, in consequence, as he believed, of
an over-indulgence in fresh lobster, a luxury in which he had found a
diversion from the cares of state. So soon as this matter was explained
and condoled upon, Ratcliffe rose and took leave.
Every device known to politicians was now in full play against the
Hoosier Quarryman. State delegations with contradictory requests were
poured in upon him, among which that of Massachusetts presented as
its only prayer the appointment of Mr. Gore to the Spanish mission.
Difficulties were invented to embarrass and worry him. False leads were
suggested, and false information carefully mingled with true. A wild
dance was kept up under his eyes from daylight to midnight, until his
brain reeled with the effort to follow it. Means were also found to
convert one of his personal, confidential friends, who had come with him
from Indiana and who had more brains or less principle than the others;
from him every word of the President was brought directly to Ratcliffe's
ear.
Early on Friday morning, Mr. Thomas Lord, a rival of the late Samuel
Baker, and heir to his triumphs, appeared in Ratcliffe's rooms while the
Senator was consuming his lonely egg and chop. Mr. Lord had been chosen
to take general charge of the presidential party and to direct all
matters connected with Ratcliffe's interests. Some people might consider
this the work of a spy; he looked on it as a public duty. He reported
that “Old Granny” had at last shown signs of weakness. Late the previous
evening when, according to his custom, he was smoking his pipe in
company with his kitchen-cabinet of followers, he had again fallen upon
the subject of Ratcliffe, and with a volley of oaths had sworn that he
would show him his place yet, and that he meant to offer him a seat in
the Cabinet that would make him “sicker than a stuck hog.” From this
remark and some explanatory hints that followed, it seemed that the
Quarryman had abandoned his scheme of putting Ratcliffe to immediate
political death, and had now undertaken to invite him into a Cabinet
which was to be specially constructed to thwart and humiliate him.
The President, it appeared, warmly applauded the remark of one
counsellor, that Ratcliffe was safer in the Cabinet than in the Senate,
and that it would be easy to kick him out when the time came.
Ratcliffe smiled grimly as Mr. Lord, with much clever mimicry, described
the President's peculiarities of language and manner, but he said
nothing and waited for the event. The same evening came a note from the
President's private secretary requesting his attendance, if possible,
to-morrow, Saturday morning, at ten o'clock. The note was curt and cool.
Ratcliffe merely sent back word that he would come, and felt a little
regret that the President should not know enough etiquette to understand
that this verbal answer was intended as a hint to improve his manners.
He did come accordingly, and found the President looking blacker
than before. This time there was no avoiding of tender subjects. The
President meant to show Ratcliffe by the decision of his course, that
he was master of the situation. He broke at once into the middle of
the matter: “I sent for you,” said he, “to consult with you about my
Cabinet. Here is a list of the gentlemen I intend to invite into it. You
will see that I have got you down for the Treasury. Will you look at the
list and say what you think of it?”
Ratcliffe took the paper, but laid it at once on the table without
looking at it. “I can have no objection,” said he, “to any Cabinet you
may appoint, provided I am not included in it. My wish is to remain
where I am. There I can serve your administration better than in the
Cabinet.”
“Then you refuse?” growled the President.
“By no means. I only decline to offer any advice or even to hear the
names of my proposed colleagues until it is decided that my services
are necessary. If they are, I shall accept without caring with whom I
serve.”
The President glared at him with an uneasy look. What was to be done
next?
He wanted time to think, but Ratcliffe was there and must be disposed
of. He involuntarily became more civil: “Mr. Ratcliffe, your refusal
would knock everything on the head. I thought that matter was all fixed.
What more can I do?”
But Ratcliffe had no mind to let the President out of his clutches so
easily, and a long conversation followed, during which he forced his
antagonist into the position of urging him to take the Treasury in order
to prevent some undefined but portentous mischief in the Senate. All
that could be agreed upon was that Ratcliffe should give a positive
answer within two days, and on that agreement he took his leave.
As he passed through the corridor, a number of gentlemen were waiting
for interviews with the President, and among them was the whole
Pennsylvania delegation, “ready for biz,” as Mr. Tom Lord remarked, with
a wink.
Ratcliffe drew Krebs aside and they exchanged a few words as he passed
out.
Ten minutes afterwards the delegation was admitted, and some of its
members were a little surprised to hear their spokesman, Senator Krebs,
press with extreme earnestness and in their names, the appointment of
Josiah B. Carson to a place in the Cabinet, when they had been given to
understand that they came to recommend Jared Caldwell as postmaster
of Philadelphia. But Pennsylvania is a great and virtuous State, whose
representatives have entire confidence in their chief. Not one of them
so much as winked.
The dance of democracy round the President now began again with wilder
energy. Ratcliffe launched his last bolts. His two-days' delay was a
mere cover for bringing new influences to bear. He needed no delay. He
wanted no time for reflection. The President had undertaken to put
him on the horns of a dilemma; either to force him into a hostile and
treacherous Cabinet, or to throw on him the blame of a refusal and
a quarrel. He meant to embrace one of the horns and to impale the
President on it, and he felt perfect confidence in his own success. He
meant to accept the Treasury and he was ready to back himself with a
heavy wager to get the government entirely into his own hands within six
weeks. His contempt for the Hoosier Stone-cutter was unbounded, and his
confidence in himself more absolute than ever.
Busy as he was, the Senator made his appearance the next evening at Mrs.
Lee's, and finding her alone with Sybil, who was occupied with her
own little devices, Ratcliffe told Madeleine the story of his week's
experience.
He did not dwell on his exploits. On the contrary he quite ignored those
elaborate arrangements which had taken from the President his power of
volition. His picture presented himself; solitary and unprotected, in
the character of that honest beast who was invited to dine with the lion
and saw that all the footmarks of his predecessors led into the lion's
cave, and none away from it. He described in humorous detail his
interviews with the Indiana lion, and the particulars of the surfeit of
lobster as given in the President's dialect; he even repeated to her the
story told him by Mr. Tom Lord, without omitting oaths or gestures; he
told her how matters stood at the moment, and how the President had laid
a trap for him which he could not escape; he must either enter a
Cabinet constructed on purpose to thwart him and with the certainty of
ignominious dismissal at the first opportunity, or he must refuse an
offer of friendship which would throw on him the blame of a quarrel, and
enable the President to charge all future difficulties to the account
of Ratcliffe's “insatiable ambition.” “And now, Mrs. Lee,” he continued,
with increasing seriousness of tone; “I want your advice; what shall I
do?”
Even this half revelation of the meanness which distorted politics; this
one-sided view of human nature in its naked deformity playing pranks
with the interests of forty million people, disgusted and depressed
Madeleine's mind. Ratclife spared her nothing except the exposure of
his own moral sores. He carefully called her attention to every leprous
taint upon his neighbours' persons, to every rag in their foul clothing,
to every slimy and fetid pool that lay beside their path. It was his way
of bringing his own qualities into relief. He meant that she should go
hand in hand with him through the brimstone lake, and the more repulsive
it seemed to her, the more overwhelming would his superiority become. He
meant to destroy those doubts of his character which Carrington was so
carefully fostering, to rouse her sympathy, to stimulate her feminine
sense of self-sacrifice.
When he asked this question she looked up at him with an expression of
indignant pride, as she spoke:
“I say again, Mr. Ratcliffe, what I said once before. Do whatever is
most for the public good.”
“And what is most for the public good?”
Madeleine half opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated, and stared
silently into the fire before her. What was indeed most for the public
good?
Where did the public good enter at all into this maze of personal
intrigue, this wilderness of stunted natures where no straight road
was to be found, but only the tortuous and aimless tracks of beasts and
things that crawl?
Where was she to look for a principle to guide, an ideal to set up and
to point at?
Ratcliffe resumed his appeal, and his manner was more serious than ever.
“I am hard pressed, Mrs. Lee. My enemies encompass me about. They mean
to ruin me. I honestly wish to do my duty. You once said that personal
considerations should have no weight. Very well! throw them away! And
now tell me what I should do.”
For the first time, Mrs. Lee began to feel his power. He was simple,
straightforward, earnest. His words moved her. How should she imagine
that he was playing upon her sensitive nature precisely as he played
upon the President's coarse one, and that this heavy western politician
had the instincts of a wild Indian in their sharpness and quickness of
perception; that he divined her character and read it as he read the
faces and tones of thousands from day to day? She was uneasy under his
eye. She began a sentence, hesitated in the middle, and broke down. She
lost her command of thought, and sat dumb-founded. He had to draw her
out of the confusion he had himself made.
“I see your meaning in your face. You say that I should accept the duty
and disregard the consequences.”
“I don't know,” said Madeleine, hesitatingly; “Yes, I think that would
be my feeling.”
“And when I fall a sacrifice to that man's envy and intrigue, what will
you think then, Mrs. Lee? Will you not join the rest of the world and
say that I overreached myself; and walked into this trap with my eyes
open, and for my own objects? Do you think I shall ever be thought
better of; for getting caught here? I don't parade high moral views like
our friend French. I won't cant about virtue. But I do claim that in
my public life I have tried to do right. Will you do me the justice to
think so?”
