Betty slept late on the following morning, but arose as soon as she
awoke and dressed herself hurriedly. Senator North was an early
visitor. Doubtless he was waiting for her on the veranda.
She ran downstairs, feeling that she could hum a tune. The morning was
radiant, and for the last five days it had seemed to her that the
atmosphere was as black as Harriet's veil. She wanted the fresh air and
the sunshine, the lake and the forest again. She wanted to talk for
long hours with the one man who she was sure could never do a weak or
cowardly act. She wanted to feel that her heavy responsibilities were
pushed out of sight, and that she could live her own life for a little.
She almost had reached the front door when a man sprang up the steps
and through it, closing it behind him. It was John, the butler, and his
face was white.
"What is it?" she managed to ask him. "What on earth has happened now?"
"It's Miss Walker, Miss. They found her three hours ago--on the lake.
The coroner's been here. They're bringing her in. I told them to take
her in the side door. I hoped we'd get her to her room before you come
down. I'll attend to everything, Miss."
Betty heard the slow tramp of feet on the side veranda. It was the most
horrid sound she ever had heard, and she wondered if she should cease
to hear it as long as she lived. She went into the living-room and
covered her face with her hands. She had not cried for Jack Emory, but
she cried passionately now. She felt utterly miserable, and crushed
with a sense of failure; as if all the wretchedness and tragedy of the
past fortnight were her own making. Two lives had almost been given
into her keeping, and in spite of her daring and will the unseen forces
had conquered. And then she wondered if the water had been very cold,
and shivered and drew herself together. And it must have been horribly
dark. Harriet was afraid of the dark, and always had burned a taper at
night.
She heard Senator North come up the front steps and knock. As no one
responded, he opened the door and came into the living-room.
"I have just heard that she has drowned herself," he said; and if there
was a note of relief in his voice, Betty did not hear it. She ran to
him and threw herself into his arms and clung to him.
"You said you would," she sobbed. "And I never shall be in greater
grief than this. I feel as if it were my entire fault, as if I were a
terrible failure, as if I had let two lives slip through my hands. Oh,
poor poor Harriet! Why are some women ever born? What terrible purpose
was she made to live twenty-four wretched years for? You wanted me to
become serious. I feel as if I never could smile again."
He held her closely, and in that strong warm embrace she was comforted
long before she would admit; but he soothed her as if she were a child,
and he did not kiss her.
_Part III_
_The Political Sea Turns Red_
I
Betty Madison arrived in Washington two days before Christmas, with the
sensation of having lived through several life-times since Lady Mary's
car had left the Pennsylvania station on the fourteenth of March; she
half expected to see several new public buildings, and she found
herself wondering if her old friends were much changed.
People capable of the deepest and most enduring impressions often
receive these impressions upon apparently shallow waters. They feel the
blow, but it skims the surface at the moment, to choose its place and
sink slowly, surely, into the thinking brain.
Betty's immediate attitude toward the tragic fact of Harriet's death
was almost spectacular. She felt herself the central figure in a
thrilling and awful drama, its horror stifling for a moment the hope
that the man whose footsteps followed closely upon that tramping of
heavy feet would fulfil his promise and take her in his arms. And when
he did her sense of personal responsibility left her, as well as her
clearer comprehension of what had happened to bring about this climax
so long and so ardently desired.
But she had not seen Senator North since the day following the funeral.
Mrs. Madison had announced with emphasis that she had had as much as
she could stand and would not remain another day in the Adirondacks;
she wanted Narragansett and the light and agreeable society of many
Southern friends who did not have frequent tragedies in their families.
Betty telegraphed for rooms at one of the large hotels at the Pier, and
thereafter had the satisfaction of seeing her mother gossip contentedly
for hours with other ladies of lineage and ante-bellum reminiscences,
or sit with even deeper contentment for intermediate hours upon the
veranda of the Casino. When she herself was bored beyond endurance, she
crossed the bay and lunched or dined in Newport, where she had many
friends; and she spent much time on horseback. When the season was
over, they paid a round of visits to country houses, and finished with
the few weeks in New York necessary for the replenishment of Miss
Madison's wardrobe. She had hoped to reach Washington for the opening
of Congress, but her mother had been ill, prolonging the last visit a
fortnight, and gowns must be consulted upon, fitted and altered did the
world itself stand still. And this was the one period of mental rest
that Betty had experienced since her parting from Senator North.
