Chapter ElevenThe season opened with a bang on the first of December. The smart set could barely get six hours in bed from going to parties at all hours. This did not apply to Mrs. Luttrell, who, although she was out every night, did not disturb herself to appear in public until four o’clock in the afternoon. That particular form of barbaric entertainment known as a ladies’ luncheon had no charms for Mrs. Luttrell, because there were no men to be found at them; for this woman, who cherished with an idolatrous recollection the memory of the only man she had ever loved, and who had refused more offers of marriage than any other woman of her day, frankly admitted that she couldn’t enjoy anything without a masculine element in it. And men she contrived to have in plenty, with a success but little inferior to that of Ninon de l’Enclos.For that reason Richard Baskerville was not only the person Mrs. Luttrell loved best in the world, but was really her most intimate friend. There was nothing Mrs. Luttrell enjoyed so muchas a midnight tête-à-tête over her bedroom fire with Baskerville, he just from his books and she just from her nightly gayety. Mrs. Luttrell scorned a boudoir,—or the modern version of it, a den. She had a huge, old-fashioned bedroom, with an ancient four-poster mahogany bed, with green silk curtains, and a lace valance; and everything in the room was big and square and handsome and comfortable, like the bed. There was a large fireplace, with shining brass fire-dogs and a monumental brass fender; and Mrs. Luttrell frequently admitted that when she got her feet on that fender and her dressing-gown on, she grew so communicative that she would tell the inmost secrets of her soul to the veriest stranger, if he had his feet on the fender at the same time.It was on a night early in January that Mrs. Luttrell nabbed Baskerville at her door, as she was being let in by the sleepy black butler. Baskerville followed her upstairs into her room, considerately turning his back while the old lady got out of her black-velvet gown, and whisked off her flannel petticoat, into her comfortable dressing-gown—an operation she performed without the least regard for his presence. Then, when her delicate, high-bred feet were on the fender before the glowing wood fire, she said:—“Now you can turn around—and I’m a great deal more clothed than the women you take down to dinner or dance with at balls.”“I don’t dance at a great many balls. Let me see—I haven’t danced for—““Oh, I know. Well, I’m just from a dinner at Secretary Slater’s, where that ridiculous little Mrs. Hill-Smith, his daughter, was in great feather, and also the Baldwin girl and Anne Clavering.”“You ought to beg Miss Clavering’s pardon for bracketing her with Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin.”“My dear boy, it would make you die laughing to see the patronizing air Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin put on with Anne Clavering. As the Slater family is at least forty years old and the Brentwood-Baldwins quite twenty years old, they regard the Claverings, who have come up within the last six years, very much as the old French nobility regarded thebourgeoisie. But I think Anne Clavering is a match for them. Indeed, she proved herself a match for a much more considerable antagonist—that is, myself—this very night.”“Have you been impertinent to Miss Clavering?”“Well, Richard, my dear boy, I am afraid Ihave been. But it was all the fault of those two foolish creatures, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin. It was in this way. The gentlemen,”—Mrs. Luttrell still used this antique word,—“the gentlemen had come into the drawing-room after dinner—very prim and proper they were after their cigarettes and two glasses of hock. In my time, when the gentlemen came in after dinner they were always as merry as lords and delightfully free: I have been slapped on the back by Daniel Webster at a dinner, when I was sixteen years old. But nothing so agreeable happens now—and there aren’t any Daniel Websters, either. Well, when I was talking to that ridiculous Mrs. Hill-Smith something unluckily started me off upon the new people in Washington. Mrs. Hill-Smith, you know, assumes that she has sixteen quarterings, so she has to grin and bear it when I begin telling about people; and I always say to her, ‘You and I, Mrs. Hill-Smith, who knew some people before 1860.’ Somebody was speaking about Mrs. James Van Cortlandt Skinner’s private chaplain—that woman has added much to the gayety of nations. There’s a story going around that she had a darling of a fight over it, not only with the bishop, but with the bishop’s wife; and I was giving a very amusingaccount of it, when Anne Clavering quietly remarked that she happened to know that Mrs. Skinner had not spoken of it yet to the bishop. Of course this spoiled my story, and I was a little cross about it. Judge Woodford was present, and he told a pleasant little tale about my grandfather having been very cross on one occasion, and having pulled somebody’s nose, and I said my crossness was a case of atavism on my part. And so it was turned into a joke. When we were leaving I was sorry I had been short with Anne Clavering, so I went up and asked her to come and see me on my next day at home, and to pour tea for me—that I still held to the good old fashion of keeping a day at home and seeing my friends. And what do you think the minx said? She was very sorry, but she had an attack of atavism, too,—her grandfather wasn’t used to afternoon tea and she had never acquired any real taste for it!”Baskerville laughed delightedly.“Oh, it wasn’t so clever, after all,” said Mrs. Luttrell, smiling with that unshakable good humor which was the most exasperating thing on earth to all her enemies and her friends alike. “It is just because you’re in love with Anne Clavering; and I think she likes you pretty well, too.”Baskerville sat up then, sobered in an instant. What Mrs. Luttrell knew or suspected all Washington would shortly know. “Why do you say that?” he asked quietly.“Because I think it, that’s why. It’s one of the strangest things in the world that people in love think all the rest of the world blind and deaf. And a woman lets her secret out just as readily as a man. I say Anne Clavering likes you. I don’t say she is pining and can’t eat and sleep for you; but I do say she likes you, though. And I feel sorry for the girl—such a family! You ought to see how that divorcée, Mrs. Denman, goes on with Count von Kappf, who, I believe, has been sent over here by a syndicate to marry an American heiress. Nobody knows what Anne Clavering has to suffer for the conduct of that sister of hers.”“And you, who call yourself a Christian, had to add to Miss Clavering’s mortification.”“Oh, it was only a trifle, and she came out ahead.”“Anyhow, you shall apologize to her. Do you understand me, Sara Luttrell? You shall apologize, and before me, too.”“Very well,” replied Mrs. Luttrell, unabashed. “The first time I catch you and Anne Clavering together I’ll apologize.”Baskerville sat silent for a while as Mrs. Luttrell luxuriously toasted her toes. Presently he said, “So people are kind enough to say that I am in love with Miss Clavering?”“Yes, indeed. People are always kind enough to say things—and a great many people are saying that you are in love with her. You haven’t escaped notice as much as you thought.”“I don’t desire to escape notice. And I only hope enough people will say it so it will get to Miss Clavering’s ears. Then she may not be so surprised as to throw me over when—the opportunity comes. I may be a good many sorts of a blamed fool, Sara, but I am not such a fool as to be anything but flattered when my name is associated with Miss Clavering’s.”“Very decently said. But how are you going to manage about this senatorial investigation—trying to ruin the father as a preliminary to marrying the daughter?”Baskerville grew grave at once. The investigation was on in earnest. The committee which had been appointed before the adjournment of Congress had begun its sittings directly upon the meeting of Congress, and Baskerville had at once come into prominence as one of the representatives of the Civil Service League. The questionof Clavering’s culpability with regard to the land grants was complicated with the open barter and sale of Federal offices, and the Civil Service League had taken it up actively. The League was in no way bound by senatorial courtesy, and it had a formidable array of evidence to produce, which pointed straight to criminal as well as civil indictments. Baskerville found himself in a difficult position. He had gone too far in one direction toward exposing Senator Clavering, and his heart had carried him too far in another direction, for he was at last beginning to realize that he had fallen in love with Anne Clavering—a path upon which a strong man never halts. It is your weakling who falls halfway in love and then stops.Mrs. Luttrell studied Baskerville keenly. Herself a sentimentalist in disguise, she loved Baskerville the better for doing what she had long dreaded—for she had a woman’s jealousy of another woman’s usurping the first place with this nephew-in-law, who was son, companion, and comrade in one. But at least he did not contemplate foisting a pink-and-white nonentity upon her; Mrs. Luttrell always declared herself afraid of silly women. She not only liked Anne Clavering, but she saw in her a large and generousspirit, who would not, by small artifices, try to come between Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell. And the ineradicable interest which is every woman’s inalienable right in a love-affair was strong in Mrs. Luttrell’s breast. She began to wish that Baskerville and Anne would marry; and after sitting quite silent for ten minutes watching Baskerville’s moody face, she suddenly got up, went over to him, and smoothing the hair back from his forehead, kissed it tenderly. Two tears dropped upon his brow. Baskerville looked up and took her hands in his. He spoke no word, but he knew that the memory of the man so long dead was poignant still; and Mrs. Luttrell, after a pause, said in a low voice:—“I hope Anne Clavering will love you as I loved my Richard. And if you can make her as happy as he made me—Good night. I can’t bear to speak much of it, even to you.”“If any woman ever loves me as you loved my uncle, I should think myself eternally blessed with such love. Good night, Sara dear.”He kissed her warmly, went out of the room and downstairs and across the garden to his own house, and into his library. The first thing he saw upon the big library table was a mass of documents relating to the K. F. R. land grants.Baskerville pushed them away, and taking up a well-thumbed volume of Theocritus tried to forget himself in the pictures of the fair shining of the Sicilian sun, in the sound of the pipe of Daphnis, in the complainings of the two poor old fishermen lying by night in their wattled cabin on the sand dunes.All was in vain. His thoughts were no sooner diverted from Anne Clavering than they turned to Clavering and his affairs. How amazing was this man who had rough-hewn his way to a high place, to enormous wealth, to great power, from which he was likely to be thrown headlong into an abyss of shame! Baskerville had very little doubt that, no matter how successful might be the suits against Clavering, he would manage to retain great tangible sums of money. Men of the Clavering type hold on to their money more intelligently than to their supposititious honor. And finding it impossible to get away from his own thoughts, even in books which had heretofore been an unfailing sedative, Baskerville went to bed, and tossed in true lover’s fashion half the remaining night, before he fell into a troubled sleep to dream of Anne Clavering.Chapter TwelveIt is said that all truly benevolent women are matchmakers, and although Mrs. Thorndyke would have indignantly denied the charge of being a matchmaker, it was an indisputable fact that within a fortnight of dining at Mrs. Luttrell’s she contrived an impromptu dinner at which Anne Clavering and Baskerville were the first guests to be asked; and if they had declined, it is doubtful if the dinner would have come off at all. However, they both accepted; and Mrs. Thorndyke, whether by inadvertence, as she stoutly alleged, or by design, as Thorndyke charged, had Baskerville take Anne in to dinner.Some faint reflection of the rumor which was flying about Washington concerning Baskerville’s devotion had reached Anne Clavering’s ears. It gave a delightful shyness to her eyes, a warm color to her usually pale cheeks. Something in Baskerville’s manner—the ingenuity with which he managed to perform every little service for her himself, conveyed subtly but plainly to Anne his interest in her. She had been deeply flattered andeven made happy by Baskerville’s calling at last at her house. There was every reason why he should remain away—so much Anne had admitted to herself often, and always with a burning blush, remembering what she knew and had read about the investigation through which her father was passing. But Baskerville had come, and there must have been a powerful force, much stronger than her mother’s timid invitation, to bring him. Perhaps he came because he could not stay away.At this thought Anne, who was sitting at her dressing-table after the dinner at the Thorndykes’, caught sight of her own face in the mirror. A happy smile hovered about the corners of her mouth, her eyes became eloquent. Women, being close students of their own emotions, can always detect the dawning and the development of this silent but intense interest in a certain man, an interest which is born, grows, and often dies for want of nourishment, but sometimes lives and thrives on neglect—and sometimes,—O glorious consummation!—comes into its kingdom of love. Anne Clavering, who had passed her twenty-seventh birthday, and who, shamed and indignant at the conduct of her sisters, had maintained a haughty reserve toward men and hadhitherto found it easy, knew that it was not without meaning she felt herself watching for Baskerville’s entrance into a room; that she was secretly uneasy until he had placed himself beside her; that when he talked, an instant, sweet, and positive mental sympathy came into being between them which seemed to bring them together without any volition on their part.January was flying by. Anne Clavering went out quite as much as Mrs. Luttrell, but with a different motive. To Mrs. Luttrell society was a necessity, as a thing becomes after a lifetime of habitude. Anne Clavering would have liked society well enough if it had been merely a means of pleasure. But she had to maintain before the world a position which her father and her two sisters jeopardized every hour. The place of the Claverings in society was by no means a fixed one. All the idle and careless people, all the worshippers of money, all those who love to eat and drink at somebody else’s expense, all those who pursue pleasure without conscience or delicacy, thronged the Clavering house.Clavering himself was seldom invited out, and did not regret it. The small talk of society bored him, and he was conscious that he did not shine unless he had the centre of the stage. Occasionallyhe met a man who interested him, and semi-occasionally a woman who did the same. But no woman had ever interested him as much as Elizabeth Darrell. He was amazed, himself, at the power she had of drawing him to her; for, under the specious pretence of getting information from General Brandon concerning the K. F. R. land grants, Clavering soon managed to spend two or three evenings a week in Elizabeth’s company. He speedily found out General Brandon’s ways—his hour or two at the club in the evening, his visits to his old friends, all of which were clock-like in their regularity. On these evenings, when General Brandon returned to meet an appointment, Clavering would invariably be found established in the study. Any other man in the world but General Brandon would have had his suspicions aroused, but the General was born to be hoodwinked. His chivalric honor, his limpidness of character, his entire innocence, were strong forces, as all these things are. He radiated good influences upon honest men, and gave active encouragement to every rogue of every sort who had dealings with him.Elizabeth Darrell, however, was not so simple as her father. After that first evening she saw that Clavering was determined to secure hersociety. She wondered at herself for submitting to it, but in truth it would have been more remarkable if she had not done so. The extreme dulness of her life made almost any companionship a resource, and Clavering had certain fascinating qualities which were very obvious. Without making himself the hero of his own recitals, he gave the most vivid and interesting pictures of life on the wide Wyoming ranges, on the Staked Plains, in California mining camps, amid the boulders of the Yellowstone. Elizabeth listened under a kind of bewitchment, while Clavering, in his rich voice, told the story of those years—a story pulsing with movement, brilliant with adventure, with life and death at issue every moment. She began to understand this man’s power over men, and to recognize a kind of compulsion he exercised over her. She might have remained out of the study, where, with a map spread out, to amuse General Brandon, Clavering talked to him and at Elizabeth. She was present not only because she wished to be, but she recognized distinctly that she also came because Clavering wished her to come. Especially was this true with regard to those odd half-hours which she spent with Clavering alone.Once she went out of the room when Serenabrought Clavering’s card up. In a minute or two Serena came with a message: “De gent’mun seh he mus’ see you, Miss ’Liz’beth, ’bout some dem papers outen de Gin’l’s trunk.” And Elizabeth, obeying this strange compulsion, went back into the room, and saw Clavering’s eyes light up with lambent fire at sight of her.That he was deeply and even desperately in love with her from the start there could be no question to any woman, and least of all to a woman as clever as Elizabeth Darrell. She received a profound shock when this was quickly revealed to her, not by any explicit word of Clavering’s, but by all his words, his looks, his course of conduct. He knew too much to venture to make open love to Elizabeth, and in other ways she made him keep his distance in a manner which Clavering had never experienced in his life before. He would no more have dared the smallest personal liberty with Elizabeth Darrell than he would have ventured to put a stick of dynamite into the fire. He had never really been afraid of a woman before, and this of itself added a powerful interest to Elizabeth. He realized fully the difficulties which beset him when he thought of his chances of making Elizabeth his wife. He could managea divorce from his present wife in a way not known by the poor soul herself, or by Anne, or by any one else in the world except Clavering. That once accomplished, though, Elizabeth remained still to be won. She probably inherited the Southern prejudice against divorce, and it might not be easy to overcome it. And there was General Brandon to be considered. Clavering, studying that honest, simple, handsome face across the table from him, bent earnestly over the ridiculous maps and useless memoranda, remembered that the General still cherished an ancient pair of duelling pistols, which he had inherited from his grandfather. He had taken these antique shooting-irons out of the old escritoire in the corner and had shown them, not without pride and reverence, to Clavering, saying solemnly:—“These weapons, my dear sir, have never been used since my grandfather purchased them in 1804, when he unfortunately became involved in a dispute concerning politics with a gentleman of the highest character in Virginia. They had a hostile meeting and shots were exchanged, but no blood was spilled. I am exceedingly glad that the old practice of duelling over trifles is gone, never to return. But there is one classof cases left in which a gentleman has but one resource—the duello. That is, when the honor of the ladies of his family is impugned. In most instances the transgressor should be shot down like a dog. But there are other cases when, owing to imprudence on the lady’s part, the code must be invoked. Thank God, the honor of Southern women is safe in their own keeping. But behind her, every woman, sir, of every country, should have the protection of a man with arms in his hands, if need be. I am aware that my ideas are antiquated; but I have always held them and I always shall.”Clavering listened to this without a word or smile. Nothing would be more likely, if he should betray his design toward Elizabeth, than that he should find himself looking down the barrel of one of those queer old pistols in the hands of this soft-voiced, gullible, guileless old Don Quixote. These, however, were but obstacles; and obstacles, in Clavering’s lexicon, were things to be overcome.In the narrowness and dulness of her life, Elizabeth naturally thought much of Clavering. If she had been asked at any moment whether she would marry him, should he get a divorce, she would instantly and with horror have answered“no.” But she had seen enough of the great, self-indulgent world to know that divorce and remarriage are by no means the impossible and unheard-of things which simple people in staid communities think they are. She began to speculate idly, in her lonely afternoon walks and in the evenings when Clavering did not come, as to what would happen if she should marry Clavering. Whenever she caught herself at this she would recoil from the idea in horror. But it returned. Pelham’s conduct had shattered all her ideals of man’s love. If he could act as he had done, where was the difference between the love of the best and the worst of men?This bitterness toward Pelham was much increased by the receipt of a letter from Mr. McBean, the solicitor, more hard, more peremptory, more insulting, than any he had yet written her. There had been no trouble in finding Elizabeth’s whereabouts, for although she had not thought fit to notify McBean of her leaving England, it was known that she had returned to America, and McBean’s letter reached her promptly. In it threats of legal proceedings were repeated, with an earnestness terrible to Elizabeth. This letter made her ill in bed. She called it a neuralgic headache, to soothe her father, but in truth it wasa collapse from alarm and grief. It was an emergency which could only be helped by money; and a large sum of money, it seemed to Elizabeth—twenty-five hundred dollars to begin with, and then cost and expense which she could not understand added to it. This referred solely to the necklace. What else had to be accounted for nearly staggered her,—but where was she to get two or three thousand dollars? Her father could not have produced it had he converted his blood into money; and the poor old house, plastered with mortgages from roof to cellar, would scarcely sell for more than what had been borrowed on it.It was now the height of the season, and the whirl of gayety and of politics made Washington seethe like a caldron. Carriages were dashing about from the early afternoon to all hours of the morning. Houses were lighted up, music resounded, men and women rushed hither and thither in the race after pleasure.At the great white building on Capitol Hill history was being steadily and rapidly made. One subject, not wholly political, aroused deep interest on the House side as well as in the Senate. The investigating committee on the K. F. R. land grants had already held severalmeetings, and it was known that for some reason of political expedience the party in power wished the question settled at the earliest possible date. There was, among certain senators who did not really understand the matter, a disposition to throw Clavering overboard like Jonah. Those senators who really understood the question reckoned Clavering to be perfectly deserving of a long term in state’s prison. There was no hope of acquittal for him from the moment the whole evidence against him was known to be available; and for this nobody deserved so much credit as Richard Baskerville. He had been more than two years unravelling the tangled web of litigation, and only a very astute lawyer, with money and time to spend on it, could have done it at all. It was quite clear now, compact and available. A lesser man than Clavering would at this stage of the proceedings have resigned from the Senate and decamped.Clavering, however, was incapable of understanding defeat, and had no more thought of surrender than the Old Guard at Waterloo. His entertainments, always lavish and frequent, grew more lavish and more frequent. Washington was not big enough to supply half the luxuries he required; New York was called upon, and Parisand Vienna, for rarities of all sorts to make the dinners and balls at the Claverings’ more brilliant, more startling. Élise and Lydia revelled in this; Anne’s good taste and good sense revolted against it. She read every word in the newspapers concerning her father, and she began to see that ruin and disgrace were threatening him with fearful quickness. Even Reginald Clavering, dull and self-centred, became frightened and ashamed. Not so Clavering; he was not the man to “roll darkling down the torrent of his fate.” He would go if he had to go, with all the splendor which unlimited money and assurance could contrive. It gave him little spells of laughter and amusement when he thought how much Washington would miss his princely entertaining, in case he should be struck down by his enemies. If that should occur, however, he reflected that Washington was not the only city, nor America even the only country, in the world. He was not really much grieved at the possibility of leaving public life, although he fought with a gladiator’s courage against being thrown out. He had accomplished much of what he had gone into public life for,—the making of a vaster fortune than the vast one he had before. And then, that new dream which had come into his life—ElizabethDarrell. If he should win her, as he fully intended and expected, she might not find Washington a very comfortable place of residence. He would give her a splendid hotel in Paris, or a grand establishment in London. He would spend half the year in America, in the West, which he liked far better than the East; and the other half he could spend having what he would have called “a great big bat” in Europe. He might go into European financiering and teach those old fogies a thing or two—Clavering indulged in many Alnaschar dreams about this time.One afternoon in the latter part of January Elizabeth went out for her usual solitary walk. It had been very cold, with snow, and the thermometer that day suddenly jumped into the sixties, bringing a damp white fog which enveloped everything. Elizabeth walked straight down the street on which she lived, without regard to where she was going; she meant to be out of doors only for so many hours, and to find in the loneliness of a walk a change from the loneliness of the house. It was within a week of the time she had received McBean’s letter, and it lay heavy on her heart.She had walked but a few squares, when she heard a step behind her which she recognizedas Clavering’s. She stopped involuntarily, the red blood surging into her pale face. In a moment Clavering was by her side.