BOOK III FOR THE PEOPLE

I

AGAIN the spring had come to Illinois, spilling the prairie flowers over the pastures, and warming the pleasant smelling earth which the mold-boards of the plows rolled back in rich loamy waves to make ready for the corn. In the town the trees rustled their new leaves in the wind that blows forever across the miles of prairie land, and the lawns along Sangamon Avenue were of a tender green, as their blue grass sprouted again under rake and roller. The birds were as busy as men, and everywhere, under the high blue sky, were the sounds that come with the awakening world, the glad sounds of preparation for every new endeavor.

The windows of the Harkness home were open, their lace curtains blowing white and cool in the young winds. Yet there, all was still. Upstairs, on his bed, with his hands folded whitely under the sheet that was smoothed across his breast, Ethan Harkness lay dead.

They buried him at Oakwood, just outside the town, beside the wife who had gone there so many springs before; buried him by the bulky monument he had raised, in his methodical business way, long ago. Its broad base glimmered between the trees, and from afar, the raised letters of his name could be read. The directors of the bank where he had spent his life, the bank he had founded, testified a belated appreciation of his virtues by adopting a long series of resolutions in which they submissively ascribed to an all-wise and inscrutable Providence the dispensation which they had done their part to hasten. They ordered, too, that the curtains of the bank be pulled down on the day of his funeral, and the door placarded “Closed,” though old Morton was kept there to collect the notes and interest falling due that day.

Then some ancient citizen, who was spending his declining years in chronicling for his own satisfaction the insignificant happenings of each day, chiefly the temperature and the times and local effect of frost, reminded the city council that Harkness had once, long years before, sat as a member of that body, and it likewise adopted resolutions. The local lodge of Masons took charge of his funeral, after Doctor Abercrombie of St. James had read the service in his beautiful voice, and recited one of his little compositions.

And when Pusey had published an obituary in his best elegiac style, all the conventions were considered as having been duly observed, and the town turned from its tribute to the dead, to judge Harkness for his deeds to the living who remained behind.

His will was proffered for probate in the County Court some days after his funeral. It had been drawn ten years before, and as drawn originally, left all his property to Emily, save a small bequest to a sister who lived somewhere in far off New Hampshire. But a codicil, drawn two years before his death, altered this original provision. To Garwood, he directed that one thousand dollars in cash be paid by his executors, and the rest and residue of his property of every kind, nature and description, real, personal and mixed, he left in trust for his beloved daughter Emily during her lifetime, and at her death, to her children, heirs of her body, in equal shares. Garwood was not named as one of the trustees.

The will, of course, was not satisfactory to any one in Grand Prairie. There were many there who had pictured to themselves their young congressman in the rôle of a lawyer without a practice, but with a predilection for politics, and a young wife of independent means. They knew how well he could cut this eminently respectable figure, and they had some dim conception of the service he could render in theoretical reform, if he only had money enough to place him above the vulgar necessities of the common politician.

Garwood himself suffered keenly, though his pride was hardly touched as much as Emily’s. He had had dreams himself, but now—he closed his memory to them. He even told Emily that he would not touch the thousand dollars, but finally consented to do so in order to please her. And then he suddenly remembered that the mortgage he had placed on his mother’s house was due once more that fall and he could think of no more pious use than that to which to put the money. He was consoled, however, when the inventory of the estate revealed the fact that Harkness’s property had either been vastly overestimated, or had lately shrunk in values, and he learned in the court house gossip of the lawyers, that certain unprofitable investments Harkness made during the last years of his life, had excited the fears of the bank directors, and led them to remove him from his wonted sphere of activity.

Emily, in the delicacy that embarrasses refined natures in money matters, was glad when the business of settling the estate was so far under way as to require her own attention no longer. She thought it indeed concluded, though the executors, being old, and rich already, relished the two per cent. commissions allowed them by law and scented a possible extra allowance by the county judge as a reward for faithful services. So they dragged the settlement along, picked out the choicest notes from Harkness’s tin box for themselves and dreaded the time when they would have to turn over so meaty a carcass to the trustees, who were itching to take hold.

Emily’s grief at her father’s death was deep, but placid, as grief for the aged must always be. She and Jerome lived on at the old house, though he often bemoaned the expense of keeping up so large an establishment, and discussed taking a smaller place. But they stayed on there, and the summer passed, quickly, as summers do in the intemperate zone, where winter in one form or another rages nine months in the year.

And Emily tried to think of her husband in her old ideal of him, because she was soon to become a mother again.

It was late October and old Mrs. Garwood, who spent much of her time now with Emily, sat in the library with her. They had a fire in the grate, the first of the season, and it cheered the somber room.

Outside the rain fell, and the wet leaves fluttering down from the trees in the yard, brushed the window panes before settling into the damp masses that choked the walks and the gutters. They had sat a long time in the bliss of silent companionship, these two women, who, though of such a different training and tradition, understood each other very well. They had been talking of housekeeping and the increased expense of living. Old Mrs. Garwood had sighed.

“I wouldn’t mind nothing,” she said, “if my mortgage was only—”

“If your mortgage—?” Emily let the garment in her fingers fall with her hands into her lap, and looked up with the question written large in her wide eyes.

“Yes, it’s due, an’ Mr. Dawson’s pressin’ me. Tschk, tschk, tschk! I don’t know, unless Jerome—but I don’t like to bother him, poor boy.”

“I thought—” but Emily checked herself. She took up the little dress she had been working on. John Ethan, who had been writhing restlessly at her feet, looked suddenly into his mother’s face, and something there silenced him, so that he was very quiet.

The next morning, after breakfast, she and Jerome were alone.

“Jerome,” Emily said in the voice that made him lay down his paper, and look up with serious eyes, “Jerome, I thought you were going to pay off mother’s mortgage for her.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

“Why so?”

“Why, you said so, at the time, you remember.”

“At what time?”

“Well, when you got your thousand dollars from—”

“Oh, am I never to hear the last of that thousand dollars!” Garwood exclaimed, dashing his paper to the floor. “Must I always have that thrown up to me! I wish I’d never seen it!”

“It isn’t that, Jerome, you told me you had paid mother’s mortgage with it, that’s all.”

Garwood looked at her angrily a moment.

“You’re mistaken there, I reckon, you must be mistaken. I said, perhaps, that I would pay it off with that, but not that I had. I did intend to, but I had to use the money in another place. I—” But he could proceed no further then. He was thinking of the big poker game in the Leland the night the state central committee met at Springfield.

Emily dropped the subject from her conversation, but she did not drop it from her thoughts. It was with her all that day, and it was the first thing in her mind the next morning, So incessantly did it recur to her, that, in search of relief, she went finally to the bank. She asked for old Morton, and when he shuffled up to the window, she made him go with her back to the directors’ room, haunted as it was with memories of her father.

“They sell mortgages sometimes, don’t they?” she asked as soon as they were alone.

“Yes, yes,” her father’s old clerk replied, delighted at being consulted confidentially in matters of finance.

“And could you get one for me, if I gave you the money, and told you the one?”

He smiled, as he had seen his superiors smile. It would be a treat for him to buy someone’s mortgage. She told him, and he scratched his head a moment. “I think,” he said, “that’s over’t the Polk National; I ain’t sure now, but it seems to me—”

“Well, find out,” said Emily, and the old man started.

“You spoke just like your father then,” he said, in a mild, reminiscent way that touched her.

He managed the matter for her in the end, and she bought the mortgage by borrowing the money of one of her trustees, who said he was glad to advance it to her, though he was careful to take out the interest for himself in advance.

Emily had the mortgage canceled, and took it herself to her mother-in-law that night.

“Here it is, mother,” she said, “Jerome had forgotten it. You know how neglectful he is!” And she smiled, as if she had named a virtue in the man.

“Law, yes!” said Mrs. Garwood, folding the mortgage in her trembling fingers. “Bless the boy! He always puts things off, but he never forgets his poor old mother in the end!”

II

THE Emersons had arrived in Washington at the beginning of February. Their trunks, scuffed with constant travel but given a cosmopolitan air of distinction by the etiquettes with which they were plastered, were ranged around the room in which the Emersons had quartered themselves at the Arlington, and stood with yawning lids, ready for Dade to dive into them after some new toilet with which to astound the guests when she swept into the dining-room.

Her mother, spent by the long winter voyage, had collapsed upon arrival, and had taken her meals in her room, vowing that if she could reach Grand Prairie alive, she would never leave there again. She was anxious now, to have Doctor Larkin undertake her cure. No one, she assured Dade, had ever understood her case as well as he, and no one had ever helped her as he had helped her. She longed to start for home immediately; but she did not feel equal to the trip just then; it would be necessary for her to remain in Washington awhile and gather strength for the journey.

Meanwhile, as she lingered, Dade gloried in the Washington spring. She had become enthusiastically American. She visited all the guide-book places about Washington; she said she was making a study of American history. In a week during which she had met several unreconstructed rebels, though the bloody shirt was then happily passing as an issue in politics, she had become intensely Southern in her sympathies. She bemoaned the lost cause as bitterly as a widow of a Confederate brigadier; she longed for a return of the golden days of Southern chivalry, and she yearned ineffably as she pictured herself on some old Virginia plantation attended by a retinue of black slaves whom she would have patronized so graciously and kept so busy.

Each morning she bought a huge bunch of violets from an old white-headed negro, in order to hear his “Lawd bless you, Missy!” It seemed to put her in touch with the days she never had known, and never could know.