Madeleine still struggled to prevent herself from being drawn into
indefinite promises of sympathy with this man. She would keep him at
arm's length whatever her sympathies might be. She would not pledge
herself to espouse his cause. She turned upon him with an effort, and
said that her thoughts, now or at any time, were folly and nonsense, and
that the consciousness of right-doing was the only reward any public man
had a right to expect.
“And yet you are a hard critic, Mrs. Lee. If your thoughts are what
you say, your words are not. You judge with the judgment of abstract
principles, and you wield the bolts of divine justice. You look on and
condemn, but you refuse to acquit. When I come to you on the verge of
what is likely to be the fatal plunge of my life, and ask you only for
some clue to the moral principle that ought to guide me, you look on and
say that virtue is its own reward. And you do not even say where virtue
lies.”
“I confess my sins,” said Madeleine, meekly and despondently; “life is
more complicated than I thought.”
“I shall be guided by your advice,” said Ratcliffe; “I shall walk into
that den of wild beasts, since you think I ought. But I shall hold you
to your responsibility. You cannot refuse to see me through dangers you
have helped to bring me into.”
“No, no!” cried Madeleine, earnestly; “no responsibility. You ask more
than I can give.”
Ratcliffe looked at her a moment with a troubled and careworn face. His
eyes seemed deep sunk in their dark circles, and his voice was pathetic
in its intensity. “Duty is duty, for you as well as for me. I have a
right to the help of all pure minds. You have no right to refuse it. How
can you reject your own responsibility and hold me to mine?”
Almost as he spoke, he rose and took his departure, leaving her no time
to do more than murmur again her ineffectual protest. After he was gone,
Mrs.
Lee sat long, with her eyes fixed on the fire, reflecting upon what he
had said. Her mind was bewildered by the new suggestions which Ratcliffe
had thrown out. What woman of thirty, with aspirations for the infinite,
could resist an attack like this? What woman with a soul could see
before her the most powerful public man of her time, appealing--with
a face furrowed by anxieties, and a voice vibrating with only
half-suppressed affection--to her for counsel and sympathy, without
yielding some response? and what woman could have helped bowing her head
to that rebuke of her over-confident judgment, coming as it did from one
who in the same breath appealed to that judgment as final? Ratcliffe,
too, had a curious instinct for human weaknesses. No magnetic needle
was ever truer than his finger when he touched the vulnerable spot in
an opponent's mind. Mrs. Lee was not to be reached by an appeal to
religious sentiment, to ambition, or to affection.
Any such appeal would have fallen flat on her ears and destroyed its own
hopes. But she was a woman to the very last drop of her blood. She
could not be induced to love Ratcliffe, but she might be deluded into
sacrificing herself for him. She atoned for want of devotion to God, by
devotion to man.
She had a woman's natural tendency towards asceticism, self-extinction,
self-abnegation. All through life she had made painful efforts to
understand and follow out her duty. Ratcliffe knew her weak point when
he attacked her from this side. Like all great orators and advocates, he
was an actor; the more effective because of a certain dignified air that
forbade familiarity.
He had appealed to her sympathy, her sense of right and of duty, to her
courage, her loyalty, her whole higher nature; and while he made this
appeal he felt more than half convinced that he was all he pretended to
be, and that he really had a right to her devotion. What wonder that she
in her turn was more than half inclined to admit that right. She knew
him now better than Carrington or Jacobi knew him. Surely a man who
spoke as he spoke, had noble instincts and lofty aims? Was not his
career a thousand times more important than hers? If he, in his
isolation and his cares, needed her assistance, had she an excuse for
refusing it? What was there in her aimless and useless life which made
it so precious that she could not afford to fling it into the gutter, if
need be, on the bare chance of enriching some fuller existence?
Chapter VIII
OF all titles ever assumed by prince or potentate, the proudest is that
of the Roman pontiffs: “Servus servorum Dei”--“Servant of the servants
of God.”
In former days it was not admitted that the devil's servants could by
right have any share in government. They were to be shut out, punished,
exiled, maimed, and burned. The devil has no servants now; only the
people have servants. There may be some mistake about a doctrine which
makes the wicked, when a majority, the mouthpiece of God against the
virtuous, but the hopes of mankind are staked on it; and if the weak
in faith sometimes quail when they see humanity floating in a shoreless
ocean, on this plank, which experience and religion long since condemned
as rotten, mistake or not, men have thus far floated better by its aid,
than the popes ever did with their prettier principle; so that it will
be a long time yet before society repents.
Whether the new President and his chief rival, Mr. Silas P. Ratcliffe,
were or were not servants of the servants of God, is not material
here. Servants they were to some one. No doubt many of those who call
themselves servants of the people are no better than wolves in sheep's
clothing, or asses in lions' skins. One may see scores of them any day
in the Capitol when Congress is in session, making noisy demonstrations,
or more usefully doing nothing. A wiser generation will employ them in
manual labour; as it is, they serve only themselves. But there are
two officers, at least, whose service is real--the President and his
Secretary of the Treasury. The Hoosier Quarryman had not been a week
in Washington before he was heartily home-sick for Indiana. No
maid-of-all-work in a cheap boarding-house was ever more harassed.
Everyone conspired against him. His enemies gave him no peace. All
Washington was laughing at his blunders, and ribald sheets, published
on a Sunday, took delight in printing the new Chief Magistrate's sayings
and doings, chronicled with outrageous humour, and placed by malicious
hands where the President could not but see them. He was sensitive to
ridicule, and it mortified him to the heart to find that remarks and
acts, which to him seemed sensible enough, should be capable of such
perversion. Then he was overwhelmed with public business. It came upon
him in a deluge, and he now, in his despair, no longer tried to control
it. He let it pass over him like a wave. His mind was muddied by the
innumerable visitors to whom he had to listen. But his greatest anxiety
was the Inaugural Address which, distracted as he was, he could not
finish, although in another week it must be delivered. He was nervous
about his Cabinet; it seemed to him that he could do nothing until he
had disposed of Ratcliffe.
Already, thanks to the President's friends, Ratcliffe had become
indispensable; still an enemy, of course, but one whose hands must be
tied; a sort of Sampson, to be kept in bonds until the time came for
putting him out of the way, but in the meanwhile, to be utilized. This
point being settled, the President had in imagination begun to lean upon
him; for the last few days he had postponed everything till next week,
“when I get my Cabinet arranged;” which meant, when he got Ratcliffe's
assistance; and he fell into a panic whenever he thought of the chance
that Ratcliffe might refuse.
He was pacing his room impatiently on Monday morning, an hour before
the time fixed for Ratcliffe's visit. His feelings still fluctuated
violently, and if he recognized the necessity of using Ratcliffe, he
was not the less determined to tie Ratcliffe's hands. He must be made
to come into a Cabinet where every other voice would be against him. He
must be prevented from having any patronage to dispose of. He must be
induced to accept these conditions at the start. How present this to him
in such a way as not to repel him at once? All this was needless, if
the President had only known it, but he thought himself a profound
statesman, and that his hand was guiding the destinies of America to his
own re-election. When at length, on the stroke of ten o'clock, Ratcliffe
entered the room, the President turned to him with nervous eagerness,
and almost before offering his hand, said that he hoped Mr. Ratcliffe
had come prepared to begin work at once. The Senator replied that,
if such was the President's decided wish, he would offer no further
opposition. Then the President drew himself up in the attitude of an
American Cato, and delivered a prepared address, in which he said that
he had chosen the members of his Cabinet with a careful regard to the
public interests; that Mr. Ratcliffe was essential to the combination;
that he expected no disagreement on principles, for there was but one
principle which he should consider fundamental, namely, that there
should be no removals from office except for cause; and that under these
circumstances he counted upon Mr. Ratcliffe's assistance as a matter of
patriotic duty.
To all this Ratcliffe assented without a word of objection, and the
President, more convinced than ever of his own masterly statesmanship,
breathed more freely than for a week past. Within ten minutes they
were actively at work together, clearing away the mass of accumulated
business.
The relief of the Quarryman surprised himself. Ratcliffe lifted the
weight of affairs from his shoulders with hardly an effort. He knew
everybody and everything. He took most of the President's visitors at
once into his own hands and dismissed them with great rapidity. He knew
what they wanted; he knew what recommendations were strong and what were
weak; who was to be treated with deference and who was to be sent
away abruptly; where a blunt refusal was safe, and where a pledge was
allowable. The President even trusted him with the unfinished manuscript
of the Inaugural Address, which Ratcliffe returned to him the next
day with such notes and suggestions as left nothing to be done beyond
copying them out in a fair hand. With all this, he proved himself a very
agreeable companion. He talked well and enlivened the work; he was not a
hard taskmaster, and when he saw that the President was tired, he boldly
asserted that there was no more business that could not as well wait
a day, and so took the weary Stone-cutter out to drive for a couple of
hours, and let him go peacefully to sleep in the carriage. They dined
together and Ratcliffe took care to send for Tom Lord to amuse them, for
Tom was a wit and a humourist, and kept the President in a laugh. Mr.
Lord ordered the dinner and chose the wines. He could be coarse enough
to suit even the President's palate, and Ratcliffe was not behindhand.
When the new Secretary went away at ten o'clock that night, his chief;
who was in high good humour with his dinner, his champagne, and his
conversation, swore with some unnecessary granite oaths, that Ratcliffe
was “a clever fellow anyhow,” and he was glad “that job was fixed.”
