you, violet-eyes. Even granting that he has fallen as low as that, which
I should think one of the most unlikely things in the world, it would
hardly be in Kenton City, would it?--a place where his face is known to
a thousand people. Tell me about it. What makes you think you saw him?"
"I was shopping this morning," said Natalie, "all alone; and as I came
out of Kendrick's and was just about to get into the brougham, I saw
that some one was holding the door open for me. I looked up carelessly,
as one naturally would under the circumstances, and, John--I know it was
he! At first I thought so, and then I didn't, because he was so changed,
so thin and pale, and because he had a beard. So, before I thought what
I was doing, I stepped into the brougham, and put my hand on the door to
close it. Then I looked up again, and saw his face, peering in at me
through the glass, and that time there couldn't be any mistake. It
_was_! I was going to speak, but he was gone in a flash. I saw him
disappearing in the crowd before the shop--_slinking_, John!--with that
dreadfully pathetic air which all beggars have, his shoulders all
hunched up, and his head bent, and his hands in his pockets. He was
cold, John, I could see that, and, no doubt, hungry! And there I was, in
that dreadful little brougham, with my hateful furs, as warm as toast,
and I didn't even speak to him. I could have died of shame!"
She buried her face in her hands, bending low over the tea-table.
Barclay was leaning forward in his chair, his lips set.
"It's impossible," he murmured, "impossible!"
The girl looked up suddenly, a white spot in the centre of each cheek,
where the pressure of her thumbs had left its mark in the tender, pink
flesh.
"Improbable--yes!" she said, "but not impossible. Oh, I wish I could
believe otherwise, but I'm sure, I'm sure! Oh, John! You are so big, so
strong, so powerful now! Think of it--Lieutenant-Governor of Alleghenia!
You can do anything. And if he _is_ here in Kenton City, homeless, cold,
starving, you must find and help him--for me, Johnny boy, for me!"
The Lieutenant-Governor had risen, and was pacing up and down the room,
with his brows knit, and his strong, white hands chafing slowly against
each other, palm to palm. It seemed impossible, indeed! Spencer
Cavendish, the last of one of Alleghenia's proudest families; Spencer
Cavendish, the brilliant young society pet and sportsman; Spencer
Cavendish, the wit, the _viveur_--a beggar in the street? And yet--
The scandal of Cavendish's sudden and reckless plunge into sodden, open
dissipation, two years before, freshly called to Barclay's mind by
Natalie's words, had pointed to almost any finale, however debased,
however sordid. Barclay mentally invoked the face of his former friend,
as he had seen it on the occasion of their last meeting, flushed,
swollen-eyed, insolent, the fine patrician mouth hideously contorted and
maundering insults, filth, banality.
"And I did it!" the girl was saying. "Don't forget that, John.
Unwittingly, ignorantly, helplessly, if you will, I did it, just the
same. If I could have loved him, I could have saved him. As it was, I
had to send him away, and he has come to--to this! Oh, don't you see?
Don't you understand that something more than chance has crossed my path
with his, just at this moment of my supremest happiness, and of his
utter degradation? My duty is plain. It is to help him, to uplift him,
to make a man of him once more--to undo what I have done! I'm
responsible--and I'm helpless! What can I do? What can any girl do in
such a case? I can't go out into the streets and search for him. I can
only turn to you, Johnny boy, and rely upon your aid."
"But, Natalie dearest," said the Lieutenant-Governor slowly, "don't you
see that it is impossible, all this? I cannot allow such an affair to
come into your pure, sweet life, bringing with it the knowledge of the
depths to which men may fall, and the shadow of misery and degradation.
I cannot bear that, in even the remotest way, you should blame yourself
for that which it was never in your power to prevent or remedy. A
man--this man--has no business to cast on you the blight of his own
weakness and folly, to establish a relation of cause and effect between
your refusal of him and the subsequent transformation of a gentleman
into a common drunkard."
"John!"