She importuned her mother, too, for details of her ancestry, a subject in which she had never displayed an interest before, and, though her mother pleaded headache, she was at last enabled to recall and body forth, though vaguely, a long dead grandmother whom tradition pictured as a Virginia lady, an F. F. V., in fact.

And then Dade’s English accent became a Southern dialect, and it was with a delight that had its own regret, that she heard some one in the hotel parlor ask her one evening what part of the South she came from. An experienced ear would have detected Dade’s little deception through its inability to localize her dialect, for if she had heard a Virginian speak, she straightway spoke like a Virginian, if a Kentuckian, like a Kentuckian, if a Georgian, then like a Georgian, and the result was that she mimicked all and mastered the tongue of none.

Yet her honesty compelled her to disclaim Southern birth, though she qualified her denial and regained the place she had momentarily lost in the estimation of her interlocutor by telling him that her family, or part of them, had come from Virginia. Those evenings in the hotel parlor were unsatisfying, however, and she tired of the limits its walls set to her social evolutions.

It was, therefore, with a joy that lent a heightened color to her face, and showed her white teeth in a genuine smile of welcome, that she saw approaching her one evening across the dining-room a young man whose stride and carriage marked him for an officer in the regular army. His waist was as slender and his body as correctly bent as when he had been a shavetail just out of West Point, though that he had seen some sort of service was shown by his face, burned to an Apache bronze by the sun of New Mexico.

He wore his civilian clothes, somewhat old in style, with the unaccustomed air that sits on the army officer when he is out of uniform. Dade did not restrain the look of pleasure that comes to any girl’s eyes at the sight of a soldier, especially a soldier with whom she may claim acquaintance, and as his friendly face broke into smiles, she said:

“Why, Mistuh Beck, who would have thought of meeting yo’ all heah! Ah thought yo’ weh aout fighting Indians somewheah.”

“I’m stationed here now,” the young lieutenant explained, and then: “The world is very small!” he marveled, making that trite remark with the self-evident pleasure that showed he considered it original. “May I?” He laid a hand tentatively on the back of a chair at her table, and bowed low in his pantomime of asking if he might sit with her.

“Ce’tainly,” she said.

“And Mrs. Emerson is well?”

“She takes heh meals in heh room. We ah only waiting heah fo’ heh to recovah sufficiently to unde’take the journey aout to Illinois.”

They were so much together after that that the ladies of the hotel, who could not have known that the young people had become acquainted long ago in St. Louis, reveled in a new subject for gossip and pitied the poor woman lying ill in her room and neglected by a daughter who spent her time flirting with an army officer. Dade, by some spiritual divination, apprehended all they were saying, and took a delight of her own in shocking them. So the flirtation raged furiously, and Dade, by delicate pathological suggestions, developed her mother’s present indisposition into the disease that was her Washington doctor’s specialty.

Beck and Dade had gone to the Capitol one day, and, when Dade expressed a wish to see how the laws were made, had gone into the gallery of the House. Below them the members were lolling in their seats, their feet on their desks, reading newspapers, yawning or chatting, while the business of the nation, or of the party then in power in the nation, was being listlessly transacted.

The Speaker, sitting in his solemn chair, looked small in the distance, the clerks below him bowed over their work. Now and then the Speaker’s voice could be heard, now and then the sharp fall of the gavel startled the common drone of voices. Some member far across the House, beyond the littered sea of desks, was speaking. His voice came to them scarcely at all. He held a bundle of notes in one trembling hand, with the other he now and then pushed his spectacles up on his sweating nose.

A cup of water stood on his desk, and he drank from it frequently in the agony of getting through the ordeal that was necessary to supply the voters in his far-away Ohio district with copies of that speech. By the time it got into the Congressional Record, it would be well parenthesized with applause, and thus paint for his constituents a scene of a decorous, black-coated House, hanging rapt upon his words, and breaking occasionally into cheers that could not be controlled. The members lolled and read, and all about this speaker seats were empty, standing there in wooden patience as if waiting for him to end. At last the Speaker of the House turned from the man to whom he had been whispering, and his gavel fell.

“The gentleman’s time has expired,” he said.

The Ohioan stopped, and when he asked leave to extend his remarks in the Record, it was granted with the only enthusiasm his effort had produced.

“It’s stupid,” said Dade, turning to her lieutenant. “Let’s go ovah to the Senate.”

“It’s worse there,” Beck answered. “This seems to be an unexciting day.”

“What ah they talking abaout?”

“Goodness knows, I don’t.”

“Do they?”

“Hardly. But—wait a minute!” The soldier leaned over the railing. A laugh had rung below him. Sharp words had been spoken. A question had been flung across the House. On both sides, Republican and Democratic, members had sprung to their feet. The Speaker had arisen, and stood with his gavel alertly poised. There were several nervous cries of,

“Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!”

Beck saw one member who had arisen with the rest, and who now stood with one hand raised, his finger leveled at the speaker.

“Mr. Speaker,” said the member confidently.

The Speaker nodded in his direction.

“The gentleman from Illinois,” he said.

The member began to speak, talking in a low tone for several moments. Something he said provoked a laugh around him. Then the House was still. He was a tall man, and his long black coat hung from heavy shoulders. As he warmed to his subject, and his coat tails swung away from his loins, they revealed a protuberant abdomen; as he warmed still more, the perspiration rolled down his cheeks and on to the neck that lay in folds of fat over his rapidly softening collar. His voice increased in volume. He became excited, he turned around in a vehement outbreak, to address directly some member who, with head bent respectfully to the fictions of parliamentary etiquette, had crept in creaking boots to a desk near the speaker, and there he now sat, a palm nursing his deaf ear. The orator turned yet more directly about, and—

“Why!” Dade cried, “that’s Jerry Gahwood! He’s ouah congressman!”

She craned her pretty chin forward, and leaned her elbows on the wide marble rail to hear the better.

“Do you know him?” Beck asked.

“Why, he’s ouah congressman! He mah’ied Emily Ha’kness—don’t yo’ remembuh? The gyrl who was with me that wintah at the Van Stohn’s in St. Louis?”

“Oh!” said Beck.

She turned in the more immediate personal interest his tone had awakened in her.

“Do yo’ know him?” she asked.

“I? No, not exactly.”

Garwood’s voice was ringing loud and clear. Members came in from the lobby, from the cloak rooms, from the committee rooms. Men gathered in the seats near Garwood to hear him the better. Now and then there was the sharp rattle of clapping hands.

Dade’s eyes were glowing.

“Isn’t he fahn?” she said. “He’s handsome, too. Ah heahd him make his great speech the night befo’ he was elected—yo’ heahd of it, didn’t yo’?”

Beck only smiled. She turned again to listen, but her attention was not steadfast. Beck had hardly been listening at all.

“Don’t yo’ think him fahn?” she inquired.

“He is really a good speaker,” the lieutenant admitted. Dade looked at him, fixing her brown eyes steadily in his blue ones.

“What do yo’ all know abaout him?” she asked suddenly.

“Why do you ask?” he parried.

“Yo’ speak so strangely—yo’ ah so queah abaout him.”

“Am I? I know nothing. I have been told that he came here two or three years ago with extraordinary prospects—”

“And he has not—justifahd or fulfilled them?”

“That’s about it.”

“Well, if that’s all!” Dade said loyally, tossing her head, and then she turned once more to watch Garwood.

His speech was brief. He finished in a fine burst of eloquence, with a hand uplifted, and his black locks shaking, and then sat down, amid a volley of applause, taking the hands of those who pressed about him, and smiling at each congratulatory word, though disparagingly, as if his achievement had been a small thing for him.

“Ah must meet him!” Dade announced, suddenly arising. “We’ll go. Yo’ must send in yo’ cahd. Can yo’? Will they let yo’?”

“Yes,” the lieutenant hesitated, “but—”

“But what?” Dade stood at her full height.

“I think you’d rather not see him—here.”

“Nonsense!” She stamped her foot petulantly, and her eyes flashed dangerously. “Ah mean to take him to task fo’ not calling on mamma and me. Ah’ve known him all my life!”

The officer shrugged his shoulders. He felt that he had already said too much, more, certainly, than was prudent for an officer in the army, where feudal notions of propriety still exist.

Garwood came out of the House in response to the lieutenant’s card. The air of serious and official demeanor with which he had prepared to listen to importunities about some of the army’s constant appropriation bills or reorganization bills, relaxed into one of surprise and friendliness when he saw Dade standing by the side of the young officer, and it expanded into a smile of much insinuation as he bowed low and took the girl’s hand.

“I’m delighted, I’m sure,” he said.

She presented the lieutenant, and the men bowed.

“I’ve met Lieutenant Beck before,” Garwood said. “Glad to meet him again—always glad to meet the officers of our little army, aren’t we, Miss Dade?”

He was red and perspiring, and stretched his neck now and then, that he might press his handkerchief below his collar.

“We have been listening to yo’ speech, Mistuh Gahwood,” Dade said. “Ah hadn’t heahd yo’ speak since that night befo’ the election. Do yo’ remembuh?”

“Oh, yes,” the congressman replied, and he laughed. “That seems years ago, doesn’t it?”

“Not to me,” she corrected him.

Garwood bowed, intensely.

“Pardon me, Miss Dade, you are the only one who hasn’t aged since then.”

Garwood had drawn a cigarette from his pocket, and as they strolled out into the rotunda, he offered the case to Beck.

