Chapter Nine

Chapter NineThe next day was a bright November Sunday, and after an early luncheon Baskerville started out for a walk into the country. Anne Clavering was much in his mind, and he was beginning to debate with himself in this wise: if Senator Clavering had no delicacy about inviting him to call, why should he be too delicate-minded to go? Which proves that Baskerville was in love with Anne Clavering, or he would have said that for him to go to a man’s house under the circumstances in which he would enter Senator Clavering’s was an outrageous breach of propriety.When he got well out of the town, he met the scanty congregation of a small Episcopal chapel in the suburbs. Among those strolling homeward he speedily recognized General Brandon and Elizabeth Darrell—and with them Reginald Clavering. This only son of Senator Clavering’s was no more like him than Anne was, and, indeed, very much resembled Anne, except that he had neither her grace nor her intelligence. He had agood and affectionate heart, and in a foolish, blundering way was both an honest man and a gentleman. His life, however, was given over to small and futile things, and even his piety, which was genuine, embodied a childish worship of ecclesiastical trifles. He was the mainstay, chief financial backer, and clerical man-of-all-work in the little chapel, while his sisters, Élise and Lydia, fought with the Brentwood-Baldwins at St. John’s, and Anne, after going to an early morning service at the nearest church, devoted the rest of her Sunday to her mother.Baskerville stopped and spoke with great cordiality to the party. He had known Elizabeth Darrell well in her girlhood, and there was a remote, seventeenth-cousin, Maryland-Virginia connection between the Baskervilles and the Brandons. His first glance at her in her mourning costume showed him that she had suffered much, and her beauty was partially eclipsed. She had gained interest, however, as the case often is, by learning the hard lessons of life, and Baskerville saw that she might regain all and more of her good looks with returning flesh and color, and a loss of the wearied and forlorn expression in her still glorious dark eyes. He asked permission to call upon her, and Elizabeth assented with outward graceand cheerfulness; but, in truth, it mattered little to her then whether she ever saw any one again, except her father, and—humiliating thought!—Pelham, once more. For, deeply incensed as she was with Pelham, the thought of ever again meeting him was profoundly agitating to her. She inquired of Baskerville about Mrs. Luttrell, and sent her a kind message; then they parted and went upon their several ways.Half an hour afterwards, when Elizabeth Darrell was nearing her own door, Senator Clavering—who, sitting at his library window, caught sight of her graceful black figure as she stopped with her father and talked a few minutes with Reginald Clavering—started to his feet, his keen, handsome eyes fixed upon her with admiring approval. He remembered her perfectly well, that beautiful girl he had seen on the icy night ten years ago when he had watched the gay people flocking to the Charity Ball, and the little trinket he had unconsciously crushed under his foot. He had wondered a dozen times since he had been in Washington, and had often asked, what had become of General Brandon’s beautiful daughter, and was told that she had married a British Army man and had disappeared in the wilderness. He had never seen General Brandon from that hour,although they lived opposite, General Brandon’s hours being very different from Senator Clavering’s and their habits being as dissimilar as could possibly be imagined.Clavering was a connoisseur in feminine beauty, and all forms of it appealed to him. He thought Elizabeth twice as beautiful as he had done in that passing glimpse of her, ten years before, in the bloom of her girlhood. Strange to say, the languid, interesting, and somewhat tragic type which Elizabeth Darrell now represented was the most attractive to him—perhaps because it is the rarest. “By Jove, what a woman! I must know her,” was his inward comment. He watched Elizabeth intently, her fragile figure, her peculiar grace of movement, the note of distinction in her whole person and air; and then and there he determined to resurrect his acquaintance with General Brandon, whose relationship to her was obvious, and whom Clavering had no more forgotten than General Brandon had forgotten him.Presently Reginald Clavering entered the house, and the first sound that met his ears was something between a wail and a shout which came from the upper region. Reginald winced at the sound. His mother still held to her original Baptist faith—about the only thing pertainingto her early life which she had not meekly given up. She was at that moment enjoying the spiritual ministrations of a Baptist minister who came sometimes on Sundays to pray with her and sing camp-meeting hymns—to the intense diversion of the smart English footman and gay French maids, of whom Mrs. Clavering was in deadly fear. And to make it worse for Reginald, Anne