The truth was that Ratcliffe had now precisely ten days before the new
Cabinet could be set in motion, and in these ten days he must establish
his authority over the President so firmly that nothing could shake it.
He was diligent in good works. Very soon the court began to feel his
hand. If a business letter or a written memorial came in, the President
found it easy to endorse: “Referred to the Secretary of the Treasury.”
If a visitor wanted anything for himself or another, the invariable
reply came to be: “Just mention it to Mr. Ratcliffe;” or, “I guess
Ratcliffe will see to that.”
Before long he even made jokes in a Catonian manner; jokes that were not
peculiarly witty, but somewhat gruff and boorish, yet significant of a
resigned and self-contented mind. One morning he ordered Ratcliffe to
take an iron-clad ship of war and attack the Sioux in Montana, seeing
that he was in charge of the army and navy and Indians at once, and
Jack of all trades; and again he told a naval officer who wanted a
court-martial that he had better get Ratcliffe to sit on him for he was
a whole court-martial by himself. That Ratcliffe held his chief in no
less contempt than before, was probable but not certain, for he kept
silence on the subject before the world, and looked solemn whenever the
President was mentioned.
Before three days were over, the President, with a little more than
his usual abruptness, suddenly asked him what he knew about this
fellow Carson, whom the Pennsylvanians were bothering him to put in his
Cabinet. Ratcliffe was guarded: he scarcely knew the man; Mr. Carson
was not in politics, he believed, but was pretty respectable--for a
Pennsylvanian. The President returned to the subject several times; got
out his list of Cabinet officers and figured industriously upon it with
a rather perplexed face; called Ratcliffe to help him; and at last
the “slate” was fairly broken, and Ratcliffe's eyes gleamed when the
President caused his list of nominations to be sent to the Senate on the
5th March, and Josiah B. Carson, of Pennsylvania, was promptly confirmed
as Secretary of the Interior.
But his eyes gleamed still more humorously when, a few days afterwards,
the President gave him a long list of some two score names, and asked
him to find places for them. He assented good-naturedly, with a remark
that it might be necessary to make a few removals to provide for these
cases.
“Oh, well,” said the President, “I guess there's just about as many as
that had ought to go out anyway. These are friends of mine; got to be
looked after. Just stuff 'em in somewhere.”
Even he felt a little awkward about it, and, to do him justice, this
was the last that was heard about the fundamental rule of his
administration.
Removals were fast and furious, until all Indiana became easy in
circumstances. And it was not to be denied that, by one means or
another, Ratcliffe's friends did come into their fair share of the
public money.
Perhaps the President thought it best to wink at such use of the
Treasury patronage for the present, or was already a little overawed by
his Secretary.
Ratcliffe's work was done. The public had, with the help of some
clever intrigue, driven its servants into the traces. Even an Indiana
stone-cutter could be taught that his personal prejudices must yield to
the public service. What mischief the selfishness, the ambition, or
the ignorance of these men might do, was another matter. As the affair
stood, the President was the victim of his own schemes. It remained to
be seen whether, at some future day, Mr. Ratcliffe would think it worth
his while to strangle his chief by some quiet Eastern intrigue, but
the time had gone by when the President could make use of either the
bow-string or the axe upon him.
All this passed while Mrs. Lee was quietly puzzling her poor little
brain about her duty and her responsibility to Ratcliffe, who,
meanwhile, rarely failed to find himself on Sunday evenings by her side
in her parlour, where his rights were now so well established that no
one presumed to contest his seat, unless it were old Jacobi, who from
time to time reminded him that he was fallible and mortal. Occasionally,
though not often, Mr. Ratcliffe came at other times, as when he
persuaded Mrs. Lee to be present at the Inauguration, and to call on the
President's wife. Madeleine and Sybil went to the Capitol and had the
best places to see and hear the Inauguration, as well as a cold March
wind would allow. Mrs. Lee found fault with the ceremony; it was of
the earth, earthy, she said. An elderly western farmer, with silver
spectacles, new and glossy evening clothes, bony features, and stiff;
thin, gray hair, trying to address a large crowd of people, under the
drawbacks of a piercing wind and a cold in his head, was not a hero.
Sybil's mind was lost in wondering whether the President would not soon
die of pneumonia. Even this experience, however, was happy when compared
with that of the call upon the President's wife, after which Madeleine
decided to leave the new dynasty alone in future. The lady, who was
somewhat stout and coarse-featured, and whom Mrs. Lee declared she
wouldn't engage as a cook, showed qualities which, seen under that
fierce light which beats upon a throne, seemed ungracious. Her antipathy
to Ratcliffe was more violent than her husband's, and was even more
openly expressed, until the President was quite put out of countenance
by it. She extended her hostility to every one who could be supposed to
be Ratcliffe's friend, and the newspapers, as well as private gossip,
had marked out Mrs. Lee as one who, by an alliance with Ratcliffe, was
aiming at supplanting her own rule over the White House.
Hence, when Mrs. Lightfoot Lee was announced, and the two sisters were
ushered into the presidential parlour, she put on a coldly patronizing
air, and in reply to Madeleine's hope that she found Washington
agreeable, she intimated that there was much in Washington which struck
her as awful wicked, especially the women; and, looking at Sybil, she
spoke of the style of dress in this city which she said she meant to do
what she could to put a stop to. She'd heard tell that people sent to
Paris for their gowns, just as though America wasn't good enough to make
one's clothes! Jacob (all Presidents' wives speak of their husbands by
their first names) had promised her to get a law passed against it. In
her town in Indiana, a young woman who was seen on the street in such
clothes wouldn't be spoken to. At these remarks, made with an air and
in a temper quite unmistakable, Madeleine became exasperated beyond
measure, and said that “Washington would be pleased to see the President
do something in regard to dress-reform--or any other reform;” and with
this allusion to the President's ante-election reform speeches, Mrs. Lee
turned her back and left the room, followed by Sybil in convulsions of
suppressed laughter, which would not have been suppressed had she seen
the face of their hostess as the door shut behind them, and the energy
with which she shook her head and said: “See if I don't reform you yet,
you--jade!”
Mrs. Lee gave Ratcliffe a lively account of this interview, and he
laughed nearly as convulsively as Sybil over it, though he tried to
pacify her by saying that the President's most intimate friends openly
declared his wife to be insane, and that he himself was the person most
afraid of her. But Mrs. Lee declared that the President was as bad as
his wife; that an equally good President and President's wife could be
picked up in any corner-grocery between the Lakes and the Ohio; and
that no inducement should ever make her go near that coarse washerwoman
again.
Ratcliffe did not attempt to change Mrs. Lee's opinion. Indeed he
knew better than any man how Presidents were made, and he had his
own opinions in regard to the process as well as the fabric produced.
Nothing Mrs. Lee could say now affected him. He threw off his
responsibility and she found it suddenly resting on her own shoulders.
When she spoke with indignation of the wholesale removals from office
with which the new administration marked its advent to power, he told
her the story of the President's fundamental principle, and asked her
what she would have him do. “He meant to tie my hands,” said Ratcliffe,
“and to leave his own free, and I accepted the condition. Can I resign
now on such a ground as this?” And Madeleine was obliged to agree that
he could not. She had no means of knowing how many removals he made in
his own interest, or how far he had outwitted the President at his own
game. He stood before her a victim and a patriot. Every step he had
taken had been taken with her approval. He was now in office to prevent
what evil he could, not to be responsible for the evil that was done;
and he honestly assured her that much worse men would come in when he
went out, as the President would certainly take good care that he did go
out when the moment arrived.
Mrs. Lee had the chance now to carry out her scheme in coming to
Washington, for she was already deep in the mire of politics and
could see with every advantage how the great machine floundered about,
bespattering with mud even her own pure garments. Ratcliffe himself,
since entering the Treasury, had begun to talk with a sneer of the way
in which laws were made, and openly said that he wondered how government
got on at all. Yet he declared still that this particular government was
the highest expression of political thought. Mrs. Lee stared at him and
wondered whether he knew what thought was. To her the government seemed
to have less thought in it than one of Sybil's gowns, for if they, like
the government, were monstrously costly, they were at least adapted to
their purpose, the parts fitted together, and they were neither awkward
nor unwieldy.
There was nothing very encouraging in all this, but it was better than
New York. At least it gave her something to look at, and to think about.
Even Lord Dunbeg preached practical philanthropy to her by the hour.
Ratcliffe, too, was compelled to drag himself out of the rut of machine
politics, and to justify his right of admission to her house. There Mr.
French discoursed at great length, until the fourth of March sent him
home to Connecticut; and he brought more than one intelligent member
of Congress to Mrs. Lee's parlour. Underneath the scum floating on the
surface of politics, Madeleine felt that there was a sort of healthy
ocean current of honest purpose, which swept the scum before it, and
kept the mass pure.
This was enough to draw her on. She reconciled herself to accepting
the Ratcliffian morals, for she could see no choice. She herself had
approved every step she had seen him take. She could not deny that there
must be something wrong in a double standard of morality, but where was
it? Mr.
Ratcliffe seemed to her to be doing good work with as pure means as he
had at hand. He ought to be encouraged, not reviled. What was she that
she should stand in judgment?
