XV

The Senate adjourned a few moments after Betty left the gallery. There

was little conversation in the cloak-room. The Senators were very

tired, and it surely was a brain of bubbles that could indulge in

comment upon the climax of the great finished chapter of the old

Republic.

North put on his hat and overcoat at once and left the Capitol. After

the close confinement in heated and vitiated air for sixteen hours, the

thought of a cab was intolerable: he shook his head at the old darky

who owned him and whom he never had been able to dodge during his

twenty years' service in Washington, plunged his hands into his

overcoat pockets, and strode off with an air of aggressive

determination which amused him as a fitting anti-climax. The darky

grinned and drove home without looking for another fare. His Senator

not only had paid him by the month for several years, but had supported

his family for the last ten.

North inhaled the pure cool air, the delicious perfume of violet and

magnolia, as Betty had done. Once he paused and looked up at the wooded

heights surrounding the city, then down at the Potomac and the great

expanse of roofs and leaves. The Washington Monument, the purest,

coldest, most impersonal monument on earth, looked as gray as the sky,

but its outlines were as sharp as at noonday. North often watched it

from the window of his Committee Room; he had seen it rosy with the

mists of sunset, as dark as granite under stormy skies, as waxen as

death. Normally, it was white and pure and inspiring, never

companionable, but helpful in its cold and lofty beauty.

"It _is_ a monument," he thought, to-night, "and to more than

Washington."

He turned into Massachusetts Avenue and strolled along, in no hurry to

find himself between walls again. He was not conscious of physical

fatigue, and experienced no longing for bed, but his brain was tired

and he enjoyed the absence of enforced companionship and continued

alertness, the cool air, the quiet morning in her last sleep.

Betty, like all brilliant women who love passionately, had

over-imagined, in her solitude and excitement. It is true that North

had felt the bitterness of defeat, that his mind had dwelt upon the

miserable and blasting thought that after years of unquestioned

statesmanship and leadership, of hard work and unremitting devotion,

his will had had no weight against hysteria and delirium. But both

bitterness and the sense of failure had been dismissed in the moment

when he had, once for all, accepted the situation; and that had been

several days before. Since then, he had shoved aside the past, and had

given his undivided thought to the present and the future. He had

uttered his "aye" almost indifferently; it had been given to the

President days since.

Nevertheless, his brain, tired as it was, did not wander from the great

climax in his country's history. To that country at large this climax

meant simply a brief and arrogant chastisement of a cruel little

nation; the generals would have been quite justified in sending their

dress clothes and golf sticks on to Havana; but North knew that this

officious "police duty" was the noisy prologue to a new United States,

possibly to the birth of a new Constitution.

"Is this the grand finale of the people's rule?" he thought. "They have

screamed for the moon as they never screamed before, and this time they

have got it fairly between their teeth. Well, it is a dead old planet;

will its decay vitiate their own blood and leave them the half-willing

prey of a Circumstance they do not dream of now? Dewey will take the

Philippines, of course. He would be an inefficient fool if he did not,

and he is the reverse. The Spanish in Cuba will crumble almost before

the world realizes that the war has begun. The United States will find

itself sitting open-mouthed with two huge prizes in its lap. It may, in

a fit of virtue which would convulse history, give them back, present

them, with much good advice and more rhetoric, to their rightful

owners. And it may not. These prizes are crusted with gold; and the

stars and stripes will look so well in the breeze above that the pride

of patriotism may decide they must remain there. And if it does--if it

does... The extremists in the Senate will grow twenty years in one...

With the bit between their teeth and the arrogance of triumph in their

blood--"

He found himself in front of his own house. He turned slowly and looked

intently for a moment toward I Street. His face softened, then he

jerked out his latchkey, let himself in and went directly to the

library. He still had no desire for bed, and threw himself into an

easy-chair before the andirons. But it was the first time in several

days that he had sat in a luxurious chair, and the room was full of

soft warmth. He fell asleep, and although he seemed to awaken

immediately, he could only conclude, when the experience which followed

was over, that he had been dreaming.

He suddenly became aware that a chair beside him was occupied, and he

wheeled about sharply. His sense of companionship was justified; a man

sat there. North stared at him, more puzzled than surprised,

endeavouring to fit the familiar face to some name on his long list of

acquaintances, and wondering who in Washington could have given a

fancy-dress ball that night. His visitor wore his hair in a queue and

powdered, a stock of soft lawn, and a dress-coat of plum-coloured cloth

cut as in the days of the founders of the Republic.

Although it was some moments before North recognized his visitor, his

resentment at this unseasonable intrusion passed quickly; the

personality in the chair was so charming, so magnetic, so genial. He

was a young man, between thirty and forty, with a long nose, a mobile

mouth, dark gray-blue eyes full of fire and humour, and a massive head.

It was a face of extraordinary power and intellect, but lit up by a

spirit so audacious and impulsive and triumphant that it was like a

leaping flame of dazzling brilliancy in some forbidding fortress. He

was smiling with a delighted expression of good fellowship; but North

experienced a profound conviction that the man was weighing and

analyzing him, that he would weigh and analyze everybody with whom he

came in contact, and make few mistakes.

