IN ARGUMENT
The egotism of women is always for two.--_Mme. De Stäel_.
The thought of missing my meeting with Elisabeth still rankled in my
soul. Had it been another man who asked me to carry this message, I must
have refused. But this man was my master, my chief, in whose service I
had engaged.
Strange enough it may seem to give John Calhoun any title showing love
or respect. To-day most men call him traitor--call him the man
responsible for the war between North and South--call him the arch
apostle of that impossible doctrine of slavery, which we all now admit
was wrong. Why, then, should I love him as I did? I can not say, except
that I always loved, honored and admired courage, uprightness,
integrity.
For myself, his agent, I had, as I say, left the old Trist homestead at
the foot of South Mountain in Maryland, to seek my fortune in our
capital city. I had had some three or four years' semi-diplomatic
training when I first met Calhoun and entered his service as assistant.
It was under him that I finished my studies in law. Meantime, I was his
messenger in very many quests, his source of information in many matters
where he had no time to go into details.
Strange enough had been some of the circumstances in which I found
myself thrust through this relation with a man so intimately connected
for a generation with our public life. Adventures were always to my
liking, and surely I had my share. I knew the frontier marches of
Tennessee and Alabama, the intricacies of politics of Ohio and New York,
mixed as those things were in Tyler's time. I had even been as far west
as the Rockies, of which young Frémont was now beginning to write so
understandingly. For six months I had been in Mississippi and Texas
studying matters and men, and now, just back from Natchitoches, I felt
that I had earned some little rest.
But there was the fascination of it--that big game of politics. No, I
will call it by its better name of statesmanship, which sometimes it
deserved in those days, as it does not to-day. That was a day of
Warwicks. The nominal rulers did not hold the greatest titles.
Naturally, I knew something of these things, from the nature of my work
in Calhoun's office. I have had insight into documents which never
became public. I have seen treaties made. I have seen the making of
maps go forward. This, indeed, I was in part to see that very night, and
curiously, too.
How the Baroness von Ritz--beautiful adventuress as she was sometimes
credited with being, charming woman as she was elsewhere described,
fascinating and in some part dangerous to any man, as all
admitted--could care to be concerned with this purely political question
of our possible territories, I was not shrewd enough at that moment in
advance to guess; for I had nothing more certain than the rumor she was
England's spy. I bided my time, knowing that ere long the knowledge must
come to me in Calhoun's office even in case I did not first learn more
than Calhoun himself.
Vaguely in my conscience I felt that, after all, my errand was
justified, even though at some cost to my own wishes and my own pride.
The farther I walked in the dark along Pennsylvania Avenue, into which
finally I swung after I had crossed Rock Bridge, the more I realized
that perhaps this big game was worth playing in detail and without
quibble as the master mind should dictate. As he was servant of a
purpose, of an ideal of triumphant democracy, why should not I also
serve in a cause so splendid?
I was, indeed, young--Nicholas Trist, of Maryland; six feet tall, thin,
lean, always hungry, perhaps a trifle freckled, a little sandy of hair,
blue I suppose of eye, although I am not sure; good rider and good
marcher, I know; something of an expert with the weapons of my time and
people; fond of a horse and a dog and a rifle--yes, and a glass and a
girl, if truth be told. I was not yet thirty, in spite of my western
travels. At that age the rustle of silk or dimity, the suspicion of
adventure, tempts the worst or the best of us, I fear. Woman!--the very
sound of the word made my blood leap then. I went forward rather
blithely, as I now blush to confess. "If there are maps to be made
to-night," said I, "the Baroness Helena shall do her share in writing on
my chief's old mahogany desk, and not on her own dressing case."
That was an idle boast, though made but to myself. I had not yet met the
woman.