“I saw you go out, and followed you,” he said.Elizabeth made no reply. He had never joined her on the street before, although sometimes she had passed him getting in and out of his automobile or driving behind a notable pair of sorrels. But this time he had not only joined her—he had followed her. Elizabeth’s sudden flushing was by no means lost on Clavering.They walked on due east through the mist which enveloped all things, the snow still piled in drifts along the edges of the streets. They spoke little, but Elizabeth felt instinctively that Clavering had something of consequence to say to her when they got into the unfamiliar part of the town, where he could be certain of being unobserved. The street, which had been fashionable as far as Sixteenth Street, grew semifashionable, and then became a region of lodging-houses, places with dressmakers’ signs, and an occasional small shop. Then, growing more and more remote, it became a street of comfortable, quiet houses, tenanted by people to whom the West End of Washington mattered as little as thewest end of Bagdad. By that time they had gone a mile. They came to one of those small triangular parks which abound in Washington, where there are seats under the trees and asphalt walks winding in and out of shrubbery.Elizabeth, under the spell of compulsion which Clavering had cast upon her, made no objection to entering the park with him. Usually it was completely open to observation, but now the soft and clinging fog drew a misty curtain between the little park and the world. Clavering led the way to a bench among a clump of evergreens, and Elizabeth, without a word of protest, sat down upon the bench, the Senator at her side.“There are places within half a mile of everywhere in this town,” he said, “where one can be as secure from observation as if one were in a back street of the city of Damascus. And if I had designed this afternoon for meeting you and talking confidentially with you, nothing could have been better. The people who live in these houses seem always to be asleep or dead, and if they knew our names, they couldn’t recognize us ten feet off. Now,” he continued, “tell me what is troubling you—for I have seen ever since that first glimpse of you that something is preying upon you.”Elizabeth remained silent.“What is it?” asked Clavering again, with authority in his voice. And Elizabeth, still with that strange feeling of being obliged to do what Clavering required, told him the whole story of the necklace.Clavering listened attentively. Elizabeth had tried to keep out of it the personal note, the shame and disappointment and resentment she felt at Pelham’s conduct; but she was dealing with a very astute man, who read her with extraordinary keenness, and who saw the good policy, from his own point of view, of still further embittering her feelings toward Pelham.“I should say that fellow Pelham ought to have shown you a little more consideration, especially as you say he inherited everything.”“Yes.”“A woman, standing alone, is almost bound to fall in with just such brutes as Pelham and that Scotch solicitor. Mind, I say that you were obliged to meet with some men who were traitors, all in fact except those who happen to be in love with you. Look—” he opened his watch, and on the inner case Elizabeth saw a Greek sentence engraved, [Greek: memnêstein apistein]. “You didn’t think I knew Greek. Of course I don’t. No man bornand raised in my circumstances ever knew Greek, and I never expect to know it. I have heard about some one of those old classics learning to play the fiddle when he was eighty, and always thought him a great fool for so doing. No, I only had this put in Greek to puzzle fools; it means, ‘Remember to distrust.’ It was a pity that you had not remembered to distrust that Pelham scoundrel.”Elizabeth remained silent and almost stunned at this characterization of Pelham, and Clavering, seeing he had gone far enough in that direction, said:—“If the diamond broker—pawn-broker, I should call him—gave you five hundred pounds on the necklace, it was probably worth fifteen hundred. However, fifteen hundred pounds is a small matter.”“It is a great deal to me and always was, except for that short time in London when we thought ourselves the richest people in the world,” replied Elizabeth.“You may, if you choose, be one of the richest women in America.”ill236“The little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.”Elizabeth’s face had grown deathly pale. She was sensible of the dishonor of any proposal Clavering might make to her. All of the stories she had heard from the beginning about Clavering’s intention to divorce his wife rushed upon her mind—all of her own vague and haunting speculations for the past few weeks. She remained silent, but every moment she grew more agitated.Clavering was silent for a few moments, allowing the leaven to work. Then he continued: “Of course there is but one way to do this. I can get a divorce and then you must marry me. No doubt you have a lot of unpractical ideas about divorce, but let me tell you that when a man and a woman are indispensable to each other—as you are to me—what does anything on earth matter?”No one listening to Clavering’s cool and measured tones would have surmised what he was proposing to Elizabeth; nor did he attempt the smallest endearment, free as they were from observation, for the fog grew denser every moment and the little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.At his last remarks Elizabeth attempted some faint protest, which went unheeded by Clavering, who spoke again: “People call me a successful man. So I am, with money, politics, cards, and horses. But I have no luck with women. First, I married before I was twenty-one—cursed folly that it was! You have seen my wife—I’ll sayno more. Then, my eldest and youngest daughters—well, they are like me in some ways, that’s enough. Élise has been through the divorce court. It cost me something like fifty thousand dollars to keep the truth about her from coming out. Lydia will go the same way. My best plan with them will be to marry them to men who will get the upper hand of them—keep a tight rein over them. So far, I haven’t succeeded; and I am seriously considering giving them each a handsome fortune, marrying them to foreigners, and getting them out of the country.”Elizabeth’s pale face had grown red while Clavering was speaking. He was close enough to see it, even by the uncertain light that penetrated the mist.“You think I’m a brute, eh? No, on the contrary I have a strong hankering after decency in my womenkind.”“Your daughter Anne—” Elizabeth spoke falteringly.“Ah, yes, bad luck again. Anne has twice the sense of her sisters, is really more attractive and is perfectly certain to behave herself. But she is on her mother’s side, and if—or when—I do get a divorce, I shall have to fight her, and she is the only one of my children whose opposition wouldamount to anything. You know what a Miss Nancy Reginald is.”“But—but—how can you get a divorce if Mrs. Clavering—““Doesn’t want it? Well, I never was properly married to her in the first place. She didn’t know it at the time, and I was a youngster and didn’t know it, either; but our marriage wasn’t regular at all. I should have got the license in Kentucky instead of in Ohio, where we crossed the river to get married. So we are not really married and never have been, according to law. When I mention the subject to Mrs. Clavering, I shall offer to get the divorce; if she is contumacious, I shall simply prove that we have never been married at all. That will be hard on the children, and on that account I think there is no doubt she would agree to the divorce, if it were not for Anne. Anne, however, doesn’t know anything about the defect in the marriage, and I rather think she will back down when she finds out just where we stand.”Elizabeth listened to this with horror. But it was horror of the deed, not of the man. Clavering’s calm and lucid presentation of the case, the absence of hypocrisy, his quiet determination, seemed to lift him out of the class of vulgarcriminals and make him almost respectable. And then he went on to give his side of the case, and his voice had in it a strange note of longing.“I have before me twenty years yet, and although I am reckoned a man who can live on bonds and stocks and lawsuits and fighting other men, still I’ve had my dreams—I have them still. If I could find a woman who would be a wife to me, and yet could be an intellectual companion for me—that would be something that all my money hasn’t brought me. Do you blame a man for longing after it? Don’t you think I am more nearly human for wanting it than if I were satisfied to go on all my life as I have done for the last thirty-five years?”“Yes.” Elizabeth spoke unwillingly, but the assent was forced out of her. And whether it was his words, his voice,—always singularly captivating,—his compelling glance, or his powerful personality, Elizabeth began to feel a toleration, along with a reprehension, of him. For Clavering, like all men, was made up of things to admire and things to abhor; only he possessed both in a stronger degree than common. He was much older than Elizabeth, but he had not lost the fire and vigor of youth.Elizabeth’s agitation had subsided somewhat,but she was still unable or unwilling to speak. The gray mist was becoming denser, and they could see the gas-lamps studding the fast-falling darkness like jewels; the sound of wheels and hoofs upon the asphalt was deadened by the fog and grew fainter, the street was quieter, more deserted even than Washington streets usually are. In the little park, with the masses of evergreen shrubbery around them, they were as alone, as little subject to intrusion, as if they had been on a desert island. After a considerable pause Clavering spoke again.“I saw you first, just ten years ago, one night as you were waiting on the street with your father, for some lady to take you to a ball. You dropped a little trinket from around your neck.”Elizabeth started with surprise. “That was the night I first met my husband—and Hugh Pelham. And I lost my little pearl heart and never found it.”“I was the guilty man,” said Clavering, with a smile. “I crushed your heart under my foot.” It was an accidental joining of words, but Clavering wished he had expressed himself otherwise. The words had an ominous sound, and Elizabeth, after looking at him intently for a few minutes, turned her head away.Clavering, hastening to recall his lost ground, added: “The day will come when I will give you the most superb diamond locket that the South African mines can produce. I will make duchesses envy you your jewels and princesses cry with envy of them. I remembered you ever after that night, and a month ago I met you. Don’t think people are fools who talk of love at first sight for anybody at any age, or under any circumstances. The moment my eyes fell upon you I was anxious to know you. When I knew you, I wanted to know you better. When I knew you better, I became willing to do anything for you, to jeopardize anything in order to marry you. And I will give you a great fortune, millions of money, of which I shall get very little benefit, because you will outlive me many years and probably marry some other man and endow him, by gad, with my money. I will go anywhere you may desire to live, for I don’t believe you would consent to live in Washington. You may have a splendid house in London or Paris, a great country house, a château, any and everywhere you like, and you may command me as no other woman has ever commanded me. Now will you marry me after I am divorced?”Elizabeth felt dazed. She had known from thefirst what was coming, but when Clavering put his wish into words it was as strange and staggering as if the idea had never before occurred to her. The thought of committing so great a wrong upon another woman, as Clavering suggested, appalled her—a wrong so vast and far-reaching that she turned away from the contemplation of it. But she did not fly from the temptation, and the temptation which is not fled from is the conqueror.Clavering interpreted her silence with ease. He took her hand, pulled off her glove, and held her soft palm between his two strong ones. Five minutes passed; they seemed an hour to Elizabeth, frightened yet fascinated, her mind overwhelmed with what Clavering had told her, had promised her, had urged upon her. Through it all came the cry of her heart for Pelham. Had he been true to her, this temptation would never have come in her way. And as he had forgotten her and had even persecuted her, what did it matter what became of her, so she had ease instead of this frightful poverty, companionship instead of this dreadful loneliness, security instead of this perpetual terror over the small and sordid matter of a few hundred pounds? Clavering was too clever a man to urge her overmuch when he sawthat he had a tempter always with her in her own self. At last, after five minutes of agitated silence, she managed to withdraw her hand and rise. Clavering, without a word, walked with her out of the little park, hailed a passing hansom in the dusk and put her in, only saying at the last:—“I will see you again as soon as possible. Meanwhile, remember you have but to say one word and all is yours.”The hansom rolled off, and Clavering, putting his hands in his pockets, walked away at a quick gait. The expression on his face was like that of a successful gladiator. It was not pleasant to see.Chapter ThirteenThe next night but one, Clavering had an appointment with General Brandon at the usual hour of half-past nine. And at nine o’clock promptly he was sitting with Elizabeth in the little study, waiting for General Brandon’s return.The first thing he said to her was: “Of course that affair about the necklace must be straightened out at once. I can cable to my London agent, and he can find out all about it and recover it, for it can be easily traced and recovered. And leave me to deal with the solicitor on the quiet.”“I hardly think you know what you are offering,” replied Elizabeth, with involuntary haughtiness. “I could not accept money or services from you. It is not to be thought of for a moment.”“Then what are you going to do about it?” asked Clavering, coolly, in the words of a celebrated character.Ah, what was she going to do about it? thought poor Elizabeth. Tell her father and see him turned out of the only shelter he had for his agedhead? If only she had been more experienced, had known more! She had been so very, very ignorant in those London days. If Pelham had not behaved so basely to her!Clavering talked on, quietly assuming that he would take charge of the matter for her; but Elizabeth, after listening to him in silence and even in weakness, suddenly and impulsively rose and said, “I desire you never to speak to me on that subject again.”Then General Brandon’s step was heard upon the stair, and nothing more was said between them. Elizabeth remained in the room while Clavering was there, and he honestly thought he was progressing quite as fast as he had any right to expect.It was now the middle of January, and the investigating committee continued to sit and the newspapers to print the proceedings. This did not tend to make it any pleasanter for Clavering’s family. Anne, with a touch of her father’s courage, continued to go out and to entertain, but it was with an aching heart. To add to her other anxieties, Mrs. Clavering was very ailing and unhappy. By some strange accident—for the poor lady never read the newspapers—she got an inkling that Clavering was under fire, and sheoften asked questions which Anne had difficulty in answering. Whatever love Mrs. Clavering had ever felt for Clavering had long since been cast out by fear; but she had the true feminine instinct which makes a dove fierce in the presence of the despoiler of her nest. Reginald Clavering redoubled his attention to his mother, and was of more help to Anne than she had thought possible.It had been determined, chiefly at Clavering’s suggestion, that a grand musical, followed by a ball, should be given at the Clavering house on Shrove Tuesday, as a wind-up to the splendid entertainments for which the house had long been noted; and the undisguised intention was to eclipse everything that had hitherto been done in Washington in the way of entertaining. Anne opposed it, but Élise and Lydia carried the day, backed up by their father.Only Clavering suspected that it was likely to be the last entertainment given there. He felt confident of knowing the decision of the committee before Shrove Tuesday, and he fully realized the possibility that it might mean expulsion from the Senate on his record alone; as, unluckily for him, there was a very complete and authentic legal record of his doings, which Baskerville had unearthed. So far Clavering had keptout of jail; but there had been more than one true bill found against him, and even verdicts in criminal cases, which had never been enforced. He was still fighting, and meant to go down fighting; but he devoted far more thought to planning what he would do if he were compelled to leave public life than if he were permitted to stay in it. He reckoned that by expediting matters he could get the divorce granted and the decree entered by the first of June, when he would marry Elizabeth Darrell, go abroad for the summer, and then arrange his life for the future. And while he was taking it for granted that he could marry Elizabeth, and was seeing her in private two or three times a week by General Brandon’s innocent connivance, Clavering had touched her hand but once and had never pressed his lips to her cheek, nor had she ever allowed him one word of acknowledged love-making. And this was a woman he was ready to dower with millions, which, as he grimly thought, a young husband, his successor, would get! Clavering concluded that some women were ungrateful. At the same time, he did not seriously doubt that he could marry Elizabeth in June.He began to congratulate himself on his good luck in his constant presence at General Brandon’shouse escaping notice. No one but himself, the General, and Elizabeth seemed to have any knowledge of his visits, although General Brandon, at his club, did some innocent bragging about the assistance he was giving to Senator Clavering “in the unholy warfare against a man incapable of the smallest dishonesty.” “Why, sir,” he would say to any one who would listen to him, “Senator Clavering has assured me, on his word of honor, that there is not one scintilla of truth in the shameful allegations brought against him in the public prints. Wait, however, until the senatorial committee has made its report. Then you will see Senator Clavering triumphantly vindicated; mark my words, sir, triumphantly vindicated.”Nobody but General Brandon, however, really believed this. Certainly Anne Clavering did not, and every day that she read the newspaper accounts of what had occurred and what had not occurred at the meeting of the investigating committee, her heart sank lower. To keep her mother from suspecting anything, Anne pursued her usual course of life; but it required all her resolution to do it. Every time she entered a drawing-room she called up all her courage to meet an affront, if one should be offered her.Not one was passed upon her, but she lived in dread of it.During this time Baskerville had gone everywhere he thought it likely that he should meet Anne Clavering, but so far he had not been fortunate. He did not repeat his visit to Clavering’s house. He had doubted the propriety of his going in the first instance, and he doubted it still more as time passed on. But it did not keep him from falling deeper and deeper in love with the image of Anne Clavering in his mind. On the Thursday which was Constance Thorndyke’s day at home, he felt tolerably confident that Anne Clavering would be paying her dinner call; and so on the stroke of four he presented himself, armed and equipped as the law directs, at Mrs. Luttrell’s door, to accompany that redoubtable person upon a round of Thursday visits.After several perfunctory calls where Baskerville was bored to death but behaved himself beautifully, he arrived with Mrs. Luttrell at Constance Thorndyke’s door precisely at five o’clock. Constance Thorndyke received them with the same charming grace and cordiality which always distinguished her and which was powerful enough to draw within her circle, asher guest on her reception day, her husband. Thorndyke never felt so proud of his wife as when he saw her in his own drawing-room, and she collected about her, from the wide field of Washington, persons who made her drawing-room shine. He frankly admitted to Constance that hers were the only receptions in Washington which he really enjoyed. He was delighted to see Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell, the latter being to him, as to most men, an ever blooming tree of delight. He came up and established Mrs. Luttrell in a chair by the fireside, with a good cup of tea and with a man on each side of her; and Mrs. Luttrell found herself as happy as it is given to mortals to be on this distressful planet. Thorndyke’s conversation interested her on the one side, and Admiral Prendergast, a superb specimen of the old-time chivalrous naval officer, with whom Mrs. Luttrell had had an intermittent flirtation for not less than forty years, on her other side.“What a blessed comfort it is,” sighed Mrs. Luttrell to a listening group, “to be able to come into a drawing-room like this and have a good cup of tea, with some cups and saucers and tea-spoons that did not come out of a curio shop, and some honest bread and butter. I declare I amtired to death of these brazen retired tradespeople who have come to this town and undertaken to receive in their Louis Quinze drawing-rooms, and in their English dining rooms, with a great big table full of pink and green kickshaws, and candelabra three feet high all over it, and a big placque of roses just like an old-fashioned feather bed.”“Will you listen to Sara?” asked her dutiful nephew. “She has hauled me about this day from one retired tradesman’s house to another, scattering compliments as she went, and embracing every man, woman, and child she met of the smart set—the smarter the better. She couldn’t be kept from going with those people unless she were chained up.”“Well,” faintly replied Mrs. Luttrell, “one has to be a hypocrite in this world; but I do say, Constance, that next my own yours is the best drawing-room in Washington.”“That is indeed high praise,” replied Constance Thorndyke, smiling, “and I am vain enough to believe it is sincere, especially when I can get my own husband to come home early Thursday afternoon.”Mrs. Thorndyke had never been strictly beautiful nor even remarkably pretty before her marriage,but since then she had developed a late-flowering loveliness which was much more than beauty. She was happy, she loved and was beloved; she had it in her power to assist the man she loved without making him hate her; she had, in fact, all that she had ever asked of high heaven, except one thing—she was childless. But that one supreme disappointment gave to her face and to her soul a touch of softness, of resignation, that disarmed fate. With a tender feminine superstition, she believed that, this last gift having been denied her, she would be suffered to retain the happiness already hers. Thorndyke himself had to be both husband and children to her, and on him she concentrated all the love and solicitude of her nature. That he was happy there could be no doubt. In Constance he had all that he had ever wished for.The Thorndyke house was one of the few in Washington which Baskerville could enter with a clear conscience in the matter of duty calls. He always paid them promptly to Constance Thorndyke, and often went when there was no obligation for him to go. He had some one besides Constance Thorndyke in view, however, in paying that particular visit; it was Anne Clavering whom he had really come to see. Mrs. Thorndyke foundmeans to let him know that Anne had not been there yet; and while Baskerville was taking what comfort he could out of this Anne walked into the drawing-room. She looked pale and worn and much older than she really was. Baskerville’s keen eye took this in at a glance; but like a sincere lover he admired her none the less for not being in a flush of spirits, and felt an increased tenderness for her. A delicate rosy color flooded her face when she saw who was present, and rosier still when Baskerville established her in a corner, that he might have a monopoly of her sweet company.Bearing in mind his promise to discipline his aunt, almost the first words Baskerville said to Anne were: “I hear my aunt was quite impertinent to you the other night; but before I slept I made her promise to apologize to you.”This was quite loud enough for Mrs. Luttrell to hear, and she promptly turned her smiling, sharp old face toward Anne. “My dear, he did, as I am a sinner! Well, it’s a great thing at my time of life to discover a new sensation, and I’ve found one in the act of apology. Now listen, all of you—Constance, make these people stop chattering—Jack Prendergast, be quiet, and Senator Thorndyke, stop laughing. Miss Clavering, I wasrather impertinent to you at Secretary Slater’s the other night, but I declare it was those two foolish women, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin, who were really to blame. However, I think you got the better of me—ha, ha! I always liked you, and like you better for your spirit. I offer you my sincere apologies—on condition that you never again make the least objection to anything I say or do—for, look you, Sara Luttrell has been used to speaking her mind too long to change. But I apologize.”At which Admiral Prendergast remarked piously, “Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace.”Anne rose and took Mrs. Luttrell’s hand in hers. “I’ll forgive you,” she said, smiling; “but don’t think I am afraid of you—I like you too much for that.”