"Who the deuce can he be?" he thought, "and why doesn't he speak?" And

then it occurred to him that he had not spoken, himself. He was about

to inquire with somewhat perfunctory courtesy in what manner he could

serve his visitor, when his glance fell on the man's hands. He sat

erect with a slight exclamation and experienced a stiffening at the

roots of his hair. The hands under the lace ruffles were the most

beautiful that ever had been given to a man, even to as small a man as

this. They were white and strong and delicate, with pointed fingers

wide apart, and filbert nails. North knew them well, for they were the

hands of the man whom he admired above all men in the history of his

country. But until to-night he had seen them on canvas only, in the

Treasury Department of the United States. His feeling of terror passed,

and he sat forward eagerly.

"The little lion," he said caressingly, for the man before him might

have been his son, although he had been in his tomb with a bullet in

his heart for nearly a century. But he looked so young, so restless, so

indomitable, that the years slipped out of the century, and Hamilton

once more was the most brilliant ornament of a country which had never

ceased to need him.

"Yes," he said brightly, "here I am, sir, and you see me at last. This

is that one moment in the lifetime of the few when the spirit burns

through the flesh and recognizes another spirit who has lost that dear

and necessary medium. I have been with you a great deal in your life,

but you never have been able to see me until to-night." He gave his

head an impatient toss. "How I have wished I were alive during the last

three or four months!" he exclaimed. "Not that I could have

accomplished what you could not, sir, but it would have been such a

satisfaction to have been able to make the effort, and then, when I

failed, to tell democracy what I thought of it."

North smiled. All sense of the supernatural had left him. His soul and

Hamilton's were face to face; that was the one glorified fact. "I have

been tempted several times lately to wish that we had your aristocratic

republic," he said, "and that I were the head and centre of it. I have

felt a strong desire to wring the neck of that many-headed nuisance

called 'the people,' and proceed as if it were where the God of nations

intended those incapable of governing should be and remain without

protest."

"Oh, yes, you are an aristocrat. That is the reason I have enjoyed the

society of your mind all these years. You were so like me in many ways

when you were my age, and since then I seem to have grown older with

you. I died so young. But in you, in the last twenty years, I seem to

have lived on. You have built an iron wall all round those terrible

fires of your youth, and roofed it over. It is only now and then that a

panel melts and the flame leaps out; and the panel is so quickly

replaced! I too should have conquered myself like that and made fewer

and fewer mistakes."

"God knows what I might not have been able to do for my country. I have

been mad to leap into the arena often enough."

"You are not dead. No man is, whose inspiration lives on. More than one

of us would be of shorter stature and shorter gait if we never had had

your accomplishment to ponder over. And as to what the nation would

have been without you--"

"Yes!" cried Hamilton. "Yes! How can any man of ability submit to death

without protest, shrug his shoulders cynically, and say that no man's

disappearance causes more than a whirl of bubbles on the surface, that

the world goes on its old gait undisturbed, and does as well with the

new as the old? Look at Great Britain. She hasn't a single great man in

all her eleven million square miles to lead her. That is answer enough

to a theory which some men are sincere enough in believing. This

country always has needed great leaders, and sometimes she has had them

and sometimes not. The time is coming when she will need them as she

has not done since the days when three or four of us set her on her

feet."

North stood up suddenly and looked down on Hamilton. "What are we

coming to?" he asked abruptly. "Monarchy?"

The guest tapped the toe of his little slipper with the tips of his

beautiful fingers. He laughed gayly. "I can see only a little farther

ahead than your own far-penetrating brain, sir. What do you think?"

"As I walked home tonight, the situation possessed my mind, which by

some process of its own seemed to develop link after link in coming

events. It seemed to me that I saw a thoroughly disorganized people,

unthinkingly but ruthlessly thrusting aside all ideals,

and--consequently--in time--ready for anything."

Hamilton nodded, "If they had begun with my ideal, they would have

remained there. Now they will leap far behind that--when there is a

strong enough man down there in the White House. Certain radical

changes, departures from their traditions and those of their fathers,

will school them for greater changes still. In some great critical

moment when a dictator seems necessary they will shrug their shoulders

and say, 'Why not?'"

"I believe you are right, but I doubt if it comes in my time."

Hamilton shook his head. "Every state in Europe has its upper lip

curled back above its teeth, and who knows, when the leashes snap, what

our fate will be, now that we have practically abandoned our policy of

non-interference in the affairs of the Eastern Hemisphere? If all

Europe is at somebody's throat in the next five years, we shall not

escape; be sure of that. Then will be the great man's opportunity. You

always have despised the office of President. Work for it from this

day. The reaction from this madness will help you. Democrats as well as

Republicans will turn to you as the one man worthy of the confidence of

the entire country."

"Not if they guessed that I meditated treason, sir. Nor should I. I

agree with you that your ideal was the best, but there is nothing for

me to do but to make the best of the one I've inherited. If I am

aristocratic in my preferences, I am also a pretty thoroughgoing

American."

"Yes, yes, I know, sir. You never will meditate what, if premeditated,

would be treason. But when the great moment comes, when your patriotism

and your statesmanship force you to admit that if the country is to be

saved it must be rescued from the people, and that you alone can rescue

it, then you will tear the Constitution down its middle. This country

is past amendments. It must begin over again. And the whole great

change must come from one man. The people never could be got to vote

for an aristocratic republic. They must be stunned into accepting a

monarchy. After the monarchy, then the real, the great Republic."