She went against all good judgment in marrying him; she cut herself off
from her own people, from the life in which she had been an alluring and
beautiful figure. Washington had never had two such seasons as those in
which she moved; for the diplomatic circle who had had “the run of the
world” knew her value, and were not content without her. She might
have made a brilliant match with one ambassador thirty years older than
herself--she was but twenty-two; and there were at least six attaches
and secretaries of legation who entered upon a tournament for her heart
and hand; but she was not for them. All her fine faculties of tact and
fairness, of harmless strategy, and her gifts of wit and unexpected
humour were needed to keep her cavaliers constant and hopeful to the
last; but she never faltered, and she did not fail. The faces of old men
brightened when they saw her, and one or two ancient figures who, for
years, had been seldom seen at social functions now came when they knew
she was to be present. There were, of course, a few women who said she
would coquette with any male from nine to ninety; but no man ever said
so; and there was none, from first to last, but smiled with pleasure
at even the mention of her name, so had her vivacity, intelligence, and
fine sympathy conquered them. She was a social artist by instinct. In
their hearts they all recognised how fair and impartial she was; and she
drew out of every man the best that was in him. The few women who did
not like her said that she chattered; but the truth was she made other
people talk by swift suggestion or delicate interrogation.
After the blow fell, Freddy Hartzman put the matter succinctly, and told
the truth faithfully, when he said, “The first time I met her, I told
her all I’d ever done that could be told, and all I wanted to do;
including a resolve to carry her off to some desert place and set up
a Kingdom of Two. I don’t know how she did it. I was like a tap, and
poured myself out; and when it was all over, I thought she was the best
talker I’d ever heard. But yet she’d done nothing except look at me
and listen, and put in a question here and there, that was like a baby
asking to see your watch. Oh, she was a lily-flower, was Sally Seabrook,
and I’ve never been sorry I told her all my little story! It did me
good. Poor darling--it makes me sick sometimes when I think of it. Yet
she’ll win out all right--a hundred to one she’ll win out. She was a
star.”
Freddy Hartzman was in an embassy of repute; he knew the chancelleries
and salons of many nations, and was looked upon as one of the ablest and
shrewdest men in the diplomatic service. He had written one of the
best books on international law in existence, he talked English like a
native, he had published a volume of delightful verse, and had
omitted to publish several others, including a tiny volume which Sally
Seabrook’s charms had inspired him to write. His view of her was shared
by most men who knew the world, and especially by the elderly men who
had a real knowledge of human nature, among whom was a certain important
member of the United States executive called John Appleton. When the end
of all things at Washington came for Sally, these two men united to bear
her up, that her feet should not stumble upon the stony path of the hard
journey she had undertaken.
Appleton was not a man of much speech, but his words had weight; for he
was not only a minister; he came of an old family which had ruled
the social destinies of a state, and had alternately controlled and
disturbed its politics. On the day of the sensation, in the fiery cloud
of which Sally disappeared, Appleton delivered himself of his mind in
the matter at a reception given by the President.
“She will come back--and we will all take her back, be glad to have her
back,” he said. “She has the grip of a lever which can lift the eternal
hills with the right pressure. Leave her alone--leave her alone. This is
a democratic country, and she’ll prove democracy a success before she’s
done.”
The world knew that John Appleton had offered her marriage, and he had
never hidden the fact. What they did not know was that she had told him
what she meant to do before she did it. He had spoken to her plainly,
bluntly, then with a voice that was blurred and a little broken,
urging her against the course towards which she was set; but it had not
availed; and, realising that he had come upon a powerful will underneath
the sunny and so human surface, he had ceased to protest, to bear down
upon her mind with his own iron force. When he realised that all his
reasoning was wasted, that all worldly argument was vain, he made one
last attempt, a forlorn hope, as though to put upon record what he
believed to be the truth.
“There is no position you cannot occupy,” he said. “You have the perfect
gift in private life, and you have a public gift. You have a genius for
ruling. Say, my dear, don’t wreck it all. I know you are not for me, but
there are better men in the country than I am. Hartzman will be a great
man one day--he wants you. Young Tilden wants you; he has millions, and
he will never disgrace them or you, the power which they can command,
and the power which you have. And there are others. Your people have
told you they will turn you off; the world will say things--will
rend you. There is nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of a
favourite. But that’s nothing--it’s nothing at all compared with the
danger to yourself. I didn’t sleep last night thinking of it. Yet I’m
glad you wrote me; it gave me time to think, and I can tell you the
truth as I see it. Haven’t you thought that he will drag you down,
down, down, wear out your soul, break and sicken your life, destroy your
beauty--you are beautiful, my dear, beyond what the world sees, even.
Give it up--ah, give it up, and don’t break our hearts! There are too
many people loving you for you to sacrifice them--and yourself, too....
You’ve had such a good time!”
“It’s been like a dream,” she interrupted, in a faraway voice, “like a
dream, these two years.”