“I know you’re not afraid of me—you and my nephew, Richard Baskerville, are the only two creatures yet who openly defy me—and when you join forces, as you have done to-day, you are too strong for me.”This coupling of their names did not lose anything by Mrs. Luttrell’s emphatic manner of saying it, and it deepened the color in Anne’s face and brought the light to Baskerville’s eyes. Andas if directly inspired by Satan, the old lady kept on:—“You ought to have seen how angry my nephew was with me when he heard of my behavior—we were having a quiet chat in my bedroom while I was undressing, and he gave me such a rating as you never heard in your life. Oh! he took it to heart much more than you did. His language to me was something shocking. He threatened to tell my age all over town, and to throw my ermine cape into the fire if I ever misbehaved to you again. I never saw him in such a way before.”How much inadvertence and how much malice aforethought there were in this speech only Sara Luttrell knew, but it was distinctly disconcerting to Anne Clavering, and visibly shortened her visit. Mrs. Luttrell went out at the same time, and, after being helped into her big coach by Baskerville, turned to speak to him as the carriage rolled off.“Didn’t I do it handsomely? Why, he isn’t here!” And at that moment she caught sight of Baskerville sitting by Anne Clavering’s side in her brougham, then whirling around the corner. Mrs. Luttrell smiled and then sighed. “The scamp,” she said to herself. “I remember howonce—” She took from her pocket the miniature which never left her, and her memory went back to the days when to recline in that man’s arms and to feel his kisses upon her lips were Paradise, a paradise to which the gate had been forever closed to any other man.Baskerville had got into his present agreeable situation by simply not waiting for an invitation, and furthermore by saying authoritatively to the footman, “Miss Clavering wishes to drive out Connecticut Avenue until she directs you to turn.”It was all done so suddenly that Anne did not realize it until it was over; but what woman who loves is averse to having the man of her choice sitting by her side in the intimate seclusion of a brougham at dusk of a winter’s evening? Baskerville, however, was there for a purpose—a purpose quickly formed but to be resolutely carried out. He said to Anne: “I saw that my aunt’s heedless words embarrassed you, and I felt sorry for you. But it was quite true—I made her promise to apologize to you; and as long as I live, as far as I have the power, I shall force everybody who injures you to make you amends.”Baskerville’s eyes, fastened upon Anne, gave a deeper meaning to his words. The flush faded from Anne’s cheeks, and she looked at Baskervillewith troubled eyes, knowing a crisis was at hand. “I am very bold in forcing myself on you,” he said, “but the time has come for me to speak. I have not the same chance as other men, because I can’t go to your father’s house. I went once upon your mother’s kind invitation, but I doubt whether I should have done so; I can only plead my desire to see you, and I feel I can’t go again. You know, perhaps, that I am one of the lawyers engaged in prosecuting this investigation before the Senate. If I had known you before I began it, I would have never gone into it. But being in it I can’t honorably withdraw. Perhaps you can’t forgive me for what I have done, but it has not kept me from loving you with all my soul.”Anne shrank back in the carriage. At any other time she would have heard these words with palpitating joy; and even now they opened to her a momentary glimpse of Paradise. But the memory of all that was said and done about her father, the conviction of his impending disgrace, overwhelmed her. She sat silent and ashamed, longing to accept the sweetness of the love offered her, conscious of her own integrity, but with a primitive honest pride, reluctant to give any man the dower of disgrace which she felt went with her father’s daughter.Silence on the part of the beloved usually augurs well to the lover, but when Anne’s silence was accentuated by two large tears that dropped upon her cheeks Baskerville realized that they were not happy tears. He would have soothed her with a lover’s tenderness, but Anne repulsed him with a strange pride. “You are not to blame for what you have done in my father’s case, but I know, as well as you do, that before this month is out my father may be a disgraced man. And although you may not believe it—you with your generations of ladies and gentlemen behind you”—she spoke with a certain bitterness—“may not believe that the daughter of people like my father and my mother can have any pride, yet I have—whether I am entitled to it or not. I would not take a disgraced name to any man.”Baskerville’s answer to this was to take her two hands in his. It became difficult for her to be haughty to a man who plainly indicated that he meant to kiss her within five minutes. And he did.Anne’s protests were not those of a woman meaning to yield; Baskerville saw that she felt a real shame, the genuine reluctance of a high and honorable spirit. But it was swept away in the torrent of a sincere and manly love. When theyparted at Anne’s door Baskerville had wrung from her the confession of her love, and they were, to each other, acknowledged lovers.That night Anne and her father dined alone. Élise and Lydia were dining out with some of their “larky” friends, and Reginald was out of town. Clavering noted that Anne was rather silent. Anne for her part looked at her father with a kind of resentment she had often felt before. What right had he to dower his children with his own evil deeds? Why, instead of acquiring a vast fortune, which he spent on them, as on himself, with lavishness, should he not have given them a decent inheritance. Was it not wholly through him that she had not been able to give herself freely and joyfully to the man who loved her and whom she loved? With these thoughts in her mind she sat through the dinner, silent and distrait; but she could not wholly subdue the happiness that Baskerville had given her, even though happiness with her could never be without alloy.When dinner was over she went up to her mother’s room, and spent the rest of the evening cheering and comforting the poor soul. After Mrs. Clavering was in bed Anne came downstairs to remain until Élise and Lydia returned fromtheir party. She sat in the library with a book in her hand, but her thoughts were on Baskerville. And, thinking of him, she fell into a soft, sweet sleep to dream of him. When she awakened it was almost midnight, and Élise and Lydia had not returned.To keep herself from falling asleep again she took up at random one of a pile of periodicals on the table. It was a scurrilous newspaper which she loathed; but the first paragraph in it which, before she could lay it down, fell under her eye enchained her attention. An hour afterward Élise and Lydia came in and tiptoed softly up to their rooms; but Anne remained in the same position in the great library chair in which she had been for the last hour, still holding the newspaper in her hand.Clavering had gone out directly after dinner, and after a visit to the club, which he found rather chilling, went to General Brandon’s house, as usual in advance of his appointment. It seemed to Clavering on that evening as if Elizabeth relaxed a little of her reserve, which was at the same time both timid and haughty. Later he went down town and managed to put up a tolerably stiff game of poker, and it was two o’clock in the morning before hefound himself at his own door. He let himself in, and went into the vast, luxurious library, where the fire still glowed. He turned up the electric light in a superb bronze electrolier on his library table, stirred the fire, and then perceived Anne sitting in a chair drawn up to the fender.“Why, what are you doing here?” asked Clavering, good-naturedly.“I wanted to speak to you to-night,” Anne replied quietly.“Go on,” said Clavering, seating himself and lighting a cigar. “Make it short, because when a woman wants to ‘speak’ to a man it always means a row.”“I hope this does not,” replied Anne.Her father looked at her closely. She had a wearied and anxious look, which belied her youth, and she had good cause to be both wearied and anxious a good part of the time. She handed him the newspaper which battened upon scandal, and the first paragraph in it announced the forthcoming divorce of Senator Clavering and his subsequent marriage to a Chicago widow, nearly his age, with a fortune almost as large as his own. Clavering’s strong-beating heart gave a jump when he began reading the paragraph, but when he found how far off the scent was thereport his countenance cleared. It was as good an opportunity as he could have desired to have it out with Anne, and he was not sorry she had broached the subject.“Well,” he said, laying the paper down, “are you surprised?”“No,” replied Anne, looking at him steadily.“Then we may proceed to discuss it,” said Clavering. “I intend to provide handsomely for your mother, and I dare say she will be a hundred times happier out in Iowa among her relations and friends than she can be here.”“I hardly think my mother would look at it from that point of view,” said Anne. She controlled her agitation and her indignation admirably, and Clavering saw in her his own cool courage and resource. “Of course my mother has felt and known for years that you had no further use for her, now that her drudgery is not necessary to you. But she is, as you know, a very religious woman. She thinks divorces are wrong, and, timid as she is, I believe she would resist a divorce. She would, I am sure, be willing to go away from you and not trouble you any more—and I would go with her. But a divorce—no. And I have the same views that she has, and would urge her to resist to the last; and she will.”She had not raised her tones at all, but Clavering understood her words perfectly. She meant to fight for her mother. He smoked quietly for several minutes, and Anne knew too much to weaken her position by repeating her protest. Then Clavering leaned over to her and said: “I think, when you know the circumstances, you will be more than willing to let your mother get the divorce. We were never legally married.”The blood poured into Anne’s face. She rose from her chair, and stood trembling with anger, but also with fear. “I don’t believe—I can’t believe—” She stopped, unable to go on.“Oh, there’s no reflection on your mother or on me, either. We ran away to be married—a couple of young fools under twenty-one. I got the license in Kentucky, but we crossed the Ohio River into Ohio. There we found a minister, an ignorant old fellow and a rogue besides, who didn’t know enough to see that the license had no effect in Ohio. And then I found out afterwards that he had been prohibited from performing marriage services because of some of his illegal doings in that line. I knew all about it within a week of the marriage, but being ignorant then myself, I thought the best way was to say nothing. Afterward, when I came to man’s estate, I still thoughtit best to keep it quiet for the sake of you children. And I am willing to keep it quiet now—unless you force me to disclose it. But, understand me, I mean to be divorced in order to marry a lady to whom I am much attached—not this old whited sepulchre from Chicago”—for so Clavering alluded to the widow with millions—“but a lady without a penny. Have you any suspicion to whom I refer?”“I have not the least suspicion of any one,” Anne replied, as haughtily as if she had all the blood of all the Howards, instead of being the nameless child she was.Clavering was secretly surprised and relieved to know this. Then the tongue of gossip had not got hold of his attentions to Elizabeth Darrell. This was indeed rare good fortune. He spoke again. “So now you know exactly where you stand. If you will let me have my way, the thing can be managed quietly. If you oppose me, you will be sorry for it.”“And you mean, if my mother doesn’t consent, that you will brand us all—us, your children—as—as—I can’t speak the word.” Anne fixed a pair of blazing eyes on her father, and Clavering never felt more uncomfortable in his life. He had no shame and no remorse, but he reallywished that Anne Clavering would not gaze at him with those eyes sparkling with anger and disgust.“I think you don’t exactly understand the masculine nature,” he said. “I simply mean that I shall have a divorce, and if you don’t choose to accept my terms—for, of course, I am dealing with you, not your mother—it will be you and not I who proclaim to the world what I have kept quiet for thirty-five years.”The interview lasted barely ten minutes, but to Anne Clavering it seemed as if æons of time separated her from the Anne Clavering of half an hour ago. Clavering was unshaken. He had been contemplating this event in his life ever since it happened, thirty-five years before, and had reckoned himself a magnanimous man in determining not to reveal the truth about his marriage unless he was compelled to—that is to say, unless he could not get the divorce by other means. But Anne had forced his hand, as it were; so let her take the consequences. The repudiation of his wife cost Clavering not a pang. He took no thought of her patience, her years of uncomplaining work for him, her silence under his neglect and abandonment. The thought, however, that he had admitted to any one the illegitimacyof his children, gave him a certain degree of discomfort; he felt an inward shock when he spoke the words. But it was not enough to turn him from his will.Anne sat still for so long that Clavering did not know what to make of it. She had grown very pale, and Clavering suspected that she really had not the strength to rise, which was the truth. The room was so profoundly still that when a smouldering log in the fireplace broke in two and fell apart with a shower of sparks, the slight noise made both Clavering and Anne start.Anne rose then, somewhat unsteadily. Clavering would have liked to offer his arm and to have assisted her to her bedroom, but he was afraid. She walked out of the room without looking at him or speaking to him again. Halfway up the broad and splendid staircase he heard her stop, and, looking out of the half-open door, he saw her shadowy figure sitting on the stairs. After a few moments more she went on up, and he could hear only the faint sound of her silken skirts as she moved. Opposite her mother’s door she stopped. There was no sound within, and she passed on.It was one of Elizabeth Darrell’s sleepless and harassed nights. About three o’clock she rosefrom her bed and went to the window. In the great house opposite, Clavering’s library windows were lighted up, and so were the windows of Anne’s boudoir. A sudden suspicion of the truth flashed into Elizabeth’s mind.“His daughter suspects something—has discovered something,” she thought to herself, panting and terrified. “They have had a scene.”Neither Elizabeth nor Clavering nor Anne had any sleep that night.
Chapter ElevenThe season opened with a bang on the first of December. The smart set could barely get six hours in bed from going to parties at all hours. This did not apply to Mrs. Luttrell, who, although she was out every night, did not disturb herself to appear in public until four o’clock in the afternoon. That particular form of barbaric entertainment known as a ladies’ luncheon had no charms for Mrs. Luttrell, because there were no men to be found at them; for this woman, who cherished with an idolatrous recollection the memory of the only man she had ever loved, and who had refused more offers of marriage than any other woman of her day, frankly admitted that she couldn’t enjoy anything without a masculine element in it. And men she contrived to have in plenty, with a success but little inferior to that of Ninon de l’Enclos.For that reason Richard Baskerville was not only the person Mrs. Luttrell loved best in the world, but was really her most intimate friend. There was nothing Mrs. Luttrell enjoyed so muchas a midnight tête-à-tête over her bedroom fire with Baskerville, he just from his books and she just from her nightly gayety. Mrs. Luttrell scorned a boudoir,—or the modern version of it, a den. She had a huge, old-fashioned bedroom, with an ancient four-poster mahogany bed, with green silk curtains, and a lace valance; and everything in the room was big and square and handsome and comfortable, like the bed. There was a large fireplace, with shining brass fire-dogs and a monumental brass fender; and Mrs. Luttrell frequently admitted that when she got her feet on that fender and her dressing-gown on, she grew so communicative that she would tell the inmost secrets of her soul to the veriest stranger, if he had his feet on the fender at the same time.It was on a night early in January that Mrs. Luttrell nabbed Baskerville at her door, as she was being let in by the sleepy black butler. Baskerville followed her upstairs into her room, considerately turning his back while the old lady got out of her black-velvet gown, and whisked off her flannel petticoat, into her comfortable dressing-gown—an operation she performed without the least regard for his presence. Then, when her delicate, high-bred feet were on the fender before the glowing wood fire, she said:—“Now you can turn around—and I’m a great deal more clothed than the women you take down to dinner or dance with at balls.”“I don’t dance at a great many balls. Let me see—I haven’t danced for—““Oh, I know. Well, I’m just from a dinner at Secretary Slater’s, where that ridiculous little Mrs. Hill-Smith, his daughter, was in great feather, and also the Baldwin girl and Anne Clavering.”“You ought to beg Miss Clavering’s pardon for bracketing her with Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin.”“My dear boy, it would make you die laughing to see the patronizing air Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin put on with Anne Clavering. As the Slater family is at least forty years old and the Brentwood-Baldwins quite twenty years old, they regard the Claverings, who have come up within the last six years, very much as the old French nobility regarded thebourgeoisie. But I think Anne Clavering is a match for them. Indeed, she proved herself a match for a much more considerable antagonist—that is, myself—this very night.”“Have you been impertinent to Miss Clavering?”“Well, Richard, my dear boy, I am afraid Ihave been. But it was all the fault of those two foolish creatures, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin. It was in this way. The gentlemen,”—Mrs. Luttrell still used this antique word,—“the gentlemen had come into the drawing-room after dinner—very prim and proper they were after their cigarettes and two glasses of hock. In my time, when the gentlemen came in after dinner they were always as merry as lords and delightfully free: I have been slapped on the back by Daniel Webster at a dinner, when I was sixteen years old. But nothing so agreeable happens now—and there aren’t any Daniel Websters, either. Well, when I was talking to that ridiculous Mrs. Hill-Smith something unluckily started me off upon the new people in Washington. Mrs. Hill-Smith, you know, assumes that she has sixteen quarterings, so she has to grin and bear it when I begin telling about people; and I always say to her, ‘You and I, Mrs. Hill-Smith, who knew some people before 1860.’ Somebody was speaking about Mrs. James Van Cortlandt Skinner’s private chaplain—that woman has added much to the gayety of nations. There’s a story going around that she had a darling of a fight over it, not only with the bishop, but with the bishop’s wife; and I was giving a very amusingaccount of it, when Anne Clavering quietly remarked that she happened to know that Mrs. Skinner had not spoken of it yet to the bishop. Of course this spoiled my story, and I was a little cross about it. Judge Woodford was present, and he told a pleasant little tale about my grandfather having been very cross on one occasion, and having pulled somebody’s nose, and I said my crossness was a case of atavism on my part. And so it was turned into a joke. When we were leaving I was sorry I had been short with Anne Clavering, so I went up and asked her to come and see me on my next day at home, and to pour tea for me—that I still held to the good old fashion of keeping a day at home and seeing my friends. And what do you think the minx said? She was very sorry, but she had an attack of atavism, too,—her grandfather wasn’t used to afternoon tea and she had never acquired any real taste for it!”Baskerville laughed delightedly.“Oh, it wasn’t so clever, after all,” said Mrs. Luttrell, smiling with that unshakable good humor which was the most exasperating thing on earth to all her enemies and her friends alike. “It is just because you’re in love with Anne Clavering; and I think she likes you pretty well, too.”Baskerville sat up then, sobered in an instant. What Mrs. Luttrell knew or suspected all Washington would shortly know. “Why do you say that?” he asked quietly.“Because I think it, that’s why. It’s one of the strangest things in the world that people in love think all the rest of the world blind and deaf. And a woman lets her secret out just as readily as a man. I say Anne Clavering likes you. I don’t say she is pining and can’t eat and sleep for you; but I do say she likes you, though. And I feel sorry for the girl—such a family! You ought to see how that divorcée, Mrs. Denman, goes on with Count von Kappf, who, I believe, has been sent over here by a syndicate to marry an American heiress. Nobody knows what Anne Clavering has to suffer for the conduct of that sister of hers.”“And you, who call yourself a Christian, had to add to Miss Clavering’s mortification.”“Oh, it was only a trifle, and she came out ahead.”“Anyhow, you shall apologize to her. Do you understand me, Sara Luttrell? You shall apologize, and before me, too.”“Very well,” replied Mrs. Luttrell, unabashed. “The first time I catch you and Anne Clavering together I’ll apologize.”Baskerville sat silent for a while as Mrs. Luttrell luxuriously toasted her toes. Presently he said, “So people are kind enough to say that I am in love with Miss Clavering?”“Yes, indeed. People are always kind enough to say things—and a great many people are saying that you are in love with her. You haven’t escaped notice as much as you thought.”“I don’t desire to escape notice. And I only hope enough people will say it so it will get to Miss Clavering’s ears. Then she may not be so surprised as to throw me over when—the opportunity comes. I may be a good many sorts of a blamed fool, Sara, but I am not such a fool as to be anything but flattered when my name is associated with Miss Clavering’s.”“Very decently said. But how are you going to manage about this senatorial investigation—trying to ruin the father as a preliminary to marrying the daughter?”Baskerville grew grave at once. The investigation was on in earnest. The committee which had been appointed before the adjournment of Congress had begun its sittings directly upon the meeting of Congress, and Baskerville had at once come into prominence as one of the representatives of the Civil Service League. The questionof Clavering’s culpability with regard to the land grants was complicated with the open barter and sale of Federal offices, and the Civil Service League had taken it up actively. The League was in no way bound by senatorial courtesy, and it had a formidable array of evidence to produce, which pointed straight to criminal as well as civil indictments. Baskerville found himself in a difficult position. He had gone too far in one direction toward exposing Senator Clavering, and his heart had carried him too far in another direction, for he was at last beginning to realize that he had fallen in love with Anne Clavering—a path upon which a strong man never halts. It is your weakling who falls halfway in love and then stops.Mrs. Luttrell studied Baskerville keenly. Herself a sentimentalist in disguise, she loved Baskerville the better for doing what she had long dreaded—for she had a woman’s jealousy of another woman’s usurping the first place with this nephew-in-law, who was son, companion, and comrade in one. But at least he did not contemplate foisting a pink-and-white nonentity upon her; Mrs. Luttrell always declared herself afraid of silly women. She not only liked Anne Clavering, but she saw in her a large and generousspirit, who would not, by small artifices, try to come between Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell. And the ineradicable interest which is every woman’s inalienable right in a love-affair was strong in Mrs. Luttrell’s breast. She began to wish that Baskerville and Anne would marry; and after sitting quite silent for ten minutes watching Baskerville’s moody face, she suddenly got up, went over to him, and smoothing the hair back from his forehead, kissed it tenderly. Two tears dropped upon his brow. Baskerville looked up and took her hands in his. He spoke no word, but he knew that the memory of the man so long dead was poignant still; and Mrs. Luttrell, after a pause, said in a low voice:—“I hope Anne Clavering will love you as I loved my Richard. And if you can make her as happy as he made me—Good night. I can’t bear to speak much of it, even to you.”“If any woman ever loves me as you loved my uncle, I should think myself eternally blessed with such love. Good night, Sara dear.”He kissed her warmly, went out of the room and downstairs and across the garden to his own house, and into his library. The first thing he saw upon the big library table was a mass of documents relating to the K. F. R. land grants.Baskerville pushed them away, and taking up a well-thumbed volume of Theocritus tried to forget himself in the pictures of the fair shining of the Sicilian sun, in the sound of the pipe of Daphnis, in the complainings of the two poor old fishermen lying by night in their wattled cabin on the sand dunes.All was in vain. His thoughts were no sooner diverted from Anne Clavering than they turned to Clavering and his affairs. How amazing was this man who had rough-hewn his way to a high place, to enormous wealth, to great power, from which he was likely to be thrown headlong into an abyss of shame! Baskerville had very little doubt that, no matter how successful might be the suits against Clavering, he would manage to retain great tangible sums of money. Men of the Clavering type hold on to their money more intelligently than to their supposititious honor. And finding it impossible to get away from his own thoughts, even in books which had heretofore been an unfailing sedative, Baskerville went to bed, and tossed in true lover’s fashion half the remaining night, before he fell into a troubled sleep to dream of Anne Clavering.
