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?