position of a Senator here with the salary, less what I was obliged to
pay in interest.
“‘Nonsense,’ he said; ‘turn your salary over to your wife; she is a
woman of uncommonly sound sense, a good manager--that I saw in her
house. Of course you can’t go into society on less than your salary,
but you can live comfortably and respectably. And let me tell you, this
town is full of big houses which caused the Senators who built them
to lose their elections. It doesn’t hurt a man with his constituents
in the least to live simply. Some of the gentlemen from the rural
districts have complained bitterly of this little place----’
“And then, after more talk, everything was settled. I wasn’t to write
to Sanders, of course, but to go and see him. Sanders wouldn’t dare to
proclaim what we agreed to do, but he will fight me with every weapon
at his command. I shouldn’t much care how things went--that is, so I
feel now--except for Senator Bicknell, but every blow at Sanders helps
the Senator, and I shall fight for him as long as breath warms my body.
When we parted I was much overcome, and I think Senator Bicknell was,
too. Coming home, it occurred to me how well you had managed on the
pittance I allowed you at Circleville.”
“It was not much, but it could hardly be called a pittance,” replied
Annette, smiling through her tears, for the stress of emotion under
which she had suffered had found its natural vent at last, and she was
weeping a little. But they were happy tears. Crane had reached the turn
in life when it was to be determined whether God or the devil should
be his master, and he had turned his back on Satan. He took his wife
in his arms and kissed her tenderly and reverently. No one knew better
then than he the moral beauty, the power to charm, to sustain, to lead
forward, of the woman he had not thought worthy to stand by him in
Washington.
* * * * *
The next morning early, Crane started West. He had his fateful
interview with Sanders and returned to Washington within a week.
Sanders’s words had been few, but full of meaning.
“All right,” he said. “I don’t take any stock in this awakening of
conscience business. You think Bicknell can serve you better than I
can. Very well. We will see.”
Suddenly, and apparently without volition, Crane’s right arm shot out
and his open palm struck Sanders’s check. The Governor, as quick as
thought, hit back. He was a brute, but not a coward. Then both men
came to their senses, and, hating each other worse than ever, each was
ashamed of his violence.
The Governor, taking out his handkerchief, coolly wiped the blood from
his nose, and said:
“I don’t care to engage in a fist fight with you. We can settle all our
quarrels when the Legislature meets. You will need all your courage
then.”
When Crane returned to Washington, he went straight to Senator Bicknell
and told him all.
“All right,” replied the Senator, as Governor Sanders had said. “This
is my fight now,” and straightway the Senator took the midnight train
for the State capital to pull off his coat and do yeoman’s work for
Crane, and incidentally for himself.
The month of December was bright and beautiful all the way through,
and the sunshine lasted into January. Thorndyke thought he had not
been so nearly happy for a long time. He saw Constance often, and she
was beautifully kind to him. He scarcely went into society at all, and
had the hardihood to decline an invitation to one of the Secretary
of State’s small dinners on the comprehensive excuse of “a previous
engagement,” which Mrs. Hill-Smith, who had invited him, did not
believe in the least; and when she had plaintively mentioned the names
of various English, French, Russian, Austrian, and German diplomats who
were to be present, Thorndyke had replied in a manner which mightily
discomposed Mrs. Hill-Smith:
“Oh, then, you won’t miss a stray American or two!”
If Mrs. Hill-Smith had had her way, she would have missed every
American invited.
Thorndyke saw much of the Cranes and of the children, who showered
their favour upon him. He could not but be struck by the new note in
Crane--something subdued, yet full of hope--and he had quite lost
that look of harassment and dejection which, on first meeting him,
had struck Thorndyke. Crane was normally a lover of fighting, and,
although Senator Bicknell, for strategic reasons, chose to keep him in
Washington while the preliminaries to the senatorial fight were raging,
yet he delivered some good shots at long range, and it began to look as
if he might be elected for the short term in spite of Governor Sanders.
