HOW IT WAS LOBBIED FOR
The Hon. Pratt C. Gashwiler, M.C., was of course unaware of the
incident described in the last chapter. His secret, even if it had been
discovered by Dobbs, was safe in that gentleman's innocent and honorable
hands, and certainly was not of a quality that Mr. Wiles, at present,
would have cared to expose. For, in spite of Mr. Wiles's discomfiture,
he still had enough experience of character to know that the irate
member from Fresno would be satisfied with his own peculiar manner of
vindicating his own personal integrity, and would not make a public
scandal of it. Again, Wiles was convinced that Dobbs was equally
implicated with Gashwiler, and would be silent for his own sake. So that
poor Dobbs, as is too often the fate of simple but weak natures, had
full credit for duplicity by every rascal in the land.
From which it may be inferred that nothing occurred to disturb the
security of Gashwiler. When the door closed upon Mr. Wiles, he indited
a note which, with a costly but exceedingly distasteful
bouquet,--rearranged by his own fat fingers, and discord and incongruity
visible in every combination of color,--he sent off by a special
messenger. Then he proceeded to make his toilet,--an operation rarely
graceful or picturesque in our sex, and an insult to the spectator when
obesity is superadded. When he had put on a clean shirt, of which there
was grossly too much, and added a white waistcoat, that seemed to accent
his rotundity, he completed his attire with a black frock coat of the
latest style, and surveyed himself complacently before a mirror. It is
to be recorded that, however satisfactory the result might have been to
Mr. Gashwiler, it was not so to the disinterested spectator. There are
some men on whom “that deformed thief, Fashion,” avenges himself by
making their clothes appear perennially new. The gloss of the tailor's
iron never disappears; the creases of the shelf perpetually rise in
judgment against the wearer. Novelty was the general suggestion of Mr.
Gashwiler's full-dress,--it was never his HABITUDE;--and “Our own
Make,” “Nobby,” and the “Latest Style, only $15,” was as patent on the
legislator's broad back as if it still retained the shop-man's ticket.
Thus arrayed, within an hour he complacently followed the note and his
floral offering. The house he sought had been once the residence of
a foreign Ambassador, who had loyally represented his government in a
single unimportant treaty, now forgotten, and in various receptions and
dinners, still actively remembered by occasional visits to its salon;
now the average dreary American parlor. “Dear me,” the fascinating Mr. X
would say, “but do you know, love, in this very room I remember meeting
the distinguished Marquis of Monte Pio;” or perhaps the fashionable
Jones of the State Department instantly crushed the decayed friend he
was perfunctorily visiting by saying, “'Pon my soul, YOU here;--why, the
last time I was in this room I gossiped for an hour with the Countess
de Castenet in that very corner.” For, with the recall of the aforesaid
Ambassador, the mansion had become a boarding-place, kept by the wife of
a departmental clerk.
Perhaps there was nothing in the history of the house more quaint and
philosophic than the story of its present occupant. Roger Fauquier had
been a departmental clerk for forty years. It was at once his practical
good luck and his misfortune to have been early appointed to a position
which required a thorough and complete knowledge of the formulas and
routine of a department that expended millions of the public funds.
Fauquier, on a poor salary, diminishing instead of increasing with his
service, had seen successive administrations bud and blossom and decay,
but had kept his position through the fact that his knowledge was a
necessity to the successive chiefs and employes. Once it was true that
he had been summarily removed by a new Secretary, to make room for a
camp follower, whose exhaustive and intellectual services in a political
campaign had made him eminently fit for anything; but the alarming
discovery that the new clerk's knowledge of grammar and etymology
was even worse than that of the Secretary himself, and that, through
ignorance of detail, the business of that department was retarded to a
damage to the Government of over half a million of dollars, led to the
reinstatement of Mr. Fauquier--AT A LOWER SALARY. For it was felt that
something was wrong somewhere, and as it had always been the custom of
Congress and the administration to cut down salaries as the first step
to reform, they made of Mr. Fauquier a moral example. A gentleman born,
of somewhat expensive tastes, having lived up to his former salary, this
change brought another bread-winner into the field, Mrs. Fauquier, who
tried, more or less unsuccessfully, to turn her old Southern habits of
hospitality to remunerative account. But as poor Fauquier could never be
prevailed upon to present a bill to a gentleman, sir, and as some of the
scions of the best Southern families were still waiting for, or had
been recently dismissed from, a position, the experiment was a pecuniary
failure. Yet the house was of excellent repute and well patronized;
indeed, it was worth something to see old Fauquier sitting at the
head of his own table, in something of his ancestral style, relating
anecdotes of great men now dead and gone, interrupted only by occasional
visits from importunate tradesmen.