“No, thanks,” said Beck.

Garwood continued pinching the cigarette.

“Emil—Mrs. Gahwood is not with yo’, is she?”

“No, poor girl,” said Garwood. “She stayed at home this winter. It has been lonely for me, too, without her. I had hoped to have her with me, but she is not well—and then her father’s death you know—”

Garwood allowed the sentence to complete in the girl’s mind its own impression of the lonely wife left at home.

“She must be lonesome,” Dade said.

“Yes—think of having to spend a winter in that beastly little place!” Garwood said, and then he hastened to add with an apologetic smile: “We wouldn’t talk that way in Grand Prairie, Lieutenant; would we, Miss Dade?”

The two men walked with her between them, and Garwood walked close to the girl. His eyes took in her fresh face, glowing under the dotted veil, and her athletic figure, which she carried as erectly as the soldier by her side did his.

“We were going over into the Senate.”

“Ah?” Garwood responded. “I’m headed in that general direction, not to hear the old men certainly, but down to the restaurant. This business of saving the nation twice a day is exhausting. Perhaps you’d—”

“No, thank yo’,” said Dade, withdrawing herself subtly.

“I shall do myself the honor of calling upon you, Miss Dade,” Garwood said.

She looked at him. Her eyes were cold.

“Mothuh will be glad to see yo’, no doubt,” she answered, and then she bowed.

Garwood stood looking after her, watching the delicate play of the muscles of her back as she walked. Then he placed the cigarette between his lips, and started for the elevators.

“He’s grown fat!” Dade was saying to the army officer. “He’s hoh’id! Po’ little Emily!”

III

IT had been a long and lonesome winter for Emily, shut up in the big house emptied of all save its memories. She was still in mourning for her father, and the conventionalities of a society that demands steadfast grief in others prevented her from seeking any diversion, even if she had had the strength or the inclination to do so. Her only companion, besides the servants, was her child, now in his third year and developing a curiosity that exhausted the little vitality that her housewifely duties had not already demanded.

Mrs. Garwood found time, of course, to “run in,” as she put it, every day, though her run had to prolong itself for many blocks, and she watched Emily with a motherly solicitude. But it was Emily’s heart that was lonely; she brooded constantly over her lengthened separations from Jerome. She had borne them bravely as long as they seemed but necessary postponements of the life she had wished to lead, but now it was beginning to dawn upon her that there was a spiritual separation between them, growing ever wider and wider, and the thought of this wore away day by day faith and hope, and left her sick with despair.

For this her mother-in-law could give her little consolation. Not that she lacked sympathy at heart, but the tenderness of her nature could only express itself in material ways. The finer qualities of the spirit’s yearnings which, in the case of a nature like Emily’s, became real necessities, she could not appreciate. If at times she was haunted by a crude intuition of Emily’s subjective difficulties, she had not the power to analyze them, and if she had, she would have found little patience with them.

The life they had led did not of course meet the standards of her own conscience, but she was disposed to blame Emily as much as, if not more than, she did Jerome, and being a rigid old woman, who would have burned at the stake for any one of her little elementary principles, she would now, as she had done so many times before, consistently wag her head with the wise disapproval her years and experience of common life warranted her in expressing, and say:

“It ain’t for the best, it ain’t for the best. You’re too young to be apart; it ain’t good for you, an’ it ain’t good for Jerome. Young husban’s should be kept at home, should be kept at home.”

“But, you know, mother,” Emily would argue, “I can’t keep him at home, and I can’t be with him there in Washington—now.”

And her head drooped over the white garment she was fashioning.

But old Mrs. Garwood inexorably shook her head.

“It won’t do,” she insisted, “a wife’s place is by her husband, an’ I s’pose women becomes mothers in Washington same’s anywhere else.”

Emily had no strength for discussion then. It was all at one, anyway, with the monotony of her life.

It became, too, but a part of her routine to follow political developments through the newspapers, trying to supply the omissions in Jerome’s infrequent letters from the broad columns of the Congressional Record, where, for the benefit of posterity, the national politicians keep a carefully revised record of the things they wish they had said.

If she found Jerome’s name, she read eagerly, and then, dropping the paper in her lap, began once more as in the past, to body forth in imagination the whole scene—Jerome in the full flush of his oratorical excitement, his face red, his eyes blazing, his brow damp with perspiration, his black hair tumbled in the picturesque way she knew, his arm uplifted, perhaps one white cuff a little disarranged.

And then, the other congressmen crowding into the seats about him, at last the “long-continued applause,” which is the only thing never expurgated from that daily magazine of fiction. In this poor way she tried to bear herself nearer to him, to remain by him, but it was not satisfying, and many times after such hopeless fancy, she wept in despair, and hugged her boy to her hungry breast, finding in his warm little body the only actual and substantial comfort her life now knew.

Emily had allowed herself to believe that serious opposition to Jerome’s renomination had disappeared after his victory in his second campaign, but when with other harbingers of spring Sprague came forth in his perennial candidacy, and announcement was made that with the solid delegation of Moultrie at his disposal he would contest with Garwood for the nomination, she realized with a certain sickening at her heart that the same old trial was upon them once more.

A few days later she read that Judge Bailey of Mason—now Speaker of the House at Springfield—was also an avowed candidate for Congress, and she tried to convince herself that Jerome’s chances were thereby favored because of the consequent division of the forces against him, though there were disquieting articles in the Advertiser that would not let her conviction rest.

The Advertiser, as is customary with the opposition organ in a man’s own town, exhibited a meanness in its treatment of Garwood to which it would not have descended in any cause less sacred than that of party-ism, and it now began to speak of Bailey in fulsome praise as if he were the savior of his times, though all its readers knew, and especially did Emily know, for she, doubtless, alone of all those readers, looked so far ahead, that if Bailey were successful before the convention, he would, when the campaign came on, get all the abuse her husband had been receiving.

But Emily had learned that editors, though they appeared at least ordinarily honorable in other ways, could become mendacious when they took up political questions; she had often wondered why it was that, simply because they happened to own newspapers to print them in, they could deliberately write and publish lies they would have scorned to use in discussing men in any of their relations other than political, and, while she could find no explanation except that partisanship inculcates hypocrisy, she tried to be practical and not credit anything she read in the newspapers, especially if it were disagreeable.

Pusey had loyally begun the campaign for Garwood’s reëlection by writing daily editorials in his praise, and these, printed in the Citizen, which the postmaster continued to edit, gave Emily a welcome antidote for the Advertiser’s venom. Pusey published all of Garwood’s speeches in full, and the Advertiser, with the relish of one who discloses state secrets, described the little postmaster as darkly setting up the pins for a county convention which should select a delegation to the congressional convention instructed to use all honorable means to bring about the renomination of Jerome B. Garwood.

The Advertiser’s editor, with a wit that sometimes illumined the recesses of his mind, printed the word “honorable” in quotation marks. This account of Pusey’s secret doings was varied at times by a description of the conferences that were nightly held in the back room of the post-office. The Advertiser pretended to lay bare all the ramifications of the little man’s designs, and as if its duty lay in the direction of its joy, did all it could to confound his politics and frustrate his knavish tricks.

But amid all this confusion, Emily was sure of one thing, that there was another contest, with all its nervous strain, before her; that the months to come, the beautiful months of the spring and summer she had longed for as ardently as an invalid longs for the days when he can be wheeled out into the sun, would bring more abuse and recrimination, more hatred and strife, and she had grown so weary of it all. If Jerome could have become a candidate for some other office it would at least relieve the monotony, but this everlasting repetition of the unchanging sordid struggle to stay in Congress—she wished that he would leave politics altogether; she almost wished in her bitterness, that he would be defeated, if it would bring him home, and make him himself once more.

IV

DADE had provisionally accepted Beck’s invitation to the Army and Navy ball, but after Mrs. Emerson had showed her endurance in an Easter service at one of the fashionable churches, there was no longer doubt that she would postpone her return to Illinois and the resumption of Doctor Larkin’s treatment until that great event should have passed into history. As the night of the ball drew near, Beck was in a flutter almost feminine, and Dade’s preparations went forward in such excitement that the old lady herself finally awakened an interest and determined to accompany Dade as chaperon.

Now that the night had come, she showed no regret for her decision, for, with a robust floridity that may have been but the final flowering of her carefully nurtured ailments, she sat and fanned herself all the evening, basking in the smiles of the young officers Beck brought up in reliefs to keep her from growing weary and impatient. These war-like youths in the esprit de corps that had been hazed into them at the national nursery heroically stood at their posts, reminded, whenever they caught a glimpse of the proud girl in the fine state of her black chiffon gown, whirling by with their brother officer, that the honor of the service was being upheld.

“They are charming, these young officers of our army!” the old lady whispered to Dade as they were going out to supper. “So much more sincere than foreign officers, such gentlemen!”

“Of cou’se,” Dade replied, but more for Beck’s benefit than for her mother’s, “they ah gentlemen bah Act of Congress.”

The old lady fed recklessly on the salads and ices, and Dade foresaw the loud alarms that would appal the nights for a week afterwards, but Beck observed her gastronomic exploits with satisfaction, for it all meant time to him. Dade had limited him to four dances, and in the wide, wide intervals between them, he had moped in the smoking room, just as if he were the love-sick hero of a novel. But now he pressed his suit by urging more dishes on the mother, and she ate gaily and carelessly on, and drank enough coffee to insure insomnia for the whole summer. And then after supper, Dade went off with a mere civilian, and left Beck and her mother to watch the brilliant stream of uniforms flow by.