"Ah, don't think me bitter, dearest! If the man you saw was actually
Cavendish, I pity him from the bottom of my heart. But it was his hands
which built up the barrier between his life and ours, and it must be his
that tear it down. It is intolerable that in his degradation he should
come into your life again, and have, even in your imagination, the
smallest claim upon you--intolerable! The paths of my love for you and
my duty toward you are identical in this respect. There can be no
alternative--no quibbling. At least until he has redeemed himself, if
redemption is still possible, the thought of him, his presence, his
misdoings, must not and shall not contaminate the atmosphere in which
you live and move."
Natalie had risen suddenly, her eyes ablaze.
"Ah, John!" she said. "Am I then a toy, a sugar figure, that I must be
packed in cotton, and shielded from all knowledge of the evil in the
world? Is that what it means to be a woman? Ah, _no_! It is bad enough
to be hemmed in by the wretched conventionalities which prevent my doing
openly what I conceive to be my duty, without adding to the restrictions
that actually exist the imaginary one that I must not even think of the
misery, the wretchedness, the sordid vice which abound just across the
borders of the comfortable little world in which I live. And see, boy
dear!--with all the force of my conviction that things should be
otherwise, yet I am reasonable. I don't ask to see Spencer, or to have
an active hand in his redemption. I realize that the time for that has
passed, and that you are just in saying that he must come to me, not I
to him--and come to me another than the man he is to-day. Anything else
is impossible: that I see and accept. But the hideous fact remains. A
man who loved me once, who offered me all that a man can offer a woman,
is walking the streets of Kenton City, cold, hungry, homeless--a
beggar! What business is it of yours or mine what his past follies and
weaknesses were? His temptations may have been beyond our understanding,
but his present plight is not. He is begging--begging at our very
doors--a man whom we have called by the name of friend! I can't help
him. All I can do, as I said before, is to turn to you, whom I love
better than all the world, and ask you to save him, in my stead. Ah,
boy, boy!--I've given you all I refused to him, taken at your hands all
I put away at his. You can afford to be generous!"
The Lieutenant-Governor came slowly toward her, and, placing his hands
upon her shoulders, looked her in the eyes.
"Dearest and Most Beautiful," he said tenderly, "you are right. I
hope--I believe--that you were overwrought, fanciful, that it is not
true. But if it is, if Cavendish is begging in our streets, then, so
surely as I am Lieutenant-Governor of Alleghenia, I will pull him out of
them, and make a man of him, if it takes a month and every police
officer and detective in Kenton City to find him. And that not alone for
your sake, tenderest-hearted, but for mine. I _can_ afford to be
generous, God bless your sweet face, I can indeed!"
And he bent over reverently, and kissed her hand.
IV
AS BETWEEN FRIENDS
There were but two guests at the Rathbawnes' dinner-table that night,
the Lieutenant-Governor and Colonel Amos Broadcastle, a veteran of the
Rebellion, brevetted Major for conspicuous gallantry at Lookout
Mountain, and now commanding officer of the Ninth Regiment, N. G. A.,
the crack militia organization of Kenton City. Colonel Broadcastle had
seen his sixty-five, but his broad, square shoulders, his rigid
carriage, and his black hair, even now only slightly touched with gray,
clipped twenty years from his appearance. His eye was one that was
famous throughout the Alleghenia Guard,--an eye accustomed to control,
not a single man, or two, or three, but a thousand, moving as one at his
command; an eye enforcing obedience immediate, machine-like, and
unquestioning.
It had been a momentous day for the Ninth when Amos Broadcastle,
retiring from the staff of a former Governor, had accepted, first a
majority therein, and then, three months later, its colonelcy. He found
ten companies, in no one instance exceeding twenty files front. He found
a field and staff vain, incompetent, and jealous; company officers
deficient alike in their knowledge of tactics and in their conception of
their responsibilities; sergeants, corporals, and lances chosen without
any view to fitness, and ignorant and tyrannical in their positions; and
finally, the rank and file lazy, untidy, and frankly contemptuous of the
school of the soldier. Some one had once said of the Ninth that there
was consolation to be found in the mortifying knowledge that the men
composing it were there with the unique view of escaping jury duty. The
consolation lay in the probability that such infernally bad soldiers
would have made jurors quite as infernally bad.