The National Committee was not indifferent to this fight, and Senator
Bicknell went into it with all his old-time vigour. He worked, ate and
drank, waked and slept, with members of the Legislature for three
weeks before the election came off. It was a stupendous battle, and
neither side got any odds in the betting.
During the latter part of the Christmas recess, Thorndyke went north to
pay his sister, Elizabeth, a visit. Her first words to him were:
“Why, Geoffrey, how young you look!”
And everybody who met him told him he looked young, or looked well, or
looked prosperous, and one horny-handed old constituent hazarded the
opinion that Mr. Thorndyke was “thinkin’ o’ gittin’ spliced.” It was
all because Constance Maitland had been kind to him.
On his way back to Washington he found himself in the same car with
James Brentwood Baldwin, Junior, who was coming home to be nursed
and taken to Palm Beach after an attack of the chicken-pox. This
fifteen-year-old youth was in charge of a valet who attended to him
assiduously, and even went into the dining-car with him to see that
he exercised due prudence with regard to his diet. This, however, was
superfluous, as the scion of the house of Baldwin was the very epitome
of prudence, and turned away from entrées, sweets, and ices with a
degree of virtue which, to Thorndyke, dining at the same table with
him, seemed superhuman in a boy of any age. Thorndyke watched the
Baldwin boy curiously; it was one of the most deadly and fascinating
phases of the whole newly-rich question to him, how the children of
the newly rich were brought up. He observed in the Baldwin boy a total
lack of the normal faults and virtues of the normal boy. Young Baldwin
eyed Thorndyke at first with suspicion, but Thorndyke, wishing to
examine and classify the specimen of a boy before him, intimated that
he was acquainted with the James Brentwood Baldwins in Washington. Then
James, Junior, abandoned something of his hauteur. He acknowledged
being the pupil of a school at which Thorndyke happened to know the
fees were made purposely so high as to exclude any but the sons of the
very rich. They had an Anglican nomenclature, a resident chaplain,
and the spiritual direction of the masters as well as the pupils was
attended to by the Bishop of the diocese--the brother of the Secretary
of State. All this James, Junior, communicated while toying with
his rice-pudding, and turning an eye of stern disapproval at the
tutti-frutti ice.
“And what do you expect to be when you grow up, my lad?” asked
Thorndyke.
“I shall be a philanthropist,” replied James, Junior, with dignity.
“I shall try to use my wealth as a means of benefiting others. I am
president of our association for giving Christmas gifts to poor boys,
and I like it very much. We, who have superior advantages, should try
and extend a helping hand to others less fortunately placed.”
Less fortunately placed! Thorndyke looked at the boy with the deepest
commiseration, and pitied the poor children of the rich.
“You can learn a great deal from a poor boy,” said he, presently,
watching the boy’s solemn, handsome face. He might have been a hearty,
wholesome youngster, this grandson of Danny Hogan’s, had he but been
given a chance. “The poor boy is the normal boy; a boy should be
generally dirty and noisy; he should occasionally get a lecture from
his mother and a licking from his father, and a black eye from some
other boy. He must be a fighter. No less a man than Paul Jones has
said that he never saw a liar who would fight, or a fighter who would
lie; and he must not only tell the truth himself, but be ready to lick
any other boy who tells him a lie, for boys are, to themselves, a
law-making body, and must enforce their own laws.”
“That is not the way of the boys at our school,” icily replied James
Brentwood Baldwin, Junior, rising with dignity and receiving his hat
from the hand of his valet.
The day of Thorndyke’s arrival in Washington he was walking along the
street in the bright, sunny, early afternoon of winter. He stopped to
buy an afternoon newspaper, that he might see how the balloting for
Senator was going in Crane’s State, when a shout aroused him, and Letty
Standiford, in a gorgeous crimson automobile, with Senator Mince Pie
Mulligan by her side, dashed up to the sidewalk.
“Mr. Thorndyke,” shrieked Letty, playfully pretending she meant to run
Thorndyke down. “I have a piece of news for you. Look out, this is my
new red devil--I don’t mean Senator Mulligan, but my auto.”
“I certainly shall look out when you are around in that death-dealing
machine,” replied Thorndyke, dodging barely in time to save his legs.
