Chapter XI: Book III: For the People (1)

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.