She had been much with people during these five months, seeking and
finding little solitude, and few had found any change in her beyond a
deeper shade of indifference and more infrequent flashes of humour. She
permitted men to amuse her if she did not amuse them, to all out-door
sports she was faithful, and she read the new books and talked
intelligently of the fashions. When the conversation swung with the
precision of a pendulum from clothes and love to war with Spain, her
mind leapt at once to action, and she argued every advocate of war into
a state of fury. She had responded heavily to the President's appeal in
behalf of the reconcentrados, but her mind was no longer divided. The
failure of the belligerency resolutions to reach the attention of the
House during the Extra Session of Congress had rekindled the war fever
in the country; and the constant chatter about the suffering Cuban and
the duty of the United States, the black iniquity of the Speaker and
the timidity of the President, were wearying to the more evenly
balanced members of the community. "You say that we need a war," said
Betty contemptuously one day, "that it will shake us up and do us good.
If we had fallen as low as that, no war could lift us, certainly not
the act of bullying a small country, of rushing into a war with the
absolute certainty of success. But we need no war. American manhood is
where it always has been and always will be until we reach that pitch
of universal luxury and sloth and vice which extinguished Rome. Those
commercial and financial pursuits should make a man less a man is the
very acme of absurdity. If our men were drawn into a righteous war
to-morrow or a hundred years hence, they would fight to the glory of
their country and their own honour. But if they swagger out to whip a
decrepit and wheezy old man, when the excitement is over they will wish
that the whole episode could be buried in oblivion. And I would be
willing to wager anything you like that if this war does come off, so
false is its sentiment that it will not inspire one great patriotic
poem, nor even one of merit, and that the only thing you will
accomplish will be to drag Cuba from the relaxing clutches of one
tyrant and fling her to a horde of politicians and greedy capitalists."
But, except when politics possessed it, her brain seldom ceased, no
matter how crowded her environment, from pondering on the events of the
summer, and pondering, it sobered and grew older. She had engaged in a
conflict with the Unseen Forces of life and been conquered. She had
been obliged to stand by and see these forces work their will upon a
helpless being, who carried in solution the vices of civilizations and
men persisting to their logical climax, almost demanding aloud the
sacrifice of the victim to death that this portion of themselves might
be buried with her. Despite her intelligence, nothing else could have
given her so clear a realization of the eternal persistence of all
acts, of the sequential symmetrical links they forge in the great chain
of Circumstance. It was this that made her hope more eager that the
United States would be guided by its statesmen and not by hysteria, and
it was this that made her think deeply and constantly upon her future
relation with Senator North.
The danger was as great as ever. Her brain had sobered, but her heart
had not. Separation and the absence of all communication--they had
agreed not to correspond--had strengthened and intensified a love that
had been half quiescent so long as its superficial wants were
gratified. Troubled times were coming when he would need her, would
seek her whenever he could, and yet when their meetings must be short
and unsatisfactory. When hours are no longer possible, minutes become
precious, and the more precious the more dangerous. If she were older,
if tragedy and thought had sobered and matured her character, if she
were deprived of the protection of the lighter moods of her mind, would
not the danger be greater still? The childish remnant upon which she
had instinctively relied had gone out of her, she had a deeper and
grimmer knowledge of what life would be without the man who had
conquered her through her highest ideals and most imperious needs; and
of what it would be with him.
She had no intention of making a problem out of the matter, constantly
as her mind dwelt upon the future. Senator North had told her once that
problems fled when the time for action began. She supposed that one of
two things would happen after her return to Washington: great events
would absorb his mind and leave him with neither the desire nor the
time for more than an occasional friendly hour with her; or after a
conscientious attempt to take up their relationship on the old lines
and give each other the companionship both needed, all intercourse
would abruptly cease.