The season opened with a bang on the first of December. The smart set could barely get six hours in bed from going to parties at all hours. This did not apply to Mrs. Luttrell, who, although she was out every night, did not disturb herself to appear in public until four o’clock in the afternoon. That particular form of barbaric entertainment known as a ladies’ luncheon had no charms for Mrs. Luttrell, because there were no men to be found at them; for this woman, who cherished with an idolatrous recollection the memory of the only man she had ever loved, and who had refused more offers of marriage than any other woman of her day, frankly admitted that she couldn’t enjoy anything without a masculine element in it. And men she contrived to have in plenty, with a success but little inferior to that of Ninon de l’Enclos.
For that reason Richard Baskerville was not only the person Mrs. Luttrell loved best in the world, but was really her most intimate friend. There was nothing Mrs. Luttrell enjoyed so muchas a midnight tête-à-tête over her bedroom fire with Baskerville, he just from his books and she just from her nightly gayety. Mrs. Luttrell scorned a boudoir,—or the modern version of it, a den. She had a huge, old-fashioned bedroom, with an ancient four-poster mahogany bed, with green silk curtains, and a lace valance; and everything in the room was big and square and handsome and comfortable, like the bed. There was a large fireplace, with shining brass fire-dogs and a monumental brass fender; and Mrs. Luttrell frequently admitted that when she got her feet on that fender and her dressing-gown on, she grew so communicative that she would tell the inmost secrets of her soul to the veriest stranger, if he had his feet on the fender at the same time.
It was on a night early in January that Mrs. Luttrell nabbed Baskerville at her door, as she was being let in by the sleepy black butler. Baskerville followed her upstairs into her room, considerately turning his back while the old lady got out of her black-velvet gown, and whisked off her flannel petticoat, into her comfortable dressing-gown—an operation she performed without the least regard for his presence. Then, when her delicate, high-bred feet were on the fender before the glowing wood fire, she said:—
“Now you can turn around—and I’m a great deal more clothed than the women you take down to dinner or dance with at balls.”
“I don’t dance at a great many balls. Let me see—I haven’t danced for—“
“Oh, I know. Well, I’m just from a dinner at Secretary Slater’s, where that ridiculous little Mrs. Hill-Smith, his daughter, was in great feather, and also the Baldwin girl and Anne Clavering.”
“You ought to beg Miss Clavering’s pardon for bracketing her with Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin.”
“My dear boy, it would make you die laughing to see the patronizing air Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin put on with Anne Clavering. As the Slater family is at least forty years old and the Brentwood-Baldwins quite twenty years old, they regard the Claverings, who have come up within the last six years, very much as the old French nobility regarded thebourgeoisie. But I think Anne Clavering is a match for them. Indeed, she proved herself a match for a much more considerable antagonist—that is, myself—this very night.”
“Have you been impertinent to Miss Clavering?”
“Well, Richard, my dear boy, I am afraid Ihave been. But it was all the fault of those two foolish creatures, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin. It was in this way. The gentlemen,”—Mrs. Luttrell still used this antique word,—“the gentlemen had come into the drawing-room after dinner—very prim and proper they were after their cigarettes and two glasses of hock. In my time, when the gentlemen came in after dinner they were always as merry as lords and delightfully free: I have been slapped on the back by Daniel Webster at a dinner, when I was sixteen years old. But nothing so agreeable happens now—and there aren’t any Daniel Websters, either. Well, when I was talking to that ridiculous Mrs. Hill-Smith something unluckily started me off upon the new people in Washington. Mrs. Hill-Smith, you know, assumes that she has sixteen quarterings, so she has to grin and bear it when I begin telling about people; and I always say to her, ‘You and I, Mrs. Hill-Smith, who knew some people before 1860.’ Somebody was speaking about Mrs. James Van Cortlandt Skinner’s private chaplain—that woman has added much to the gayety of nations. There’s a story going around that she had a darling of a fight over it, not only with the bishop, but with the bishop’s wife; and I was giving a very amusingaccount of it, when Anne Clavering quietly remarked that she happened to know that Mrs. Skinner had not spoken of it yet to the bishop. Of course this spoiled my story, and I was a little cross about it. Judge Woodford was present, and he told a pleasant little tale about my grandfather having been very cross on one occasion, and having pulled somebody’s nose, and I said my crossness was a case of atavism on my part. And so it was turned into a joke. When we were leaving I was sorry I had been short with Anne Clavering, so I went up and asked her to come and see me on my next day at home, and to pour tea for me—that I still held to the good old fashion of keeping a day at home and seeing my friends. And what do you think the minx said? She was very sorry, but she had an attack of atavism, too,—her grandfather wasn’t used to afternoon tea and she had never acquired any real taste for it!”
Baskerville laughed delightedly.
“Oh, it wasn’t so clever, after all,” said Mrs. Luttrell, smiling with that unshakable good humor which was the most exasperating thing on earth to all her enemies and her friends alike. “It is just because you’re in love with Anne Clavering; and I think she likes you pretty well, too.”
Baskerville sat up then, sobered in an instant. What Mrs. Luttrell knew or suspected all Washington would shortly know. “Why do you say that?” he asked quietly.
“Because I think it, that’s why. It’s one of the strangest things in the world that people in love think all the rest of the world blind and deaf. And a woman lets her secret out just as readily as a man. I say Anne Clavering likes you. I don’t say she is pining and can’t eat and sleep for you; but I do say she likes you, though. And I feel sorry for the girl—such a family! You ought to see how that divorcée, Mrs. Denman, goes on with Count von Kappf, who, I believe, has been sent over here by a syndicate to marry an American heiress. Nobody knows what Anne Clavering has to suffer for the conduct of that sister of hers.”
“And you, who call yourself a Christian, had to add to Miss Clavering’s mortification.”
“Oh, it was only a trifle, and she came out ahead.”
“Anyhow, you shall apologize to her. Do you understand me, Sara Luttrell? You shall apologize, and before me, too.”
“Very well,” replied Mrs. Luttrell, unabashed. “The first time I catch you and Anne Clavering together I’ll apologize.”
Baskerville sat silent for a while as Mrs. Luttrell luxuriously toasted her toes. Presently he said, “So people are kind enough to say that I am in love with Miss Clavering?”
“Yes, indeed. People are always kind enough to say things—and a great many people are saying that you are in love with her. You haven’t escaped notice as much as you thought.”
“I don’t desire to escape notice. And I only hope enough people will say it so it will get to Miss Clavering’s ears. Then she may not be so surprised as to throw me over when—the opportunity comes. I may be a good many sorts of a blamed fool, Sara, but I am not such a fool as to be anything but flattered when my name is associated with Miss Clavering’s.”
“Very decently said. But how are you going to manage about this senatorial investigation—trying to ruin the father as a preliminary to marrying the daughter?”
Baskerville grew grave at once. The investigation was on in earnest. The committee which had been appointed before the adjournment of Congress had begun its sittings directly upon the meeting of Congress, and Baskerville had at once come into prominence as one of the representatives of the Civil Service League. The questionof Clavering’s culpability with regard to the land grants was complicated with the open barter and sale of Federal offices, and the Civil Service League had taken it up actively. The League was in no way bound by senatorial courtesy, and it had a formidable array of evidence to produce, which pointed straight to criminal as well as civil indictments. Baskerville found himself in a difficult position. He had gone too far in one direction toward exposing Senator Clavering, and his heart had carried him too far in another direction, for he was at last beginning to realize that he had fallen in love with Anne Clavering—a path upon which a strong man never halts. It is your weakling who falls halfway in love and then stops.
Mrs. Luttrell studied Baskerville keenly. Herself a sentimentalist in disguise, she loved Baskerville the better for doing what she had long dreaded—for she had a woman’s jealousy of another woman’s usurping the first place with this nephew-in-law, who was son, companion, and comrade in one. But at least he did not contemplate foisting a pink-and-white nonentity upon her; Mrs. Luttrell always declared herself afraid of silly women. She not only liked Anne Clavering, but she saw in her a large and generousspirit, who would not, by small artifices, try to come between Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell. And the ineradicable interest which is every woman’s inalienable right in a love-affair was strong in Mrs. Luttrell’s breast. She began to wish that Baskerville and Anne would marry; and after sitting quite silent for ten minutes watching Baskerville’s moody face, she suddenly got up, went over to him, and smoothing the hair back from his forehead, kissed it tenderly. Two tears dropped upon his brow. Baskerville looked up and took her hands in his. He spoke no word, but he knew that the memory of the man so long dead was poignant still; and Mrs. Luttrell, after a pause, said in a low voice:—
“I hope Anne Clavering will love you as I loved my Richard. And if you can make her as happy as he made me—Good night. I can’t bear to speak much of it, even to you.”
“If any woman ever loves me as you loved my uncle, I should think myself eternally blessed with such love. Good night, Sara dear.”
He kissed her warmly, went out of the room and downstairs and across the garden to his own house, and into his library. The first thing he saw upon the big library table was a mass of documents relating to the K. F. R. land grants.Baskerville pushed them away, and taking up a well-thumbed volume of Theocritus tried to forget himself in the pictures of the fair shining of the Sicilian sun, in the sound of the pipe of Daphnis, in the complainings of the two poor old fishermen lying by night in their wattled cabin on the sand dunes.
All was in vain. His thoughts were no sooner diverted from Anne Clavering than they turned to Clavering and his affairs. How amazing was this man who had rough-hewn his way to a high place, to enormous wealth, to great power, from which he was likely to be thrown headlong into an abyss of shame! Baskerville had very little doubt that, no matter how successful might be the suits against Clavering, he would manage to retain great tangible sums of money. Men of the Clavering type hold on to their money more intelligently than to their supposititious honor. And finding it impossible to get away from his own thoughts, even in books which had heretofore been an unfailing sedative, Baskerville went to bed, and tossed in true lover’s fashion half the remaining night, before he fell into a troubled sleep to dream of Anne Clavering.
Chapter TwelveIt is said that all truly benevolent women are matchmakers, and although Mrs. Thorndyke would have indignantly denied the charge of being a matchmaker, it was an indisputable fact that within a fortnight of dining at Mrs. Luttrell’s she contrived an impromptu dinner at which Anne Clavering and Baskerville were the first guests to be asked; and if they had declined, it is doubtful if the dinner would have come off at all. However, they both accepted; and Mrs. Thorndyke, whether by inadvertence, as she stoutly alleged, or by design, as Thorndyke charged, had Baskerville take Anne in to dinner.Some faint reflection of the rumor which was flying about Washington concerning Baskerville’s devotion had reached Anne Clavering’s ears. It gave a delightful shyness to her eyes, a warm color to her usually pale cheeks. Something in Baskerville’s manner—the ingenuity with which he managed to perform every little service for her himself, conveyed subtly but plainly to Anne his interest in her. She had been deeply flattered andeven made happy by Baskerville’s calling at last at her house. There was every reason why he should remain away—so much Anne had admitted to herself often, and always with a burning blush, remembering what she knew and had read about the investigation through which her father was passing. But Baskerville had come, and there must have been a powerful force, much stronger than her mother’s timid invitation, to bring him. Perhaps he came because he could not stay away.At this thought Anne, who was sitting at her dressing-table after the dinner at the Thorndykes’, caught sight of her own face in the mirror. A happy smile hovered about the corners of her mouth, her eyes became eloquent. Women, being close students of their own emotions, can always detect the dawning and the development of this silent but intense interest in a certain man, an interest which is born, grows, and often dies for want of nourishment, but sometimes lives and thrives on neglect—and sometimes,—O glorious consummation!—comes into its kingdom of love. Anne Clavering, who had passed her twenty-seventh birthday, and who, shamed and indignant at the conduct of her sisters, had maintained a haughty reserve toward men and hadhitherto found it easy, knew that it was not without meaning she felt herself watching for Baskerville’s entrance into a room; that she was secretly uneasy until he had placed himself beside her; that when he talked, an instant, sweet, and positive mental sympathy came into being between them which seemed to bring them together without any volition on their part.January was flying by. Anne Clavering went out quite as much as Mrs. Luttrell, but with a different motive. To Mrs. Luttrell society was a necessity, as a thing becomes after a lifetime of habitude. Anne Clavering would have liked society well enough if it had been merely a means of pleasure. But she had to maintain before the world a position which her father and her two sisters jeopardized every hour. The place of the Claverings in society was by no means a fixed one. All the idle and careless people, all the worshippers of money, all those who love to eat and drink at somebody else’s expense, all those who pursue pleasure without conscience or delicacy, thronged the Clavering house.Clavering himself was seldom invited out, and did not regret it. The small talk of society bored him, and he was conscious that he did not shine unless he had the centre of the stage. Occasionallyhe met a man who interested him, and semi-occasionally a woman who did the same. But no woman had ever interested him as much as Elizabeth Darrell. He was amazed, himself, at the power she had of drawing him to her; for, under the specious pretence of getting information from General Brandon concerning the K. F. R. land grants, Clavering soon managed to spend two or three evenings a week in Elizabeth’s company. He speedily found out General Brandon’s ways—his hour or two at the club in the evening, his visits to his old friends, all of which were clock-like in their regularity. On these evenings, when General Brandon returned to meet an appointment, Clavering would invariably be found established in the study. Any other man in the world but General Brandon would have had his suspicions aroused, but the General was born to be hoodwinked. His chivalric honor, his limpidness of character, his entire innocence, were strong forces, as all these things are. He radiated good influences upon honest men, and gave active encouragement to every rogue of every sort who had dealings with him.Elizabeth Darrell, however, was not so simple as her father. After that first evening she saw that Clavering was determined to secure hersociety. She wondered at herself for submitting to it, but in truth it would have been more remarkable if she had not done so. The extreme dulness of her life made almost any companionship a resource, and Clavering had certain fascinating qualities which were very obvious. Without making himself the hero of his own recitals, he gave the most vivid and interesting pictures of life on the wide Wyoming ranges, on the Staked Plains, in California mining camps, amid the boulders of the Yellowstone. Elizabeth listened under a kind of bewitchment, while Clavering, in his rich voice, told the story of those years—a story pulsing with movement, brilliant with adventure, with life and death at issue every moment. She began to understand this man’s power over men, and to recognize a kind of compulsion he exercised over her. She might have remained out of the study, where, with a map spread out, to amuse General Brandon, Clavering talked to him and at Elizabeth. She was present not only because she wished to be, but she recognized distinctly that she also came because Clavering wished her to come. Especially was this true with regard to those odd half-hours which she spent with Clavering alone.Once she went out of the room when Serenabrought Clavering’s card up. In a minute or two Serena came with a message: “De gent’mun seh he mus’ see you, Miss ’Liz’beth, ’bout some dem papers outen de Gin’l’s trunk.” And Elizabeth, obeying this strange compulsion, went back into the room, and saw Clavering’s eyes light up with lambent fire at sight of her.That he was deeply and even desperately in love with her from the start there could be no question to any woman, and least of all to a woman as clever as Elizabeth Darrell. She received a profound shock when this was quickly revealed to her, not by any explicit word of Clavering’s, but by all his words, his looks, his course of conduct. He knew too much to venture to make open love to Elizabeth, and in other ways she made him keep his distance in a manner which Clavering had never experienced in his life before. He would no more have dared the smallest personal liberty with Elizabeth Darrell than he would have ventured to put a stick of dynamite into the fire. He had never really been afraid of a woman before, and this of itself added a powerful interest to Elizabeth. He realized fully the difficulties which beset him when he thought of his chances of making Elizabeth his wife. He could managea divorce from his present wife in a way not known by the poor soul herself, or by Anne, or by any one else in the world except Clavering. That once accomplished, though, Elizabeth remained still to be won. She probably inherited the Southern prejudice against divorce, and it might not be easy to overcome it. And there was General Brandon to be considered. Clavering, studying that honest, simple, handsome face across the table from him, bent earnestly over the ridiculous maps and useless memoranda, remembered that the General still cherished an ancient pair of duelling pistols, which he had inherited from his grandfather. He had taken these antique shooting-irons out of the old escritoire in the corner and had shown them, not without pride and reverence, to Clavering, saying solemnly:—“These weapons, my dear sir, have never been used since my grandfather purchased them in 1804, when he unfortunately became involved in a dispute concerning politics with a gentleman of the highest character in Virginia. They had a hostile meeting and shots were exchanged, but no blood was spilled. I am exceedingly glad that the old practice of duelling over trifles is gone, never to return. But there is one classof cases left in which a gentleman has but one resource—the duello. That is, when the honor of the ladies of his family is impugned. In most instances the transgressor should be shot down like a dog. But there are other cases when, owing to imprudence on the lady’s part, the code must be invoked. Thank God, the honor of Southern women is safe in their own keeping. But behind her, every woman, sir, of every country, should have the protection of a man with arms in his hands, if need be. I am aware that my ideas are antiquated; but I have always held them and I always shall.”Clavering listened to this without a word or smile. Nothing would be more likely, if he should betray his design toward Elizabeth, than that he should find himself looking down the barrel of one of those queer old pistols in the hands of this soft-voiced, gullible, guileless old Don Quixote. These, however, were but obstacles; and obstacles, in Clavering’s lexicon, were things to be overcome.In the narrowness and dulness of her life, Elizabeth naturally thought much of Clavering. If she had been asked at any moment whether she would marry him, should he get a divorce, she would instantly and with horror have answered“no.” But she had seen enough of the great, self-indulgent world to know that divorce and remarriage are by no means the impossible and unheard-of things which simple people in staid communities think they are. She began to speculate idly, in her lonely afternoon walks and in the evenings when Clavering did not come, as to what would happen if she should marry Clavering. Whenever she caught herself at this she would recoil from the idea in horror. But it returned. Pelham’s conduct had shattered all her ideals of man’s love. If he could act as he had done, where was the difference between the love of the best and the worst of men?This bitterness toward Pelham was much increased by the receipt of a letter from Mr. McBean, the solicitor, more hard, more peremptory, more insulting, than any he had yet written her. There had been no trouble in finding Elizabeth’s whereabouts, for although she had not thought fit to notify McBean of her leaving England, it was known that she had returned to America, and McBean’s letter reached her promptly. In it threats of legal proceedings were repeated, with an earnestness terrible to Elizabeth. This letter made her ill in bed. She called it a neuralgic headache, to soothe her father, but in truth it wasa collapse from alarm and grief. It was an emergency which could only be helped by money; and a large sum of money, it seemed to Elizabeth—twenty-five hundred dollars to begin with, and then cost and expense which she could not understand added to it. This referred solely to the necklace. What else had to be accounted for nearly staggered her,—but where was she to get two or three thousand dollars? Her father could not have produced it had he converted his blood into money; and the poor old house, plastered with mortgages from roof to cellar, would scarcely sell for more than what had been borrowed on it.It was now the height of the season, and the whirl of gayety and of politics made Washington seethe like a caldron. Carriages were dashing about from the early afternoon to all hours of the morning. Houses were lighted up, music resounded, men and women rushed hither and thither in the race after pleasure.At the great white building on Capitol Hill history was being steadily and rapidly made. One subject, not wholly political, aroused deep interest