“And it’s been such a good dream,” he urged; “and you will only go to a
bad one, from which you will never wake. The thing has fastened on him;
he will never give it up. And penniless, too--his father has cast him
off. My girl, it’s impossible. Listen to me. There’s no one on earth
that would do more for you than I would--no one.”
“Dear, dear friend!” she cried with a sudden impulse, and caught his
hand in hers and kissed it before he could draw it back. “You are so
true, and you think you are right. But, but”--her eyes took on a
deep, steady, far-away look--“but I will save him; and we shall not be
penniless in the end. Meanwhile I have seven hundred dollars a year of
my own. No one can touch that. Nothing can change me now--and I have
promised.”
When he saw her fixed determination, he made no further protest, but
asked that he might help her, be with her the next day, when she was
to take a step which the wise world would say must lead to sorrow and a
miserable end.
The step she took was to marry Jim Templeton, the drunken, cast-off son
of a millionaire senator from Kentucky, who controlled railways, and
owned a bank, and had so resented his son’s inebriate habits that for
five years he had never permitted Jim’s name to be mentioned in his
presence. Jim had had twenty thousand dollars left him by his mother,
and a small income of three hundred dollars from an investment which had
been made for him when a little boy. And this had carried him on; for,
drunken as he was, he had sense enough to eke out the money, limiting
himself to three thousand dollars a year. He had four thousand dollars
left, and his tiny income of three hundred, when he went to Sally
Seabrook, after having been sober for a month, and begged her to marry
him.
Before dissipation had made him look ten years older than he was, there
had been no handsomer man in all America. Even yet he had a remarkable
face; long, delicate, with dark brown eyes, as fair a forehead as man
could wish, and black, waving hair, streaked with grey-grey, though he
was but twenty-nine years of age.
When Sally was fifteen and he twenty-two, he had fallen in love with
her and she with him; and nothing had broken the early romance. He had
captured her young imagination, and had fastened his image on her heart.
Her people, seeing the drift of things, had sent her to a school on
the Hudson, and the two did not meet for some time. Then came a stolen
interview, and a fastening of the rivets of attraction--for Jim had
gifts of a wonderful kind. He knew his Horace and Anacreon and Heine
and Lamartine and Dante in the originals, and a hundred others; he was
a speaker of power and grace; and he had a clear, strong head for
business. He was also a lawyer, and was junior attorney to his father’s
great business. It was because he had the real business gift, not
because he had a brilliant and scholarly mind, that his father had taken
him into his concerns, and was the more unforgiving when he gave way to
temptation. Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed
him from his mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace,
Anacreon, and philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the
feeble-minded. He had set his heart on Jim, and what Jim could do and
would do by and by in the vast financial concerns he controlled, when
he was ready to slip out and down; but Jim had disappointed him beyond
calculation.
In the early days of their association Jim had left his post and taken
to drink at critical moments in their operations. At first, high words
had been spoken; then there came the strife of two dissimilar natures,
and both were headstrong, and each proud and unrelenting in his own way.
Then, at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim
had flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight or
a month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he
quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a
voice meant for the stage--a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon
the English stage a hundred years before. Even in his cups, even after
his darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out
from his fellows, distinguished and very handsome. Society, however, had
ceased to recognise him for a long time, and he did not seek it. For two
or three years he practised law now and then. He took cases, preferably
criminal cases, for which very often he got no pay; but that, too,
ceased at last. Now, in his quiet, sober intervals he read omnivorously,
and worked out problems in physics for which he had a taste, until the
old appetite surged over him again. Then his spirits rose, and he was
the old brilliant talker, the joyous galliard until, in due time, he
became silently and lethargically drunk.
In one of his sober intervals he had met Sally Seabrook in the street.
It was the first time in four years, for he had avoided her, and though
she had written to him once or twice, he had never answered her--shame
was in his heart. Yet all the time the old song was in Sally’s ears.
Jim Templeton had touched her in some distant and intimate corner of her
nature where none other had reached; and in all her gay life, when men
had told their tale of admiration in their own way, her mind had gone
back to Jim, and what he had said under the magnolia trees; and his
voice had drowned all others. She was not blind to what he had become,
but a deep belief possessed her that she, of all the world, could save
him. She knew how futile it would look to the world, how wild a dream
it looked even to her own heart, how perilous it was; but, play upon
the surface of things as she had done so much and so often in her brief
career, she was seized of convictions having origin, as it might seem,
in something beyond herself.
So when she and Jim met in the street, the old true thing rushed upon
them both, and for a moment they stood still and looked at each other.
As they might look who say farewell forever, so did each dwell upon the
other’s face. That was the beginning of the new epoch. A few days more,
and Jim came to her and said that she alone could save him; and she
meant him to say it, had led him to the saying, for the same conviction
was burned deep in her own soul. She knew the awful risk she was taking,
that the step must mean social ostracism, and that her own people would
be no kinder to her than society; but she gasped a prayer, smiled at Jim
as though all were well, laid her plans, made him promise her one thing
on his knees, and took the plunge.