Others watched her progress with less satisfaction. Mr. Nathan Gore was
one of these, for he came in one evening, looking much out of temper,
and, sitting down by her side he said he had come to bid good-bye and to
thank her for the kindness she had shown him; he was to leave Washington
the next morning. She too expressed her warm regret, but added that she
hoped he was only going in order to take his passage to Madrid.
He shook his head. “I am going to take my passage,” said he, “but not to
Madrid. The fates have cut that thread. The President does not want my
services, and I can't blame him, for if our situations were reversed, I
should certainly not want his. He has an Indiana friend, who, I am told,
wanted to be postmaster at Indianapolis, but as this did not suit the
politicians, he was bought off at the exorbitant price of the Spanish
mission. But I should have no chance even if he were out of the way. The
President does not approve of me. He objects to the cut of my overcoat
which is unfortunately an English one. He also objects to the cut of my
hair. I am afraid that his wife objects to me because I am so happy as
to be thought a friend of yours.”
Madeleine could only acknowledge that Mr. Gore's case was a bad one.
“But after all,” said she, “why should politicians be expected to love
you literary gentlemen who write history. Other criminal classes are not
expected to love their judges.”
“No, but they have sense enough to fear them,” replied Gore
vindictively; “not one politician living has the brains or the art to
defend his own cause. The ocean of history is foul with the carcases of
such statesmen, dead and forgotten except when some historian fishes one
of them up to gibbet it.”
Mr. Gore was so much out of temper that after this piece of extravagance
he was forced to pause a moment to recover himself. Then he went
on:--“You are perfectly right, and so is the President. I have no
business to be meddling in politics. It is not my place. The next time
you hear of me, I promise it shall not be as an office-seeker.”
Then he rapidly changed the subject, saying that he hoped Mrs. Lee was
soon going northward again, and that they might meet at Newport.
“I don't know,” replied Madeleine; “the spring is pleasant here, and we
shall stay till the warm weather, I think.”
Mr. Gore looked grave. “And your politics!” said he; “are you satisfied
with what you have seen?”
“I have got so far as to lose the distinction between right and wrong.
Isn't that the first step in politics?”
Mr. Gore had no mind even for serious jesting. He broke out into a long
lecture which sounded like a chapter of some future history: “But Mrs.
Lee, is it possible that you don't see what a wrong path you are on.
If you want to know what the world is really doing to any good purpose,
pass a winter at Samarcand, at Timbuctoo, but not at Washington. Be a
bank-clerk, or a journeyman printer, but not a Congressman. Here you
will find nothing but wasted effort and clumsy intrigue.”
“Do you think it a pity for me to learn that?” asked Madeleine when his
long essay was ended.
“No!” replied Gore, hesitating; “not if you do learn it. But many people
never get so far, or only when too late. I shall be glad to hear
that you are mistress of it and have given up reforming politics. The
Spaniards have a proverb that smells of the stable, but applies to
people like you and me: The man who washes his donkey's head, loses time
and soap.”
Gore took his leave before Madeleine had time to grasp all the impudence
of this last speech. Not until she was fairly in bed that night did it
suddenly flash on her mind that Mr. Gore had dared to caricature her as
wasting time and soap on Mr. Ratcliffe. At first she was violently
angry and then she laughed in spite of herself; there was truth in the
portrait. In secret, too, she was the less offended because she half
thought that it had depended only on herself to make of Mr. Gore
something more than a friend. If she had overheard his parting words to
Carrington, she would have had still more reason to think that a little
jealousy of Ratcliffe's success sharpened the barb of Gore's enmity.
“Take care of Ratcliffe!” was his farewell; “he is a clever dog. He has
set his mark on Mrs. Lee. Look out that he doesn't walk off with her!”
A little startled by this sudden confidence, Carrington could only ask
what he could do to prevent it.
“Cats that go ratting, don't wear gloves,” replied Gore, who always
carried a Spanish proverb in his pocket. Carrington, after painful
reflection, could only guess that he wanted Ratcliffe's enemies to show
their claws. But how?
Mrs. Lee not long afterwards spoke to Ratcliffe of her regret at Gore's
disappointment and hinted at his disgust. Ratcliffe replied that he had
done what he could for Gore, and had introduced him to the President,
who, after seeing him, had sworn his usual granitic oath that he would
sooner send his nigger farm-hand Jake to Spain than that man-milliner.
“You know how I stand;” added Ratcliffe; “what more could I do?” And
Mrs. Lee's implied reproach was silenced.
If Gore was little pleased with Ratcliffe's conduct, poor Schneidekoupon
was still less so. He turned up again at Washington not long after
the Inauguration and had a private interview with the Secretary of the
Treasury.
What passed at it was known only to themselves, but, whatever it
was, Schneidekoupon's temper was none the better for it. From his
conversations with Sybil, it seemed that there was some question about
appointments in which his protectionist friends were interested, and he
talked very openly about Ratcliffe's want of good faith, and how he had
promised everything to everybody and had failed to keep a single pledge;
if Schneidekoupon's advice had been taken, this wouldn't have happened.
Mrs. Lee told Ratcliffe that Schneidekoupon seemed out of temper, and
asked the reason. He only laughed and evaded the question, remarking
that cattle of this kind were always complaining unless they were
allowed to run the whole government; Schneidekoupon had nothing
to grumble about; no one had ever made any promises to him. But
nevertheless Schneidekoupon confided to Sybil his antipathy to Ratcliffe
and solemnly begged her not to let Mrs. Lee fall into his hands, to
which Sybil answered tartly that she only wished Mr.
Schneidekoupon would tell her how to help it.
The reformer French had also been one of Ratcliffe's backers in the
fight over the Treasury. He remained in Washington a few days after the
Inauguration, and then disappeared, leaving cards with P.P.C. in the
corner, at Mrs. Lee's door. Rumour said that he too was disappointed,
but he kept his own counsel, and, if he really wanted the mission
to Belgium, he contented himself with waiting for it. A respectable
stage-coach proprietor from Oregon got the place.
As for Jacobi, who was not disappointed, and who had nothing to ask
for, he was bitterest of all. He formally offered his congratulations to
Ratcliffe on his appointment. This little scene occurred in Mrs.
Lee's parlour. The old Baron, with his most suave manner, and his most
Voltairean leer, said that in all his experience, and he had seen a
great many court intrigues, he had never seen anything better managed
than that about the Treasury.
Ratcliffe was furiously angry, and told the Baron outright that foreign
ministers who insulted the governments to which they were accredited ran
a risk of being sent home.
“Ce serait toujours un pis aller,” said Jacobi, seating himself with
calmness in Ratcliffe's favourite chair by Mrs. Lee's side.
Madeleine, alarmed as she was, could not help interposing, and hastily
asked whether that remark was translatable.
“Ah!” said the Baron; “I can do nothing with your language. You would
only say that it was a choice of evils, to go, or to stay.”
“We might translate it by saying: 'One may go farther and fare worse,'”
rejoined Madeleine; and so the storm blew over for the time, and
Ratcliffe sulkily let the subject drop. Nevertheless the two men never
met in Mrs.
Lee's parlour without her dreading a personal altercation. Little by
little, what with Jacobi's sarcasms and Ratcliffe's roughness, they
nearly ceased to speak, and glared at each other like quarrelsome dogs.
Madeleine was driven to all kinds of expedients to keep the peace, yet
at the same time she could not but be greatly amused by their behaviour,
and as their hatred of each other only stimulated their devotion to her,
she was content to hold an even balance between them.
Nor were these all the awkward consequences of Ratcliffe's attentions.
Now that he was distinctly recognized as an intimate friend of Mrs.
Lee's, and possibly her future husband, no one ventured any longer to
attack him in her presence, but nevertheless she was conscious in a
thousand ways that the atmosphere became more and more dense under
the shadow of the Secretary of the Treasury. In spite of herself she
sometimes felt uneasy, as though there were conspiracy in the air. One
March afternoon she was sitting by her fire, with an English Review in
her hand, trying to read the last Symposium on the sympathies of Eternal
Punishment, when her servant brought in a card, and Mrs. Lee had barely
time to read the name of Mrs. Samuel Baker when that lady followed the
servant into the room, forcing the countersign in so effective style
that for once Madeleine was fairly disconcerted. Her manner when thus
intruded upon, was cool, but in this case, on Carrington's account, she
tried to smile courteously and asked her visitor to sit down, which Mrs.
Baker was doing without an invitation, very soon putting her hostess
entirely at her ease. She was, when seen without her veil, a showy woman
verging on forty, decidedly large, tall, over-dressed even in mourning,
and with a complexion rather fresher than nature had made it.
There was a geniality in her address, savouring of easy Washington ways,
a fruitiness of smile, and a rich southern accent, that explained on
the spot her success in the lobby. She looked about her with fine
self-possession, and approved Mrs. Lee's surroundings with a cordiality
so different from the northern stinginess of praise, that Madeleine
was rather pleased than offended. Yet when her eye rested on the Corot,
Madeleine's only pride, she was evidently perplexed, and resorted to
eye-glasses, in order, as it seemed, to gain time for reflection. But
she was not to be disconcerted even by Corot's masterpiece:
“How pretty! Japanese, isn't it? Sea-weeds seen through a fog. I went to
an auction yesterday, and do you know I bought a tea-pot with a picture
just like that.”