on the House side as well as in the Senate. The investigating committee on the K. F. R. land grants had already held severalmeetings, and it was known that for some reason of political expedience the party in power wished the question settled at the earliest possible date. There was, among certain senators who did not really understand the matter, a disposition to throw Clavering overboard like Jonah. Those senators who really understood the question reckoned Clavering to be perfectly deserving of a long term in state’s prison. There was no hope of acquittal for him from the moment the whole evidence against him was known to be available; and for this nobody deserved so much credit as Richard Baskerville. He had been more than two years unravelling the tangled web of litigation, and only a very astute lawyer, with money and time to spend on it, could have done it at all. It was quite clear now, compact and available. A lesser man than Clavering would at this stage of the proceedings have resigned from the Senate and decamped.Clavering, however, was incapable of understanding defeat, and had no more thought of surrender than the Old Guard at Waterloo. His entertainments, always lavish and frequent, grew more lavish and more frequent. Washington was not big enough to supply half the luxuries he required; New York was called upon, and Parisand Vienna, for rarities of all sorts to make the dinners and balls at the Claverings’ more brilliant, more startling. Élise and Lydia revelled in this; Anne’s good taste and good sense revolted against it. She read every word in the newspapers concerning her father, and she began to see that ruin and disgrace were threatening him with fearful quickness. Even Reginald Clavering, dull and self-centred, became frightened and ashamed. Not so Clavering; he was not the man to “roll darkling down the torrent of his fate.” He would go if he had to go, with all the splendor which unlimited money and assurance could contrive. It gave him little spells of laughter and amusement when he thought how much Washington would miss his princely entertaining, in case he should be struck down by his enemies. If that should occur, however, he reflected that Washington was not the only city, nor America even the only country, in the world. He was not really much grieved at the possibility of leaving public life, although he fought with a gladiator’s courage against being thrown out. He had accomplished much of what he had gone into public life for,—the making of a vaster fortune than the vast one he had before. And then, that new dream which had come into his life—ElizabethDarrell. If he should win her, as he fully intended and expected, she might not find Washington a very comfortable place of residence. He would give her a splendid hotel in Paris, or a grand establishment in London. He would spend half the year in America, in the West, which he liked far better than the East; and the other half he could spend having what he would have called “a great big bat” in Europe. He might go into European financiering and teach those old fogies a thing or two—Clavering indulged in many Alnaschar dreams about this time.One afternoon in the latter part of January Elizabeth went out for her usual solitary walk. It had been very cold, with snow, and the thermometer that day suddenly jumped into the sixties, bringing a damp white fog which enveloped everything. Elizabeth walked straight down the street on which she lived, without regard to where she was going; she meant to be out of doors only for so many hours, and to find in the loneliness of a walk a change from the loneliness of the house. It was within a week of the time she had received McBean’s letter, and it lay heavy on her heart.She had walked but a few squares, when she heard a step behind her which she recognizedas Clavering’s. She stopped involuntarily, the red blood surging into her pale face. In a moment Clavering was by her side.“I saw you go out, and followed you,” he said.Elizabeth made no reply. He had never joined her on the street before, although sometimes she had passed him getting in and out of his automobile or driving behind a notable pair of sorrels. But this time he had not only joined her—he had followed her. Elizabeth’s sudden flushing was by no means lost on Clavering.They walked on due east through the mist which enveloped all things, the snow still piled in drifts along the edges of the streets. They spoke little, but Elizabeth felt instinctively that Clavering had something of consequence to say to her when they got into the unfamiliar part of the town, where he could be certain of being unobserved. The street, which had been fashionable as far as Sixteenth Street, grew semifashionable, and then became a region of lodging-houses, places with dressmakers’ signs, and an occasional small shop. Then, growing more and more remote, it became a street of comfortable, quiet houses, tenanted by people to whom the West End of Washington mattered as little as thewest end of Bagdad. By that time they had gone a mile. They came to one of those small triangular parks which abound in Washington, where there are seats under the trees and asphalt walks winding in and out of shrubbery.Elizabeth, under the spell of compulsion which Clavering had cast upon her, made no objection to entering the park with him. Usually it was completely open to observation, but now the soft and clinging fog drew a misty curtain between the little park and the world. Clavering led the way to a bench among a clump of evergreens, and Elizabeth, without a word of protest, sat down upon the bench, the Senator at her side.“There are places within half a mile of everywhere in this town,” he said, “where one can be as secure from observation as if one were in a back street of the city of Damascus. And if I had designed this afternoon for meeting you and talking confidentially with you, nothing could have been better. The people who live in these houses seem always to be asleep or dead, and if they knew our names, they couldn’t recognize us ten feet off. Now,” he continued, “tell me what is troubling you—for I have seen ever since that first glimpse of you that something is preying upon you.”Elizabeth remained silent.“What is it?” asked Clavering again, with authority in his voice. And Elizabeth, still with that strange feeling of being obliged to do what Clavering required, told him the whole story of the necklace.Clavering listened attentively. Elizabeth had tried to keep out of it the personal note, the shame and disappointment and resentment she felt at Pelham’s conduct; but she was dealing with a very astute man, who read her with extraordinary keenness, and who saw the good policy, from his own point of view, of still further embittering her feelings toward Pelham.“I should say that fellow Pelham ought to have shown you a little more consideration, especially as you say he inherited everything.”“Yes.”“A woman, standing alone, is almost bound to fall in with just such brutes as Pelham and that Scotch solicitor. Mind, I say that you were obliged to meet with some men who were traitors, all in fact except those who happen to be in love with you. Look—” he opened his watch, and on the inner case Elizabeth saw a Greek sentence engraved, [Greek: memnêstein apistein]. “You didn’t think I knew Greek. Of course I don’t. No man bornand raised in my circumstances ever knew Greek, and I never expect to know it. I have heard about some one of those old classics learning to play the fiddle when he was eighty, and always thought him a great fool for so doing. No, I only had this put in Greek to puzzle fools; it means, ‘Remember to distrust.’ It was a pity that you had not remembered to distrust that Pelham scoundrel.”Elizabeth remained silent and almost stunned at this characterization of Pelham, and Clavering, seeing he had gone far enough in that direction, said:—“If the diamond broker—pawn-broker, I should call him—gave you five hundred pounds on the necklace, it was probably worth fifteen hundred. However, fifteen hundred pounds is a small matter.”“It is a great deal to me and always was, except for that short time in London when we thought ourselves the richest people in the world,” replied Elizabeth.“You may, if you choose, be one of the richest women in America.”ill236“The little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.”Elizabeth’s face had grown deathly pale. She was sensible of the dishonor of any proposal Clavering might make to her. All of the stories she had heard from the beginning about Clavering’s intention to divorce his wife rushed upon her mind—all of her own vague and haunting speculations for the past few weeks. She remained silent, but every moment she grew more agitated.Clavering was silent for a few moments, allowing the leaven to work. Then he continued: “Of course there is but one way to do this. I can get a divorce and then you must marry me. No doubt you have a lot of unpractical ideas about divorce, but let me tell you that when a man and a woman are indispensable to each other—as you are to me—what does anything on earth matter?”No one listening to Clavering’s cool and measured tones would have surmised what he was proposing to Elizabeth; nor did he attempt the smallest endearment, free as they were from observation, for the fog grew denser every moment and the little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.At his last remarks Elizabeth attempted some faint protest, which went unheeded by Clavering, who spoke again: “People call me a successful man. So I am, with money, politics, cards, and horses. But I have no luck with women. First, I married before I was twenty-one—cursed folly that it was! You have seen my wife—I’ll sayno more. Then, my eldest and youngest daughters—well, they are like me in some ways, that’s enough. Élise has been through the divorce court. It cost me something like fifty thousand dollars to keep the truth about her from coming out. Lydia will go the same way. My best plan with them will be to marry them to men who will get the upper hand of them—keep a tight rein over them. So far, I haven’t succeeded; and I am seriously considering giving them each a handsome fortune, marrying them to foreigners, and getting them out of the country.”Elizabeth’s pale face had grown red while Clavering was speaking. He was close enough to see it, even by the uncertain light that penetrated the mist.“You think I’m a brute, eh? No, on the contrary I have a strong hankering after decency in my womenkind.”“Your daughter Anne—” Elizabeth spoke falteringly.“Ah, yes, bad luck again. Anne has twice the sense of her sisters, is really more attractive and is perfectly certain to behave herself. But she is on her mother’s side, and if—or when—I do get a divorce, I shall have to fight her, and she is the only one of my children whose opposition wouldamount to anything. You know what a Miss Nancy Reginald is.”“But—but—how can you get a divorce if Mrs. Clavering—““Doesn’t want it? Well, I never was properly married to her in the first place. She didn’t know it at the time, and I was a youngster and didn’t know it, either; but our marriage wasn’t regular at all. I should have got the license in Kentucky instead of in Ohio, where we crossed the river to get married. So we are not really married and never have been, according to law. When I mention the subject to Mrs. Clavering, I shall offer to get the divorce; if she is contumacious, I shall simply prove that we have never been married at all. That will be hard on the children, and on that account I think there is no doubt she would agree to the divorce, if it were not for Anne. Anne, however, doesn’t know anything about the defect in the marriage, and I rather think she will back down when she finds out just where we stand.”Elizabeth listened to this with horror. But it was horror of the deed, not of the man. Clavering’s calm and lucid presentation of the case, the absence of hypocrisy, his quiet determination, seemed to lift him out of the class of vulgarcriminals and make him almost respectable. And then he went on to give his side of the case, and his voice had in it a strange note of longing.“I have before me twenty years yet, and although I am reckoned a man who can live on bonds and stocks and lawsuits and fighting other men, still I’ve had my dreams—I have them still. If I could find a woman who would be a wife to me, and yet could be an intellectual companion for me—that would be something that all my money hasn’t brought me. Do you blame a man for longing after it? Don’t you think I am more nearly human for wanting it than if I were satisfied to go on all my life as I have done for the last thirty-five years?”“Yes.” Elizabeth spoke unwillingly, but the assent was forced out of her. And whether it was his words, his voice,—always singularly captivating,—his compelling glance, or his powerful personality, Elizabeth began to feel a toleration, along with a reprehension, of him. For Clavering, like all men, was made up of things to admire and things to abhor; only he possessed both in a stronger degree than common. He was much older than Elizabeth, but he had not lost the fire and vigor of youth.Elizabeth’s agitation had subsided somewhat,but she was still unable or unwilling to speak. The gray mist was becoming denser, and they could see the gas-lamps studding the fast-falling darkness like jewels; the sound of wheels and hoofs upon the asphalt was deadened by the fog and grew fainter, the street was quieter, more deserted even than Washington streets usually are. In the little park, with the masses of evergreen shrubbery around them, they were as alone, as little subject to intrusion, as if they had been on a desert island. After a considerable pause Clavering spoke again.“I saw you first, just ten years ago, one night as you were waiting on the street with your father, for some lady to take you to a ball. You dropped a little trinket from around your neck.”Elizabeth started with surprise. “That was the night I first met my husband—and Hugh Pelham. And I lost my little pearl heart and never found it.”“I was the guilty man,” said Clavering, with a smile. “I crushed your heart under my foot.” It was an accidental joining of words, but Clavering wished he had expressed himself otherwise. The words had an ominous sound, and Elizabeth, after looking at him intently for a few minutes, turned her head away.Clavering, hastening to recall his lost ground, added: “The day will come when I will give you the most superb diamond locket that the South African mines can produce. I will make duchesses envy you your jewels and princesses cry with envy of them. I remembered you ever after that night, and a month ago I met you. Don’t think people are fools who talk of love at first sight for anybody at any age, or under any circumstances. The moment my eyes fell upon you I was anxious to know you. When I knew you, I wanted to know you better. When I knew you better, I became willing to do anything for you, to jeopardize anything in order to marry you. And I will give you a great fortune, millions of money, of which I shall get very little benefit, because you will outlive me many years and probably marry some other man and endow him, by gad, with my money. I will go anywhere you may desire to live, for I don’t believe you would consent to live in Washington. You may have a splendid house in London or Paris, a great country house, a château, any and everywhere you like, and you may command me as no other woman has ever commanded me. Now will you marry me after I am divorced?”Elizabeth felt dazed. She had known from thefirst what was coming, but when Clavering put his wish into words it was as strange and staggering as if the idea had never before occurred to her. The thought of committing so great a wrong upon another woman, as Clavering suggested, appalled her—a wrong so vast and far-reaching that she turned away from the contemplation of it. But she did not fly from the temptation, and the temptation which is not fled from is the conqueror.Clavering interpreted her silence with ease. He took her hand, pulled off her glove, and held her soft palm between his two strong ones. Five minutes passed; they seemed an hour to Elizabeth, frightened yet fascinated, her mind overwhelmed with what Clavering had told her, had promised her, had urged upon her. Through it all came the cry of her heart for Pelham. Had he been true to her, this temptation would never have come in her way. And as he had forgotten her and had even persecuted her, what did it matter what became of her, so she had ease instead of this frightful poverty, companionship instead of this dreadful loneliness, security instead of this perpetual terror over the small and sordid matter of a few hundred pounds? Clavering was too clever a man to urge her overmuch when he sawthat he had a tempter always with her in her own self. At last, after five minutes of agitated silence, she managed to withdraw her hand and rise. Clavering, without a word, walked with her out of the little park, hailed a passing hansom in the dusk and put her in, only saying at the last:—“I will see you again as soon as possible. Meanwhile, remember you have but to say one word and all is yours.”The hansom rolled off, and Clavering, putting his hands in his pockets, walked away at a quick gait. The expression on his face was like that of a successful gladiator. It was not pleasant to see.
It is said that all truly benevolent women are matchmakers, and although Mrs. Thorndyke would have indignantly denied the charge of being a matchmaker, it was an indisputable fact that within a fortnight of dining at Mrs. Luttrell’s she contrived an impromptu dinner at which Anne Clavering and Baskerville were the first guests to be asked; and if they had declined, it is doubtful if the dinner would have come off at all. However, they both accepted; and Mrs. Thorndyke, whether by inadvertence, as she stoutly alleged, or by design, as Thorndyke charged, had Baskerville take Anne in to dinner.
Some faint reflection of the rumor which was flying about Washington concerning Baskerville’s devotion had reached Anne Clavering’s ears. It gave a delightful shyness to her eyes, a warm color to her usually pale cheeks. Something in Baskerville’s manner—the ingenuity with which he managed to perform every little service for her himself, conveyed subtly but plainly to Anne his interest in her. She had been deeply flattered andeven made happy by Baskerville’s calling at last at her house. There was every reason why he should remain away—so much Anne had admitted to herself often, and always with a burning blush, remembering what she knew and had read about the investigation through which her father was passing. But Baskerville had come, and there must have been a powerful force, much stronger than her mother’s timid invitation, to bring him. Perhaps he came because he could not stay away.
At this thought Anne, who was sitting at her dressing-table after the dinner at the Thorndykes’, caught sight of her own face in the mirror. A happy smile hovered about the corners of her mouth, her eyes became eloquent. Women, being close students of their own emotions, can always detect the dawning and the development of this silent but intense interest in a certain man, an interest which is born, grows, and often dies for want of nourishment, but sometimes lives and thrives on neglect—and sometimes,—O glorious consummation!—comes into its kingdom of love. Anne Clavering, who had passed her twenty-seventh birthday, and who, shamed and indignant at the conduct of her sisters, had maintained a haughty reserve toward men and hadhitherto found it easy, knew that it was not without meaning she felt herself watching for Baskerville’s entrance into a room; that she was secretly uneasy until he had placed himself beside her; that when he talked, an instant, sweet, and positive mental sympathy came into being between them which seemed to bring them together without any volition on their part.
January was flying by. Anne Clavering went out quite as much as Mrs. Luttrell, but with a different motive. To Mrs. Luttrell society was a necessity, as a thing becomes after a lifetime of habitude. Anne Clavering would have liked society well enough if it had been merely a means of pleasure. But she had to maintain before the world a position which her father and her two sisters jeopardized every hour. The place of the Claverings in society was by no means a fixed one. All the idle and careless people, all the worshippers of money, all those who love to eat and drink at somebody else’s expense, all those who pursue pleasure without conscience or delicacy, thronged the Clavering house.
Clavering himself was seldom invited out, and did not regret it. The small talk of society bored him, and he was conscious that he did not shine unless he had the centre of the stage. Occasionallyhe met a man who interested him, and semi-occasionally a woman who did the same. But no woman had ever interested him as much as Elizabeth Darrell. He was amazed, himself, at the power she had of drawing him to her; for, under the specious pretence of getting information from General Brandon concerning the K. F. R. land grants, Clavering soon managed to spend two or three evenings a week in Elizabeth’s company. He speedily found out General Brandon’s ways—his hour or two at the club in the evening, his visits to his old friends, all of which were clock-like in their regularity. On these evenings, when General Brandon returned to meet an appointment, Clavering would invariably be found established in the study. Any other man in the world but General Brandon would have had his suspicions aroused, but the General was born to be hoodwinked. His chivalric honor, his limpidness of character, his entire innocence, were strong forces, as all these things are. He radiated good influences upon honest men, and gave active encouragement to every rogue of every sort who had dealings with him.
Elizabeth Darrell, however, was not so simple as her father. After that first evening she saw that Clavering was determined to secure hersociety. She wondered at herself for submitting to it, but in truth it would have been more remarkable if she had not done so. The extreme dulness of her life made almost any companionship a resource, and Clavering had certain fascinating qualities which were very obvious. Without making himself the hero of his own recitals, he gave the most vivid and interesting pictures of life on the wide Wyoming ranges, on the Staked Plains, in California mining camps, amid the boulders of the Yellowstone. Elizabeth listened under a kind of bewitchment, while Clavering, in his rich voice, told the story of those years—a story pulsing with movement, brilliant with adventure, with life and death at issue every moment. She began to understand this man’s power over men, and to recognize a kind of compulsion he exercised over her. She might have remained out of the study, where, with a map spread out, to amuse General Brandon, Clavering talked to him and at Elizabeth. She was present not only because she wished to be, but she recognized distinctly that she also came because Clavering wished her to come. Especially was this true with regard to those odd half-hours which she spent with Clavering alone.
Once she went out of the room when Serenabrought Clavering’s card up. In a minute or two Serena came with a message: “De gent’mun seh he mus’ see you, Miss ’Liz’beth, ’bout some dem papers outen de Gin’l’s trunk.” And Elizabeth, obeying this strange compulsion, went back into the room, and saw Clavering’s eyes light up with lambent fire at sight of her.
