BYGONES

A telegram had been thrust under my door--"I must see you. Don't fail to

stop off here on your way back. Answer. Carlotta."

Again she was at the station in her phaeton. Her first look, long before

I was near enough for speech, showed me how her mood had changed; but

she waited until we were clear of the town. "Forgive me," she then said

in the abrupt, direct manner which was the expression of her greatest

charm, her absolute honesty. "I've got the meanest temper in the world,

but it don't last, and as soon as you were gone I was ashamed of

myself."

"I don't understand why you are making these apologies," said I, "and I

don't understand why you were angry."

"That's what it means to be a man," she replied. "Your letter about your

mother made me furious. You hadn't ever urged me to hurry up the

wedding on your own account. And your letter made me feel as if, while

you personally didn't care whether we ever married or not, still for

your mother's sake you were willing to--to sacrifice yourself."

"Let me see my letter," said I.

"I tore it into a thousand pieces," said she. "But I don't mean that you

really wrote just that. You didn't. But you made me jealous of your

mother, and my temper got hold of me, and then I read the meanest kind

of things into and under and all round every word. And--I'm sorry."

I could find nothing to say. I saw my freedom slipping from me. I

watched it, sick at heart; yet, on the other hand, I neither tried nor

wished to detain it, though I could easily have made a renewal of our

engagement impossible. I have no explanation for this conflict of

emotions and motives.

"Don't make it so hard for me," she went on. "I never before in my life

told anybody I was sorry for anything, and I thought I never would. But

I _am_ sorry, and--we'll have the wedding the first day of August."

Still I found nothing to say. It was so painfully obvious that, true to

her training, she had not given and was not giving a thought to the

state of my mind and feelings. What _she_ wished, that she would do--the

rest did not interest her.

"Are you satisfied, my lord?" she demanded. "Have I humbled myself

sufficiently?"

"You haven't humbled yourself at all," said I. "You have only humbled

me."

She did not pause on my remark long enough to see what it meant. "Now

that it's all settled," she said gaily, "I don't mind telling you that I

began to make my preparations to be married on the first of

August--when, do you think?"

"When?" I said.

"The very day I got your nasty letter, putting me second to your

mother." And she laughed, and was still laughing, when she added: "So,

you see, I was determined to marry you."

"I do," said I dryly. "I suppose I ought to feel flattered."

"No, you oughtn't," she retorted. "I simply made up my mind to marry

you. And I'd do it, no matter what it cost. I get _that_ from father.

But I've got mother's disposition, too--and that makes me far too good

for such a cold, unsentimental, ambitious person as you."

"Don't you think you're rather rash to confess so frankly--when I could

still escape?"

"Not at all," was her confident answer. "I know you, and so I know

nothing could make you break your word."

"There's some truth in that,"--and I hope that I do not deceive myself

in thinking I was honest there. "More truth, perhaps, than you guess."

She looked shrewdly at me--and friendlily. "Don't be too sure I haven't

guessed," said she. "Nobody's ever so blind as he lets others think.

It's funny, isn't it? There are things in your mind that you'd never

tell me, and things in my mind that I'd never tell you. And each of us

guesses most of them, without ever letting on." She laughed queerly, and

struck the horse smartly so that he leaped into a gait at which

conversation was impossible.

When we resumed, the subject was the details of our wedding.

At home again, I found my mother too ill to leave her bed. She had been

ill before,--many times when she wouldn't confess it, several times when

she was forced to admit it, but never before so ill that she could not

dress and come down stairs. "I shall be up to-morrow," she assured me,

and I almost believed her. She drew a letter from under her pillow.

"This came while you were away," she went on. "I kept it here,

because--" a look of shame flitted across her face, and then her eyes

were steady and proud again,--"why should I be ashamed of it? I had the

impulse to destroy the letter, and I'm not sure but that I'm failing in

my duty."

I took it,--yes, it was from Boston, from Betty. I opened it and

fortunately had nerved myself against showing myself to my mother. There

was neither beginning nor end, just a single sentence:

"From the bottom of my broken heart I am thankful that I have been

spared the horror of discovering I had bound myself for life to a

coward."

The shot went straight to the center of the target. But----There lay my

mother--did _she_ not have the right to determine my destiny--she who

had given me my life and her own? I tore up Betty's letter, and I looked

at mother and said, "There's nothing in that to make me waver--or

regret." It was the only lie I ever told her. I told it well, thank God,

for she was convinced, and the look in her face repaid me a

thousandfold. It repays me once more as I write.

Carlotta and I were married at her bedside, and she lived only until the

next day but one. When the doctor told me of the long concealed mortal

disease that was the cause of her going, he ended with: "And, Mr.

