"To back me up. She thoroughly approves of him!"
The Governor smiled. "You talk as if Ella had a political _salon_ and
distributed _lettres de cachet_! I'm glad she approves of Ashford; but
if you think my wife makes my appointments for me--" He broke off with
a laugh at the superfluity of such a protest.
Mrs. Nimick reddened. "One never knows how you will take the simplest
thing. What harm is there in my saying that Ella approves of Mr.
Ashford? I thought you liked her to take an interest in your work."
"I like it immensely. But I shouldn't care to have it take that form."
"What form?"
"That of promising to use her influence to get people appointed. But
you always talk of politics in the vocabulary of European courts. Thank
Heaven, Ella has less imagination. She has her sympathies, of course,
but she doesn't think they can affect the distribution of offices."
Mrs. Nimick gathered up her furs with an air at once crestfallen and
resentful. "I'm sorry--I always seem to say the wrong thing. I'm sure I
came with the best intentions--it's natural that your sister should
want to be with you at such a happy moment."
"Of course it is, my dear," exclaimed the Governor genially, as he rose
to grasp the hands with which she was nervously adjusting her wraps.
Mrs. Nimick, who lived a little way out of town, and whose visits to
her brother were apparently achieved at the cost of immense effort and
mysterious complications, had come to congratulate him on his victory,
and to sound him regarding the nomination to a coveted post of the
lawyer in whose firm her eldest son was a clerk. In the urgency of the
latter errand she had rather lost sight of the former, but her face
softened as the Governor, keeping both her hands in his, said in the
voice which always seemed to put the most generous interpretation on
her motives: "I was sure you would be one of the first to give me your
blessing."
"Oh, your success--no one feels it more than I do!" sighed Mrs. Nimick,
always at home in the emotional key. "I keep in the background. I make
no noise, I claim no credit, but whatever happens, no one shall ever
prevent my rejoicing in my brother's success!"
Mrs. Nimick's felicitations were always couched in the conditional,
with a side-glance at dark contingencies, and the Governor, smiling at
the familiar construction, returned cheerfully: "I don't see why any
one should want to deprive you of that privilege."
"They couldn't--they couldn't--" Mrs. Nimick heroically affirmed.
"Well, I'm in the saddle for another two years at any rate, so you had
better put in all the rejoicing you can."
"Whatever happens--whatever happens!" cried Mrs. Nimick, melting on his
bosom.
"The only thing likely to happen at present is that you will miss your
train if I let you go on saying nice things to me much longer."
Mrs. Nimick at this dried her eyes, renewed her clutch on her
draperies, and stood glancing sentimentally about the room while her
brother rang for the carriage.
"I take away a lovely picture of you," she murmured. "It's wonderful
what you've made of this hideous house."
"Ah, not I, but Ella--there she _does_ reign undisputed," he
acknowledged, following her glance about the library, which wore an air
of permanent habitation, of slowly formed intimacy with its inmates, in
marked contrast to the gaudy impersonality of the usual executive
apartment.
"Oh, she's wonderful, quite wonderful. I see she has got those imported
damask curtains she was looking at the other day at Fielding's. When I
am asked how she does it all, I always say it's beyond me!" Mrs. Nimick
murmured.
"It's an art like another," smiled the Governor. "Ella has been used to
living in tents and she has the knack of giving them a wonderful look
of permanence."
"She certainly makes the most extraordinary bargains--all the knack in
the world won't take the place of such curtains and carpets."
"Are they good? I'm glad to hear it. But all the good curtains and
carpets won't make a house comfortable to live in. There's where the
knack comes in, you see."
He recalled with a shudder the lean Congressional years--the years
before his marriage--when Mrs. Nimick had lived with him in Washington,
and the daily struggle in the House had been combined with domestic
conflicts almost equally recurrent. The offer of a foreign mission,
though disconnecting him from active politics, had the advantage of
freeing him from his sister's tutelage, and in Europe, where he
remained for two years, he had met the lady who was to become his wife.
Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the diplomatists who languish in
perpetual first secretary-ship at our various embassies. Her life had
given her ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of
politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality. She regarded a
public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined
with great social versatility an equal gift for reading blue-books and
studying debates. So sincere was the latter taste that she passed
without regret from the amenities of a European life well stocked with
picturesque intimacies to the rawness of the Midsylvanian capital. She
helped Mornway in his fight for the Governorship as a man likes to be
helped by a woman--by her tact, her good looks, her memory for faces,
her knack of saying the right thing to the right person, and her
capacity for obscure hard work in the background of his public
activity. But, above all, she helped him by making his private life
smooth and harmonious. For a man careless of personal ease, Mornway was
singularly alive to the domestic amenities. Attentive service,
well-ordered dinners, brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers in
the house--these material details, which had come to seem the extension
of his wife's personality, the inevitable result of her nearness, were
as agreeable to him after five years of marriage as in the first
surprise of his introduction to them. Mrs. Nimick had kept house
jerkily and vociferously; Ella performed the same task silently and
imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of the latter method.
Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large means, the
household, under Mrs. Mornway's guidance, took on an air of sober
luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her
sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no
upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of
showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance
and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could
have detected a gradually increasing scale of expense.
Such an eye was now projected on the Governor's surroundings, and its
explorations were summed up in the tone in which Mrs. Nimick repeated
from the threshold: "I always say I don't see how she does it!"
The tone did not escape the Governor, but it disturbed him no more than
the buzz of a baffled insect. Poor Grace! It was not his fault if her
husband was given to chimerical investments, if her sons were
"unsatisfactory," and her cooks would not stay with her; but it was
natural that these facts should throw into irritating contrast the ease
and harmony of his own domestic life. It made him all the sorrier for
his sister to know that her envy did not penetrate to the essence of
his happiness, but lingered on those external signs of well-being which
counted for so little in the sum total of his advantages. Poor Mrs.
Nimick's life seemed doubly thin and mean when one remembered that,
beneath its shabby surface, there were no compensating riches of the
spirit.