She went against all good judgment in marrying him; she cut herself off
from her own people, from the life in which she had been an alluring and
beautiful figure. Washington had never had two such seasons as those in
which she moved; for the diplomatic circle who had had "the run of the
world" knew her value, and were not content without her. She might have
made a brilliant match with one ambassador thirty years older than
herself--she was but twenty-two; and there were at least six attaches and
secretaries of legation who entered upon a tournament for her heart and
hand; but she was not for them. All her fine faculties of tact and
fairness, of harmless strategy, and her gifts of wit and unexpected humor
were needed to keep her cavaliers constant and hopeful to the last; but
she never faltered, and she did not fail. The faces of old men brightened
when they saw her, and one or two ancient figures who, for years, had been
seldom seen at social functions now came when they knew she was to be
present. There were, of course, a few women who said she would coquette
with any male from nine to ninety; but no man ever said so; and there was
none, from first to last, but smiled with pleasure at even the mention of
her name, so had her vivacity, intelligence, and fine sympathy conquered
them. She was a social artist by instinct. In their hearts they all
recognized how fair and impartial she was; and she drew out of every man
the best that was in him. The few women who did not like her said that she
chattered; but the truth was she made other people talk by swift
suggestion or delicate interrogation.
After the blow fell, Freddy Hartzman put the matter succinctly, and told
the truth faithfully, when he said: "The first time I met her, I told her
all I'd ever done that could be told, and all I wanted to do; including a
resolve to carry her off to some desert place and set up a Kingdom of Two.
I don't know how she did it. I was like a tap, and poured myself out; and
when it was all over I thought she was the best talker I'd ever heard. But
yet she'd done nothing except look at me and listen, and put in a question
here and there, that was like a baby asking to see your watch. Oh, she was
a lily-flower, was Sally Seabrook, and I've never been sorry I told her
all my little story! It did me good. Poor darling--it makes me sick
sometimes when I think of it. Yet she'll win out all right--a hundred to
one she'll win out. She was a star."
Freddy Hartzman was in an embassy of repute; he knew the chancelleries and
salons of many nations, and was looked upon as one of the ablest and
shrewdest men in the diplomatic service. He had written one of the best
books on international law in existence, he talked English like a native,
he had published a volume of delightful verse, and had omitted to publish
several others, including a tiny volume which Sally Seabrook's charms had
inspired him to write. His view of her was shared by most men who knew the
world, and especially by the elderly men who had a real knowledge of human
nature, among whom was a certain important member of the United States
executive called John Appleton. When the end of all things at Washington
came for Sally, these two men united to bear her up, that her feet should
not stumble upon the stony path of the hard journey she had undertaken.
Appleton was not a man of much speech; but his words had weight; for he
was not only a minister; he came of an old family which had ruled the
social destinies of a state, and had alternately controlled and disturbed
its politics. On the day of the sensation, in the fiery cloud of which
Sally disappeared, Appleton delivered himself of his mind in the matter at
a reception given by the President.
"She will come back--and we will all take her back, be glad to have her
back," he said. "She has the grip of a lever which can lift the eternal
hills with the right pressure. Leave her alone--leave her alone. This is a
democratic country, and she'll prove democracy a success before she's
done."
The world knew that John Appleton had offered her marriage, and he had
never hidden the fact. What they did not know was that she had told him
what she meant to do before she did it. He had spoken to her plainly,
bluntly, then with a voice that was blurred and a little broken, urging
her against the course toward which she was set; but it had not availed;
and, realizing that he had come upon a powerful will underneath the sunny
and so human surface, he had ceased to protest, to bear down upon her mind
with his own iron force. When he realized that all his reasoning was
wasted, that all worldly argument was vain, he made one last attempt, a
forlorn hope, as though to put upon record what he believed to be the
truth.
"There is no position you cannot occupy," he said. "You have the perfect
gift in private life, and you have a public gift. You have a genius for
ruling. Say, my dear, don't wreck it all. I know you are not for me, but
there are better men in the country than I am. Hartzman will be a great
man one day--he wants you. Young Tilden wants you; he has millions, and he
will never disgrace them or you, the power which they can command, and the
power which you have. And there are others. Your people have told you they
will turn you off; the world will say things--will rend you. There is
nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of a favorite. But that's
nothing--it's nothing at all compared with the danger to yourself. I
didn't sleep last night thinking of it. Yet I'm glad you wrote me; it gave
me time to think, and I can tell you the truth as I see it. Haven't you
thought that he will drag you down, down, down, wear out your soul, break
and sicken your life, destroy your beauty--you are beautiful, my dear,
beyond what the world sees, even. Give it up--ah, give it up, and don't
break our hearts! There are too many people loving you for you to
sacrifice them--and yourself, too.... You've had such a good time!"
"It's been like a dream," she interrupted, in a far-away voice--"like a
dream, these two years."
"And it's been such a good dream," he urged; "and you will only go to a
bad one, from which you will never wake. The thing has fastened on him; he
will never give it up. And penniless, too--his father has cast him off. My
girl, it's impossible. Listen to me. There's no one on earth that would do
more for you than I would--no one."