It was the male, who in a reversion to the barbaric type, made a display of toilets that night, and not the female. There were uniforms everywhere. The embowered Marine Band, itself cutting no mean figure in its white breeches and scarlet coats, played the tunes that were popular that spring, while the proud and happy men moved by in glittering splendor—navy officers, with their gold-braided dress coats and low waistcoats; army officers, in the white stripes of the infantry, the yellow of the cavalry, or the red of the artillery; the members of some local company of rifles in their cadet gray and pipe-clayed cross-belts, now and then some foreign officer in the pride of his own pulchritude, and the happy consciousness that he was serving nobly in that hour because his uniform marked him out even in all that distinction of gold-mounted clothes.

The members of the diplomatic corps, too, had come with their ribbons and stars, to give the final touch of splendor; even the Japanese and Chinese ministers with their silks and fans were there, gazing calmly on from the far misty distance of their oriental lives. There were, to be sure, some white-headed old infantry captains who had not a sign of gold cord on their breasts, but they served to show how unequally the real rewards of military service are apportioned.

Dade could see Beck, striding here and there over the ball room floor, trampling the trains of gowns, with muttered apologies as angry as the vengeful looks the ladies flung at him, but she did not cast one glance in his direction to help him in his quest. Rather, with her head inclined indolently, her long arms, in their black mousquetaire gloves, stretched straight to her knees, her fingers knit together, she sat and talked to the black-coated civilian, who, despite the eclipse into which he and all his unnoticed kind were thrown by the blaze of uniforms that night, had manfully striven to shine in his own proper luster.

Yet from the corner of her dark eye, she followed Beck’s frantic evolutions as he dashed in and out among the promenading couples, assuring herself again that she had never known how handsome the young soldier was until she beheld him that night for the first time in uniform. She had always longed to see him armed and equipped, and had frankly told him so, not at all to his discomfort or displeasure, but she pictured him at such times as a kind of animated Remington figure in cavalry boots and spurs, a heavy saber hooked up at his belt, and a six-shooter in its holster swinging ready to his right hand; with gauntlets, too, a gray campaign hat to shade his eyes, and a polka-dotted handkerchief knotted at his sun-burned throat. Then, in the violet haze of the western prairies, a body of hardened troopers standing by, some picketed horses, a grizzled officer with a field glass, and perhaps some Indians on their ponies impudently galloping in far off taunting circles, had completed the picture her young imagination had made of him.

But he had presented himself before her that evening as the apotheosis of the full-dress uniform, with his cavalry cape over his shoulders—though it had one corner thrown back to give freedom to his right arm, and possibly to show its own yellow lining—and his helmet with its long yellow horse-hair plume hanging to his shoulders, and adding at least a cubit to his stature, after the cubit of a man. When they arrived at the armory, he had doffed the helmet and the cape, but it was only to display himself in the more gorgeous magnificence of his helmet cord, arranged on his breast with an intricacy that would have bewildered a lady’s maid, and his heavier aiguillettes, which his detail as aide-de-camp now entitled him to wear, looped from his right shoulder.

His shoulder knots gave him an effect of greater broadness, and when he walked his long saber smote militantly against the wide yellow stripe that ran down his leg. His face, tanned to a chronic brown by the suns of the Southwest, where he had been chasing Apaches for three years, was red to-night with the heat and the excitement of this social expression of the civilization he was so glad to get back to, and his yellow hair, cropped close in the military style, was twisting tightly at his brow into the curls that he would have cultivated had he been trained to some practical occupation.

The eclipsed civilian was glad enough when the band struck up a waltz, and rescued him from Dade’s comparative studies of uniforms, for if he did not quite recover his individuality with his new partner, he could at least forget it in the vertiginous mazes of the dance.

Dade, left alone, began to long for Beck’s coming to save her from the ignominy of a wallflower, and, under the stress of this apprehension, she held herself more stiffly with the intention of acquiring thereby a greater visibility, and of expressing that reproach site meant him to feel in the moment when he should discover her thus deserted. She could see him still dashing here and there on the outlook for her.

He had left the middle of the floor where the gyrating dancers made his position absurd and even dangerous, and now, applying the tactics of his arm of the service, was beating up the walls of the room, feeling that there somewhere, his scout must end. When he saw her at last, his perspiring face lit up, and he bore down upon her in triumph. He sank into the chair beside her, and, drawing out a handkerchief, began to pat his brow delicately with it, though he would have liked to give his hot face a good scrubbing.

“Have yo’ all been having a good tahm?” drawled Dade, with her eyes far away to where the Chinese minister was cross-examining some woman on the subject of her age and her maiden name.

“No,” Beck said, bluntly.

“Ah should think yo’ would,” Dade replied, coldly.

Beck looked at her in alarm.

“Why?” he ventured.

“Yo’ seemed to have difficulty in teahing yo’self away.”

Beck’s alarm became positive.

“I have been looking for you everywhere,” he said in earnest defense.

“And then,” she continued, as if to eliminate herself from consideration as quickly as possible, “ah yo’ not in unifohm?”

She turned toward him, and inclining her head over her white shoulder, looked at him with an eye to sartorial effects.

“If you only knew how hot this dress uniform is!” He scoured his whole visage with his handkerchief, and angrily pulled at the collar that was binding his neck.

“But just think how remahkably well yo’ all look in it,” she said, her lips parting in a mocking smile.

“Don’t, please,” he said, quite seriously. “Do you think we live only for uniforms?”

“Don’t yo’?” she asked. “Look at that red commodo’e theah. He comes into the hotel pahlo’ every night buhsting in that unifohm—he wouldn’t give it up fo’ the wo’ld.”

Beck smiled at the fat old sailor who was wheeling gravely around.

“If it weh not fo’ the unifohms we all would have no ahmy at all,” Dade persisted; “it is the unifohm that keeps the institution of milita’ism alive.”

“You seem to be thinking deeply to-night,” Beck replied.

“Ah nevah had such a good oppo’tunity befo’ fo’ studying the vanity of man.”

“If you could see us in the field, you wouldn’t think so,” Beck said, and he managed to put the words in the tone of one who had suffered for a great cause.

Dade glanced at him. She had a glimpse of her Remington picture again. His tone had touched her. She recalled all she had read of the hardships of soldiers’ lives, and she softened.

“Ah would lahk to see yo’ all theah,” she confessed.

“Would you?” He spoke eagerly, leaning toward her, gathering his saber into his lap. “You shall.” His cheek flushed red under his brown skin. He cast a glance about the armory, striving to hide its bare walls under the flags of all nations that had been draped there. The green plants standing stolidly in their tubs offered no place for a tête-à-tête.

She cast one glance his way, and then dropped her eyes.

“Yo’ swo’d theah, fo’ instance, is an emblem of vanity,” she went on hurriedly, in a final effort to regain her lost note of banter, “why do yo’ weah it in a ball room? Ah yo’ in dangeh? No, yo’ me’ely wish to show that yo’ can handle it skilfully in a dance—which yo’ can’t——” And she thrust a hand into a rent in her overskirt, and spread it over her palm in proof. “And those things, what do yo’ call them? That helmet co’d, as Leftenant Wood so cahfully explained to me, that is to hold yo’ helmet on; but yo’ haven’t yo’ helmet on now. And those othah things, lak pencils, that knock in mah eyes in dancing, what good ah they?”

She touched with the tip of her finger his dangling aiguillettes. The touch thrilled him.

“Did you hear me?” he went on. All her mockery had not been heard. She knew it had not been heard, and she tried to say more, but her mind would not work; she caught her breath. They were alone on that side of the great hall. He leaned closer.

“Did you hear me?” he went on. “You shall see me so if you will. I’ll take you there—will you go?”

She laughed softly.

“It would be a treat, wouldn’t it,” she said, “to see yo’ on yo’ native heath?”

His face remained serious. His jaw set.

“Dade,” he said, and she flushed crimson, “it’s no use—I can’t say it right—only—I love you, that’s all.”

She hung her head.

“Do you hear, darling?” he continued, bending nearer. “Do you hear? You must excuse the bluntness of a soldier—I love you, that’s all there is to it.”

He clutched the scabbard of his saber in his nervousness. Her hand had fallen to her side, and with his own he seized it, and crushed it between them.

“Listen,” he said, “I love you, love you, love you! Oh, if we were somewhere else! You can’t say ‘No’ now; you must not! You do love me, you must—listen, do you hear?—you must love me! If we were elsewhere I’d take you in my arms—I’ll do it anyway, here and now—what do I care? And you couldn’t stop me!”

He leaned impulsively forward. She stirred, and turned her face half-frightened toward him.

“Not here!”

“Tell me, then, do you love me?”

Her eyes looked full in his, and then, without dropping one of her Western r’s, she said:

“You know, Arthur.”

He crushed her hand until she winced with the pain.

V

EMILY and Dade had kept up a correspondence that gushed from their pens with all the olden spontaneity of their girlhood, though in the latter days this thin black-gowned matron who paused in her household duties to sit down to epistolary labors found it an effort which caused her rueful smiles to assume a character that was akin to her ancient self. Dade in her letters from Washington had hinted darkly at a secret she had to impart when they were, as she put it, heart to heart again, though her constant and enthusiastic celebration of Lieutenant Beck of the cavalry detracted somewhat from the mystery she was saving for Emily’s stupefaction.