Madeleine inquired with extreme interest about the auction, but after
learning all that Mrs. Baker had to tell, she was on the point of being
reduced to silence, when she bethought herself to mention Carrington.
Mrs.
Baker brightened up at once, if she could be said to brighten where
there was no sign of dimness:
“Dear Mr. Carrington! Isn't he sweet? I think he's a delicious man. I
don't know what I should do without him. Since poor Mr. Baker left
me, we have been together all the time. You know my poor husband left
directions that all his papers should be burned, and though I would not
say so unless you were such a friend of Mr. Carrington's, I reckon it's
just as well for some people that he did. I never could tell you what
quantities of papers Mr. Carrington and I have put in the fire; and we
read them all too.”
Madeleine asked whether this was not dull work.
“Oh, dear, no! You see I know all about it, and told Mr. Carrington the
story of every paper as we went on. It was quite amusing, I assure you.”
Mrs. Lee then boldly said she had got from Mr. Carrington an idea that
Mrs.
Baker was a very skilful diplomatist.
“Diplomatist!” echoed the widow with her genial laugh; “Well! it was as
much that as anything, but there's not many diplomatists' wives in this
city ever did as much work as I used to do. Why, I knew half the members
of Congress intimately, and all of them by sight. I knew where they came
from and what they liked best. I could get round the greater part of
them, sooner or later.”
Mrs. Lee asked what she did with all this knowledge. Mrs. Baker shook
her pink-and-white countenance, and almost paralysed her opposite
neighbour by a sort of Grande Duchesse wink:
“Oh, my dear! you are new here. If you had seen Washington in war-times
and for a few years afterwards, you wouldn't ask that. We had more
congressional business than all the other agents put together. Every one
came to us then, to get his bill through, or his appropriation watched.
We were hard at work all the time. You see, one can't keep the run of
three hundred men without some trouble. My husband used to make lists
of them in books with a history of each man and all he could learn about
him, but I carried it all in my head.”
“Do you mean that you could get them all to vote as you pleased?” asked
Madeleine.
“Well! we got our bills through,” replied Mrs. Baker.
“But how did you do it? did they take bribes?”
“Some of them did. Some of them liked suppers and cards and theatres
and all sorts of things. Some of them could be led, and some had to be
driven like Paddy's pig who thought he was going the other way. Some
of them had wives who could talk to them, and some--hadn't,” said Mrs.
Baker, with a queer intonation in her abrupt ending.
“But surely,” said Mrs. Lee, “many of them must have been above--I mean,
they must have had nothing to get hold of; so that you could manage
them.”
Mrs. Baker laughed cheerfully and remarked that they were very much of a
muchness.
“But I can't understand how you did it,” urged Madeleine; “now, how
would you have gone to work to get a respectable senator's vote--a man
like Mr. Ratcliffe, for instance?”
“Ratcliffe!” repeated Mrs. Baker with a slight elevation of voice that
gave way to a patronising laugh. “Oh, my dear! don't mention names.
I should get into trouble. Senator Ratcliffe was a good friend of my
husband's. I guess Mr. Carrington could have told you that. But you see,
what we generally wanted was all right enough. We had to know where
our bills were, and jog people's elbows to get them reported in time.
Sometimes we had to convince them that our bill was a proper one, and
they ought to vote for it. Only now and then, when there was a great
deal of money and the vote was close, we had to find out what votes were
worth. It was mostly dining and talking, calling them out into the lobby
or asking them to supper. I wish I could tell you things I have seen,
but I don't dare. It wouldn't be safe. I've told you already more than
I ever said to any one else; but then you are so intimate with Mr.
Carrington, that I always think of you as an old friend.”
Thus Mrs. Baker rippled on, while Mrs. Lee listened with more and more
doubt and disgust. The woman was showy, handsome in a coarse style, and
perfectly presentable. Mrs. Lee had seen Duchesses as vulgar. She knew
more about the practical working of government than Mrs. Lee could
ever expect or hope to know. Why then draw back from this interesting
lobbyist with such babyish repulsion?
When, after a long, and, as she declared, a most charming call, Mrs.
Baker wended her way elsewhere and Madeleine had given the strictest
order that she should never be admitted again, Carrington entered, and
Madeleine showed him Mrs. Baker's card and gave a lively account of the
interview.
“What shall I do with the woman?” she asked; “must I return her card?”
But Carrington declined to offer advice on this interesting point. “And
she says that Mr. Ratcliffe was a friend of her husband's and that you
could tell me about that.”
“Did she say so?” remarked Carrington vaguely.
“Yes! and that she knew every one's weak points and could get all their
votes.”
Carrington expressed no surprise, and so evidently preferred to change
the subject, that Mrs. Lee desisted and said no more.
But she determined to try the same experiment on Mr. Ratcliffe, and
chose the very next chance that offered. In her most indifferent manner
she remarked that Mrs. Sam Baker had called upon her and had initiated
her into the mysteries of the lobby till she had become quite ambitious
to start on that career.
“She said you were a friend of her husband's,” added Madeleine softly.
Ratcliffe's face betrayed no sign.
“If you believe what those people tell you,” said he drily, “you will be
wiser than the Queen of Sheba.”
Chapter IX
WHENEVER a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies
unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting. Among
the many dangers of this sort which now threatened Ratcliffe, there was
one that, had he known it, might have made him more uneasy than any
of those which were the work of senators and congressmen. Carrington
entered into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Sybil. It came
about in this wise. Sybil was fond of riding and occasionally, when
Carrington could spare the time, he went as her guide and protector in
these country excursions; for every Virginian, however out at elbows,
has a horse, as he has shoes or a shirt.
In a thoughtless moment Carrington had been drawn into a promise that he
would take Sybil to Arlington. The promise was one that he did not hurry
to keep, for there were reasons which made a visit to Arlington anything
but a pleasure to him; but Sybil would listen to no excuses, and so it
came about that, one lovely March morning, when the shrubs and the trees
in the square before the house were just beginning, under the warmer
sun, to show signs of their coming wantonness, Sybil stood at the open
window waiting for him, while her new Kentucky horse before the door
showed what he thought of the delay by curving his neck, tossing his
head, and pawing the pavement.
Carrington was late and kept her waiting so long, that the mignonette
and geraniums, which adorned the window, suffered for his slowness,
and the curtain tassels showed signs of wilful damage. Nevertheless he
arrived at length, and they set out together, choosing the streets
least enlivened by horse-cars and provision-carts, until they had crept
through the great metropolis of Georgetown and come upon the bridge
which crosses the noble river just where its bold banks open out to
clasp the city of Washington in their easy embrace. Then reaching the
Virginia side they cantered gaily up the laurel-margined road, with
glimpses of woody defiles, each carrying its trickling stream and rich
in promise of summer flowers, while from point to point they caught
glorious glimpses of the distant city and river. They passed the small
military station on the heights, still dignified by the name of
fort, though Sybil silently wondered how a fort was possible without
fortifications, and complained that there was nothing more warlike than
a “nursery of telegraph poles.” The day was blue and gold; everything
smiled and sparkled in the crisp freshness of the morning. Sybil was
in bounding spirits and not at all pleased to find that her companion
became moody and abstracted as they went on. “Poor Mr. Carrington!”
thought she to herself, “he is so nice; but when he puts on that solemn
air, one might as well go to sleep. I am quite certain no nice woman
will ever marry him if he looks like that;” and her practical mind ran
off among all the girls of her acquaintance, in search of one who would
put up with Carrington's melancholy face. She knew his devotion to her
sister, but had long ago rejected this as a hopeless chance. There was
a simplicity about Sybil's way of dealing with life, which had its
own charm. She never troubled herself about the impossible or the
unthinkable. She had feelings, and was rather quick in her sympathies
and sorrows, but she was equally quick in getting over them, and she
expected other people to do likewise. Madeleine dissected her own
feelings and was always wondering whether they were real or not; she
had a habit of taking off her mental clothing, as she might take off a
dress, and looking at it as though it belonged to some one else, and as
though sensations were manufactured like clothes. This seems to be one
of the easier ways of deadening sorrow, as though the mind could
teach itself to lop off its feelers. Sybil particularly disliked this
self-inspection. In the first place she did not understand it, and in
the second her mind was all feelers, and amputation was death. She could
no more analyse a feeling than doubt its existence, both which were
habits of her sister.
How was Sybil to know what was passing in Carrington's mind? He was
thinking of nothing in which she supposed herself interested. He was
troubled with memories of civil war and of associations still earlier,
belonging to an age already vanishing or vanished; but what could she
know about civil war who had been almost an infant at the time? At this
moment, she happened to be interested in the baffle of Waterloo, for she
was reading “Vanity Fair,” and had cried as she ought for poor little
Emmy, when her husband, George Osborne, lay dead on the field there,
with a bullet through his heart. But how was she to know that here, only
a few rods before her, lay scores and hundreds of George Osbornes, or
his betters, and in their graves the love and hope of many Emmys, not
creatures of the imagination, but flesh and blood, like herself? To her,
there was no more in those associations which made Carrington groan in
the silence of his thoughts, than if he had been old Kaspar, and she the
little Wilhelmine. What was a skull more or less to her? What concern
had she in the famous victory?