Prominent among what Mr. Fauquier called his “little family” was a
black-eyed lady of great powers of fascination, and considerable local
reputation as a flirt. Nevertheless, these social aberrations were amply
condoned by a facile and complacent husband, who looked with a lenient
and even admiring eye upon the little lady's amusement, and to a certain
extent lent a tacit indorsement to her conduct. Nobody minded Hopkinson;
in the blaze of Mrs. Hopkinson's fascinations he was completely lost
sight of. A few married women with unduly sensitive husbands, and
several single ladies of the best and longest standing, reflected
severely on her conduct. The younger men of course admired her, but I
think she got her chief support from old fogies like ourselves. For it
is your quiet, self-conceited, complacent, philosophic, broad-waisted
paterfamilias who, after all, is the one to whom the gay and giddy of
the proverbially impulsive, unselfish sex owe their place in the social
firmament. We are never inclined to be captious; we laugh at as a
folly what our wives and daughters condemn as a fault; OUR “withers are
unwrung,” yet we still confess to the fascinations of a pretty face.
We know, bless us, from dear experience, the exact value of one woman's
opinion of another; we want our brilliant little friend to shine; it
is only the moths who will burn their two-penny immature wings in the
flame! And why should they not? Nature has been pleased to supply more
moths than candles! Go to!--give the pretty creature--be she maid, wife,
or widow--a show! And so, my dear sir, while mater-familias bends her
black brows in disgust, we smile our superior little smile, and extend
to Mistress Anonyma our gracious indorsement. And if giddiness is
grateful, or if folly is friendly,--well, of course, we can't help that.
Indeed it rather proves our theory.
I had intended to say something about Hopkinson; but really there is
very little to say. He was invariably good humored. A few ladies once
tried to show him that he really ought to feel worse than he did about
the conduct of his wife; and it is recorded that Hopkinson, in an excess
of good humor and kindliness, promised to do so. Indeed the good
fellow was so accessible that it is said that young DeLancy of the Tape
Department confided to Hopkinson his jealousy of a rival; and revealed
the awful secret that he (DeLancy) had reason to expect more loyalty
from his (Hopkinson's) wife. The good fellow is reported to have
been very sympathetic, and to have promised Delaney to lend whatever
influence he had with Mrs. Hopkinson in his favor. “You see,” he said
explanatorily to DeLancy, “she has a good deal to attend to lately, and
I suppose has got rather careless,--that's women's ways. But if I
can't bring her round I'll speak to Gashwiler,--I'll get him to use his
influence with Mrs. Hop. So cheer up, my boy, HE'LL make it all right.”
The appearance of a bouquet on the table of Mrs. Hopkinson was no
rare event; nevertheless, Mr. Gashwiler's was not there. Its hideous
contrasts had offended her woman's eye,--it is observable that good
taste survives the wreck of all the other feminine virtues,--and she had
distributed it to make boutonnieres for other gentlemen. Yet, when he
appeared, she said to him hastily, putting her little hand over the
cardiac region:
“I'm so glad you came. But you gave me SUCH a fright an hour ago.”
Mr. Gashwiler was both pleased and astounded. “What have I done, my dear
Mrs. Hopkinson?” he began.
“Oh, don't talk,” she said sadly. “What have you done, indeed! Why, you
sent me that beautiful bouquet. I could not mistake your taste in the
arrangement of the flowers;--but my husband was here. You know his
jealousy. I was obliged to conceal it from him. Never--promise me
now--NEVER do it again.”
Mr. Gashwiler gallantly protested.
“No! I am serious! I was so agitated: he must have seen me blush.”
Nothing but the gross flattery to this speech could have clouded its
manifest absurdity to the Gashwiler consciousness. But Mr. Gashwiler
had already succumbed to the girlish half-timidity with which it was
uttered. Nevertheless, he could not help saying:
“But why should he be so jealous now? Only day before yesterday I saw
Simpson of Duluth hand you a nosegay right before him!”
“Ah,” returned the lady, “he was outwardly calm THEN, but you know
nothing of the scene that occurred between us after you left.”