Clavering, instead of setting her face against this unchurchmanlike proceeding, actually aided and abetted her mother in her plebeian sort of religion, and joined her clear note to the Rev. Mr. Smithers’ bellowing and Mrs. Clavering’s husky contralto. The whole thing offended Reginald Clavering’s æsthetic sense; but it was a proof that he had much that was good in him that he bore these proceedings silently, as became a gentleman, a Christian, and an Anglican, and made no complaint to any one except Anne.As he passed the open library door, Senator Clavering called out to him in that rich and melodious voice which the stenographers in the Senate gallery declared the most agreeable and easily followed voice of any member of the Senate: “Hello! What is the name of that infernally pretty woman whom you were escorting just now?”“Mrs. Darrell, the widowed daughter of GeneralBrandon. General Brandon is one of the vestrymen at St. Gabriel’s Chapel,” replied Reginald, stiffly.“Yes, fine old fellow. I knew him more than thirty years ago when he was a captain of infantry out on the plains and I was a sutler, as it was called then. Handsome old chap still, and his daughter is like him. You show good taste, my boy. I thought you’d find something more entertaining than religion out at that chapel.”Reginald Clavering scorned to reply to this, but went on to his study in another part of the house. In a few minutes he heard his father’s step on the stair, and dutifully opened the door for him. Clavering entered, threw himself in a great chair, and began to look around him with an amused smile. The room was a museum of ecclesiastical pictures and gimcracks.“When I was your age,” said Clavering, laughing openly, “I hadn’t a room like this—I shared a board shanty with a fellow from God knows where, who had served a term in state’s prison. But he was the finest smelter expert I ever saw, and had the best eye for a pretty woman. You couldn’t see the boards in our walls for the pictures of ballet dancers and the like. Nothing in the least like this.” And he laughed.Reginald’s pale face flushed with many emotions. His father’s tone and manner expressed a frank scorn for him and all his surroundings. Clavering kept on:—“My roommate—nobody had a room to himself in those diggings—taught me how to differentiate among pretty women.” Clavering was diverted at the spectacle of a man shrinking from such a discussion. “Now, of your sisters, Anne is really the best looking—the most effective, that is. Élise and Lydia are of the tulip variety. Anne is something more and different.”“Élise and Lydia are both of them strikingly like you, sir,” replied Reginald. It was the nearest approach to sarcasm he had ever made in his life. Clavering enjoyed the cut at himself immensely.“Very neat; thank you. Now I should say that Mrs.—what’s her name?—old Brandon’s daughter is a remarkably attractive, even beautiful woman, although she strikes me at first glance as one of those women, not exactly young, who haven’t yet found themselves. Perhaps you’ll show the lady the way.”“Sir,” said Reginald, after a pause, “you shock me!”Clavering was not in the least annoyed at this.He looked at Reginald as one studies an amusing specimen, and said, as if to himself, “Good God! that you should be my son!” He then took up some of the books on the table and began to turn them over, laughing silently to himself the while. The books corresponded with the pictures and ornaments. Reginald Clavering found all of his family a cross, except his sister Anne, and his father the heaviest cross of all. He was sincerely relieved when Clavering took himself downstairs to his own library again.It was a handsome library, and quite what the library of a senator, if not a statesman, should be. The walls were lined with encyclopædias, histories, and the English classics. Clavering, however, was a student of far more interesting documents than any ever printed in a book. He had studied unceasingly the human subject, and knew men and women as a Greek scholar knows his Sophocles. This knowledge of men had made him not only dazzlingly and superbly successful, but even happy in his way. The most saintly man on earth might have envied James Clavering his mind, ever at ease; for he knew no morals, and was unmoral rather than immoral.Two things only in life disturbed him. One was that he would have liked to get rid of hiswife, whom he had married when he was barely twenty-one. She had served his turn. Although homely, shapeless, and stupid now, she had made him comfortable—in the days when his miner’s wages barely kept a humble roof over his head. She had brought her children up properly. Clavering had enough of justice in him not to hold her accountable for the fastness, the vagaries, the love of splendor, the lack of principle, that made his eldest and youngest daughters the subject of frequent paragraphs in scandalous newspapers, and had landed one in the divorce court. They were like him—so Clavering admitted to himself, without a blush. His one fear was that they would, as he expressed it, “make fools of themselves.” He admired chastity