But Broadcastle, a born disciplinarian and a trained tactician, was now
in a position to echo, albeit in a different spirit, the arrogance of
Louis: "_Nous avons changé tout cela!_" Ten years had sufficed to change
the indolent and incompetent Ninth of Alleghenia into a regiment
rivaling in prestige the Seventh of New York. The commissioned officers
were thrust upon, rather than achieved by, their companies, but, once
established in their respective positions, proceeded without exception
to justify, by their energy and ability, their selection from the best
element of Kenton City. Among the enlisted men the exponents of the old
spirit of sloth, indifference, and laxity were weeded out as fast as
their terms of service expired, and their places filled from the same
sources whence the company officers were drawn. Colonel Broadcastle was
a diplomat as well as a disciplinarian. By some unknowable system of
suggestion and example it came, little by little, to be regarded in
Kenton City as "the thing" to belong to the Ninth. Before the capital
was aware of the transformation, every company roster read 103, the
field and staff had been reorganized and perfected, and the Ninth
Regiment, N. G. A., was what it remained thereafter: a magnificent
fighting machine, ably drilled, perfectly equipped, a credit to the
state, to the credit of which there stood so little else. The
declaration of war with Spain brought it suddenly into prominence by the
astonishing readiness with which it went into camp twenty hours after
the Adjutant-General of Alleghenia published the President's call for
volunteers; and although it never saw active service, it attracted at
Chickamauga, and later at Tampa, the admiring attention of the regular
army, and was spoken of as the most perfect body among the volunteer
forces.
The citizens of Kenton City were not accustomed to discovering things in
which they could take pride. The exact contrary was more apt to be the
case. When, therefore, they discovered the rehabilitated Ninth, and its
redeemer in the person of its commanding officer, they had a deal to
say, and said it with unexampled arrogance and satisfaction.
Thenceforward, Alleghenia meant much to Colonel Broadcastle, and
Colonel Broadcastle considerably more than much to Alleghenia.
Something of all this went through the Lieutenant-Governor's mind during
the progress of the dinner. He sat at Mrs. Rathbawne's right, than which
nothing in the world could have been more cheerless, unless it was
sitting at Mrs. Rathbawne's left. But the good lady's habitual
complacency was plainly in abeyance, her customary volubility replaced
by a fidgety reserve. The dinner, as a social achievement, was a
distinct failure, save in so far as Mrs. Wynyard and Colonel Broadcastle
were concerned. Several months before, Mrs. Wynyard had frankly
announced that she had designs upon the Colonel. Latterly, Barclay had
begun to suspect the Colonel of having designs upon Mrs. Wynyard. Thirty
and sixty-five that looked forty-five--a widow and a widower! More
wonderful things had happened.
"If I were thirty years younger," Broadcastle was saying even now, as he
did full justice to the celery mayonnaise, "I should say we were made
for each other."
"Since two single people may be made for each other," laughed Mrs.
Wynyard, "I wonder if two married people can't be unmade for each other.
Perhaps that is just what has happened to us!"
"I'll think that over," replied the Colonel with mock gravity. "I don't
want to commit myself on so serious a hypothesis, without due
reflection."
They were the only ones who were thoroughly at ease. Barclay and
Natalie, unstrung by the events of the day, ate little and talked
listlessly. Dorothy, victim to an inward excitement which was half
happiness and half disappointment, chattered feverishly. Rathbawne was
wrapped in his own thoughts, and his wife, innocently unobservant of
emotional manifestations in any and every other, but pathetically
sensitive to the slightest evidence of mental perturbation in this
stern, kind man, between herself and whom existed a devotion dog-like in
its silence and intensity, watched his clouded face with an anxiety
which she made no effort to conceal. The dinner dragged hopelessly,
until she shook herself into a bewildered realization that it was over,
folded her napkin scrupulously, dusted a few crumbs from the black-satin
slope of her obsolete lap, and, followed by her daughters and Mrs.