When it was at last announced to her that the Emersons were about to start for Grand Prairie, Emily welcomed the news with joy, and fondly expected to renew in Dade that blithe girlhood which, as she sadly realized, had gone from her. But when Dade appeared one morning at the bottom of the broad steps that led to the veranda of Congressman Garwood’s place, as the old home of the Harknesses so soon had come to be called, and mounted them with anything but continental stateliness, Emily, standing in the doorway to meet her, saw in a flash, that however ardent and however intimate their letters may have been, their diverging lives could never meet again.

To Emily the recognition was prompter than to Dade, to whom, indeed, it never came at all. Though she had roamed all over the world, Dade had not grown in experience, unless a cosmopolite’s knowledge of the conveniences of travel, a guide-book acquaintance with art galleries, and a smattering of gossip about, if not of, the fashionable courts of Europe could be called experience. She still looked out upon the world with the wide eyes of her girlhood; while Emily, though immured in all the provincialism of her little prairie town, had known the daily heart-ache and the sleepless nights in which the soul sounds all the deeps of life. So it was that out of eyes from which the scales had fallen she looked upon Dade’s glowing and radiant face this May morning, and the smile that came to her was of a longing sympathy with the youth and girlhood that stood revealed before her.

Dade, swinging the jacket she had been carrying on her arm, caught Emily about the waist and led her into the house at a livelier step than she had known for many a day. Emily took her upstairs, where they could be near the new baby, who was taking a morning nap, and once in the old familiar room that Dade had known as Emily’s in their girlhood, she plumped Emily down on the box couch, then plumped herself down beside her, and when the vibration of the springs had spent itself, and she had ceased to bounce up and down, Dade impetuously turned, and fixing her eyes on Emily under the brim of the mannish alpine hat she wore, she seized the matron by both shoulders and said:

“Em, Ah’m engaged!”

“Again?” smiled Emily, with the indulgence of the elder woman to a girl.

“Again!” cried Dade, repeating Emily’s word, and arching her brows. She released her hold of Emily’s shoulders, and throwing her arms behind her, rested on them like two props, while she regarded Emily with a mimicry of reproach. But her black eyebrows twitched disobediently in the mirth that was turbulent that day in her whole being.

“Again!” she repeated, trying to prolong the pose. “Yo’ speak as if mah husband was d’aid, and Ah’d been mah’ied the second tahm!”

Emily gave a little distant laugh.

“I’m glad, dear,” she said.

Dade regarded her curiously, and then instantly voiced her thought.

“Yo’ all talk lak some kind old auntie!” she said. “Why, gyrl, yo’ ahn’t old’s Ah am. Mah heaht’s wohn to a frazzle. Ah’ve been engaged befo’, oh, a dozen tahms, Ah reckon—mo’n yo’ all evah dreamed of!”

“A dozen times!” exclaimed Emily, in real amazement, and then with a touch of the spirit of their old intimacy she said:

“But you never told me, Dade, only that once!”

“Co’se not,” said Dade; “they really didn’t count. Ah was on and off with them so quick. Ah wanted to wait to see if—if—the’d take befo’ writing yo’, but they nevah did, only the one with the baron, po’ ol’ soul!”

“Did that one take?” asked Emily, with a languid return to the remoteness her own experience had drawn her to, and with a sigh, also, that her heart so quickly lost the perfume of the youth that a moment before had been wafted into it.

Dade was serious an instant.

“Well, yes. Ah thought it did, but yo’ know, Em, those Eu’opeans ah simply im-possible, that’s all.”

“And you were engaged to twelve of them! I thought the chaperon was an institution in Europe. Yours couldn’t have watched you very carefully.”

“Oh, they’re just to see that the gyrls dew mah’y some one—that’s all—but——”

“You escaped?”

“Yes, it’s different with an Ame’ican gyrl, yo’ know; they won’t be watched, and Ah escaped.”

Dade had raised her arms to her head, with a graceful preliminary flourish to loosen her sleeves at the elbows, and was withdrawing the pins that fastened her hat. Emily noticed that the pins were all headed with army buttons, with the “C” on their bright little shields that told of the despoilment of some cavalryman’s forage cap. She connected these with the buckle Dade wore on her belt, the plain buckle of the West Point cadet’s belt, though over the washed gold of this one was a monogram of the initials of Dade’s name, “D.E.,” in silver.

“Ahthu’ says——” Dade began, stabbing the pins back into the hat, and flinging it beside her on the couch, “Oh, Em, he’s the deahest man—pe’fectly scrumptious! Ah must tell yo’ abaout him.”

And she began a celebration of the young soldier, setting him in what was to her the picturesque atmosphere of a western army post, and drawing once more, in all its details, the picture she had imagined of him, booted and spurred and gauntleted, riding forth with his dusty troopers clattering behind to do the ungentle deeds that somehow have always filled the mind of the gentler sex with a sentimental pleasure.

“And oh,” she said, “Ah must tell yo’ abaout his being o’dehed to proceed along the South Fo’k of the—something-oah-othah—Ah must write to-day and get the name of that rivah—all hidden by cottonwoods along its banks, just lak in the books, yo’ know—and destroy all Piegan Indians. He was a shavetail then, and didn’t know a Piegan Indian from a Sioux, and he nea’ly brought on a wah. If it hadn’t been fo’ his old first se’geant—Oh, his men all love him, Ah know—eve’ybody does!”

And so she flowed on, while Emily sat and listened with the mellowed smile of an indulgence almost motherly.

“And we ah going to live in Washington at first, he’s General—What’s-his-name’s aide now, yo’ know. That’s why he’s allowed to weah aiguillettes; Ah must show them to yo’ in his photograph. But when he’s changed, we’ll probably have to go to some weste’n post. Think of mah living aout theah—an ahmy woman! Ah’ll have an Indian to cook fo’ us, and yo’ and Je—Mistuh Gahwood must come aout and visit us. He can get himself appointed on a committee to inspect ahmy posts, yo’ know, yo’ all can save lots of money that way. Ah’ve grown economical since Ah’m going to mah’y an ahmy officeh. They get awfully small salaries; it’s a shame. But Mistuh Gahwood can have himself put on the committee——”

“I’m afraid Washington has corrupted you, Dade,” said Emily.

“Corrupted me?” the girl repeated. “Co’se it has, it corrupts eve’ybody. That’s what eve’ybody does down theah. It’s all pull—that’s the way Ahthu’ got his detail as aide.”

Emily’s face had lost its smile, and had sobered.

“Yes,” she breathed with a sigh. “Did you see Jerome there?”

Dade looked at Emily questioningly an instant, and then she hastened to say:

“How stupid of me! To sit heah and talk of Ahthu’ when Ah ought to have known that yo’ all weh dying to heah abaout yoah husband. Oh, yes, Ah saw him at a distance a numbah of times, and one day Ah met him in the rotunda of the Capitol. We weh in the gallery, Ahthu’ and Ah, and had heahd him make a speech.”

Emily had leaned forward a little; her lips were parted, and her teeth showed in the first smile of real interest she had displayed. She laid her hand lightly on Dade’s arm, finding it a comfort to touch some one who had been there in Washington, some one who had seen him in his proper place, some one who had heard him speak, who had spoken to him and touched his hand.

“What speech was it, Dade?” she asked, eagerly. “The one in the tariff debate, or——”

“Oh, goodness me’cy me!” ejaculated Dade. “Ah don’t know what it was on—yo’ can’t tell a wo’d they say, they all make so much noise. Ahthu’ said it was lak a sun dance of the Ogallalla Sioux.”

“Tell me, how did he look?” Emily’s eyes were glistening.

“He looked splendid, Emily, splendid. He rose, yo’ know, suddenly, and began to speak befo’ Ah knew it was he at all. And he grew excited, and all the othahs crowded in to heah—it must have been a great speech.”

Emily made Dade tell her all she could recall out of her scattered memories of that scene, and the glow in her eyes mingled all the love she had borne him, all the hopes she had cherished, and all the high envy of Dade, to whom it had been given to be there and behold that scene.

“And how is he looking, tell me that?” asked Emily when Dade had told her at last that she could think of no more to tell.

Dade turned toward her as if she had an unpleasant revelation to make, and said, hesitatingly:

“Well, Emily—he’s grown fat!”

She thought of the trim, narrow-waisted figure of her own brown soldier lover. But Emily only laughed.

“Yes,” she observed, “Mother Garwood says his father filled out at his age.”

Then Dade resumed her celebration of Beck once more, and described for Emily the glories of the Army and Navy ball. And when she had done, she sat, her chin on her little white fist, and looked dreamily out of the open window into the cool green foliage of the trees, where some robins were building a nest. Emily likewise fell into reverie, and they sat there a long time before the reverie was broken. It was Dade at last who said:

“Emily, ah mah’ied people happieh than single people?”

The childishness of the question was lost upon Emily, whose thoughts had been busy with the unpleasant task of contrasting her own girlhood’s dreams and their fulfilment with the dreams of Dade and their promise.

“No,” she said in reply. Her voice was a mere hollow note.

“Ah yo’ all happy?” said Dade.

“Y-yes,” Emily answered. Her voice was still pitched on that hollow note.

Dade turned her head and looked at Emily. She saw her great eyes blinking, the tears brimming to their long lashes. She looked and wondered, looked as long as she dared. And the wide, wide distance between them she did not try to span by any words, but together they sat, and pondered on the great thing that had come into their lives, as it comes into all lives, with its hope and its frustration of hope, its joy and its death of joy, its peace and its tragedy.