“But,” gasped the practical Gashwiler, “Simpson had given your husband
that contract,--a cool fifty thousand in his pocket!”
Mrs. Hopkinson looked as dignifiedly at Gashwiler as was consistent with
five feet three (the extra three inches being a pyramidal structure of
straw-colored hair), a frond of faint curls, a pair of laughing blue
eyes, and a small belted waist. Then she said, with a casting down of
her lids:
“You forget that my husband loves me.” And for once the minx appeared to
look penitent. It was becoming; but as it had been originally practiced
in a simple white dress, relieved only with pale-blue ribbons, it was
not entirely in keeping with be-flounced lavender and rose-colored
trimmings. Yet the woman who hesitates between her moral expression and
the harmony of her dress is lost. And Mrs. Hopkinson was victrix by her
very audacity.
Mr. Gashwiler was flattered. The most dissolute man likes the appearance
of virtue. “But graces and accomplishments like yours, dear Mrs.
Hopkinson,” he said oleaginously, “belong to the whole country.”
Which, with something between a courtesy and a strut, he endeavored to
represent. “And I shall want to avail myself of all,” he added, “in the
matter of the Castro claim. A little supper at Welcker's, a glass or two
of champagne, and a single flash of those bright eyes, and the thing is
done.”
“But,” said Mrs. Hopkinson, “I've promised Josiah that I would give up
all those frivolities, and although my conscience is clear, you know how
people talk! Josiah hears it. Why, only last night, at a reception at
the Patagonian Minister's, every woman in the room gossiped about me
because I led the german with him. As if a married woman, whose
husband was interested in the Government, could not be civil to the
representative of a friendly power?”
Mr. Gashwiler did not see how Mr. Hopkinson's late contract for
supplying salt pork and canned provisions to the army of the United
States should make his wife susceptible to the advances of foreign
princes; but he prudently kept that to himself. Still, not being himself
a diplomat, he could not help saying:
“But I understood that Mr. Hopkinson did not object to your interesting
yourself in this claim, and you know some of the stock--”
The lady started, and said:
“Stock! Dear Mr. Gashwiler, for Heaven's sake don't mention that hideous
name to me. Stock, I am sick of it! Have you gentlemen no other topic
for a lady?”
She punctuated her sentence with a mischievous look at her interlocutor.
For a second time I regret to say that Mr. Gashwiler succumbed. The
Roman constituency at Remus, it is to be hoped, were happily ignorant of
this last defection of their great legislator. Mr. Gashwiler instantly
forgot his theme,--began to ply the lady with a certain bovine-like
gallantry, which it is to be said to her credit she parried with a
playful, terrier-like dexterity, when the servant suddenly announced,
“Mr. Wiles.”
Gashwiler started. Not so Mrs. Hopkinson, who, however, prudently and
quietly removed her own chair several inches from Gashwiler's.
“Do you know Mr. Wiles?” she asked pleasantly.
“No! That is, I--ah--yes, I may say I have had some business relations
with him,” responded Gashwiler rising.
“Won't you stay?” she added pleadingly. “Do!”
Mr. Gashwiler's prudence always got the better of his gallantry. “Not
now,” he responded in some nervousness. “Perhaps I had better go now,
in view of what you have just said about gossip. You need not mention my
name to this-er--this--Mr. Wiles.” And with one eye on the door, and an
awkward dash of his lips at the lady's fingers, he withdrew.
There was no introductory formula to Mr. Wiles's interview. He dashed at
once in medias res. “Gashwiler knows a woman that, he says, can help us
against that Spanish girl who is coming here with proofs, prettiness,
fascination, and what not! You must find her out.”
“Why?” asked the lady laughingly.
“Because I don't trust that Gashwiler. A woman with a pretty face and an
ounce of brains could sell him out; aye, and US with him.”
“Oh, say TWO ounces of brains. Mr. Wiles, Mr. Gashwiler is no fool.”
“Possibly, except when your sex is concerned, and it is very likely that
the woman is his superior.”
“I should think so,” said Mrs. Hopkinson with a mischievous look.
“Ah, you know her, then?”
“Not so well as I know him,” said Mrs. H. quite seriously. “I wish I
did.”
“Well, you'll find out if she's to be trusted! You are laughing,--it is
a serious matter! This woman--”
Mrs. Hopkinson dropped him a charming courtesy and said,
“C'est moi!”