"Dear, dear friend!" she cried, with a sudden impulse, and caught his hand
in hers and kissed it before he could draw it back. "You are so true, and
you think you are right. But, but"--her eyes took on a deep, steady,
far-away look--"but I will save him; and we shall not be penniless in the
end. Meanwhile I have seven hundred dollars a year of my own. No one can
touch that. Nothing can change me now--and I have promised."
When he saw her fixed determination, he made no further protest, but asked
that he might help her, be with her the next day, when she was to take a
step which the wise world would say must lead to sorrow and a miserable
end.
The step she took was to marry Jim Templeton, the drunken, cast-off son of
a millionaire senator from Kentucky, who controlled railways and owned a
bank, and had so resented his son's inebriate habits that for five years
he had never permitted Jim's name to be mentioned in his presence. Jim had
had twenty thousand dollars left him by his mother, and a small income of
three hundred dollars from an investment which had been made for him when
a little boy. And this had carried him on; for, drunken as he was, he had
sense enough to eke out the money, limiting himself to three thousand
dollars a year. He had four thousand dollars left, and his tiny income of
three hundred, when he went to Sally Seabrook, after having been sober for
a month, and begged her to marry him.
Before dissipation had made him look ten years older than he was, there
had been no handsomer man in all America. Even yet he had a remarkable
face: long, delicate, with dark-brown eyes, as fair a forehead as man
could wish, and black, waving hair, streaked with gray--gray, though he
was but twenty-nine years of age.
When Sally was fifteen and he twenty-two, he had fallen in love with her
and she with him; and nothing had broken the early romance. He had
captured her young imagination, and had fastened his image on her heart.
Her people, seeing the drift of things, had sent her to a school on the
Hudson, and the two did not meet for some time. Then came a stolen
interview, and a fastening of the rivets of attraction--for Jim had gifts
of a wonderful kind. He knew his Horace and Anacreon and Heine and
Lamartine and Dante in the originals, and a hundred others; he was a
speaker of power and grace; and he had a clear, strong head for business.
He was also a lawyer, and was junior attorney to his father's great
business. It was because he had the real business gift, not because he had
a brilliant and scholarly mind, that his father had taken him into his
concerns, and was the more unforgiving when he gave way to temptation.
Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed him from his
mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace, Anacreon, and
philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the feeble-minded.
He had set his heart on Jim, and what Jim could do and would do by-and-by
in the vast financial concerns he controlled, when he was ready to slip
out and down; but Jim had disappointed him beyond calculation.
In the early days of their association Jim had left his post and taken to
drink at critical moments in their operations. At first, high words had
been spoken, then there came the strife of two dissimilar natures, and
both were headstrong, and each proud and unrelenting in his own way. Then,
at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim had
flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight, or a
month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he
quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a
voice meant for the stage--a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon
the English stage a hundred years before. Even in his cups, even after his
darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out from
his fellows, distinguished and very handsome. Society, however, had ceased
to recognize him for a long time, and he did not seek it. For two or three
years he practised law now and then. He took cases, preferably criminal
cases, for which very often he got no pay; but that, too, ceased at last.
Now, in his quiet, sober intervals he read omnivorously, and worked out
problems in physics for which he had a taste, until the old appetite
surged over him again. Then his spirits rose, and he was the old brilliant
talker, the joyous galliard until, in due time, he became silently and
lethargically drunk.
In one of his sober intervals he had met Sally Seabrook in the street. It
was the first time in four years, for he had avoided her, and though she
had written to him once or twice, he had never answered her--shame was in
his heart. Yet all the time the old song was in Sally's ears. Jim
Templeton had touched her in some distant and intimate corner of her
nature where none other had reached; and in all her gay life, when men had
told their tale of admiration in their own way, her mind had gone back to
Jim, and what he had said under the magnolia-trees; and his voice had
drowned all others. She was not blind to what he had become, but a deep
belief possessed her that she, of all the world, could save him. She knew
how futile it would look to the world, how wild a dream it looked even to
her own heart, how perilous it was; but, play upon the surface of things
as she had done so much and so often in her brief career, she was seized
of convictions having origin, as it might seem, in something beyond
herself.
So when she and Jim met in the street, the old, true thing rushed upon
them both, and for a moment they stood still and looked at each other. As
they might look who say farewell forever, so did each dwell upon the
other's face. That was the beginning of the new epoch. A few days more,
and Jim came to her and said that she alone could save him; and she meant
him to say it, had led him to the saying, for the same conviction was
burned deep in her own soul. She knew the awful risk she was taking, that
the step must mean social ostracism, and that her own people would be no
kinder to her than society; but she gasped a prayer, smiled at Jim as
though all were well, laid her plans, made him promise her one thing on
his knees, and took the plunge.