That he was deeply and even desperately in love with her from the start there could be no question to any woman, and least of all to a woman as clever as Elizabeth Darrell. She received a profound shock when this was quickly revealed to her, not by any explicit word of Clavering’s, but by all his words, his looks, his course of conduct. He knew too much to venture to make open love to Elizabeth, and in other ways she made him keep his distance in a manner which Clavering had never experienced in his life before. He would no more have dared the smallest personal liberty with Elizabeth Darrell than he would have ventured to put a stick of dynamite into the fire. He had never really been afraid of a woman before, and this of itself added a powerful interest to Elizabeth. He realized fully the difficulties which beset him when he thought of his chances of making Elizabeth his wife. He could managea divorce from his present wife in a way not known by the poor soul herself, or by Anne, or by any one else in the world except Clavering. That once accomplished, though, Elizabeth remained still to be won. She probably inherited the Southern prejudice against divorce, and it might not be easy to overcome it. And there was General Brandon to be considered. Clavering, studying that honest, simple, handsome face across the table from him, bent earnestly over the ridiculous maps and useless memoranda, remembered that the General still cherished an ancient pair of duelling pistols, which he had inherited from his grandfather. He had taken these antique shooting-irons out of the old escritoire in the corner and had shown them, not without pride and reverence, to Clavering, saying solemnly:—
“These weapons, my dear sir, have never been used since my grandfather purchased them in 1804, when he unfortunately became involved in a dispute concerning politics with a gentleman of the highest character in Virginia. They had a hostile meeting and shots were exchanged, but no blood was spilled. I am exceedingly glad that the old practice of duelling over trifles is gone, never to return. But there is one classof cases left in which a gentleman has but one resource—the duello. That is, when the honor of the ladies of his family is impugned. In most instances the transgressor should be shot down like a dog. But there are other cases when, owing to imprudence on the lady’s part, the code must be invoked. Thank God, the honor of Southern women is safe in their own keeping. But behind her, every woman, sir, of every country, should have the protection of a man with arms in his hands, if need be. I am aware that my ideas are antiquated; but I have always held them and I always shall.”
Clavering listened to this without a word or smile. Nothing would be more likely, if he should betray his design toward Elizabeth, than that he should find himself looking down the barrel of one of those queer old pistols in the hands of this soft-voiced, gullible, guileless old Don Quixote. These, however, were but obstacles; and obstacles, in Clavering’s lexicon, were things to be overcome.
In the narrowness and dulness of her life, Elizabeth naturally thought much of Clavering. If she had been asked at any moment whether she would marry him, should he get a divorce, she would instantly and with horror have answered“no.” But she had seen enough of the great, self-indulgent world to know that divorce and remarriage are by no means the impossible and unheard-of things which simple people in staid communities think they are. She began to speculate idly, in her lonely afternoon walks and in the evenings when Clavering did not come, as to what would happen if she should marry Clavering. Whenever she caught herself at this she would recoil from the idea in horror. But it returned. Pelham’s conduct had shattered all her ideals of man’s love. If he could act as he had done, where was the difference between the love of the best and the worst of men?
This bitterness toward Pelham was much increased by the receipt of a letter from Mr. McBean, the solicitor, more hard, more peremptory, more insulting, than any he had yet written her. There had been no trouble in finding Elizabeth’s whereabouts, for although she had not thought fit to notify McBean of her leaving England, it was known that she had returned to America, and McBean’s letter reached her promptly. In it threats of legal proceedings were repeated, with an earnestness terrible to Elizabeth. This letter made her ill in bed. She called it a neuralgic headache, to soothe her father, but in truth it wasa collapse from alarm and grief. It was an emergency which could only be helped by money; and a large sum of money, it seemed to Elizabeth—twenty-five hundred dollars to begin with, and then cost and expense which she could not understand added to it. This referred solely to the necklace. What else had to be accounted for nearly staggered her,—but where was she to get two or three thousand dollars? Her father could not have produced it had he converted his blood into money; and the poor old house, plastered with mortgages from roof to cellar, would scarcely sell for more than what had been borrowed on it.
It was now the height of the season, and the whirl of gayety and of politics made Washington seethe like a caldron. Carriages were dashing about from the early afternoon to all hours of the morning. Houses were lighted up, music resounded, men and women rushed hither and thither in the race after pleasure.
At the great white building on Capitol Hill history was being steadily and rapidly made. One subject, not wholly political, aroused deep interest on the House side as well as in the Senate. The investigating committee on the K. F. R. land grants had already held severalmeetings, and it was known that for some reason of political expedience the party in power wished the question settled at the earliest possible date. There was, among certain senators who did not really understand the matter, a disposition to throw Clavering overboard like Jonah. Those senators who really understood the question reckoned Clavering to be perfectly deserving of a long term in state’s prison. There was no hope of acquittal for him from the moment the whole evidence against him was known to be available; and for this nobody deserved so much credit as Richard Baskerville. He had been more than two years unravelling the tangled web of litigation, and only a very astute lawyer, with money and time to spend on it, could have done it at all. It was quite clear now, compact and available. A lesser man than Clavering would at this stage of the proceedings have resigned from the Senate and decamped.
Clavering, however, was incapable of understanding defeat, and had no more thought of surrender than the Old Guard at Waterloo. His entertainments, always lavish and frequent, grew more lavish and more frequent. Washington was not big enough to supply half the luxuries he required; New York was called upon, and Parisand Vienna, for rarities of all sorts to make the dinners and balls at the Claverings’ more brilliant, more startling. Élise and Lydia revelled in this; Anne’s good taste and good sense revolted against it. She read every word in the newspapers concerning her father, and she began to see that ruin and disgrace were threatening him with fearful quickness. Even Reginald Clavering, dull and self-centred, became frightened and ashamed. Not so Clavering; he was not the man to “roll darkling down the torrent of his fate.” He would go if he had to go, with all the splendor which unlimited money and assurance could contrive. It gave him little spells of laughter and amusement when he thought how much Washington would miss his princely entertaining, in case he should be struck down by his enemies. If that should occur, however, he reflected that Washington was not the only city, nor America even the only country, in the world. He was not really much grieved at the possibility of leaving public life, although he fought with a gladiator’s courage against being thrown out. He had accomplished much of what he had gone into public life for,—the making of a vaster fortune than the vast one he had before. And then, that new dream which had come into his life—ElizabethDarrell. If he should win her, as he fully intended and expected, she might not find Washington a very comfortable place of residence. He would give her a splendid hotel in Paris, or a grand establishment in London. He would spend half the year in America, in the West, which he liked far better than the East; and the other half he could spend having what he would have called “a great big bat” in Europe. He might go into European financiering and teach those old fogies a thing or two—Clavering indulged in many Alnaschar dreams about this time.
One afternoon in the latter part of January Elizabeth went out for her usual solitary walk. It had been very cold, with snow, and the thermometer that day suddenly jumped into the sixties, bringing a damp white fog which enveloped everything. Elizabeth walked straight down the street on which she lived, without regard to where she was going; she meant to be out of doors only for so many hours, and to find in the loneliness of a walk a change from the loneliness of the house. It was within a week of the time she had received McBean’s letter, and it lay heavy on her heart.
She had walked but a few squares, when she heard a step behind her which she recognizedas Clavering’s. She stopped involuntarily, the red blood surging into her pale face. In a moment Clavering was by her side.
“I saw you go out, and followed you,” he said.
Elizabeth made no reply. He had never joined her on the street before, although sometimes she had passed him getting in and out of his automobile or driving behind a notable pair of sorrels. But this time he had not only joined her—he had followed her. Elizabeth’s sudden flushing was by no means lost on Clavering.
They walked on due east through the mist which enveloped all things, the snow still piled in drifts along the edges of the streets. They spoke little, but Elizabeth felt instinctively that Clavering had something of consequence to say to her when they got into the unfamiliar part of the town, where he could be certain of being unobserved. The street, which had been fashionable as far as Sixteenth Street, grew semifashionable, and then became a region of lodging-houses, places with dressmakers’ signs, and an occasional small shop. Then, growing more and more remote, it became a street of comfortable, quiet houses, tenanted by people to whom the West End of Washington mattered as little as thewest end of Bagdad. By that time they had gone a mile. They came to one of those small triangular parks which abound in Washington, where there are seats under the trees and asphalt walks winding in and out of shrubbery.
Elizabeth, under the spell of compulsion which Clavering had cast upon her, made no objection to entering the park with him. Usually it was completely open to observation, but now the soft and clinging fog drew a misty curtain between the little park and the world. Clavering led the way to a bench among a clump of evergreens, and Elizabeth, without a word of protest, sat down upon the bench, the Senator at her side.
“There are places within half a mile of everywhere in this town,” he said, “where one can be as secure from observation as if one were in a back street of the city of Damascus. And if I had designed this afternoon for meeting you and talking confidentially with you, nothing could have been better. The people who live in these houses seem always to be asleep or dead, and if they knew our names, they couldn’t recognize us ten feet off. Now,” he continued, “tell me what is troubling you—for I have seen ever since that first glimpse of you that something is preying upon you.”
Elizabeth remained silent.
“What is it?” asked Clavering again, with authority in his voice. And Elizabeth, still with that strange feeling of being obliged to do what Clavering required, told him the whole story of the necklace.
Clavering listened attentively. Elizabeth had tried to keep out of it the personal note, the shame and disappointment and resentment she felt at Pelham’s conduct; but she was dealing with a very astute man, who read her with extraordinary keenness, and who saw the good policy, from his own point of view, of still further embittering her feelings toward Pelham.
“I should say that fellow Pelham ought to have shown you a little more consideration, especially as you say he inherited everything.”
“Yes.”
“A woman, standing alone, is almost bound to fall in with just such brutes as Pelham and that Scotch solicitor. Mind, I say that you were obliged to meet with some men who were traitors, all in fact except those who happen to be in love with you. Look—” he opened his watch, and on the inner case Elizabeth saw a Greek sentence engraved, [Greek: memnêstein apistein]. “You didn’t think I knew Greek. Of course I don’t. No man bornand raised in my circumstances ever knew Greek, and I never expect to know it. I have heard about some one of those old classics learning to play the fiddle when he was eighty, and always thought him a great fool for so doing. No, I only had this put in Greek to puzzle fools; it means, ‘Remember to distrust.’ It was a pity that you had not remembered to distrust that Pelham scoundrel.”
Elizabeth remained silent and almost stunned at this characterization of Pelham, and Clavering, seeing he had gone far enough in that direction, said:—
“If the diamond broker—pawn-broker, I should call him—gave you five hundred pounds on the necklace, it was probably worth fifteen hundred. However, fifteen hundred pounds is a small matter.”
“It is a great deal to me and always was, except for that short time in London when we thought ourselves the richest people in the world,” replied Elizabeth.
“You may, if you choose, be one of the richest women in America.”
ill236
“The little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.”
“The little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.”
“The little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.”
Elizabeth’s face had grown deathly pale. She was sensible of the dishonor of any proposal Clavering might make to her. All of the stories she had heard from the beginning about Clavering’s intention to divorce his wife rushed upon her mind—all of her own vague and haunting speculations for the past few weeks. She remained silent, but every moment she grew more agitated.
Clavering was silent for a few moments, allowing the leaven to work. Then he continued: “Of course there is but one way to do this. I can get a divorce and then you must marry me. No doubt you have a lot of unpractical ideas about divorce, but let me tell you that when a man and a woman are indispensable to each other—as you are to me—what does anything on earth matter?”
No one listening to Clavering’s cool and measured tones would have surmised what he was proposing to Elizabeth; nor did he attempt the smallest endearment, free as they were from observation, for the fog grew denser every moment and the little park was wholly deserted except for themselves.
At his last remarks Elizabeth attempted some faint protest, which went unheeded by Clavering, who spoke again: “People call me a successful man. So I am, with money, politics, cards, and horses. But I have no luck with women. First, I married before I was twenty-one—cursed folly that it was! You have seen my wife—I’ll sayno more. Then, my eldest and youngest daughters—well, they are like me in some ways, that’s enough. Élise has been through the divorce court. It cost me something like fifty thousand dollars to keep the truth about her from coming out. Lydia will go the same way. My best plan with them will be to marry them to men who will get the upper hand of them—keep a tight rein over them. So far, I haven’t succeeded; and I am seriously considering giving them each a handsome fortune, marrying them to foreigners, and getting them out of the country.”
Elizabeth’s pale face had grown red while Clavering was speaking. He was close enough to see it, even by the uncertain light that penetrated the mist.
“You think I’m a brute, eh? No, on the contrary I have a strong hankering after decency in my womenkind.”
“Your daughter Anne—” Elizabeth spoke falteringly.
“Ah, yes, bad luck again. Anne has twice the sense of her sisters, is really more attractive and is perfectly certain to behave herself. But she is on her mother’s side, and if—or when—I do get a divorce, I shall have to fight her, and she is the only one of my children whose opposition wouldamount to anything. You know what a Miss Nancy Reginald is.”
“But—but—how can you get a divorce if Mrs. Clavering—“
“Doesn’t want it? Well, I never was properly married to her in the first place. She didn’t know it at the time, and I was a youngster and didn’t know it, either; but our marriage wasn’t regular at all. I should have got the license in Kentucky instead of in Ohio, where we crossed the river to get married. So we are not really married and never have been, according to law. When I mention the subject to Mrs. Clavering, I shall offer to get the divorce; if she is contumacious, I shall simply prove that we have never been married at all. That will be hard on the children, and on that account I think there is no doubt she would agree to the divorce, if it were not for Anne. Anne, however, doesn’t know anything about the defect in the marriage, and I rather think she will back down when she finds out just where we stand.”
Elizabeth listened to this with horror. But it was horror of the deed, not of the man. Clavering’s calm and lucid presentation of the case, the absence of hypocrisy, his quiet determination, seemed to lift him out of the class of vulgarcriminals and make him almost respectable. And then he went on to give his side of the case, and his voice had in it a strange note of longing.
“I have before me twenty years yet, and although I am reckoned a man who can live on bonds and stocks and lawsuits and fighting other men, still I’ve had my dreams—I have them still. If I could find a woman who would be a wife to me, and yet could be an intellectual companion for me—that would be something that all my money hasn’t brought me. Do you blame a man for longing after it? Don’t you think I am more nearly human for wanting it than if I were satisfied to go on all my life as I have done for the last thirty-five years?”
“Yes.” Elizabeth spoke unwillingly, but the assent was forced out of her. And whether it was his words, his voice,—always singularly captivating,—his compelling glance, or his powerful personality, Elizabeth began to feel a toleration, along with a reprehension, of him. For Clavering, like all men, was made up of things to admire and things to abhor; only he possessed both in a stronger degree than common. He was much older than Elizabeth, but he had not lost the fire and vigor of youth.
Elizabeth’s agitation had subsided somewhat,but she was still unable or unwilling to speak. The gray mist was becoming denser, and they could see the gas-lamps studding the fast-falling darkness like jewels; the sound of wheels and hoofs upon the asphalt was deadened by the fog and grew fainter, the street was quieter, more deserted even than Washington streets usually are. In the little park, with the masses of evergreen shrubbery around them, they were as alone, as little subject to intrusion, as if they had been on a desert island. After a considerable pause Clavering spoke again.
“I saw you first, just ten years ago, one night as you were waiting on the street with your father, for some lady to take you to a ball. You dropped a little trinket from around your neck.”
Elizabeth started with surprise. “That was the night I first met my husband—and Hugh Pelham. And I lost my little pearl heart and never found it.”
“I was the guilty man,” said Clavering, with a smile. “I crushed your heart under my foot.” It was an accidental joining of words, but Clavering wished he had expressed himself otherwise. The words had an ominous sound, and Elizabeth, after looking at him intently for a few minutes, turned her head away.
Clavering, hastening to recall his lost ground, added: “The day will come when I will give you the most superb diamond locket that the South African mines can produce. I will make duchesses envy you your jewels and princesses cry with envy of them. I remembered you ever after that night, and a month ago I met you. Don’t think people are fools who talk of love at first sight for anybody at any age, or under any circumstances. The moment my eyes fell upon you I was anxious to know you. When I knew you, I wanted to know you better. When I knew you better, I became willing to do anything for you, to jeopardize anything in order to marry you. And I will give you a great fortune, millions of money, of which I shall get very little benefit, because you will outlive me many years and probably marry some other man and endow him, by gad, with my money. I will go anywhere you may desire to live, for I don’t believe you would consent to live in Washington. You may have a splendid house in London or Paris, a great country house, a château, any and everywhere you like, and you may command me as no other woman has ever commanded me. Now will you marry me after I am divorced?”
Elizabeth felt dazed. She had known from thefirst what was coming, but when Clavering put his wish into words it was as strange and staggering as if the idea had never before occurred to her. The thought of committing so great a wrong upon another woman, as Clavering suggested, appalled her—a wrong so vast and far-reaching that she turned away from the contemplation of it. But she did not fly from the temptation, and the temptation which is not fled from is the conqueror.
Clavering interpreted her silence with ease. He took her hand, pulled off her glove, and held her soft palm between his two strong ones. Five minutes passed; they seemed an hour to Elizabeth, frightened yet fascinated, her mind overwhelmed with what Clavering had told her, had promised her, had urged upon her. Through it all came the cry of her heart for Pelham. Had he been true to her, this temptation would never have come in her way. And as he had forgotten her and had even persecuted her, what did it matter what became of her, so she had ease instead of this frightful poverty, companionship instead of this dreadful loneliness, security instead of this perpetual terror over the small and sordid matter of a few hundred pounds? Clavering was too clever a man to urge her overmuch when he sawthat he had a tempter always with her in her own self. At last, after five minutes of agitated silence, she managed to withdraw her hand and rise. Clavering, without a word, walked with her out of the little park, hailed a passing hansom in the dusk and put her in, only saying at the last:—
“I will see you again as soon as possible. Meanwhile, remember you have but to say one word and all is yours.”
The hansom rolled off, and Clavering, putting his hands in his pockets, walked away at a quick gait. The expression on his face was like that of a successful gladiator. It was not pleasant to see.