Yet even Sybil was startled as she rode through the gate and found
herself suddenly met by the long white ranks of head-stones, stretching
up and down the hill-sides by thousands, in order of baffle; as though
Cadmus had reversed his myth, and had sown living men, to come up
dragons' teeth. She drew in her horse with a shiver and a sudden impulse
to cry. Here was something new to her. This was war--wounds, disease,
death. She dropped her voice and with a look almost as serious as
Carrington's, asked what all these graves meant. When Carrington told
her, she began for the first time to catch some dim notion why his
face was not quite as gay as her own. Even now this idea was not very
precise, for he said little about himself, but at least she grappled
with the fact that he had actually, year after year, carried arms
against these men who lay at her feet and who had given their lives for
her cause. It suddenly occurred to her as a new thought that perhaps
he himself might have killed one of them with his own hand. There was
a strange shock in this idea. She felt that Carrington was further from
her. He gained dignity in his rebel isolation. She wanted to ask him
how he could have been a traitor, and she did not dare. Carrington a
traitor!
Carrington killing her friends! The idea was too large to grasp. She
fell back on the simpler task of wondering how he had looked in his
rebel uniform.
They rode slowly round to the door of the house and dismounted, after
he had with some difficulty found a man to hold their horses. From the
heavy brick porch they looked across the superb river to the raw and
incoherent ugliness of the city, idealised into dreamy beauty by the
atmosphere, and the soft background of purple hills behind. Opposite
them, with its crude “thus saith the law” stamped on white dome and
fortress-like walls, rose the Capitol.
Carrington stood with her a short time while they looked at the view;
then said he would rather not go into the house himself, and sat down
on the steps while she strolled alone through the rooms. These were bare
and gaunt, so that she, with her feminine sense of fitness, of course
considered what she would do to make them habitable. She had a neat
fancy for furniture, and distributed her tones and half tones and bits
of colour freely about the walls and ceilings, with a high-backed
chair here, a spindle-legged sofa there, and a claw-footed table in the
centre, until her eye was caught by a very dirty deal desk, on which
stood an open book, with an inkstand and some pens. On the leaf she read
the last entry: “Eli M. Grow and lady, Thermopyle Centre.” Not even the
graves outside had brought the horrors of war so near.
What a scourge it was! This respectable family turned out of such a
lovely house, and all the pretty old furniture swept away before a horde
of coarse invaders “with ladies.” Did the hosts of Attila write their
names on visiting books in the temple of Vesta and the house of Sallust?
What a new terror they would have added to the name of the scourge of
God! Sybil returned to the portico and sat down by Carrington on the
steps.
“How awfully sad it is!” said she; “I suppose the house was prettily
furnished when the Lees lived here? Did you ever see it then?”
Sybil was not very profound, but she had sympathy, and at this moment
Carrington felt sorely in need of comfort. He wanted some one to share
his feelings, and he turned towards her hungry for companionship.
“The Lees were old family friends of mine,” said he. “I used to stay
here when I was a boy, even as late as the spring of 1861. The last time
I sat here, it was with them. We were wild about disunion and talked of
nothing else. I have been trying to recall what was said then. We
never thought there would be war, and as for coercion, it was nonsense.
Coercion, indeed! The idea was ridiculous. I thought so, too, though I
was a Union man and did not want the State to go out. But though I felt
sure that Virginia must suffer, I never thought we could be beaten. Yet
now I am sitting here a pardoned rebel, and the poor Lees are driven
away and their place is a grave-yard.”
Sybil became at once absorbed in the Lees and asked many questions, all
which Carrington gladly answered. He told her how he had admired and
followed General Lee through the war. “We thought he was to be our
Washington, you know; and perhaps he had some such idea himself;” and
then, when Sybil wanted to hear about the baffles and the fighting, he
drew a rough map on the gravel path to show her how the two lines had
run, only a few miles away; then he told her how he had carried his
musket day after day over all this country, and where he had seen his
battles. Sybil had everything to learn; the story came to her with all
the animation of real life, for here under her eyes were the graves of
her own champions, and by her side was a rebel who had stood under our
fire at Malvern Hill and at South Mountain, and who was telling her how
men looked and what they thought in face of death. She listened with
breathless interest, and at last summoned courage to ask in an awestruck
tone whether Carrington had ever killed any one himself. She was
relieved, although a little disappointed, when he said that he believed
not; he hoped not; though no private who has discharged a musket in
baffle can be quite sure where the bullet went. “I never tried to kill
any one,” said he, “though they tried to kill me incessantly.” Then
Sybil begged to know how they had tried to kill him, and he told her one
or two of those experiences, such as most soldiers have had, when he had
been fired upon and the balls had torn his clothes or drawn blood. Poor
Sybil was quite overcome, and found a deadly fascination in the horror.
As they sat together on the steps with the glorious view spread before
them, her attention was so closely fixed on his story that she saw
neither the view nor even the carriages of tourists who drove up, looked
about, and departed, envying Carrington his occupation with the lovely
girl.
She was in imagination rushing with him down the valley of Virginia on
the heels of our flying army, or gloomily toiling back to the Potomac
after the bloody days at Gettysburg, or watching the last grand deb;cle
on the road from Richmond to Appomattox. They would have sat there till
sunset if Carrington had not at length insisted that they must go, and
then she rose slowly with a deep sigh and undisguised regret.
As they rode away, Carrington, whose thoughts were not devoted to his
companion so entirely as they should have been, ventured to say that he
wished her sister had come with them, but he found that his hint was not
well received.
Sybil emphatically rejected the idea: “I'm very glad she didn't come. If
she had, you would have talked with her all the time, and I should have
been left to amuse myself. You would have been discussing things, and I
hate discussions. She would have been hunting for first principles,
and you would have been running about, trying to catch some for her.
Besides, she is coming herself some Sunday with that tiresome Mr.
Ratcliffe. I don't see what she finds in that man to amuse her. Her
taste is getting to be demoralised in Washington. Do you know, Mr.
Carrington, I'm not clever or serious, like Madeleine, and I can't read
laws, and hate politics, but I've more common sense than she has, and
she makes me cross with her. I understand now why young widows are
dangerous, and why they're bumed at their husband's funerals in India.
Not that I want to have Madeleine burned, for she's a dear, good
creature, and I love her better than anything in the world; but she will
certainly do herself some dreadful mischief one of these days; she
has the most extravagant notions about self-sacrifice and duty; if she
hadn't luckily thought of taking charge of me, she would have done some
awful thing long ago, and if I could only be a little wicked, she would
be quite happy all the rest of her life in reforming me; but now she has
got hold of that Mr. Ratcliffe, and he is trying to make her think she
can reform him, and if he does, it's all up with us. Madeleine will just
go and break her heart over that odious, great, coarse brute, who only
wants her money.”
Sybil delivered this little oration with a degree of energy that went to
Carrington's heart. She did not often make such sustained efforts, and
it was clear that on this subject she had exhausted her whole mind.
Carrington was delighted, and urged her on. “I dislike Mr. Ratcliffe as
much as you do;--more perhaps. So does every one who knows much about
him. But we shall only make the matter worse if we interfere. What can
we do?”
“That is just what I tell everybody,” resumed Sybil. “There is Victoria
Dare always telling me I ought to do something; and Mr. Schneidekoupon
too; just as though I could do anything. Madeleine has done nothing but
get into mischief here. Half the people think her worldly and ambitious.
Only last night that spiteful old woman, Mrs. Clinton, said to me: 'Your
sister is quite spoiled by Washington. She is more wild for power than
any human being I ever saw.' I was dreadfully angry and told her she was
quite mistaken--Madeleine was not the least spoiled. But I couldn't
say that she was not fond of power, for she is; but not in the way Mrs.
Clinton meant. You should have seen her the other evening when Mr.
Ratcliffe said about some matter of public business that he would do
whatever she thought right; she spoke up quite sharply for her, with a
scornful little laugh, and said that he had better do what he thought
right. He looked for a moment almost angry, and muttered something about
women's being incomprehensible. He is always trying to tempt her with
power. She might have had long ago all the power he could give her, but
I can see, and he sees too, that she always keeps him at arm's length.
He doesn't like it, but he expects one of these days to find a bribe
that will answer. I wish we had never come to Washington. New York is so
much nicer and the people there are much more amusing; they dance ever
so much better and send one flowers all the time, and then they never
talk about first principles. Maude had her hospitals and paupers and
training school, and got along very well. It was so safe. But when I say
so to her, she only smiles in a patronising kind of way, and tells me
that I shall have as much of Newport as I want; just as though I were a
child, and not a woman of twenty-five. Poor Maude! I can't stay with her
if she marries Mr. Ratcliffe, and it would break my heart to leave her
with that man. Do you think he would beat her? Does he drink? I would
almost rather be beaten a little, if I cared for a man, than be taken
out to Peonia. Oh, Mr. Carrington! you are our only hope. She will
listen to you. Don't let her marry that dreadful politician.”
To all this pathetic appeal, some parts of which were as little
calculated to please Carrington as Ratcliffe himself, Carrington
answered that he was ready to do all in his power but that Sybil must
tell him when and how to act.
“Then, it's a bargain,” said she; “whenever I want you, I shall call on
you for help, and you shall prevent the marriage.”
