"I repeat that I never should work nor scheme for the position that
such a change might bring me. Nevertheless, believing, as I do, that we
are on the threshold of a new and entirely different era in this
country, if the time should come when I felt that I, as its most highly
trained servant, could best serve the United States by taking her
destinies entirely into my own hands, I should do so without an
instant's hesitation. I have done all I could to preserve the old order
for them, and they have called me traitor and gone their own way. Now
let them take the consequences."
Hamilton set his mobile lips in a hard line. His eyes looked like
steel. "Yes," he said harshly, "let them take the consequences. They
had their day, they have gone mad with democracy, let them now die of
their own poison. The greatest Republic the world ever will have known
is only in the ante-room of its real history." He stood up suddenly and
held out his hand. "Good-bye, sir," he said. "We may or may not meet
again before you too are forced to abandon your work. But I often shall
be close to you, and I believe, I firmly believe, that you will do
exactly as I should do if I stood on solid ground to-day."
North took the exquisite hand that had written the greatest state
papers of the century, and looked wonderingly at its white beauty. It
suddenly gave him the grip of an iron vise. North returned the
pressure. Then the strong hand melted from his, and he stood alone.
Exactly in what the transition from sleep to waking consisted, North
was not able to define. There was a brief sense of change, including a
lifting of heavy eyelids. Technically he awoke. But he was standing on
the hearthrug. And his right hand ached.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"What difference does it make whether he appeared to my waking eyes or
passed through my sleeping brain and sat down with my soul?"
He plunged his hands into his pockets and stood thinking for many
minutes. He said, half aloud, finally,--
"Not in my time, perhaps. But it will come, it will come."