Wynyard, left the men to their cordials and cigars.
The latter drew their chairs nearer, as the door closed, made little
clearings in the wilderness of finger-bowls, silver, and discarded
napkins, for the accommodation of their coffee-cups and cordial glasses,
and, lighting the long Invincibles which were Rathbawne's sole
extravagance, inhaled that first matchless whiff of smoke which makes a
whole day of anxiety and vexation seem to have been worth the while.
It is a moment apart and _sui generis_, this, and is rivaled only by
that of early morning realization that one is awake--and not obliged to
get up. It is apt to pass in silence, for a newly lit cigar is like a
newly married wife: a man is deliberately oblivious to all else. The
moment, too, is one of readjustment, of hasty mental survey of the
chatter that has passed, and of preparation for the essentially
dissimilar talk to come. With men of the mental calibre of the three
here assembled this opportunity is sacred to some of the gravest and
most vital thoughts which they exchange. Peter Rathbawne, in particular,
whenever he reviewed the paramount conversations of his life, seemed to
find their significance indissolubly fused with the fragrance of Havana
cigars and the taste of kümmel or yellow Chartreuse.
His eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his companions during the pause which
followed. First, on Broadcastle. He could depend upon him as he could
depend upon no other man on earth. They had fought side by side in many
a tight place in the black days of '62, and in many another, full as
tight, since then, on battlefields commercial and political. It is
doubtful whether so much as a single word of admiration or affection had
ever passed between them. It is equally doubtful whether anything could
have been more entirely superfluous than such a voicing of self-evident
sentiments.
John Barclay, too! Peter Rathbawne, with what had been natural
shrewdness at the outset now sharpened almost to clairvoyance by his
years of dealing with a multiplicity of men and things, understood the
Lieutenant-Governor absolutely, and admired him with all the force of
his rugged nature. And Rathbawne was not given to admiring people. His
business experience had not fostered the spirit of hero-worship. He had
seen too much for that. But in the two men before him he recognized
qualities so unusual, and in many ways so similar, that he was proud to
count them friends.
For the moment, however, as he took stock of them, he was measuring them
by a new standard, more rigid, more severe than he had hitherto had
reason to apply. It is one thing to trust a man implicitly, and another
thing entirely to try to tell him so. For silence is most golden in the
specification of friendship, and when employed in the particularizing of
intimate emotion the silver of speech is apt to turn to veriest tinsel.
Yet the occasion was one which demanded speech. Moreover, and in direct
opposition to his inclinations and the precedents he had established, he
was forced not only to give practical expression to his feeling for
Broadcastle and Barclay, but, what humiliated as well as annoyed him, to
confess himself incapable of dealing with a question which confronted
him. It was the first time within his recollection when he had
mistrusted his own judgment.
But Peter Rathbawne was not the man to procrastinate, and presently he
began to speak, in a low but curiously intense voice, from which the
others instinctively took their cue. He was a short man, inclined to
stoutness, but with the clear, sharp eye and the underhang of jaw which
tell of right principle and indomitable perseverance. It was a question
whether in calling him the second most obstinate man in Alleghenia,
Governor Abbott had given him the full measure of his due.
"Gentlemen," he said, with the somewhat stilted formality which was part
of his manner, "I will say to you what I wouldn't say to others,--I'm in
a hole, and I want your advice. I'll be as brief as possible, and I'll
come right to the point. For thirty years I've been building up the
Rathbawne Mills, giving them every hour of my thought, every particle of
my strength, every atom of my ability. I've seen them grow from a little
shanty on the outskirts of Kenton City to a collection of buildings
covering four solid squares, filled with modern machinery, and employing
four thousand, two hundred and odd hands. I've been a business man, I've
been a rigid man, but I've been a fair man, too. No one can say that I
ever clipped wages, even when I had to run the mills at a loss, as I've
had to do more than once. I gave my people an eight-hour day long before
the law of Alleghenia jammed it down the throats of other mill-owners.