“Alliance offensive and defensive,” said he, laughing; “war to the knife
on Ratcliffe. We will have his scalp if necessary, but I rather think he
will soon commit hari-kari himself if we leave him alone.”
“Madeleine will like him all the better if he does anything Japanese,”
replied Sybil, with great seriousness; “I wish there was more Japanese
bric-;-brac here, or any kind of old pots and pans to talk about. A
little art would be good for her. What a strange place this is, and how
people do stand on their heads in it! Nobody thinks like anyone else.
Victoria Dare says she is trying on principle not to be good, because
she wants to keep some new excitements for the next world. I'm sure she
practices as she preaches. Did you see her at Mrs. Clinton's last night.
She behaved more outrageously than ever. She sat on the stairs all
through supper, looking like a demure yellow cat with two bouquets in
her paws--and I know Lord Dunbeg sent one of them;--and she actually
let Mr. French feed her with ice-cream from a spoon. She says she was
showing Lord Dunbeg a phase, and that he is going to put it into his
article on American Manners and Customs in the Quarterly, but I don't
think it's nice, do you, Mr. Carrington? I wish Madeleine had her to
take care of. She would have enough to do then, I can tell her.”
And so, gently prattling, Miss Sybil returned to the city, her alliance
with Carrington completed; and it was a singular fact that she never
again called him dull. There was henceforward a look of more positive
pleasure and cordiality on her face when he made his appearance wherever
she might be; and the next time he suggested a horseback excursion she
instantly agreed to go, although aware that she had promised a younger
gentleman of the diplomatic body to be at home that same afternoon, and
the good fellow swore polyglot oaths on being turned away from her door.
Mr. Ratcliffe knew nothing of this conspiracy against his peace and
prospects. Even if he had known it, he might only have laughed, and
pursued his own path without a second thought. Yet it was certain that
he did not think Carrington's enmity a thing to be overlooked, and from
the moment of his obtaining a clue to its cause, he had begun to take
precautions against it. Even in the middle of the contest for the
Treasury, he had found time to listen to Mr. Wilson Keens report on the
affairs of the late Samuel Baker.
Mr. Keen came to him with a copy of Baker's will and with memoranda of
remarks made by the unsuspecting Mrs. Baker; “from which it appears,”
said he, “that Baker, having no time to put his affairs in order, left
special directions that his executors should carefully destroy all
papers that might be likely to compromise individuals.”
“What is the executor's name?” interrupted Ratcliffe.
“The executor's name is--John Carrington,” said Keen, methodically
referring to his copy of the will.
Ratcliffe's face was impassive, but the inevitable, “I knew it,” almost
sprang to his lips. He was rather pleased at the instinct which had led
him so directly to the right trail.
Keen went on to say that from Mrs. Baker's conversation it was certain
that the testator's directions had been carried out, and that the great
bulk of these papers had been burned.
“Then it will be useless to press the inquiry further,” said Ratcliffe;
“I am much obliged to you for your assistance,” and he turned the
conversation to the condition of Mr. Keen's bureau in the Treasury
department.
The next time Ratcliffe saw Mrs. Lee, after his appointment to
the Treasury was confirmed, he asked her whether she did not think
Carrington very well suited for public service, and when she warmly
assented, he said it had occurred to him to offer the place of Solicitor
of the Treasury to Mr.
Carrington, for although the actual salary might not be very much more
than he earned by his private practice, the incidental advantages to
a Washington lawyer were considerable; and to the Secretary it was
especially necessary to have a solicitor in whom he could place entire
confidence. Mrs. Lee was pleased by this motion of Ratcliffe's, the more
because she had supposed that Ratcliffe had no liking for Carrington.
She doubted whether Carrington would accept the place, but she hoped
that it might modify his dislike for Ratcliffe, and she agreed to sound
him on the subject. There was something a little compromising in
thus allowing herself to appear as the dispenser of Mr. Ratcliffe's
patronage, but she dismissed this objection on the ground that
Carrington's interests were involved, and that it was for him to judge
whether he should take the place or not. Perhaps the world would not be
so charitable if the appointment were made. What then? Mrs. Lee asked
herself the question and did not feel quite at ease.
So far as Carrington was concerned, she might have dismissed her doubts.
There was not a chance of his taking the place, as very soon appeared.
When she spoke to him on the subject, and repeated what Ratcliffe had
said, his face flushed, and he sat for some moments in silence. He never
thought very rapidly, but now the ideas seemed to come so fast as to
bewilder his mind.
The situation flashed before his eyes like electric sparks. His first
impression was that Ratcliffe wanted to buy him; to tie his tongue; to
make him run, like a fastened dog, under the waggon of the Secretary of
the Treasury. His second notion was that Ratcliffe wanted to put Mrs.
Lee under obligations, in order to win her regard; and, again, that he
wanted to raise himself in her esteem by posing as a friend of honest
administration and unassisted virtue. Then suddenly it occurred to him
that the scheme was to make him appear jealous and vindictive; to put
him in an attitude where any reason he might give for declining would
bear a look of meanness, and tend to separate him from Mrs. Lee.
Carrington was so absorbed by these thoughts, and his mind worked so
slowly, that he failed to hear one or two remarks addressed to him by
Mrs. Lee, who became a little alarmed, under the impression that he was
unexpectedly paralyzed.
When at length he heard her and attempted to frame an answer, his
embarrassment increased. He could only stammer that he was sorry to be
obliged to decline, but this office was one he could not undertake.
If Madeleine felt a little relieved by this decision, she did not show
it.
From her manner one might have supposed it to be her fondest wish that
Carrington should be Solicitor of the Treasury. She cross-questioned
him with obstinacy. Was not the offer a good one?--and he was obliged to
confess that it was. Were the duties such as he could not perform? Not
at all! there was nothing in the duties which alarmed him. Did he object
to it because of his southern prejudices against the administration? Oh,
no! he had no political feeling to stand in his way. What, then, could
be his reason for refusing?
Carrington resorted again to silence, until Mrs. Lee, a little
impatiently, asked whether it was possible that his personal dislike
to Racliffe could blind him so far as to make him reject so fair a
proposal. Carrington, finding himself more and more uncomfortable, rose
restlessly from his chair and paced the room. He felt that Ratclife had
fairly out-generaled him, and he was at his wits' end to know what card
he could play that would not lead directly into Ratcliffe's trump suit.
To refuse such an offer was hard enough at best, for a man who wanted
money and professional advancement as he did, but to injure himself and
help Ratcliffe by this refusal, was abominably hard. Nevertheless,
he was obliged to admit that he would rather not take a position so
directly under Ratcliffe's control. Madeleine said no more, but he
thought she looked annoyed, and he felt himself in an intolerably
painful situation. He was not certain that she herself might not have
had some share in proposing the plan, and that his refusal might not
have some mortifying consequences for her. What must she think of him,
then?
At this very moment he would have given his right arm for a word of real
affection from Mrs. Lee. He adored her. He would willingly enough have
damned himself for her. There was no sacrifice he would not have made to
bring her nearer to him. In his upright, quiet, simple kind of way, he
immolated himself before her. For months his heart had ached with this
hopeless passion. He recognized that it was hopeless. He knew that she
would never love him, and, to do her justice, she never had given him
reason to suppose that it was in her power to love him, r any man. And
here he stood, obliged to appear ungrateful and prejudiced, mean and
vindictive, in her eyes. He took his seat again, looking so unutterably
dejected, his patient face so tragically mournful, that Madeleine, after
a while, began to see the absurd side of the matter, and presently burst
into a laugh “Please do not look so frightfully miserable!” said she;
“I did not mean to make you unhappy. After all, what does it matter? You
have a perfect right to refuse, and, for my part, I have not the least
wish to see you accept.”
On this, Carrington brightened, and declared that if she thought him
right in declining, he cared for nothing else. It was only the idea of
hurting her feelings that weighed on his mind. But in saying this, he
spoke in a tone that implied a deeper feeling, and made Mrs. Lee again
look grave and sigh.
“Ah, Mr. Carrington,” she said, “this world will not run as we want.
Do you suppose the time will ever come when every one will be good and
happy and do just what they ought? I thought this offer might possibly
take one anxiety off your shoulders. I am sorry now that I let myself be
led into making it.”
Carrington could not answer her. He dared not trust his voice. He rose
to go, and as she held out her hand, he suddenly raised it to his lips,
and so left her. She sat for a moment with tears in her eyes after he
was gone. She thought she knew all that was in his mind, and with
a woman's readiness to explain every act of men by their consuming
passions for her own sex, she took it as a matter of course that
jealousy was the whole cause of Carrington's hostility to Ratcliffe,
and she pardoned it with charming alacrity. “Ten years ago, I could have
loved him,” she thought to herself, and then, while she was half smiling
at the idea, suddenly another thought flashed upon her, and she threw
her hand up before her face as though some one had struck her a blow.
Carrington had reopened the old wound.