“What is your news?”
“Just this. Dad gave me his word this morning that he would not be a
candidate for re-election next year. I went after the doctors myself,
and made them tell me the truth about Dad--he’s the only father I’ve
got, you know. And they all told me the same thing--that if he could
slack up work, and retire at the end of his term, he was good for
twenty years more, but that if he kept at the grind, his life wasn’t
worth a pin’s purchase. Dad wasn’t scared by that, but when I told
him that I should die of fright and distress if he went away and left
me, the poor old thing weakened, and said he’d decline a re-election,
and--oh, good gracious! He told me not to breathe it to a soul! He
actually shook his finger at me when he said it. Oh, heavens! If you or
Senator Mulligan give me away----”
“Dad will shake his finger at you again,” replied Thorndyke, laughing.
Nevertheless, his pulses had started off at a great rate.
“It’s not that--it’s not that I’m afraid of him--but it would break
his dear old heart to think I had disobeyed him.”
Letty Standiford, as she said this, was an object for angels to love,
in spite of her wild air, her mannish hat and coat, her flying and
dishevelled locks.
“It is safe with me,” said Thorndyke, gravely, and Senator Mulligan
spoke up:
“Divil a word will I say about it. I’m too much afraid of th’ ould
chap--and of you, too, Miss Letty.”
“Glad to hear it, Sinitor,” replied madcap Letty, viciously mimicking
the Senator’s unfortunate accent, “and, oh, Mr. Thorndyke, have you
heard that Miss Maitland is engaged to Mr. Cathcart, the navy man, who
is always hanging around her? It was announced this morning. Good-bye.”
Letty flashed off, with a bicycle policeman after her full tilt.
Thorndyke was near his lodgings. He did not know how he got there, but
presently he found himself sitting in his arm-chair before the fire.
Two hours later, when the maid-servant brought him a letter, he was
sitting in the same position.
The dusk was closing in, but he saw that the address was in Constance
Maitland’s handwriting. Of course she had written to tell him of her
engagement--it was kind of her so to break his calamity to him.
The letter lay unopened for half an hour. Then, with a desperate
courage, Thorndyke tore open the envelope. It was an invitation to
dinner two weeks hence. It was unfeeling of her to do this. It was
ignoble to forget that dear, lost past of which she had often spoken to
him, and had allowed him freely to speak to her. It was impossible that
he should accept; it was impossible that he should voluntarily meet
Constance again, except for one last interview--that final leave-taking
which is like the last farewell to the dying. And the sooner it was
over the better. Thorndyke pulled himself together, and made up his
mind to go to Constance at once.
As he walked along the streets in the sharp air of the January
twilight, everything looked unfamiliar to him. His interior world was
destroyed--engulfed. Never more could he know hope or happiness; for
him was only that stolid endurance of life which is like a prisoner’s
endurance of his cell and his shackles.
When he reached Constance Maitland’s door, she was at home, and he
walked into the familiar drawing-room. She was sitting on the great,
deep sofa, with no light but that of the blazing wood fire, although it
was quite six o’clock. She rose as Thorndyke entered and greeted him
gaily. Her meditations seemed to have been singularly happy.
Thorndyke sat down on the sofa by her, and, as all men do under stress
of feeling, put his pain into the fewest words possible.
“I heard this afternoon,” he said, in a strange, cold voice, “of your
engagement to Cathcart.”
“Did you?” replied Constance, smiling brightly. “From whom, pray?”
“From Miss Standiford.”
“So that crazy Letty Standiford goes about announcing my engagement!”
There was a pause, and then Thorndyke said, in the same strange, cold
voice:
“Cathcart is an admirable man.”
“So everybody says,” brightly responded Constance. “Many persons have
assured me of that.”
A longer pause followed. It might be ungenerous to interject a note of
pain into her first happiness, but it is human to cry out, to justify
one’s self, to call attention to the gift, when one has given a heart
and a soul.
