AN AWAKENING.
Judge Thorn sat looking over the evening paper.
Lost in her own thoughts, Jean sat in the shadow of a palm idly
thrumming a guitar, the soft pliant strains corresponding well with the
expression of her face.
A sudden exclamation from her father caused her to look up.
His profile alone was visible to her, but there is an expression in
outlines when one understands the subject, and she knew that something
of an unusually puzzling or distressing nature engaged him.
Eagerly watching, she played on softly.
Presently the judge crushed the paper into a ball and with another
exclamation of disgust threw it across the room where it rolled behind a
scrap basket under a desk. At sight of so uncommon a procedure Jean went
to her father's side.
"What news, father mine? What news?" she asked.
Judge Thorn pointed in the direction of the wadded paper.
"Jean," said he, solemnly, "you remember how proudly I boasted to you
when Congress prohibited that blackest disgrace of our army, the
liquor-selling canteen. You know how deeply I felt the shame and
disgrace upon the whole legal profession when an officer of the cabinet
perpetrated the outrage that thwarted the will of the sovereign people.
Jean, girl, in a long life of close contact with the nation's politics I
have never met anything that has so deeply tried my loyalty to the party
in which I have helped to work out the political problems of almost half
a century as did that act that, as a life-long student of law, I
recognized as a fraud.
"But I have bolstered my shattered faith in the party with my absolute
confidence in the President. I have refused to believe--to this very
hour I have refused to believe that the man whose magnificent career I
have watched with such interest and of whose stainless honor I have been
so proud, would consent to be a party to such an act of anarchy. I have
insisted, as you well know, stoutly holding my position though the long
delay has made me sick at heart, that when the long routine of official
red tape had at length unrolled itself and the case should finally come
to the President, justice would be done and the nation's honor
vindicated.
"Now, look there!"
And with hands that trembled with suppressed anger the old jurist
unfolded the crumpled paper, which Jean had recovered, and pointed out
the telegraphic report that told how another high official of the
President's official family had disgraced himself, his profession and
the administration by the formal declaration that he accepted the
historic Griggs infamy as a correct interpretation of law.
"Jean, my child, spare me. Say nothing now, child. I can not bear it.
The faith of a lifetime is shattered. On that page I read, plainly as if
it were printed there, that the President is a party to the infamy. The
party of my lifelong loyalty stands committed by the act of its chosen
leaders to the foulest anarchy that ever disgraced a civilized people.
Had I no thought for temperance, as a citizen and as a lawyer, I could
not otherwise than see in this the forerunner of the gravest national
disaster."
The young woman listened with an expression in which deepest scorn for
the treason done was mingled with tender pity for the stricken man at
her side. Sharp, cutting words crowded to her lips for a final argument,
but her love for her father checked them.
Just then, in the silence, a step was heard approaching the house. In a
twinkling the canteen outrage slipped from the mind of the girl, for the
step was one whose echo had made indelible prints on her heart and whose
owner she had been many times heartsick to see.
She had hardly time to wonder what brought him at an hour long past the
usual time for making calls before he was with them.
When he had been informed by the judge of the latest chapter in the
history of the canteen outrage, Mr. Allison laughed heartily.
"What have you been voting for the last ten years, Judge," he asked.
"Not for the canteen," the older man answered warmly.
"I have, and for every other measure conducive to the best interests of
the trade--and we have voted the same ticket to a dot."
Finding the judge rather indisposed to talk just then the young man
turned to his hostess.
"I am on a quest," he said. "Tell me of some one possessed of enough
knowledge of human nature to recommend a course that will square me with
an unruly conscience and--a woman."
"My father is a legal light, ask him. He needs diversion now, I think,"
and Jean smiled at sight of his perplexed face.
"His specialty has not been 'man atoms of a great iniquity,'" said
Allison with a smile that hardly concealed his anxiety. "Tell me, what
would you do if you had been a 'man-atom,' had grown disgusted with the
mother mass and wished to completely sever your connection with it
before God and man?"
"You mean if I were a man? Well, first I would ask the Lord to forgive
me for ever having been a 'man-atom.'"
"I have been duly penitent," assented the questioner.
"Then I would buy some paper--a quantity of it--and I would write yards
and yards of resolutions stating that 'it can never be legalized without
sin.'"
"And then?"
"Then I should pray a whole lot--and pursue the even tenor of my way;
and if my conscience should assert itself in the face of all this, I
should think it too cranky a conscience to be humored."
"What about the woman?"
Jean smiled.
"Woman? Women," she said, "have notions. To save their lives they cannot
see the use in wasting paper and prayers. They would DO something.
Women--some women--believe in standing right with God and conscience
though the heavens fall."
"So do some men," said Allison, gravely.
Jean started slightly. The tone of his voice, the look of his eye,
conveyed to her the knowledge that somewhere, somehow, since she had
seen him last he had been awakened.
Involuntarily she clasped her hands and in the passing glance she gave
him Gilbert Allison caught a glimpse of the heaven that orthodox people
say follows the resurrection of the just.
Judge Thorn roused himself from the spell that had been cast over him by
the news in the crumpled paper.
A second time he took it in his hands and slowly, solemnly crushed it.
"The rank and file, the men whose honesty and virtue have made the
party great," he said, "have been defrauded, outraged. My support of the
administration and of the party of my political life is forever ended
unless it reclaim the right to a decent man's support."
While her father talked, Jean, lest in the first moments of her
delightful discovery she should clap her hands or cry or dance or in
some other unconventional way outrage grave decorum, returned to her
seat and her guitar.
The fringed palm threw long jagged shadows over her dress and stretched
away to meet the firelight dancing on the hearth-rug.
The mingled tones of the two voices reached her ear, but she heard them
indistinctly. To the soft strains that answered the strokes of her
fingers, she kept repeating over and over to herself, "He is awake, he
is awake."
Presently she heard her father leave the room.
Then her heart began to whirl and beat in a way unknown to her before.
She caught the faint chime of a distant steeple bell and the notes of
the low music died away to a plaintive breathing as she counted the
strokes, for she knew the fateful hour of her life was at hand.
Just as the last stroke quivered out onto the new hour, he came. He sat
down beside her and putting aside the guitar, drew her close to him.
"You are awake," she said softly, as if half afraid of breaking some
magic spell. "Tell me about it."
He dropped his hand over one of hers and described the tragedy of the
victims of the "great iniquity" that he had seen on that eventful night.
When he spoke of the murdered child he felt her hand clinch in his and
when he told of the prayer consigning the "respectable" dealer to the
place prepared for Satan and his earthly henchmen, involuntarily she
would have drawn away from him, but his arm bound her like a band of
steel.
"A tortured face--a bitter prayer--a bloody tragedy--ugly instruments;
but in the hands of the Divinity that smooths out man's rough hewing
they have cut away the last outline of a 'man-atom.' Are you glad? Has
fate fashioned me to the satisfaction of one peerless, priceless woman?"
For one moment Jean hesitated. Then----
But what business is that of ours? Our story has been of the daughter of
a Republican, and the young woman whose face is hidden upon the shoulder
of Gilbert Allison, once rum-seller, now by God's grace Prohibitionist,
is no longer the daughter of a Republican; for Judge Thorn's resolution,
slow formed, is as unbreakable as nature's laws.
THE END.