VI

THOUGH it was still early in May, though the business of the nation was pressing for attention, though the reforms promised by the party in power had not been brought to pass, and though two months must elapse before the candidates for the presidency could be nominated, six before a president could be elected, and nearly a year before he could be inducted into office, the coming national conventions already wrought a curious effect in the nation.

In the first place, that strange artificial thing which men call business felt a peculiar numbing influence stealing over it. Men began to move cautiously, to speak guardedly, to control their opinions. They grew crafty and secretive, as if the trend of events depended on what, in the next few months, they said or did. The great question, of course, was not what should be done to make the people better and happier, though there was abundant pretense that this was so, but who should get hold of the offices, for only so far as the holding of offices and the drawing of salaries could make men and those dependent upon them happier, did this question of the joy of humanity enter into the calculations of men.

Those already in office sighed as they thought of the rapidity with which their terms had rolled around and wondered how they might stay in. The greater army of those who had been out of office, and for whom the time had dragged so slowly by, were wondering how to get in. To succeed in either case it was not necessary that men should have programs of reform and progress, or to have any real understanding of the theories of government, it was only necessary for them to say that they belonged to one or the other of two great parties into which the people had arbitrarily divided themselves, and to be able to control, somehow, other men in the casting of their votes.

There were, of course, two or three other parties, small and without hope of success, so that the men who belonged to them could honestly say what they thought, but it was not considered respectable or dignified to belong to any of these smaller parties, and the men who adhered to them were ridiculed and ostracized and made to feel ashamed.

Everywhere in Washington, where all depend in some way upon the Government, in the cloak rooms of the two houses of Congress, in the rotundas and lobbies of hotels, in the clubs and bar-rooms, in drawing rooms and parlors, and in the secret chambers of the White House itself, men talked of nothing but these national conventions. In Congress business was dragging. The usual daily sessions were held, and perfervid speeches were delivered, but there was no legislation, which was perhaps just as well. Both parties feared just then the possible effect legislation might have on the voters, and each sought to put the other in an unpopular attitude before the people. In a word, as the correspondents wrote in the lengthened specials they wired to their newspapers each night, the politicians at Washington were playing politics.

To Garwood, however, this life was full and satisfying. To saunter over to the House at noon, to saunter back, to lean at the corner of the little bar in the Arlington, one foot cocked over the other, his broad hat on the back of his head, and the Havana cigar between his teeth tilted at an angle parallel with the line of his hat brim, thus preserving to the eye the symmetry of the whole striking picture he knew he made—this was existence for him.

“You’ll be on yoah state delegation to the national convention, I take it, suh?” Colonel Bird would say to him.

“Well,” Garwood would reply, “I don’t know yet whether I’ll go on at large or not. It’ll all depend on the situation when we get down to Springfield. Unless the boys feel that I could do more good somewhere else, I’ll go on. Anyway, I’ll go from the district.”

“Well, you’ll be theah, I’m suah, suh. Boy—make us anothah of those mint juleps. And, boy!—if you will allow me, suh——” the colonel bowed in his courtly old-school way to Garwood—“don’t mash the mint this time, just pinch the sprigs, oah twis’ them, so as to avoid the bittah flavah you othahwise impaht to yoah concoction. I find it ve’y difficult, Colonel,” the old gentleman continued, turning to Garwood, “to get a julep made prope’ly out of Kentucky.”

It pleased Garwood to be addressed as colonel, as it pleases any man, and he was conscious of a momentary regret that he had not induced Colonel Warfield to ask the governor of Illinois to appoint him as an aide-de-camp on his staff, so that the title might be his. He resolved to have that done if—but his mind darkened at the prospect of all he must suffer and endure before his political fortunes could again be considered secure. Another campaign with all its uncertainty lay before him, and there was no Rankin any more to lean on. He preferred to close his eyes to the future, and to live to the full the happy moments that flew by so swiftly.

The colonel had insisted on their seating themselves at one of the two or three small tables in the little bar-room, so that he might sip his julep in the lazy deliberation so dear to his Southern nature, and as they sat there, other members dropped in, and were invited by the colonel with a hospitable wave of his white hand to join them.

They were all glad to do so, for Colonel Bird represented one of those Kentucky districts dear to the congressional heart, which not only afforded a romantic background for his own picturesque figure, but possessed a higher attribute in this, that it always returned the colonel to Washington without contest or question. He was never troubled about renomination or reëlection. He had been speaking of that district for years—ever since he had accepted the benefits of the amnesty proclamation, which he affected to despise—with a calm proprietary air that filled the souls of the men gathered about him in the afternoon of this warm spring day, with a longing far above all the other longings of spring.

The colonel had laid off his planter’s hat, and with his paunch pressed against the table, sat and tinkled the ice in his tall glass as if he loved its cool music, and awaited the serving of the others whom he had invited to become of his party. He sat erectly, as his paunch forced him to do, and now and then, in a way that added to his dignity, stroked the mustaches and imperial that were white as cotton against his red face. But his relief was apparent when at last the bartender brought the fragrant glasses with their cool crystal reflecting the green of the little sprigs of mint, and then he bowed, as well as he could, and formally awaited the pleasure of his guests.

“How!” said Ladd, of Colorado, in the big western voice that so heartily expressed the amenity that all felt due the occasion.

“Suhs,” replied the colonel, “yoah ve’y good health.”

The colonel took a long pull at the straw, and then straightening himself, sat, warm and red and pompous, the glossy bosom of his shirt arching itself to meet his imperial as though it would do its best to replace the starched frills that his antebellum personality lacked.

“Well, Colonel, whom are you Democrats going to nominate?” asked Van Beek, of New York.

“Well, suh,” the colonel began, speaking gravely and with much consideration, as if he were indeed to deliver the judgment of his party’s convention. “Pehsonally, I’d like to see a Southe’n gentleman, of cou’se. But that reminds me of an old friend of mine, who came down to see me ’long in the spring of seventy-six to ask that same question, suh. You all remembah that the’ was a good deal of discussion goin’ on in ouah pahty that yeah about ouah p’ospective candidate. The friend to whom I refeh was an old fellah who lived neah mah place, and he always came ovah to see me whenevah I got home f’om Washington, in o’deh to discuss the political issues of the day. I received him, and we sat down on the po’ch, and aftah I’d called mah house niggah to make us some juleps—I wish, suhs, we had those juleps heah to-day, though I do not wish to dispa’age the liquah ouah landlo’d se’ves heah, not at all, suhs.” He inclined his head apologetically toward the bar. “I had known this old man fo’ a long pe’iod of tahm. He was a po’ fahmah, but—he rode in mah troop.”

The colonel paused again, that the company might have time to appreciate the paternal relation of officer and man who had ridden with Morgan’s Raiders, and then went on:

“I rehea’sed the names of seve’al of the distinguished gentlemen whose names had been brought fo’wahd by theah friends fo’ the high office. The’ was Tilden, and Seymoah, and Bayahd, and Thu’man, and othahs you’ll remembuh, but none of them seemed somehow to impress the ol’ fellah favo’ably. No, suh, none of the names seemed to impress the ol’ fellah favo’ably, till at las’, I added: ‘And then, theah’s some mention of Davis,’ meaning the distinguished ju’ist of yoah state, suh,” the colonel explained, bowing to Garwood, who, as if expressly deputed thereto by the governor of Illinois, bowed the acknowledgment that seemed to be due the honor thus conferred upon that commonwealth.

“At the magic name of Davis, the po’ ol’ man’s eyes lit up with Promethean fiah,” the colonel continued, his own little eyes sparkling, “and, leaning fo’wahd, trembling like an aspen leaf, with the delight he was almost afraid to indulge, he looked cahfully all about him, and took his long seegah from his lips, and then he whispehed: ‘But, Colonel, ain’t yo’ all afeahed it’s a leetle airly?’

“And so, suhs,” the colonel resumed, having bent his purple face to sip his julep and to give his companions opportunity to pay his story the tribute of the laugh he demanded, “I feah in this instance, suhs, it’s a leetle airly fo’ a Southron.

“But, se’iously, suhs,” the colonel went on, after a proper pause, “I’m goin’ back to Kentucky the end of this month. I’ll go ovah to Frankfo’t, and I’ll go to the Capitol Hotel, and theah I’ll meet the friends of mah own state, and aftah that, I’ll have some idea of whom I shall suppoht when we all get up to Chicago.”

“Like to get over to Frankfort, don’t you, Colonel?” asked Conley of Ohio, in the bald way that men had of inducing the colonel to talk about Kentucky.

“Well, suh, yes, suh, in a ce’tain sense I dew. It’s ve’y pleasant to’ a gentleman to meet all his old friends and comrades in ahms, as I do theah, but I will say this, suhs, that theah is at Frankfo’t an aggregation of men who seemingly fo’ ages have been hanging onto the public teat theah, suhs, and who, if the good Lawd would see fit to snatch them to his bosom, would be the subjects of a special dispensation of divahn Providence in which I could acquiesce, suhs, with an enthusiasm that would be tuhbulent and even riotous.”

After this the colonel, feeling that politeness demanded the elimination of himself from his conversation, temporarily at least, turned to Garwood and said:

“Have you got a contes’ on in yoah district this yeah, Colonel?”

“I always have had,” said Garwood, and a sudden rueful expression overspread his countenance, “and I know no reason to expect any change in the ordinary routine this year.”