Chapter ThirteenThe next night but one, Clavering had an appointment with General Brandon at the usual hour of half-past nine. And at nine o’clock promptly he was sitting with Elizabeth in the little study, waiting for General Brandon’s return.The first thing he said to her was: “Of course that affair about the necklace must be straightened out at once. I can cable to my London agent, and he can find out all about it and recover it, for it can be easily traced and recovered. And leave me to deal with the solicitor on the quiet.”“I hardly think you know what you are offering,” replied Elizabeth, with involuntary haughtiness. “I could not accept money or services from you. It is not to be thought of for a moment.”“Then what are you going to do about it?” asked Clavering, coolly, in the words of a celebrated character.Ah, what was she going to do about it? thought poor Elizabeth. Tell her father and see him turned out of the only shelter he had for his agedhead? If only she had been more experienced, had known more! She had been so very, very ignorant in those London days. If Pelham had not behaved so basely to her!Clavering talked on, quietly assuming that he would take charge of the matter for her; but Elizabeth, after listening to him in silence and even in weakness, suddenly and impulsively rose and said, “I desire you never to speak to me on that subject again.”Then General Brandon’s step was heard upon the stair, and nothing more was said between them. Elizabeth remained in the room while Clavering was there, and he honestly thought he was progressing quite as fast as he had any right to expect.It was now the middle of January, and the investigating committee continued to sit and the newspapers to print the proceedings. This did not tend to make it any pleasanter for Clavering’s family. Anne, with a touch of her father’s courage, continued to go out and to entertain, but it was with an aching heart. To add to her other anxieties, Mrs. Clavering was very ailing and unhappy. By some strange accident—for the poor lady never read the newspapers—she got an inkling that Clavering was under fire, and sheoften asked questions which Anne had difficulty in answering. Whatever love Mrs. Clavering had ever felt for Clavering had long since been cast out by fear; but she had the true feminine instinct which makes a dove fierce in the presence of the despoiler of her nest. Reginald Clavering redoubled his attention to his mother, and was of more help to Anne than she had thought possible.It had been determined, chiefly at Clavering’s suggestion, that a grand musical, followed by a ball, should be given at the Clavering house on Shrove Tuesday, as a wind-up to the splendid entertainments for which the house had long been noted; and the undisguised intention was to eclipse everything that had hitherto been done in Washington in the way of entertaining. Anne opposed it, but Élise and Lydia carried the day, backed up by their father.Only Clavering suspected that it was likely to be the last entertainment given there. He felt confident of knowing the decision of the committee before Shrove Tuesday, and he fully realized the possibility that it might mean expulsion from the Senate on his record alone; as, unluckily for him, there was a very complete and authentic legal record of his doings, which Baskerville had unearthed. So far Clavering had keptout of jail; but there had been more than one true bill found against him, and even verdicts in criminal cases, which had never been enforced. He was still fighting, and meant to go down fighting; but he devoted far more thought to planning what he would do if he were compelled to leave public life than if he were permitted to stay in it. He reckoned that by expediting matters he could get the divorce granted and the decree entered by the first of June, when he would marry Elizabeth Darrell, go abroad for the summer, and then arrange his life for the future. And while he was taking it for granted that he could marry Elizabeth, and was seeing her in private two or three times a week by General Brandon’s innocent connivance, Clavering had touched her hand but once and had never pressed his lips to her cheek, nor had she ever allowed him one word of acknowledged love-making. And this was a woman he was ready to dower with millions, which, as he grimly thought, a young husband, his successor, would get! Clavering concluded that some women were ungrateful. At the same time, he did not seriously doubt that he could marry Elizabeth in June.He began to congratulate himself on his good luck in his constant presence at General Brandon’shouse escaping notice. No one but himself, the General, and Elizabeth seemed to have any knowledge of his visits, although General Brandon, at his club, did some innocent bragging about the assistance he was giving to Senator Clavering “in the unholy warfare against a man incapable of the smallest dishonesty.” “Why, sir,” he would say to any one who would listen to him, “Senator Clavering has assured me, on his word of honor, that there is not one scintilla of truth in the shameful allegations brought against him in the public prints. Wait, however, until the senatorial committee has made its report. Then you will see Senator Clavering triumphantly vindicated; mark my words, sir, triumphantly vindicated.”Nobody but General Brandon, however, really believed this. Certainly Anne Clavering did not, and every day that she read the newspaper accounts of what had occurred and what had not occurred at the meeting of the investigating committee, her heart sank lower. To keep her mother from suspecting anything, Anne pursued her usual course of life; but it required all her resolution to do it. Every time she entered a drawing-room she called up all her courage to meet an affront, if one should be offered her.Not one was passed upon her, but she lived in dread of it.During this time Baskerville had gone everywhere he thought it likely that he should meet Anne Clavering, but so far he had not been fortunate. He did not repeat his visit to Clavering’s house. He had doubted the propriety of his going in the first instance, and he doubted it still more as time passed on. But it did not keep him from falling deeper and deeper in love with the image of Anne Clavering in his mind. On the Thursday which was Constance Thorndyke’s day at home, he felt tolerably confident that Anne Clavering would be paying her dinner call; and so on the stroke of four he presented himself, armed and equipped as the law directs, at Mrs. Luttrell’s door, to accompany that redoubtable person upon a round of Thursday visits.After several perfunctory calls where Baskerville was bored to death but behaved himself beautifully, he arrived with Mrs. Luttrell at Constance Thorndyke’s door precisely at five o’clock. Constance Thorndyke received them with the same charming grace and cordiality which always distinguished her and which was powerful enough to draw within her circle, asher guest on her reception day, her husband. Thorndyke never felt so proud of his wife as when he saw her in his own drawing-room, and she collected about her, from the wide field of Washington, persons who made her drawing-room shine. He frankly admitted to Constance that hers were the only receptions in Washington which he really enjoyed. He was delighted to see Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell, the latter being to him, as to most men, an ever blooming tree of delight. He came up and established Mrs. Luttrell in a chair by the fireside, with a good cup of tea and with a man on each side of her; and Mrs. Luttrell found herself as happy as it is given to mortals to be on this distressful planet. Thorndyke’s conversation interested her on the one side, and Admiral Prendergast, a superb specimen of the old-time chivalrous naval officer, with whom Mrs. Luttrell had had an intermittent flirtation for not less than forty years, on her other side.“What a blessed comfort it is,” sighed Mrs. Luttrell to a listening group, “to be able to come into a drawing-room like this and have a good cup of tea, with some cups and saucers and tea-spoons that did not come out of a curio shop, and some honest bread and butter. I declare I amtired to death of these brazen retired tradespeople who have come to this town and undertaken to receive in their Louis Quinze drawing-rooms, and in their English dining rooms, with a great big table full of pink and green kickshaws, and candelabra three feet high all over it, and a big placque of roses just like an old-fashioned feather bed.”“Will you listen to Sara?” asked her dutiful nephew. “She has hauled me about this day from one retired tradesman’s house to another, scattering compliments as she went, and embracing every man, woman, and child she met of the smart set—the smarter the better. She couldn’t be kept from going with those people unless she were chained up.”“Well,” faintly replied Mrs. Luttrell, “one has to be a hypocrite in this world; but I do say, Constance, that next my own yours is the best drawing-room in Washington.”“That is indeed high praise,” replied Constance Thorndyke, smiling, “and I am vain enough to believe it is sincere, especially when I can get my own husband to come home early Thursday afternoon.”Mrs. Thorndyke had never been strictly beautiful nor even remarkably pretty before her marriage,but since then she had developed a late-flowering loveliness which was much more than beauty. She was happy, she loved and was beloved; she had it in her power to assist the man she loved without making him hate her; she had, in fact, all that she had ever asked of high heaven, except one thing—she was childless. But that one supreme disappointment gave to her face and to her soul a touch of softness, of resignation, that disarmed fate. With a tender feminine superstition, she believed that, this last gift having been denied her, she would be suffered to retain the happiness already hers. Thorndyke himself had to be both husband and children to her, and on him she concentrated all the love and solicitude of her nature. That he was happy there could be no doubt. In Constance he had all that he had ever wished for.The Thorndyke house was one of the few in Washington which Baskerville could enter with a clear conscience in the matter of duty calls. He always paid them promptly to Constance Thorndyke, and often went when there was no obligation for him to go. He had some one besides Constance Thorndyke in view, however, in paying that particular visit; it was Anne Clavering whom he had really come to see. Mrs. Thorndyke foundmeans to let him know that Anne had not been there yet; and while Baskerville was taking what comfort he could out of this Anne walked into the drawing-room. She looked pale and worn and much older than she really was. Baskerville’s keen eye took this in at a glance; but like a sincere lover he admired her none the less for not being in a flush of spirits, and felt an increased tenderness for her. A delicate rosy color flooded her face when she saw who was present, and rosier still when Baskerville established her in a corner, that he might have a monopoly of her sweet company.Bearing in mind his promise to discipline his aunt, almost the first words Baskerville said to Anne were: “I hear my aunt was quite impertinent to you the other night; but before I slept I made her promise to apologize to you.”This was quite loud enough for Mrs. Luttrell to hear, and she promptly turned her smiling, sharp old face toward Anne. “My dear, he did, as I am a sinner! Well, it’s a great thing at my time of life to discover a new sensation, and I’ve found one in the act of apology. Now listen, all of you—Constance, make these people stop chattering—Jack Prendergast, be quiet, and Senator Thorndyke, stop laughing. Miss Clavering, I wasrather impertinent to you at Secretary Slater’s the other night, but I declare it was those two foolish women, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin, who were really to blame. However, I think you got the better of me—ha, ha! I always liked you, and like you better for your spirit. I offer you my sincere apologies—on condition that you never again make the least objection to anything I say or do—for, look you, Sara Luttrell has been used to speaking her mind too long to change. But I apologize.”At which Admiral Prendergast remarked piously, “Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace.”Anne rose and took Mrs. Luttrell’s hand in hers. “I’ll forgive you,” she said, smiling; “but don’t think I am afraid of you—I like you too much for that.”“I know you’re not afraid of me—you and my nephew, Richard Baskerville, are the only two creatures yet who openly defy me—and when you join forces, as you have done to-day, you are too strong for me.”This coupling of their names did not lose anything by Mrs. Luttrell’s emphatic manner of saying it, and it deepened the color in Anne’s face and brought the light to Baskerville’s eyes. Andas if directly inspired by Satan, the old lady kept on:—“You ought to have seen how angry my nephew was with me when he heard of my behavior—we were having a quiet chat in my bedroom while I was undressing, and he gave me such a rating as you never heard in your life. Oh! he took it to heart much more than you did. His language to me was something shocking. He threatened to tell my age all over town, and to throw my ermine cape into the fire if I ever misbehaved to you again. I never saw him in such a way before.”How much inadvertence and how much malice aforethought there were in this speech only Sara Luttrell knew, but it was distinctly disconcerting to Anne Clavering, and visibly shortened her visit. Mrs. Luttrell went out at the same time, and, after being helped into her big coach by Baskerville, turned to speak to him as the carriage rolled off.“Didn’t I do it handsomely? Why, he isn’t here!” And at that moment she caught sight of Baskerville sitting by Anne Clavering’s side in her brougham, then whirling around the corner. Mrs. Luttrell smiled and then sighed. “The scamp,” she said to herself. “I remember howonce—” She took from her pocket the miniature which never left her, and her memory went back to the days when to recline in that man’s arms and to feel his kisses upon her lips were Paradise, a paradise to which the gate had been forever closed to any other man.Baskerville had got into his present agreeable situation by simply not waiting for an invitation, and furthermore by saying authoritatively to the footman, “Miss Clavering wishes to drive out Connecticut Avenue until she directs you to turn.”It was all done so suddenly that Anne did not realize it until it was over; but what woman who loves is averse to having the man of her choice sitting by her side in the intimate seclusion of a brougham at dusk of a winter’s evening? Baskerville, however, was there for a purpose—a purpose quickly formed but to be resolutely carried out. He said to Anne: “I saw that my aunt’s heedless words embarrassed you, and I felt sorry for you. But it was quite true—I made her promise to apologize to you; and as long as I live, as far as I have the power, I shall force everybody who injures you to make you amends.”Baskerville’s eyes, fastened upon Anne, gave a deeper meaning to his words. The flush faded from Anne’s cheeks, and she looked at Baskervillewith troubled eyes, knowing a crisis was at hand. “I am very bold in forcing myself on you,” he said, “but the time has come for me to speak. I have not the same chance as other men, because I can’t go to your father’s house. I went once upon your mother’s kind invitation, but I doubt whether I should have done so; I can only plead my desire to see you, and I feel I can’t go again. You know, perhaps, that I am one of the lawyers engaged in prosecuting this investigation before the Senate. If I had known you before I began it, I would have never gone into it. But being in it I can’t honorably withdraw. Perhaps you can’t forgive me for what I have done, but it has not kept me from loving you with all my soul.”Anne shrank back in the carriage. At any other time she would have heard these words with palpitating joy; and even now they opened to her a momentary glimpse of Paradise. But the memory of all that was said and done about her father, the conviction of his impending disgrace, overwhelmed her. She sat silent and ashamed, longing to accept the sweetness of the love offered her, conscious of her own integrity, but with a primitive honest pride, reluctant to give any man the dower of disgrace which she felt went with her father’s daughter.Silence on the part of the beloved usually augurs well to the lover, but when Anne’s silence was accentuated by two large tears that dropped upon her cheeks Baskerville realized that they were not happy tears. He would have soothed her with a lover’s tenderness, but Anne repulsed him with a strange pride. “You are not to blame for what you have done in my father’s case, but I know, as well as you do, that before this month is out my father may be a disgraced man. And although you may not believe it—you with your generations of ladies and gentlemen behind you”—she spoke with a certain bitterness—“may not believe that the daughter of people like my father and my mother can have any pride, yet I have—whether I am entitled to it or not. I would not take a disgraced name to any man.”Baskerville’s answer to this was to take her two hands in his. It became difficult for her to be haughty to a man who plainly indicated that he meant to kiss her within five minutes. And he did.Anne’s protests were not those of a woman meaning to yield; Baskerville saw that she felt a real shame, the genuine reluctance of a high and honorable spirit. But it was swept away in the torrent of a sincere and manly love. When theyparted at Anne’s door Baskerville had wrung from her the confession of her love, and they were, to each other, acknowledged lovers.That night Anne and her father dined alone. Élise and Lydia were dining out with some of their “larky” friends, and Reginald was out of town. Clavering noted that Anne was rather silent. Anne for her part looked at her father with a kind of resentment she had often felt before. What right had he to dower his children with his own evil deeds? Why, instead of acquiring a vast fortune, which he spent on them, as on himself, with lavishness, should he not have given them a decent inheritance. Was it not wholly through him that she had not been able to give herself freely and joyfully to the man who loved her and whom she loved? With these thoughts in her mind she sat through the dinner, silent and distrait; but she could not wholly subdue the happiness that Baskerville had given her, even though happiness with her could never be without alloy.When dinner was over she went up to her mother’s room, and spent the rest of the evening cheering and comforting the poor soul. After Mrs. Clavering was in bed Anne came downstairs to remain until Élise and Lydia returned fromtheir party. She sat in the library with a book in her hand, but her thoughts were on Baskerville. And, thinking of him, she fell into a soft, sweet sleep to dream of him. When she awakened it was almost midnight, and Élise and Lydia had not returned.To keep herself from falling asleep again she took up at random one of a pile of periodicals on the table. It was a scurrilous newspaper which she loathed; but the first paragraph in it which, before she could lay it down, fell under her eye enchained her attention. An hour afterward Élise and Lydia came in and tiptoed softly up to their rooms; but Anne remained in the same position in the great library chair in which she had been for the last hour, still holding the newspaper in her hand.Clavering had gone out directly after dinner, and after a visit to the club, which he found rather chilling, went to General Brandon’s house, as usual in advance of his appointment. It seemed to Clavering on that evening as if Elizabeth relaxed a little of her reserve, which was at the same time both timid and haughty. Later he went down town and managed to put up a tolerably stiff game of poker, and it was two o’clock in the morning before hefound himself at his own door. He let himself in, and went into the vast, luxurious library, where the fire still glowed. He turned up the electric light in a superb bronze electrolier on his library table, stirred the fire, and then perceived Anne sitting in a chair drawn up to the fender.“Why, what are you doing here?” asked Clavering, good-naturedly.“I wanted to speak to you to-night,” Anne replied quietly.“Go on,” said Clavering, seating himself and lighting a cigar. “Make it short, because when a woman wants to ‘speak’ to a man it always means a row.”“I hope this does not,” replied Anne.Her father looked at her closely. She had a wearied and anxious look, which belied her youth, and she had good cause to be both wearied and anxious a good part of the time. She handed him the newspaper which battened upon scandal, and the first paragraph in it announced the forthcoming divorce of Senator Clavering and his subsequent marriage to a Chicago widow, nearly his age, with a fortune almost as large as his own. Clavering’s strong-beating heart gave a jump when he began reading the paragraph, but when he found how far off the scent was thereport his countenance cleared. It was as good an opportunity as he could have desired to have it out with Anne, and he was not sorry she had broached the subject.“Well,” he said, laying the paper down, “are you surprised?”“No,” replied Anne, looking at him steadily.“Then we may proceed to discuss it,” said Clavering. “I intend to provide handsomely for your mother, and I dare say she will be a hundred times happier out in Iowa among her relations and friends than she can be here.”“I hardly think my mother would look at it from that point of view,” said Anne. She controlled her agitation and her indignation admirably, and Clavering saw in her his own cool courage and resource. “Of course my mother has felt and known for years that you had no further use for her, now that her drudgery is not necessary to you. But she is, as you know, a very religious woman. She thinks divorces are wrong, and, timid as she is, I believe she would resist a divorce. She would, I am sure, be willing to go away from you and not trouble you any more—and I would go with her. But a divorce—no. And I have the same views that she has, and would urge her to resist to the last; and she will.”She had not raised her tones at all, but Clavering understood her words perfectly. She meant to fight for her mother. He smoked quietly for several minutes, and Anne knew too much to weaken her position by repeating her protest. Then Clavering leaned over to her and said: “I think, when you know the circumstances, you will be more than willing to let your mother get the divorce. We were never legally married.”The blood poured into Anne’s face. She rose from her chair, and stood trembling with anger, but also with fear. “I don’t believe—I can’t believe—” She stopped, unable to go on.“Oh, there’s no reflection on your mother or on me, either. We ran away to be married—a couple of young fools under twenty-one. I got the license in Kentucky, but we crossed the Ohio River into Ohio. There we found a minister, an ignorant old fellow and a rogue besides, who didn’t know enough to see that the license had no effect in Ohio. And then I found out afterwards that he had been prohibited from performing marriage services because of some of his illegal doings in that line. I knew all about it within a week of the marriage, but being ignorant then myself, I thought the best way was to say nothing. Afterward, when I came to man’s estate, I still thoughtit best to keep it quiet for the sake of you children. And I am willing to keep it quiet now—unless you force me to disclose it. But, understand me, I mean to be divorced in order to marry a lady to whom I am much attached—not this old whited sepulchre from Chicago”—for so Clavering alluded to the widow with millions—“but a lady without a penny. Have you any suspicion to whom I refer?”“I have not the least suspicion of any one,” Anne replied, as haughtily as if she had all the blood of all the Howards, instead of being the nameless child she was.Clavering was secretly surprised and relieved to know this. Then the tongue of gossip had not got hold of his attentions to Elizabeth Darrell. This was indeed rare good fortune. He spoke again. “So now you know exactly where you stand. If you will let me have my way, the thing can be managed quietly. If you oppose me, you will be sorry for it.”“And you mean, if my mother doesn’t consent, that you will brand us all—us, your children—as—as—I can’t speak the word.” Anne fixed a pair of blazing eyes on her father, and Clavering never felt more uncomfortable in his life. He had no shame and no remorse, but he reallywished that Anne Clavering would not gaze at him with those eyes sparkling with anger and disgust.“I think you don’t exactly understand the masculine nature,” he said. “I simply mean that I shall have a divorce, and if you don’t choose to accept my terms—for, of course, I am dealing with you, not your mother—it will be you and not I who proclaim to the world what I have kept quiet for thirty-five years.”The interview lasted barely ten minutes, but to Anne Clavering it seemed as if æons of time separated her from the Anne Clavering of half an hour ago. Clavering was unshaken. He had been contemplating this event in his life ever since it happened, thirty-five years before, and had reckoned himself a magnanimous man in determining not to reveal the truth about his marriage unless he was compelled to—that is to say, unless he could not get the divorce by other means. But Anne had forced his hand, as it were; so let her take the consequences. The repudiation of his wife cost Clavering not a pang. He took no thought of her patience, her years of uncomplaining work for him, her silence under his neglect and abandonment. The thought, however, that he had admitted to any one the illegitimacyof his children, gave him a certain degree of discomfort; he felt an inward shock when he spoke the words. But it was not enough to turn him from his will.Anne sat still for so long that Clavering did not know what to make of it. She had grown very pale, and Clavering suspected that she really had not the strength to rise, which was the truth. The room was so profoundly still that when a smouldering log in the fireplace broke in two and fell apart with a shower of sparks, the slight noise made both Clavering and Anne start.Anne rose then, somewhat unsteadily. Clavering would have liked to offer his arm and to have assisted her to her bedroom, but he was afraid. She walked out of the room without looking at him or speaking to him again. Halfway up the broad and splendid staircase he heard her stop, and, looking out of the half-open door, he saw her shadowy figure sitting on the stairs. After a few moments more she went on up, and he could hear only the faint sound of her silken skirts as she moved. Opposite her mother’s door she stopped. There was no sound within, and she passed on.It was one of Elizabeth Darrell’s sleepless and harassed nights. About three o’clock she rosefrom her bed and went to the window. In the great house opposite, Clavering’s library windows were lighted up, and so were the windows of Anne’s boudoir. A sudden suspicion of the truth flashed into Elizabeth’s mind.“His daughter suspects something—has discovered something,” she thought to herself, panting and terrified. “They have had a scene.”Neither Elizabeth nor Clavering nor Anne had any sleep that night.
The next night but one, Clavering had an appointment with General Brandon at the usual hour of half-past nine. And at nine o’clock promptly he was sitting with Elizabeth in the little study, waiting for General Brandon’s return.
The first thing he said to her was: “Of course that affair about the necklace must be straightened out at once. I can cable to my London agent, and he can find out all about it and recover it, for it can be easily traced and recovered. And leave me to deal with the solicitor on the quiet.”
“I hardly think you know what you are offering,” replied Elizabeth, with involuntary haughtiness. “I could not accept money or services from you. It is not to be thought of for a moment.”
“Then what are you going to do about it?” asked Clavering, coolly, in the words of a celebrated character.
Ah, what was she going to do about it? thought poor Elizabeth. Tell her father and see him turned out of the only shelter he had for his agedhead? If only she had been more experienced, had known more! She had been so very, very ignorant in those London days. If Pelham had not behaved so basely to her!
Clavering talked on, quietly assuming that he would take charge of the matter for her; but Elizabeth, after listening to him in silence and even in weakness, suddenly and impulsively rose and said, “I desire you never to speak to me on that subject again.”
Then General Brandon’s step was heard upon the stair, and nothing more was said between them. Elizabeth remained in the room while Clavering was there, and he honestly thought he was progressing quite as fast as he had any right to expect.
It was now the middle of January, and the investigating committee continued to sit and the newspapers to print the proceedings. This did not tend to make it any pleasanter for Clavering’s family. Anne, with a touch of her father’s courage, continued to go out and to entertain, but it was with an aching heart. To add to her other anxieties, Mrs. Clavering was very ailing and unhappy. By some strange accident—for the poor lady never read the newspapers—she got an inkling that Clavering was under fire, and sheoften asked questions which Anne had difficulty in answering. Whatever love Mrs. Clavering had ever felt for Clavering had long since been cast out by fear; but she had the true feminine instinct which makes a dove fierce in the presence of the despoiler of her nest. Reginald Clavering redoubled his attention to his mother, and was of more help to Anne than she had thought possible.