Sayler, it passes belief that she managed to keep alive for five years.

I can't understand it." But _I_ understood. She simply refused to go

until she felt that her mission was accomplished.

"We must never forget her," said Carlotta, trying to console me by

grieving with me.

I did not answer,--how could I explain? Never forget her! On the

contrary, I knew that I must forget, and that I must work and grow and

so heal the wound and cover its scar. I lost not a day in beginning.

To those few succeeding months I owe the power I have had all these

years to concentrate my mind upon whatever I will to think about; for in

those months I fought the fight I dared not lose--fought it and won. Let

those who have never loved talk of remembering the dead.

* * * * *

I turned away from her grave with the resolve that my first act of power

would be to stamp out Dominick. But for him she would not have gone for

many a year. It was his persecutions that involved us in the miseries

which wasted her and made her fall a victim to the mortal disease. It

was his malignity that poisoned her last years, which, but for him,

would have been happy.

As my plans for ousting Dunkirk took shape, I saw clearly that, if he

were to be overthrown at once, I must use part of the existing control

of the machine of the party,--it would take several years, at least

three, to build up an entirely new control. To work quickly, I must use

Croffut, Dunkirk's colleague in the Senate. And Croffut was the creature

of Dominick.

Early in September Woodruff came to me, at Fredonia, his manner

jubilant. "I can get Dominick," he exclaimed. "He is furious against

Dunkirk because he's just discovered that Dunkirk cheated him out of a

hundred thousand dollars on that perpetual street railway franchise,

last winter."

"But we don't want Dominick," said I.

My face must have reflected my mind, for Woodruff merely replied, "Oh,

very well. Of course that alters the case."

"We must get Croffut without him," I went on.

Woodruff shook his head. "Can't get him," he said. "Dominick controls

the two southern ranges of counties. He finances his own machine from

what he collects from vice and crime in those cities. He gives that

branch of the plum tree to the boys. He keeps the bigger one, the

corporations, for himself."

"He can be destroyed," said I, waving aside these significant reminders.

"Yes, in five years or so of hard work. Meanwhile, Dunkirk will run

things at the capital to suit himself. Anyhow, you're taking on a good

deal more than's necessary--starting with two big fights, one of 'em

against a man you ought to use to do up the other. It's like breaking

your own sword at the beginning of the duel."

"Go back to the capital," said I, after a moment's thought; "I'll

telegraph you up there what to do."

It was my first test--my first chance to show whether I had learned at

the savage school at which I had been a pupil. Scores, hundreds of men,

can plan, and plan wisely,--at almost any cross-roads' general store you

hear in the conversation round the stove as good plans as ever moved the

world to admiration. But execution,--there's the rub! And the first

essential of an executive is freedom from partialities and hatreds,--not

to say, "Do I like him? Do I hate him? Was he my enemy a year or a week

or a moment ago?" but only to ask oneself the one question, "Can he be

useful to me _now_?"

"I will use Dominick to destroy Dunkirk, and then I will destroy him," I

said to myself. But that did not satisfy me. I saw that I was

temporizing with the weakness that has wrecked more careers than

misjudgment. I felt that I must decide then and there whether or not I

would eliminate personal hatred from my life. After a long and bitter

struggle, I did decide once and for all.

I telegraphed Woodruff to go ahead. When I went back to Pulaski to

settle my affairs there, Dominick came to see me. Not that he dreamed of

the existence of my combine or of my connection with the new political

deal, but simply because I had married into the Ramsay family and was

therefore now in the Olympus of corporate power before which he was on

his knees,--for a price, like a wise devotee, untroubled by any such

qualmishness as self-respect. I was ready for him. I put out my hand.

"I'm glad you're willing to let bygones be bygones, Mr. Sayler," said

he, so moved that the tears stood in his eyes.

Then it flashed on me that, after all, he was only a big brute, driven

blindly by his appetites. How silly to plot revenges upon the creatures

of circumstance--how like a child beating the chair it happens to

strike against! Hatreds and revenges are for the small mind with small

matters to occupy it. Of the stones I have quarried to build my career,

not one has been, or could have been, spared to waste as a missile.

I went down to the Cedar Grove cemetery, where my mother lay beside my

father. My two sisters who died before I was born were at their feet;

her parents and his on either side. And I said to her, "Mother, I am

going to climb up to a place where I can use my life as you would have

me use it. To rise in such a world as this I shall have to do many

things you would not approve. I shall do them. But when I reach the

height, I shall justify myself and you. I know how many have started

with the same pledge and have been so defiled by what they had to handle

that when they arrived they were past cleansing; and they neither kept

nor cared to keep their pledge. But I, mother, shall not break this

pledge to you."