in women and even respected it, so far as he could feel respect for anything; and he would, if he could, have kept all the women in his family strictly virtuous. But he never was quite at ease about either Élise or Lydia; and when he saw the simple way in which Élise had slipped off the matrimonial fetters, Clavering had begun to fear greatly—those two girls were so extremely like himself!He knew well enough from whom Reginald inherited his temperament. Mrs. Clavering’s father had been a weak, well-meaning Baptist preacher,and Reginald was a replica of him, plus a university education and a large allowance superadded. Where Anne came in Clavering frankly acknowledged himself beaten. She inherited his own strong will and her mother’s gentleness of address. But she had an innate delicacy, a singular degree of social sense, a power of making herself felt and respected, that Clavering admired but the origin of which he could not trace. She was the one person in the world whom he feared and respected. It was due to her that the Claverings had any real social status whatever. It was through her, and for her alone, that certain honest, dignified, and punctilious senators and public officials came to the grand Clavering dinners and musicals, and allowed their wives to come. It was Anne who would have to be vanquished when, as Clavering had always intended, he should get a divorce from his wife and marry again. He had not attempted this, merely because, so far, the women who would have married him he did not want or could get on easier terms, and the women he might have wanted would not have him at any price. Anne was known as her mother’s champion, and Clavering knew that she would fight the divorce with all the skill, courage, and pertinacity which, as Baskerville had truly said, was all she had inherited fromher father. She had in her, disguised by much suavity and sweetness, a touch of aggressiveness, a noble wilfulness that would not be reasoned away. Clavering knew that the tussle of his life would come when the divorce was seriously mooted; but he was not the less ready for the tussle.The first sight of Elizabeth Darrell had impressed him wonderfully, and the second vision of her had determined him to renew his acquaintance with General Brandon; and while he was turning the mode of this over in his mind he was summoned to luncheon. At luncheon all of the family assembled—Élise and Lydia in elaborate negligées, Anne simply but properly dressed. She sat next her mother at the table and was that poor creature’s only outspoken champion.“So you had a nice morning, with the psalm-singing and all that,” said Élise to Anne.“Very nice,” replied Anne. “Mamma seemed to enjoy it very much.”“We had a nice morning, too,” replied Élise. “The Brentwood-Baldwins glared at us as we went into church; they will never forgive us for getting that pew in the middle aisle, so close to the President’s. Then, after church, Count Rosalka asked to walk home with me. Lydiagot Laurison, the new British third secretary; so we sent the carriage on and walked out Connecticut Avenue with all the Seventh Street shopkeepers. It was very amusing, though.”“It must have been,” said Clavering, gravely. “You must have recalled the time when you would have thought yourself as rich as Pierpont Morgan and Rockefeller combined if you had been as well dressed as a Seventh Street shopkeeper’s daughter. It was only twelve years ago, you remember, since I struck pay dirt in mines and politics.”Élise and Lydia both smiled pleasantly. They were their father’s own daughters, and along with many of his vices they inherited his superb good humor, which never gave way except to a preconcerted burst of imposing wrath.“I remember those days quite well,” said Anne. Her voice, as well as her looks, was quite different from her sisters’. Instead of their rich and sensuous tones, beautiful like their father’s, Anne’s voice had a dovelike quality of cooing softness; but she could always make herself heard. “I remember,” she continued, touching her mother’s coarse hand outspread on the table, “when mamma used to make our gowns, and we looked quite as nice as the girls whocould afford to have their clothes made by a dressmaker.”“Them was happy days,” said Mrs. Clavering. It was her only remark during luncheon.They talked of their plans for the coming week, as people do to whom pleasure and leisure are new and intoxicating things. Anne was plied with questions about Mrs. Luttrell’s dinner. She told freely all about it, being secretive only concerning Baskerville, merely mentioning that he was present.“A more toploftical, stuck-up F. F. V.—or F. F. M., I suppose he is—I never saw than this same Mr. Baskerville, and as dull as ditchwater besides,” said Lydia.Here Reginald spoke. “Mr. Baskerville is very highly esteemed by the bishop of the diocese,” he said.