Her people did as she expected. She was threatened with banishment from
heart and home--with disinheritance; but she pursued her course; and the
only person who stood with her and Jim at the altar was John Appleton,
who would not be denied, and who had such a half-hour with Jim before
the ceremony as neither of them forgot in the years that the locust ate
thereafter. And, standing at the altar, Jim’s eyes were still wet, with
new resolves in his heart and a being at his side meant for the best man
in the world. As he knelt beside her, awaiting the benediction, a sudden
sense of the enormity of this act came upon him, and for her sake he
would have drawn back then, had it not been too late. He realised that
it was a crime to put this young, beautiful life in peril; that his own
life was a poor, contemptible thing, and that he had been possessed of
the egotism of the selfish and the young.
But the thing was done, and a new life was begun. Before they were
launched upon it, however, before society had fully grasped the
sensation, or they had left upon their journey to northern Canada, where
Sally intended they should work out their problem and make their home,
far and free from all old associations, a curious thing happened. Jim’s
father sent an urgent message to Sally to come to him. When she came, he
told her she was mad, and asked her why she had thrown her life away.
“Why have you done it?” he said. “You--you knew all about him; you might
have married the best man in the country. You could rule a kingdom; you
have beauty and power, and make people do what you want: and you’ve got
a sot.”
“He is your son,” she answered quietly.
She looked so beautiful and so fine as she stood there, fearless and
challenging before him, that he was moved. But he would not show it.
“He was my son--when he was a man,” he retorted grimly.
“He is the son of the woman you once loved,” she answered.
The old man turned his head away.
“What would she have said to what you did to Jim?” He drew himself
around sharply. Her dagger had gone home, but he would not let her know
it.
“Leave her out of the question--she was a saint,” he said roughly.
“She cannot be left out; nor can you. He got his temperament naturally;
he inherited his weakness from your grandfather, from her father. Do you
think you are in no way responsible?”
He was silent for a moment, but then said stubbornly: “Why--why have you
done it? What’s between him and me can’t be helped; we are father and
son; but you--you had no call, no responsibility.”
“I love Jim. I always loved him, ever since I can remember, as you did.
I see my way ahead. I will not desert him. No one cares what happens to
him, no one but me. Your love wouldn’t stand the test; mine will.”
“Your folks have disinherited you,--you have almost nothing, and I will
not change my mind. What do you see ahead of you?”
“Jim--only Jim--and God.”
Her eyes were shining, her hands were clasped together at her side in
the tenseness of her feeling, her indomitable spirit spoke in her face.
Suddenly the old man brought his fist down on the table with a bang.
“It’s a crime--oh, it’s a crime, to risk your life so! You ought to have
been locked up. I’d have done it.”
“Listen to me,” she rejoined quietly. “I know the risk. But do you think
that I could have lived my life out, feeling that I might have saved
Jim, and didn’t try? You talk of beauty and power and ruling--you say
what others have said to me. Which is the greater thing, to get what
pleases one, or to work for something which is more to one than all else
in the world? To save one life, one intellect, one great man--oh, he
has the making of a great man in him!--to save a soul, would not life be
well lost, would not love be well spent in doing it?”
“Love’s labour lost,” said the old man slowly, cynically, but not
without emotion.
“I have ambition,” she continued. “No girl was ever more ambitious, but
my ambition is to make the most and best of myself. Place?--Jim and I
will hold it yet. Power?--it shall be as it must be; but Jim and I will
work for it to fulfil ourselves. For me--ah, if I can save him--and
I mean to do so--do you think that I would not then have my heaven on
earth? You want money--money--money, power, and to rule; and these
are to you the best things in the world. I make my choice differently,
though I would have these other things if I could; and I hope I shall.
But Jim first--Jim first, your son, Jim--my husband, Jim.”
The old man got to his feet slowly. She had him at bay. “But you are
great,” he said, “great! It is an awful stake--awful. Yet if you win,
you’ll have what money can’t buy. And listen to me. We’ll make the stake
bigger. It will give it point, too, in another way. If you keep Jim
sober for four years from the day of your marriage, on the last day
of that four years I’ll put in your hands for you and him, or for your
child--if you have one--five millions of dollars. I am a man of my word.
While Jim drinks I won’t take him back; he’s disinherited. I’ll give him
nothing now or hereafter. Save him for four years,--if he can do that he
will do all, and there’s five millions as sure as the sun’s in heaven.
Amen and amen.”
He opened the door. There was a strange soft light in her eyes as she
came to go.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she said, looking at him whimsically.
He was disconcerted. She did not wait, but reached up and kissed him
on the cheek. “Good-by,” she said with a smile. “We’ll win the stake.
Good-by.”
An instant, and she was gone. He shut the door, then turned and looked
in a mirror on the wall. Abstractedly he touched the cheek she had
kissed. Suddenly a change passed over his face. He dropped in a chair,
and his fist struck the table as he said: “By God, she may do it, she
may do it! But it’s life and death--it’s life and death.”
Society had its sensation, and then the veil dropped. For a long time
none looked behind it except Jim’s father. He had too much at stake not
to have his telescope upon them. A detective followed them to keep Jim’s
record. But this they did not know.