Her people did as she expected. She was threatened with banishment from
heart and home--with disinheritance; but she pursued her course; and the
only person who stood with her and Jim at the altar was John Appleton, who
would not be denied, and who had such a half-hour with Jim before the
ceremony as neither of them forgot in the years that the locust ate
thereafter. And, standing at the altar, Jim's eyes were still wet, with
new resolves in his heart and a being at his side meant for the best man
in the world. As he knelt beside her, awaiting the benediction, a sudden
sense of the enormity of this act came upon him, and for her sake he would
have drawn back then, had it not been too late. He realized that it was a
crime to put this young, beautiful life in peril; that his own life was a
poor, contemptible thing, and that he had been possessed of the egotism of
the selfish and the young.
But the thing was done, and a new life was begun. Before they were
launched upon it, however, before society had fully grasped the sensation,
or they had left upon their journey to northern Canada, where Sally
intended they should work out their problem and make their home, far and
free from all old associations, a curious thing happened. Jim's father
sent an urgent message to Sally to come to him. When she came, he told her
she was mad, and asked her why she had thrown her life away.
"Why have you done it?" he said. "You--you knew all about him; you might
have married the best man in the country. You could rule a kingdom; you
have beauty and power, and make people do what you want; and you've got a
sot."
"He is your son," she answered, quietly.
She looked so beautiful and so fine as she stood there, fearless and
challenging before him, that he was moved. But he would not show it.
"He was my son--when he was a man," he retorted grimly.
"He is the son of the woman you once loved," she answered.
The old man turned his head away.
"What would she have said to what you did to Jim?"
He drew himself around sharply. Her dagger had gone home, but he would not
let her know it.
"Leave her out of the question--she was a saint," he said, roughly.
"She cannot be left out; nor can you. He got his temperament naturally; he
inherited his weakness. From your grandfather, from her father. Do you
think you are in no way responsible?"
He was silent for a moment, but then said, stubbornly: "Why--why have you
done it? What's between him and me can't be helped; we are father and son;
but you--you had no call, no responsibility."
"I love Jim. I always loved him, ever since I can remember, as you did. I
see my way ahead. I will not desert him. No one cares what happens to him,
no one but me. Your love wouldn't stand the test; mine will."
"Your folks have disinherited you--you have almost nothing, and I will not
change my mind. What do you see ahead of you?"
"Jim--only Jim--and God."
Her eyes were shining, her hands were clasped together at her side in the
tenseness of her feeling, her indomitable spirit spoke in her face.
Suddenly the old man brought his fist down on the table with a bang. "It's
a crime--oh, it's a crime, to risk your life so! You ought to have been
locked up. I'd have done it."
"Listen to me," she rejoined, quietly. "I know the risk. But do you think
that I could have lived my life out, feeling that I might have saved Jim
and didn't try? You talk of beauty and power and ruling--you say what
others have said to me. Which is the greater thing, to get what pleases
one, or to work for something which is more to one than all else in the
world? To save one life, one intellect, one great man--oh, he has the
making of a great man in him!--to save a soul, would not life be well
lost, would not love be well spent, in doing it?"
"Love's labor lost," said the old man, slowly, cynically, but not without
emotion.
"I have ambition," she continued. "No girl was ever more ambitious, but my
ambition is to make the most and best of myself. Place?--Jim and I will
hold it yet. Power?--it shall be as it must be; but Jim and I will work
for it to fulfil ourselves. For me--ah, if I can save him--and I mean to
do so!--do you think that I would not then have my heaven on earth? You
want money--money--money, power, and to rule; and these are to you the
best things in the world. I make my choice differently, though I would
have these other things if I could; and I hope I shall. But Jim first--Jim
first, your son, Jim--my husband, Jim!"
The old man got to his feet slowly. She had him at bay. "But you are
great," he said, "great! It is an awful stake--awful! Yet, if you win,
you'll have what money can't buy. And listen to me. We'll make the stake
bigger. It will give it point, too, in another way. If you keep Jim sober
for four years from the day of your marriage, on the last day of that four
years I'll put in your hands for you and him, or for your child--if you
have one--five millions of dollars. I am a man of my word. While Jim
drinks I won't take him back; he's disinherited. I'll give him nothing now
or hereafter. Save him for four years--if he can do that he will do
all--and there's five millions as sure as the sun's in heaven. Amen and
amen."
He opened the door. There was a strange, soft light in her eyes as she
came to go.
"Aren't you going to kiss me?" she said, looking at him whimsically.
He was disconcerted. She did not wait, but reached up and kissed him on
the cheek. "Good-bye," she said, with a smile. "We'll win the stake.
Good-bye."
An instant and she was gone. He shut the door, then turned and looked in a
mirror on the wall. Abstractedly he touched the cheek she had kissed.
Suddenly a change passed over his face. He dropped in a chair, and his
fist struck the table as he said: "By God, she may do it, she may do it!
But it's life and death--it's life and death."
Society had its sensation, and then the veil dropped. For a long time none
looked behind it except Jim's father. He had too much at stake not to have
his telescope upon them. A detective followed them to keep Jim's record.
But this they did not know.