It had been determined, chiefly at Clavering’s suggestion, that a grand musical, followed by a ball, should be given at the Clavering house on Shrove Tuesday, as a wind-up to the splendid entertainments for which the house had long been noted; and the undisguised intention was to eclipse everything that had hitherto been done in Washington in the way of entertaining. Anne opposed it, but Élise and Lydia carried the day, backed up by their father.
Only Clavering suspected that it was likely to be the last entertainment given there. He felt confident of knowing the decision of the committee before Shrove Tuesday, and he fully realized the possibility that it might mean expulsion from the Senate on his record alone; as, unluckily for him, there was a very complete and authentic legal record of his doings, which Baskerville had unearthed. So far Clavering had keptout of jail; but there had been more than one true bill found against him, and even verdicts in criminal cases, which had never been enforced. He was still fighting, and meant to go down fighting; but he devoted far more thought to planning what he would do if he were compelled to leave public life than if he were permitted to stay in it. He reckoned that by expediting matters he could get the divorce granted and the decree entered by the first of June, when he would marry Elizabeth Darrell, go abroad for the summer, and then arrange his life for the future. And while he was taking it for granted that he could marry Elizabeth, and was seeing her in private two or three times a week by General Brandon’s innocent connivance, Clavering had touched her hand but once and had never pressed his lips to her cheek, nor had she ever allowed him one word of acknowledged love-making. And this was a woman he was ready to dower with millions, which, as he grimly thought, a young husband, his successor, would get! Clavering concluded that some women were ungrateful. At the same time, he did not seriously doubt that he could marry Elizabeth in June.
He began to congratulate himself on his good luck in his constant presence at General Brandon’shouse escaping notice. No one but himself, the General, and Elizabeth seemed to have any knowledge of his visits, although General Brandon, at his club, did some innocent bragging about the assistance he was giving to Senator Clavering “in the unholy warfare against a man incapable of the smallest dishonesty.” “Why, sir,” he would say to any one who would listen to him, “Senator Clavering has assured me, on his word of honor, that there is not one scintilla of truth in the shameful allegations brought against him in the public prints. Wait, however, until the senatorial committee has made its report. Then you will see Senator Clavering triumphantly vindicated; mark my words, sir, triumphantly vindicated.”
Nobody but General Brandon, however, really believed this. Certainly Anne Clavering did not, and every day that she read the newspaper accounts of what had occurred and what had not occurred at the meeting of the investigating committee, her heart sank lower. To keep her mother from suspecting anything, Anne pursued her usual course of life; but it required all her resolution to do it. Every time she entered a drawing-room she called up all her courage to meet an affront, if one should be offered her.Not one was passed upon her, but she lived in dread of it.
During this time Baskerville had gone everywhere he thought it likely that he should meet Anne Clavering, but so far he had not been fortunate. He did not repeat his visit to Clavering’s house. He had doubted the propriety of his going in the first instance, and he doubted it still more as time passed on. But it did not keep him from falling deeper and deeper in love with the image of Anne Clavering in his mind. On the Thursday which was Constance Thorndyke’s day at home, he felt tolerably confident that Anne Clavering would be paying her dinner call; and so on the stroke of four he presented himself, armed and equipped as the law directs, at Mrs. Luttrell’s door, to accompany that redoubtable person upon a round of Thursday visits.
After several perfunctory calls where Baskerville was bored to death but behaved himself beautifully, he arrived with Mrs. Luttrell at Constance Thorndyke’s door precisely at five o’clock. Constance Thorndyke received them with the same charming grace and cordiality which always distinguished her and which was powerful enough to draw within her circle, asher guest on her reception day, her husband. Thorndyke never felt so proud of his wife as when he saw her in his own drawing-room, and she collected about her, from the wide field of Washington, persons who made her drawing-room shine. He frankly admitted to Constance that hers were the only receptions in Washington which he really enjoyed. He was delighted to see Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell, the latter being to him, as to most men, an ever blooming tree of delight. He came up and established Mrs. Luttrell in a chair by the fireside, with a good cup of tea and with a man on each side of her; and Mrs. Luttrell found herself as happy as it is given to mortals to be on this distressful planet. Thorndyke’s conversation interested her on the one side, and Admiral Prendergast, a superb specimen of the old-time chivalrous naval officer, with whom Mrs. Luttrell had had an intermittent flirtation for not less than forty years, on her other side.
“What a blessed comfort it is,” sighed Mrs. Luttrell to a listening group, “to be able to come into a drawing-room like this and have a good cup of tea, with some cups and saucers and tea-spoons that did not come out of a curio shop, and some honest bread and butter. I declare I amtired to death of these brazen retired tradespeople who have come to this town and undertaken to receive in their Louis Quinze drawing-rooms, and in their English dining rooms, with a great big table full of pink and green kickshaws, and candelabra three feet high all over it, and a big placque of roses just like an old-fashioned feather bed.”
“Will you listen to Sara?” asked her dutiful nephew. “She has hauled me about this day from one retired tradesman’s house to another, scattering compliments as she went, and embracing every man, woman, and child she met of the smart set—the smarter the better. She couldn’t be kept from going with those people unless she were chained up.”
“Well,” faintly replied Mrs. Luttrell, “one has to be a hypocrite in this world; but I do say, Constance, that next my own yours is the best drawing-room in Washington.”
“That is indeed high praise,” replied Constance Thorndyke, smiling, “and I am vain enough to believe it is sincere, especially when I can get my own husband to come home early Thursday afternoon.”
Mrs. Thorndyke had never been strictly beautiful nor even remarkably pretty before her marriage,but since then she had developed a late-flowering loveliness which was much more than beauty. She was happy, she loved and was beloved; she had it in her power to assist the man she loved without making him hate her; she had, in fact, all that she had ever asked of high heaven, except one thing—she was childless. But that one supreme disappointment gave to her face and to her soul a touch of softness, of resignation, that disarmed fate. With a tender feminine superstition, she believed that, this last gift having been denied her, she would be suffered to retain the happiness already hers. Thorndyke himself had to be both husband and children to her, and on him she concentrated all the love and solicitude of her nature. That he was happy there could be no doubt. In Constance he had all that he had ever wished for.
The Thorndyke house was one of the few in Washington which Baskerville could enter with a clear conscience in the matter of duty calls. He always paid them promptly to Constance Thorndyke, and often went when there was no obligation for him to go. He had some one besides Constance Thorndyke in view, however, in paying that particular visit; it was Anne Clavering whom he had really come to see. Mrs. Thorndyke foundmeans to let him know that Anne had not been there yet; and while Baskerville was taking what comfort he could out of this Anne walked into the drawing-room. She looked pale and worn and much older than she really was. Baskerville’s keen eye took this in at a glance; but like a sincere lover he admired her none the less for not being in a flush of spirits, and felt an increased tenderness for her. A delicate rosy color flooded her face when she saw who was present, and rosier still when Baskerville established her in a corner, that he might have a monopoly of her sweet company.
Bearing in mind his promise to discipline his aunt, almost the first words Baskerville said to Anne were: “I hear my aunt was quite impertinent to you the other night; but before I slept I made her promise to apologize to you.”
This was quite loud enough for Mrs. Luttrell to hear, and she promptly turned her smiling, sharp old face toward Anne. “My dear, he did, as I am a sinner! Well, it’s a great thing at my time of life to discover a new sensation, and I’ve found one in the act of apology. Now listen, all of you—Constance, make these people stop chattering—Jack Prendergast, be quiet, and Senator Thorndyke, stop laughing. Miss Clavering, I wasrather impertinent to you at Secretary Slater’s the other night, but I declare it was those two foolish women, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin, who were really to blame. However, I think you got the better of me—ha, ha! I always liked you, and like you better for your spirit. I offer you my sincere apologies—on condition that you never again make the least objection to anything I say or do—for, look you, Sara Luttrell has been used to speaking her mind too long to change. But I apologize.”
At which Admiral Prendergast remarked piously, “Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace.”
Anne rose and took Mrs. Luttrell’s hand in hers. “I’ll forgive you,” she said, smiling; “but don’t think I am afraid of you—I like you too much for that.”
“I know you’re not afraid of me—you and my nephew, Richard Baskerville, are the only two creatures yet who openly defy me—and when you join forces, as you have done to-day, you are too strong for me.”
This coupling of their names did not lose anything by Mrs. Luttrell’s emphatic manner of saying it, and it deepened the color in Anne’s face and brought the light to Baskerville’s eyes. Andas if directly inspired by Satan, the old lady kept on:—
“You ought to have seen how angry my nephew was with me when he heard of my behavior—we were having a quiet chat in my bedroom while I was undressing, and he gave me such a rating as you never heard in your life. Oh! he took it to heart much more than you did. His language to me was something shocking. He threatened to tell my age all over town, and to throw my ermine cape into the fire if I ever misbehaved to you again. I never saw him in such a way before.”
How much inadvertence and how much malice aforethought there were in this speech only Sara Luttrell knew, but it was distinctly disconcerting to Anne Clavering, and visibly shortened her visit. Mrs. Luttrell went out at the same time, and, after being helped into her big coach by Baskerville, turned to speak to him as the carriage rolled off.
“Didn’t I do it handsomely? Why, he isn’t here!” And at that moment she caught sight of Baskerville sitting by Anne Clavering’s side in her brougham, then whirling around the corner. Mrs. Luttrell smiled and then sighed. “The scamp,” she said to herself. “I remember howonce—” She took from her pocket the miniature which never left her, and her memory went back to the days when to recline in that man’s arms and to feel his kisses upon her lips were Paradise, a paradise to which the gate had been forever closed to any other man.
Baskerville had got into his present agreeable situation by simply not waiting for an invitation, and furthermore by saying authoritatively to the footman, “Miss Clavering wishes to drive out Connecticut Avenue until she directs you to turn.”
It was all done so suddenly that Anne did not realize it until it was over; but what woman who loves is averse to having the man of her choice sitting by her side in the intimate seclusion of a brougham at dusk of a winter’s evening? Baskerville, however, was there for a purpose—a purpose quickly formed but to be resolutely carried out. He said to Anne: “I saw that my aunt’s heedless words embarrassed you, and I felt sorry for you. But it was quite true—I made her promise to apologize to you; and as long as I live, as far as I have the power, I shall force everybody who injures you to make you amends.”
Baskerville’s eyes, fastened upon Anne, gave a deeper meaning to his words. The flush faded from Anne’s cheeks, and she looked at Baskervillewith troubled eyes, knowing a crisis was at hand. “I am very bold in forcing myself on you,” he said, “but the time has come for me to speak. I have not the same chance as other men, because I can’t go to your father’s house. I went once upon your mother’s kind invitation, but I doubt whether I should have done so; I can only plead my desire to see you, and I feel I can’t go again. You know, perhaps, that I am one of the lawyers engaged in prosecuting this investigation before the Senate. If I had known you before I began it, I would have never gone into it. But being in it I can’t honorably withdraw. Perhaps you can’t forgive me for what I have done, but it has not kept me from loving you with all my soul.”
Anne shrank back in the carriage. At any other time she would have heard these words with palpitating joy; and even now they opened to her a momentary glimpse of Paradise. But the memory of all that was said and done about her father, the conviction of his impending disgrace, overwhelmed her. She sat silent and ashamed, longing to accept the sweetness of the love offered her, conscious of her own integrity, but with a primitive honest pride, reluctant to give any man the dower of disgrace which she felt went with her father’s daughter.
Silence on the part of the beloved usually augurs well to the lover, but when Anne’s silence was accentuated by two large tears that dropped upon her cheeks Baskerville realized that they were not happy tears. He would have soothed her with a lover’s tenderness, but Anne repulsed him with a strange pride. “You are not to blame for what you have done in my father’s case, but I know, as well as you do, that before this month is out my father may be a disgraced man. And although you may not believe it—you with your generations of ladies and gentlemen behind you”—she spoke with a certain bitterness—“may not believe that the daughter of people like my father and my mother can have any pride, yet I have—whether I am entitled to it or not. I would not take a disgraced name to any man.”
Baskerville’s answer to this was to take her two hands in his. It became difficult for her to be haughty to a man who plainly indicated that he meant to kiss her within five minutes. And he did.
Anne’s protests were not those of a woman meaning to yield; Baskerville saw that she felt a real shame, the genuine reluctance of a high and honorable spirit. But it was swept away in the torrent of a sincere and manly love. When theyparted at Anne’s door Baskerville had wrung from her the confession of her love, and they were, to each other, acknowledged lovers.
That night Anne and her father dined alone. Élise and Lydia were dining out with some of their “larky” friends, and Reginald was out of town. Clavering noted that Anne was rather silent. Anne for her part looked at her father with a kind of resentment she had often felt before. What right had he to dower his children with his own evil deeds? Why, instead of acquiring a vast fortune, which he spent on them, as on himself, with lavishness, should he not have given them a decent inheritance. Was it not wholly through him that she had not been able to give herself freely and joyfully to the man who loved her and whom she loved? With these thoughts in her mind she sat through the dinner, silent and distrait; but she could not wholly subdue the happiness that Baskerville had given her, even though happiness with her could never be without alloy.
When dinner was over she went up to her mother’s room, and spent the rest of the evening cheering and comforting the poor soul. After Mrs. Clavering was in bed Anne came downstairs to remain until Élise and Lydia returned fromtheir party. She sat in the library with a book in her hand, but her thoughts were on Baskerville. And, thinking of him, she fell into a soft, sweet sleep to dream of him. When she awakened it was almost midnight, and Élise and Lydia had not returned.
To keep herself from falling asleep again she took up at random one of a pile of periodicals on the table. It was a scurrilous newspaper which she loathed; but the first paragraph in it which, before she could lay it down, fell under her eye enchained her attention. An hour afterward Élise and Lydia came in and tiptoed softly up to their rooms; but Anne remained in the same position in the great library chair in which she had been for the last hour, still holding the newspaper in her hand.
Clavering had gone out directly after dinner, and after a visit to the club, which he found rather chilling, went to General Brandon’s house, as usual in advance of his appointment. It seemed to Clavering on that evening as if Elizabeth relaxed a little of her reserve, which was at the same time both timid and haughty. Later he went down town and managed to put up a tolerably stiff game of poker, and it was two o’clock in the morning before hefound himself at his own door. He let himself in, and went into the vast, luxurious library, where the fire still glowed. He turned up the electric light in a superb bronze electrolier on his library table, stirred the fire, and then perceived Anne sitting in a chair drawn up to the fender.
“Why, what are you doing here?” asked Clavering, good-naturedly.
“I wanted to speak to you to-night,” Anne replied quietly.
“Go on,” said Clavering, seating himself and lighting a cigar. “Make it short, because when a woman wants to ‘speak’ to a man it always means a row.”
“I hope this does not,” replied Anne.
Her father looked at her closely. She had a wearied and anxious look, which belied her youth, and she had good cause to be both wearied and anxious a good part of the time. She handed him the newspaper which battened upon scandal, and the first paragraph in it announced the forthcoming divorce of Senator Clavering and his subsequent marriage to a Chicago widow, nearly his age, with a fortune almost as large as his own. Clavering’s strong-beating heart gave a jump when he began reading the paragraph, but when he found how far off the scent was thereport his countenance cleared. It was as good an opportunity as he could have desired to have it out with Anne, and he was not sorry she had broached the subject.
“Well,” he said, laying the paper down, “are you surprised?”
“No,” replied Anne, looking at him steadily.
“Then we may proceed to discuss it,” said Clavering. “I intend to provide handsomely for your mother, and I dare say she will be a hundred times happier out in Iowa among her relations and friends than she can be here.”
“I hardly think my mother would look at it from that point of view,” said Anne. She controlled her agitation and her indignation admirably, and Clavering saw in her his own cool courage and resource. “Of course my mother has felt and known for years that you had no further use for her, now that her drudgery is not necessary to you. But she is, as you know, a very religious woman. She thinks divorces are wrong, and, timid as she is, I believe she would resist a divorce. She would, I am sure, be willing to go away from you and not trouble you any more—and I would go with her. But a divorce—no. And I have the same views that she has, and would urge her to resist to the last; and she will.”
She had not raised her tones at all, but Clavering understood her words perfectly. She meant to fight for her mother. He smoked quietly for several minutes, and Anne knew too much to weaken her position by repeating her protest. Then Clavering leaned over to her and said: “I think, when you know the circumstances, you will be more than willing to let your mother get the divorce. We were never legally married.”
The blood poured into Anne’s face. She rose from her chair, and stood trembling with anger, but also with fear. “I don’t believe—I can’t believe—” She stopped, unable to go on.
“Oh, there’s no reflection on your mother or on me, either. We ran away to be married—a couple of young fools under twenty-one. I got the license in Kentucky, but we crossed the Ohio River into Ohio. There we found a minister, an ignorant old fellow and a rogue besides, who didn’t know enough to see that the license had no effect in Ohio. And then I found out afterwards that he had been prohibited from performing marriage services because of some of his illegal doings in that line. I knew all about it within a week of the marriage, but being ignorant then myself, I thought the best way was to say nothing. Afterward, when I came to man’s estate, I still thoughtit best to keep it quiet for the sake of you children. And I am willing to keep it quiet now—unless you force me to disclose it. But, understand me, I mean to be divorced in order to marry a lady to whom I am much attached—not this old whited sepulchre from Chicago”—for so Clavering alluded to the widow with millions—“but a lady without a penny. Have you any suspicion to whom I refer?”
“I have not the least suspicion of any one,” Anne replied, as haughtily as if she had all the blood of all the Howards, instead of being the nameless child she was.
Clavering was secretly surprised and relieved to know this. Then the tongue of gossip had not got hold of his attentions to Elizabeth Darrell. This was indeed rare good fortune. He spoke again. “So now you know exactly where you stand. If you will let me have my way, the thing can be managed quietly. If you oppose me, you will be sorry for it.”
“And you mean, if my mother doesn’t consent, that you will brand us all—us, your children—as—as—I can’t speak the word.” Anne fixed a pair of blazing eyes on her father, and Clavering never felt more uncomfortable in his life. He had no shame and no remorse, but he reallywished that Anne Clavering would not gaze at him with those eyes sparkling with anger and disgust.
“I think you don’t exactly understand the masculine nature,” he said. “I simply mean that I shall have a divorce, and if you don’t choose to accept my terms—for, of course, I am dealing with you, not your mother—it will be you and not I who proclaim to the world what I have kept quiet for thirty-five years.”
The interview lasted barely ten minutes, but to Anne Clavering it seemed as if æons of time separated her from the Anne Clavering of half an hour ago. Clavering was unshaken. He had been contemplating this event in his life ever since it happened, thirty-five years before, and had reckoned himself a magnanimous man in determining not to reveal the truth about his marriage unless he was compelled to—that is to say, unless he could not get the divorce by other means. But Anne had forced his hand, as it were; so let her take the consequences. The repudiation of his wife cost Clavering not a pang. He took no thought of her patience, her years of uncomplaining work for him, her silence under his neglect and abandonment. The thought, however, that he had admitted to any one the illegitimacyof his children, gave him a certain degree of discomfort; he felt an inward shock when he spoke the words. But it was not enough to turn him from his will.
Anne sat still for so long that Clavering did not know what to make of it. She had grown very pale, and Clavering suspected that she really had not the strength to rise, which was the truth. The room was so profoundly still that when a smouldering log in the fireplace broke in two and fell apart with a shower of sparks, the slight noise made both Clavering and Anne start.
Anne rose then, somewhat unsteadily. Clavering would have liked to offer his arm and to have assisted her to her bedroom, but he was afraid. She walked out of the room without looking at him or speaking to him again. Halfway up the broad and splendid staircase he heard her stop, and, looking out of the half-open door, he saw her shadowy figure sitting on the stairs. After a few moments more she went on up, and he could hear only the faint sound of her silken skirts as she moved. Opposite her mother’s door she stopped. There was no sound within, and she passed on.
It was one of Elizabeth Darrell’s sleepless and harassed nights. About three o’clock she rosefrom her bed and went to the window. In the great house opposite, Clavering’s library windows were lighted up, and so were the windows of Anne’s boudoir. A sudden suspicion of the truth flashed into Elizabeth’s mind.
“His daughter suspects something—has discovered something,” she thought to herself, panting and terrified. “They have had a scene.”
Neither Elizabeth nor Clavering nor Anne had any sleep that night.