“If Cathcart can give you even a part of the fortune you will lose by
marrying him, he is right to ask you. I could give you nothing. And so,
although I have loved you for nineteen years, I could not ask you to
descend from wealth to poverty with me.”
“I shall not lose, perhaps, as much as you think by marrying an
American,” replied Constance to this, adjusting her draperies in the
light of the fire, which played over her face. How bright, how smiling
she was! Her dark eyes shone, and the faint dimple in her cheek kept
coming and going. “I did not, of course, relish the thought of spending
all my life alone,” she continued, laughing shamelessly. “I was very
young, you may remember. So I determined to save up all I could of
my income. It was easy enough, living, as I did, with a person who
was most of the time a helpless invalid. Then, my uncle, von Hesselt,
realising the injustice done me by my aunt, left in his will a
considerable sum of money, which was to be paid me if I lost my aunt’s
fortune through marrying an American. This was no more than fair, as
my aunt left the money to the von Hesselts in case I should marry an
American. My lawyers here have assured me that it is an open question
whether I could not, after all, marry whom I will, and retain the
money, because the terms of the reversion to the von Hesselts are very
obscure, and it might come at last to my aunt’s heirs-at-law, of which
I am the chief. But I hate publicity and lawsuits and all such things,
and as I am still reasonably well off, I concluded to spare myself
such agonies, and to be satisfied with much less than I have now. But
it will be enough to give me all I want in any event. I can keep this
house, my carriage and servants, and dress well. What more does any one
want?”
As she continued speaking, Thorndyke’s agony increased with every word.
If only he had known before! Possibly--ah, how vain now was it! How
hopeless, how full of everlasting pain!
“But,” Constance kept on, “Mr. Cathcart is not the man for whom I
should sacrifice even so much. He has never hinted that I should marry
him. I am sure he does not want me. I cannot imagine how such an absurd
report got out.”
Thorndyke felt stunned. He said, after a moment:
“So you are not engaged to Cathcart?”
“Certainly not. Have I not just said that he has never asked me to
marry him? And that _he_ is not the man for whom I would sacrifice any
part of my fortune?”
She emphasised the “he,” and her words were full of meaning.
Poor Thorndyke was so dazed, so overwhelmed, that he could do nothing
but stare stupidly into Constance’s face. The man who really loves and
suffers is generally stupid at the supreme moment. And as she looked
into his eyes, so full of longing and yet half-despairing, she turned
her head aside and held out her hand a little way, and he caught it in
his.
* * * * *
Ten minutes afterward Scipio Africanus poked his head in the door and
saw that which made his eyeballs bulge an inch from his head. At the
same moment the bell rang sharply.
Scipio opened the front door, and, announcing that Miss Maitland was at
home, showed Julian Crane and Annette into the drawing-room. As they
walked briskly to the fireplace, they saw the two persons on the sofa
start apart. Thorndyke rose to his feet. Having been accepted, he was
once more master of himself and of the situation. Constance cowered in
the corner of the sofa.
“Pray excuse us,” cried Annette, laughing, blushing, and hesitating.
“There is nothing to excuse,” replied Thorndyke, smiling coolly. “Miss
Maitland has just promised to marry me. I am sure I don’t know why, but
I am very much obliged to her all the same.”
Annette reached out and took Thorndyke’s hand in hers.
“I know why,” she said, “any woman would know why.”
Crane shook Thorndyke’s hand warmly.
Constance, too, rose, and without a word, but with rapture in her eyes
and smile, received Annette’s kiss and Crane’s cordial grasp of the
hand.
“I suppose,” said Annette, “you are too blissfully happy to be
interested in anything now, but when you come to your senses, I am sure
both of you will rejoice with us. We have just had a despatch from
Senator Bicknell, saying my husband was elected Senator at four o’clock
to-day on the fifth ballot.”
And then Crane spoke, with sincerity in his eye and his smile:
“We came straight to you for sympathy in our good fortune, for which we
are wholly indebted to Senator Bicknell. And we find you enjoying the
good fortune that befell us ten years ago. Ah, there is no such good
fortune on this earth, Thorndyke, as a good wife!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.