When Ratcliffe came to see her again, which he did very shortly
afterwards, glad of so good an excuse, she told him of Carrington's
refusal, adding only that he seemed unwilling to accept any position
that had a political character. Ratcliffe showed no sign of displeasure;
he only said, in a benignant tone, that he was sorry to be unable to
do something for so good a friend of hers; thus establishing, at all
events, his claim on her gratitude. As for Carrington, the offer which
Ratcliffe had made was not intended to be accepted, and Carrington
could not have more embarrassed the secretary than by closing with
it. Ratcliffe's object had been to settle for his own satisfaction the
question of Carrington's hostility, for he knew the man well enough to
feel sure that in any event he would act a perfectly straightforward
part. If he accepted, he would at least be true to his chief. If he
refused, as Ratcliffe expected, it would be a proof that some means must
be found of getting him out of the way. In any case the offer was a new
thread in the net that Mr. Ratcliffe flattered himself he was rapidly
winding about the affections and ambitions of Mrs. Lee. Yet he had
reasons of his own for thinking that Carrington, more easily than any
other man, could cut the meshes of this net if he chose to do so, and
therefore that it would be wiser to postpone action until Carrington
were disposed of.
Without a moment's delay he made inquiries as to all the vacant
or eligible offices in the gift of the government outside his own
department. Very few of these would answer his purpose. He wanted some
temporary law business that would for a time take its holder away to a
distance, say to Australia or Central Asia, the further the better; it
must be highly paid, and it must be given in such a way as not to excite
suspicion that Ratcliffe was concerned in the matter. Such an office was
not easily found. There is little law business in Central Asia, and
at this moment there was not enough to require a special agent in
Australia. Carrington could hardly be induced to lead an expedition
to the sources of the Nile in search of business merely to please Mr.
Ratcliffe, nor could the State Department offer encouragement to a hope
that government would pay the expenses of such an expedition. The
best that Ratcliffe could do was to select the place of counsel to the
Mexican claims-commission which was soon to meet in the city of
Mexico, and which would require about six months' absence. By a little
management he could contrive to get the counsel sent away in advance
of the commission, in order to work up a part of the case on the spot.
Ratcliffe acknowledged that Mexico was too near, but he drily remarked
to himself that if Carrington could get back in time to dislodge him
after he had once got a firm hold on Mrs. Lee, he would never try to run
another caucus.
The point once settled in his own mind, Ratcliffe, with his usual
rapidity of action, carried his scheme into effect. In this there was
little difficulty. He dropped in at the office of the Secretary of State
within eight-and-forty hours after his last conversation with Mrs.
Lee. During these early days of every new administration, the absorbing
business of government relates principally to appointments. The
Secretary of the Treasury was always ready to oblige his colleagues in
the Cabinet by taking care of their friends to any reasonable extent.
The Secretary of State was not less courteous. The moment he understood
that Mr. Ratcliffe had a strong wish to secure the appointment of
a certain person as counsel to the Mexican claims-commission, the
Secretary of State professed readiness to gratify him, and when he heard
who the proposed person was, the suggestion was hailed with pleasure,
for Carrington was well known and much liked at the Department, and
was indeed an excellent man for the place. Ratcliffe hardly needed to
promise an equivalent. The business was arranged in ten minutes.
“I only need say,” added Ratcliffe, “that if my agency in the affair is
known, Mr. Carrington will certainly refuse the place, for he is one of
your old-fashioned Virginia planters, proud as Lucifer, and willing
to accept nothing by way of favour. I will speak to your Assistant
Secretary about it, and the recommendation shall appear to come from
him.”
The very next day Carrington received a private note from his old
friend, the Assistant Secretary of State, who was overjoyed to do him a
kindness.
The note asked him to call at the Department at his earliest
convenience. He went, and the Assistant Secretary announced that he
had recommended Carrington's appointment as counsel to the
Mexican claims-commission, and that the Secretary had approved the
recommendation. “We want a Southern man, a lawyer with a little
knowledge of international law, one who can go at once, and, above all,
an honest man. You fit the description to a hair; so pack your trunk as
soon as you like.”
Carrington was startled. Coming as it did, this offer was not only
unobjectionable, but tempting. It was hard for him even to imagine a
reason for hesitation. From the first he felt that he must go, and yet
to go was the very last thing he wanted to do. That he should suspect
Ratcliffe to be at the bottom of this scheme of banishment was a matter
of course, and he instantly asked whether any influence had been used
in his favour; but the Assistant Secretary so stoutly averred that
the appointment was made on his recommendation alone, as to block all
further inquiry. Technically this assertion was exact, and it made
Carrington feel that it would be base ingratitude on his part not to
accept a favour so handsomely offered.
Yet he could not make up his mind to acceptance. He begged four and
twenty hours' delay, in order, as he said, to see whether he could
arrange his affairs for a six months' absence, although he knew there
would be no difficulty in his doing so. He went away and sat in his
office alone, gloomily wondering what he could do, although from the
first he saw that the situation was only too clear, and there could not
be the least dark corner of a doubt to crawl into. Six months ago he
would have jumped at this offer.
What had happened within six months to make it seem a disaster?
Mrs. Lee! There was the whole story. To go away now was to give up Mrs.
Lee, and probably to give her up to Ratcliffe. Carrington gnashed his
teeth when he thought how skilfully Ratcliffe was playing his cards. The
longer he reflected, the more certain he felt that Ratcliffe was at
the bottom of this scheme to get rid of him; and yet, as he studied
the situation, it occurred to him that after all it was possible for
Ratcliffe to make a blunder. This Illinois politician was clever, and
understood men; but a knowledge of men is a very different thing from
a knowledge of women. Carrington himself had no great experience in the
article of women, but he thought he knew more than Ratcliffe, who was
evidently relying most on his usual theory of political corruption as
applied to feminine weaknesses, and who was only puzzled at finding how
high a price Mrs. Lee set on herself. If Ratcliffe were really at the
bottom of the scheme for separating Carrington from her, it could only
be because he thought that six months, or even six weeks, would
be enough to answer his purpose. And on reaching this point in his
reflections, Carrington suddenly rose, lit a cigar, and walked up and
down his room steadily for the next hour, with the air of a general
arranging a plan of campaign, or a lawyer anticipating his opponent's
line of argument.
On one point his mind was made up. He would accept. If Ratcliffe really
had a hand in this move, he should be gratified. If he had laid a trap,
he should be caught in it. And when the evening came, Carrington took
his hat and walked off to call upon Mrs. Lee.
He found the sisters alone and quietly engaged in their occupations.
Madeleine was dramatically mending an open-work silk stocking, a
delicate and difficult task which required her whole mind. Sybil was at
the piano as usual, and for the first time since he had known her, she
rose when he came in, and, taking her work-basket, sat down to share in
the conversation. She meant to take her place as a woman, henceforward.
She was tired of playing girl. Mr. Carrington should see that she was
not a fool.
Carrington plunged at once into his subject, and announced the offer
made to him, at which Madeleine expressed delight, and asked many
questions. What was the pay? How soon must he go? How long should he be
away? Was there danger from the climate? and finally she added, with a
smile, “What am I to say to Mr. Ratcliffe if you accept this offer after
refusing his?” As for Sybil, she made one reproachful exclamation: “Oh,
Mr. Carrington!” and sank back into silence and consternation. Her
first experiment at taking a stand of her own in the world was not
encouraging. She felt betrayed.
Nor was Carrington gay. However modest a man may be, only an idiot
can forget himself entirely in pursuing the moon and the stars. In the
bottom of his soul, he had a lingering hope that when he told his
story, Madeleine might look up with a change of expression, a glance
of unpremeditated regard, a little suffusion of the eyes, a little
trembling of the voice. To see himself relegated to Mexico with such
cheerful alacrity by the woman he loved was not the experience he would
have chosen. He could not help feeling that his hopes were disposed of,
and he watched her with a painful sinking of the heart, which did not
lead to lightness of conversation. Madeleine herself felt that her
expressions needed to be qualified, and she tried to correct her
mistake. What should she do without a tutor? she said. He must let her
have a list of books to read while he was away: they were themselves
going north in the middle of May, and Carrington would be back by the
time they returned in December. After all, they should see as little of
him during the summer if he were in Virginia as if he were in Mexico.
Carrington gloomily confessed that he was very unwilling to go; that he
wished the idea had never been suggested; that he should be perfectly
happy if for any reason the scheme broke down; but he gave no
explanation of his feeling, and Madeleine had too much tact to press
for one. She contented herself by arguing against it, and talking as
vivaciously as she could. Her heart really bled for him as she saw
his face grow more and more pathetic in its quiet expression of
disappointment. But what could she say or do? He sat till after ten
o'clock; he could not tear himself away. He felt that this was the end
of his pleasure in life; he dreaded the solitude of his thoughts.
Mrs. Lee's resources began to show signs of exhaustion. Long pauses
intervened between her remarks; and at length Carrington, with a
superhuman effort, apologized for inflicting himself upon her so
unmercifully. If she knew, he said, how he dreaded being alone, she
would forgive him. Then he rose to go, and, in taking leave, asked Sybil
if she was inclined to ride the next day; if so, he was at her service.
Sybil's face brightened as she accepted the invitation.
Mrs. Lee, a day or two afterwards, did mention Carrington's appointment
to Mr. Ratcliffe, and she told Carrington that the Secretary certainly
looked hurt and mortified, but showed it only by almost instantly
changing the subject.
***
Chapter X
Äåìîêðàòèÿ. Ãåíðè Àäàìñ, 5-9 ãëàâà
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