“Well, suh. I wish I weh at liberty to go into yoah district this fall and make some speeches fo’ you,” said the colonel, with that naïve conceit of his which led him to feel that his presence would save the day for Garwood.

“If you could go out there now, with your gun, and in approved Kentucky style, kill off a few men I could name, I would like it almost as well,” Garwood replied.

The colonel made no answer to this. But he looked a stern rebuke at Garwood, as at one who trifled with grave and serious matters.

They sat there and drank and listened to the colonel’s stories until the evening came, until the night itself had fallen. And then Garwood received Pusey’s telegram, and it smote him dumb in the middle of a laugh. He had only time to ask Colonel Bird to request a leave of absence for him, before he hurried away to pack his bag. The colonel was delighted, of course, to have the opportunity to act for a friend in any matter. In fact, nothing could please him more than to be enabled to rise in his place in the House in all that morning dignity which no dissipation of the previous night could impair, and address the Speaker. And it may have been merely to show his appreciation of the confidence thus reposed in him, that he went with Garwood to see him safely aboard his train, on which he was to speed westward, with troubled mind, through the mountains and over the plains, out to Illinois.

VII

GARWOOD’S train, like most trains that go through Grand Prairie, was late that evening, and the white twilight upon which Emily had depended for protection as she waited at the station, had deepened to a gloom that almost absorbed her little figure, clad in the black of her mourning garb, though the little toque and jacket she wore were of a vernal fashion that lent a smartness to her attire. She had determined to spend the half hour she had to wait beyond the moment scheduled for the train’s arrival, in fancying herself again in her husband’s arms, and in imagining his joy at being once more at home with her, but the memories of her last visit to this station on that rainy December night long ago, when she had reached home from her broken visit to Washington, would crowd in upon her, and torture her, setting in train thoughts that assailed her resolute cheerfulness.

The station agent had begun by energetically chalking on the blackboard that was nailed under the wide eaves of the little chalet that did for a station, the number of minutes the train was late. When that time fled by, and the train did not come, he rubbed out his first figures and chalked in others; when the minutes these inadequately symboled had gone by like the rest, he gave over the effort and flatly told Emily, with a helpless gesture that spoke his refusal to be any longer responsible, that he did not know when the train would come. He glanced at the lights on his semaphore, and then shut himself into his little ticket office, where the telegraph instrument, ticking feverishly away, indicated some remaining spark of life in the railroad’s system.

Emily had been worrying for some time about all the possible things that might happen to the baby during her absence. She had been worrying about the dinner she had ordered in place of their usual supper, but that, she was sure, had long ago grown cold, and was beyond reach even of a woman’s worry.

The train came at last, when every one about the station had collapsed into an attitude of having given it up entirely, and Emily forgot her long wait in the joy with which she rushed forth to greet her husband. She saw his big figure emerging from the last coach on the train. His hat was pulled down to his brows, and he looked out upon the desolate scene that the little station presents to the traveler who enters Grand Prairie by that road, with the crossness of a passenger whose train with almost human perversity had been losing time ever since it started. When he saw Emily he did not quicken his pace, though he walked on in her direction, with a long face that told her he was entitled to her pity and sympathy for all that he had to endure in life. She ran toward him, and he bent his head that she might embrace his neck and kiss him. She clung there an instant, and when she released him his eyes were searching the barren platform.

“Nobody else here?” he asked.

“Why, no, dear—who would——”

“Isn’t Pusey here?”

“Pusey?” she repeated, in surprise. But Garwood made no answer. He was thinking of the old days when he was always met by Rankin, and usually by half a dozen of Rankin’s followers gathered together to give éclat to the congressman’s home-coming. But now there was no one to meet him but Emily.

He insisted upon a carriage to be driven home in, saying the ride from Olney in the common coach had nearly killed him, and when, above the rattle of the old hack’s windows, Emily said:

“I’m so glad to have you home again,” her last words somehow expressed the whole situation against which his nature was in revolt, and he cried out:

“Yes, home again! Nice time to be called away from Washington! What are they all trying to do here now, do you know?”

“They seem,” Emily replied, “to be trying to defeat you for a third term.”

“Well, I sometimes wish they’d succeed,” said Garwood; “sometimes I get sick of this whole business of politics, and wish——”

Emily was sitting upright, her face turned away from him in her disappointment.

“So do I,” she acquiesced, in a low voice.

“Well,” Garwood growled, as if she and not he himself had suggested the very disaster which of all others he most feared, “they won’t beat me this time, I’ll tell ’em that. I reckon Jim Rankin’s at the bottom of it all.”

VIII

THE curtains were drawn at the windows of Garwood’s law office that night, but the thin lip of light that outlined the casement told to belated men in Grand Prairie that a conference was going on within. The primaries were but two days off, and a vague uncertain quality in the rays that straggled into the gloom and lightened the rusty gilt letters of Garwood’s sign, creaking as it had done for so many years in the wind, might have hinted to the imaginative something of the straits in which the little council gathered within found itself.

Had such a one been acquainted with politics in that prairie district, and had seen Jim Rankin pass by at midnight under the trees that swayed the thick black shadows of their foliage dizzily to and fro on the wide stone sidewalk, and noted the curious smile that glimmered an instant on Rankin’s face, when from force of old habit he raised an upward glance, he would have concluded that serious obstacles beset the way of Jerome B. Garwood in that career to which as a man of destiny he had believed himself ordained, and from which the inconstant and ever-changing circle of his friends had expected so much.

Garwood had come home to find his political condition desperate. He himself, out of the anger that showed black in his face during those hot and trying days, described the situation as a revolt and, had he been possessed of the power, would gladly have punished the rebels by such stern repressive measures as autocratic governments employ in the terror their inherent weakness inspires.

Amid the spring delights of Washington public life he had become swollen with new ambitions. He not only wished to be renominated for Congress, but he wished also to be placed at the head of the Polk County delegation to the state convention called to meet in Springfield early in June; and beyond this, he had the higher wish to be sent as delegate to the national convention at Chicago. He would have preferred, of course, to be named as one of the Big Four delegates at large from Illinois, and when his imagination had been more warmly stimulated by Colonel Bird’s mint juleps, he had dramatized himself as electrifying the national convention by some fine extemporaneous flight of oratory, in which he should soar in an instant to the pinnacle of a national fame, and from that rare altitude behold new and illimitable possibilities of political future. It was, therefore, with a shock of disappointment to which he had not the power to reconcile himself that he had obeyed Pusey’s urgent telegram and had come home to find his very political existence at stake.

Sprague, reviled and reproached as a perennial candidate by those in the district who were themselves perennial candidates, was once more in the field seeking congressional honors. His county, Moultrie, had held its convention, and once more instructed its fifteen delegates for him. Over in Logan, General Barrett, having had a glimpse of the promised land at the Pekin convention, had so far departed from the reserve and dignity of his eminent respectability as to have himself declared a candidate, and he had been indorsed by his county. These candidatures did not seriously alarm Garwood, but a new complication had been suddenly added to the situation of such grave portent that he had summoned about him those who, having received government offices of varying degrees of importance, still felt themselves bound to his support.

This night, then, they were gathered in the office where Enright now spent his days in the midst of a law practice so immature and modest that it could not keep the dust off the books that were piled all about. Pusey was there and Hale had hurried over from Pekin on receipt of a telegram from Garwood. Beside these were Kellogg, whom Garwood had succeeded in placing in the office of the secretary of state at Springfield, and Crawford, his private secretary. They were ranged on chairs uniformly tilted against the wall of the little private office, and the air was streaked with the customary clouds of tobacco smoke that indicate a political fire.

Hale lowered his chair to the floor, and bent over with his elbows on his knees, his head hanging and his face hidden. The others in the room, except Pusey, who was as indifferent as ever, had transfixed him with accusing eyes, though any one could have told that their attitude was feigned in order to keep in sympathy with the threatening mood of Garwood, who sat at his desk, and glowered at the Pekin postmaster.

“Why don’t you speak?” demanded Garwood presently, as if Hale had been arraigned upon an indictment, and they were waiting for him to enter a plea.

Hale stirred uneasily, but he did not speak.

“My God!” said Garwood, petulantly, “I don’t see why you couldn’t have held Tazewell, anyhow!”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Garwood,” said Hale, at length, breaking under the pressure of all those accusing stares, “you see, it’s like this. The people over our way are sore on the president, they’re down on the administration——”

“Oh, hell!” cried Garwood, striking his desk in disgust, “I don’t give a damn for what the people think about the president, or the administration. I ain’t the president, nor the administration, either.”

“But they think you’re supportin’ the administration—course,”—Hale hastened to disclaim any individual responsibility for so serious a charge—“I’m only tellin’ you what they say.”

“Well, didn’t any of them read my speech the other day? Does that look as if I’m supporting the administration?”

Hale had no reply to make to this argument. He only heaved his heavy shoulders in something that approximated a shrug.

“When was Bailey over there?” Garwood demanded.

“Oh, he’s been over off an’ on for a month.”

“Then why in hell didn’t you write me!” said Garwood, turning angrily in his chair. His eyes blazed at Hale a moment, and then he tossed his head and looked away in utter disgust.

Hale had thrown him a glance that in its turn had some of the anger that was beginning to show in his reddening face, and he replied:

“Well, I didn’t know it, that’s why. You can’t get on to Zeph Bailey; he wades in the water, he does.”