I swallowed the Union, though it was a bitter mouthful. There has never
been a just complaint from one of my employees that wasn't attended to
in short order, if it was in my power to do so. There's many an old
fossil on my pay-rolls to-day who isn't worth his salt, but he stays
there, and will continue to stay there, because he did his best when he
could, and it's not his fault that he's dead wood now. I've given in,
over and over again, in one way or another, sometimes against my
convictions, and oftener against my will. But one thing I've stuck to,
and that's my right to discharge a hand when I see fit, without
dictation from the Union or anybody else. In the past, this has been
comparatively easy sailing. One man, now and again, isn't a ripple on
the surface of four thousand employees. Besides, there was always a good
reason. The others saw that, and there was never a finger raised. They
believed in me, through and through, and it has been my pride to know
that they did, and that they had good cause to. But now it's different.
There has been a band of young good-for-nothings in Shop 22, who were
full, chock-a-block, of socialism, and equality, and workingmen's
rights, and God knows what-not! They've talked enough poisonous gas to
the other hands to blow up a state. They distributed pamphlets, and made
speeches, and organized clubs, and fomented discord, till I got sick and
tired of it. There wasn't one square day's work in the whole fifteen of
them put together. So, when I'd stood them as long as I could--which was
at ten o'clock yesterday morning--I discharged them all in a bunch, and
if there'd been a steep place handy, I'd have expected to see them all
run violently down it into the sea--like the other swine, in Scripture.
For if ever there was a band of devils made incarnate, it was that same
fifteen who were sowing anarchy broadcast through the Rathbawne Mills!
"Now--what? Lo and behold, they are all henchmen and disciples of
Michael McGrath, whom we in Kenton City know to our cost, and regular
and loyal members--save the mark!--of his Union. Well, gentlemen, I've
got that Union about my ears like a nest of hornets, with McGrath at the
head, and unless those fifteen men are reinstated by noon to-morrow, my
four thousand hands will be out on strike, and the Rathbawne Mills will
be tied up as tight as a drum!"
"Fight 'em!" said Colonel Broadcastle curtly, as the other paused.
"That's what I meant to do--but where am I going to come out? If I
thought, for instance, that I was going to have your regiment to back me
up, Broadcastle, or even the Kenton City police, why, well and good! But
_am_ I? No, sir! _No_, sir! Not with Elijah Abbott in the Governor's
chair, I'm not! You know that as well as I. Why, Broadcastle, I'd rather
see McGrath himself at the capitol than that smooth-spoken skunk!"
He paused to relight his cigar, and then continued.
"The Rathbawne Mills are like the fruit of my own body to me. I love
them! I love every stone and brick of them, that I've put in place, as
it were, with my own hands. I've often thought that if they should burn
down it would come close to killing me. And yet I could watch them go
with a lighter heart, God knows, than that with which I foresee the
misery that's coming to these people of mine, who are going to starve at
the bidding of a band of black-legs, and that not even because they
think their cause a just one, but simply because they can't help
themselves. It isn't only that ruin's staring me in the face, though
there's that possibility in the situation, too, but that privation,
bitter misery, and despair are lying in wait for them. God!--what an
iniquity!
"But I _can't_ give in, Broadcastle--I _can't_ give in, John Barclay! It
means the sacrifice of a principle I've held out for, and that I know is
right. What's more, it isn't as if I were yielding one point. It would
only be the beginning. If I give in now, I might as well turn over the
mills to McGrath at once, and let him run them according to his own
blackguardly will. You know how such things go. Give them an inch"--
"And they raise a hell!" put in Colonel Broadcastle.
"Exactly! It's commercial suicide. And yet, if I _don't_ yield, I'm
precipitating disorder, and bloodshed, and the untold suffering of four
thousand souls. What am I to do?"
"Fight 'em!" said Colonel Broadcastle, with a sharp nod of his head.
Rathbawne turned from him to the Lieutenant-Governor, and to the latter,
knowing the man he had been, there was something indescribably
heart-rending in the sudden, irresolute trembling of his half-raised
hands, the slow shake of his head, and the pathos of his raised eyebrows
and drooping lips.