Hale breathed hard, and no one had an answer ready. They all knew Bailey’s mysterious habits, and Hale’s explanation was sufficient to acquit him in the forum of their minds. Hale sensed instantly a new and defensive quality in the atmosphere; a current of sympathy seemed to set in toward him, and he kept on, feeling his advantage.

“Why didn’t any of the rest of you wise guys get on to him when he come over and started to fix things right here in Polk County?”

And they had no answer for that. Garwood, sweeping the circle with a glance, and fearing a division in his own ranks, forced a smile of conciliation, and said:

“Oh, well, if Bailey’s a candidate, we’ll have to fight him, that’s all. It’s only one more, anyway, and——”

But the menace of Bailey’s candidacy had cast upon his spirits a shadow too dense to be lightened by mere words, and his sentence died with the confident air he had been able for a moment to command. Hale, however, had been mollified, and took Garwood’s manner from him, as he straightened up to say:

“Course, we’ll make a fight for it. You’ve got some friends left in Tazewell, and so have I, and if we’re licked, we’ll die with our boots on, that’s all there is to that.”

“He has his own county, of course. And you say he has men at work up in DeWitt. Now, if he gets Tazewell and Polk—well——” Garwood flung out his hands hopelessly, as if to surrender. “Great guns, what’s the use?”

“And Sprague’ll throw Moultrie to him—that’s fixed. Sprague knows he can’t get it; he’s just been acting as a stalking horse for Bailey,” said Kellogg, anxious to bear his part in this conference, even if he could bring nothing cheerful to it.

“How did he ever get on the blind side of Sprague?” queried Garwood, peevishly.

“Oh, legislature,” said Kellogg, proud to be able to show his knowledge of affairs in the state house at Springfield; “he put some of Sprague’s fellows—Simp Lewis and some more of ’em—on the pay roll, and took care of brother-in-law Wilson when he made up the committees.”

“H-m-m-m,” Garwood mused, “Mason and Moultrie, and DeWitt—if he gets Tazewell or Polk now—I don’t know what you gentlemen think about it, but it looks to me as if he had us pretty nearly skinned.”

What they thought of it was not apparent, for none of them spoke, and silence settled over the little room, where Garwood’s ambitions were trembling in the fateful balance. At last Pusey spoke:

“He hasn’t got Polk yet.”

Something of the determination which the little man had put into his tone affected the others, and they looked up with new smiles. A reaction set in and Garwood glanced at Pusey gratefully.

“Yes,” he said, trying to resume his congressional dignity, with a smile that was intended to take from it its suggestion of distance, “you remember what the devil said:

They stared at him in amazement, wondering how it was possible for him to know what the devil had said, all except Pusey, who nodded appreciatively, to show his own relation to the world of letters. And then Hale drew a long breath and threw back his shoulders.

“Of course,” he said, “if we can carry the primaries here in Polk, that will help us to win out over in my county. Can you do it?”

“How about Jim Rankin?” blurted out the tactless, maladroit Kellogg. The name cast a chill over the little gathering just as the new cheer was warming it, and they were all vicariously embarrassed by what, just at that time, amounted to a contretemps. If Rankin himself, passing by outside at that very moment, could have seen the expressive glances that were secretly exchanged before they all yielded to the impulse to fix unitedly on Garwood’s face, he would have had a sensation to gladden him during all his homeward way. But Garwood met the situation with real dignity.

“Well, Jim will be against me, of course.”

They might have demurred out of mere politeness, but Garwood added:

“And I can assure you, gentlemen, he is an antagonist not to be despised.”

The mention of Rankin’s name, however, had the final effect of forcing them to seek some positive means of dealing with the situation, and after the preliminary waste of time common to most conferences, they began at last to plan for the coming primaries. They were at it a long while, and when in the chill, ghastly hours of the early morning they separated, Garwood voiced what was doubtless in the hearts of all of them, when he said to Pusey:

“Remember, we have Jim Rankin to fight, Pusey.”

Pusey switched his little eyes toward Garwood, but Garwood did not see them. He was thinking of other days.

IX

GARWOOD awoke after a few hours of restless sleep, snatched a hurried breakfast, seized his hat and was going away without a word, when Emily followed him through the hall and to the door, and with nervousness and suspense showing in her concentrated brows she looked up at him and said:

“I’ll be glad when this day’s over.”

“So’ll I,” he rejoined, and then, though he had stepped on the veranda, he turned again. A sudden tenderness, springing from the need of support and sympathy he himself felt that day, overflowed his heart, and he pressed his fingers to her brow and touched the wrinkles.

“I don’t like to see those there,” he said, and as if in instant response to his whim, her smile smoothed them away.

“You’ll send me word, Jerome, won’t you?” she said, “the babies and I’ll be watching and waiting, you know. Oh, I wish we could help!”

He smiled his old smile at her loyalty.

“Good by,” he said; “I’ll keep you posted.” And he ran down the steps. The rain was slanting down to make an ideal primary day, and Garwood was glad of the waiting carriage which, in the extravagance a man can always justify to himself in the midst of a campaign, he had ordered the night before. Emily watched him drive away, down the streaming street. Once he turned and looked back through the window at her, or she thought he did, and she waved her hand.

Then all the morning long she went about the house with the memory of his kiss upon her lips, and she sang at times, though her heart would forever leap into her throat when she thought of the bitter contest going on in the rain that was falling upon the green fields of Polk County. The rain fell steadily in the gloom with an impressiveness that would remind her of the silent fate which that day was deciding Jerome’s future and her own.

She felt as if she were passing through a crisis in her life. She found it impossible to apply herself steadily to any one of the futile little tasks that are always awaiting the hand of the housewife, but wandered aimlessly about, unable to rest, unable to work, unable to do anything until she knew the event of that day. She had found a new faith in Jerome with the kiss he had given her at parting, and she lived over and over again that one last moment when he had smiled down into her eyes with the expression she remembered of other days. That moment and that kiss were enough to blot out all the years of her loneliness and renunciation, and as those years faded from her view she could look forward now with a new hope and a new confidence to the happier days she felt must come when this last battle had been fought. For she felt it would be the last battle; she determined that it must be the last battle; she could not endure the strain and suspense of another, and her soul’s sincere desire took the romantic form of a prayer that Jerome return to her bearing his shield or being borne upon it.

The rain had come with a thunder storm early in the morning, but as the day advanced the temperature lowered and a cold, raw wind blowing from the west lashed out the last of the warm weather they had been having all over central Illinois. The hope of the spring seemed suddenly gone; the day, indeed, might have belonged to that dreary season of the fall, when gray clouds hang low and children long for the darkness that will bring the needed cheer of early lamp-light.

The streets were silent and deserted. Now and then, perhaps some grocer’s wagon would lurch along, its driver slapping the streaming rubber blanket on his horse’s back with his wet reins, and sometimes one of the town’s tattered old hacks would rattle by. Here and there, near some cobbler’s shanty, or by the door of a little barber shop, ward workers huddled in shivering groups, and every little while men drove out of town in buggies or buckboards, to look after the caucuses that were to be held that afternoon in the townships; but the people themselves, as their habit ever was, in Grand Prairie, evinced little interest in the political contest at this critical stage of its development, and seemed to be indoors waiting for the rain to cease.

Yet a great battle was raging in Grand Prairie that day, and Garwood’s law offices were once more serving as political headquarters. All morning long the crowd of workers whom he had enrolled in his new organization thronged the outer office, each of them wishing to seize Garwood a moment for himself, as if his suggestion, or his complaint, or the news he bore was such that Garwood himself alone should hear it.

Their clothes were soaked with the rain, their wet boots tracked the floor with mud, their umbrellas trickled little streams of dirty water. The air, already saturated with heavy moisture and foggy with the smoke of tobacco, which does for the smoke of battle in these political contests, was foul with the fumes of beer and whisky, while the whiff of an onion now and then brought to mind the long saloon of Chris Steisfloss below where the pink mosquito-netting had been removed for that day from the free-lunch table.

In his private office, his rumpled hair falling to his haggard eyes, his cravat untied, his long coat tails gathered behind the hands that were thrust deep in his trousers’ pockets, Garwood strode back and forth silent and savage, chewing the cigar that smoked away in the corner of his mouth. Pusey was with him, tapping in and out of the room, and so was Hale. Hale had been there all morning, for, having no acquaintance in Grand Prairie, he could do nothing outside, and so he sat, feeling that his stolid, imponderable presence must somehow be a comfort to Garwood. And, besides, he did not know how he could decently get away.

Garwood spoke to neither of them; but walked the floor and rolled his cigar round and round in his mouth, spitting out pieces of it now and then savagely. Once at the end of the beat he was pacing he paused by the revolving bookcase in which he had kept his working library, the books he had needed at his elbow when he was digging into the law. These books, because of that rapid displacement which goes on in law libraries, so swiftly do the appellate courts grind out new decisions, were now out of date; the statutes were two sessions behind the Legislature, the digest had been superseded by a new edition, the last six numbers of his set of the reports were missing.

But he did not observe these things—a little volume had caught his eye, and he picked it up, blew the dust from it, and opened it. And as his glance fell on its pages, its well-read remembered pages, his face softened and there passed across its darkness the faint reflection of a smile. It was not a law book, for Garwood held it tenderly in his hand, as though he loved it, and men do not learn to love law books. It was a little leather covered copy of Epictetus, with the imprint of a London publisher on its title page, one that Emily had given him, and he had read it through and through, and it bore many loving marks on its margins.