“And by people of a good deal more brains than the bishop of the diocese,” added Clavering. “Baskerville is one of the brainiest men of his age I ever knew. He is fighting me in this K. F. R. business; but all the same I have a high opinion of his gray matter, and I wish you two girls—Élise and Lydia—knew men like Baskerville instead of foreign rapscallions and fortune-hunters like Rosalka. And I wish you went to dinnerssuch as Anne went to last night, instead of scampering over the town to all sorts of larky places with all sorts of larky people.”To this Lydia replied. So far, she had achieved neither marriage nor divorce, but she was not averse to either. “I think the dinners Anne goes to must be precious dull. Now, our men and our parties, whatever they are, they aren’t dull. I never laughed so much in my life as I did at Rosalka’s stories.”Clavering’s face grew black. He was no better than he should be himself, and ethically he made no objection to his daughters’ amusing themselves in any way but one; but old prejudices and superstitions made him delicate on the one point upon which he suspected two of his daughters were the least squeamish. He said nothing, however, nor did Anne or Reginald; it was a subject none of them cared to discuss. When luncheon was over, Mrs. Clavering and Anne made ready for their early Sunday afternoon walk—a time to which Mrs. Clavering looked forward all the week and with which Anne never allowed any of her own engagements to interfere.Meanwhile Clavering himself, interested for the first time in the tall, shabby house across the way, walked out upon the broad stone steps of his ownplace and watched the windows opposite, hoping for a glimpse of Elizabeth Darrell’s face. While he stood there smoking and apparently engaged in the harmless enjoyment of a lovely autumn afternoon, Richard Baskerville approached. Baskerville denied himself the pleasure of seeking Anne in her own home, but he often found himself, without his own volition, in the places where he would be likely to meet her, and so he was walking along the street in which she lived. Seeing Clavering on the steps Baskerville would have passed with a cool nod, but Clavering stopped him; and the younger man, thinking Anne Clavering might be within sight or might appear, compromised with his conscience and entered into conversation with Clavering. It was always an effort on Baskerville’s part to avoid Clavering, whose extraordinary charm of manner and personality was a part of his capital. Baskerville, deep in the study of Clavering’s career, felt a genuine curiosity about the man and how he did things and what he really thought of himself and his own doings. He reckoned Clavering to be a colossal and very attractive scoundrel, whom he was earnestly seeking to destroy; and his relations were further complicated with Clavering by the fact that Anne Clavering was—a very interestingwoman. This Baskerville admitted to himself; he had got that far on the road to love.The Senator, with the brilliant smile which made him handsomer than ever, said to Baskerville, “We may as well enjoy the privilege of speaking before you do me up in the matter of the K. F. R. land grants.”The younger man cleverly avoided shaking hands with Clavering, but replied, also smiling, “Your attorneys say we shan’t be able to ‘do you up,’ Senator.”“I hope they’re right. I swear, in that business the amount of lying and perjury, if placed on end, would reach to the top of the Washington Monument. Have a cigar?”Such indeed was Baskerville’s own view of the lying and perjury, but he opined that it was all on Senator Clavering’s side, and he was trying to prove it. He got out of taking one of Clavering’s cigars—for he was nice upon points of honor—by taking a cigarette out of his case.“I don’t know what you youngsters are coming to,” said Clavering, as he smoked. “Cigarettes and vermouth, and that sort of thing, instead of a good strong cigar and four fingers of whiskey.”“I was on the foot-ball team at the university for three terms, and we had to lead lives likeboarding-school misses,” replied Baskerville, toying with his cigarette. “Our coach was about the stiffest man against whiskey and cigars I ever knew—and used to preach to us seven days in the week that a couple of cigars a day and four fingers of whiskey would shortly land any fellow at the undertaker’s. I fell from grace, it is true, directly I was graduated; but that coach’s gruesome predictions have stuck to me like the shirt of Nemesis, as your colleague, Senator Jephson, said the other day on the floor of the Senate.”“Jephson’s an ass. He is the sort of man that would define a case of mixed property as a suit for a mule.”“Hardly. And he’s an honest old blunderbuss.”“Still, he’s an ass, as I say. His honesty doesn’t prevent that.”“Well, yes, in a way it does. I’m not a professional moralist, but I don’t believe there is any really good substitute for honesty.” Then Baskerville suddenly turned red; the discussion of honesty with a man whose dishonesty he firmly believed in, and was earnestly trying to prove, was a blunder into which he did not often fall. Clavering, who saw everything, noted the other’s flush, understood it perfectly, and smiled in appreciationof the joke. Baskerville did not propose to emphasize his mistake by running away, and was prepared to stay some minutes longer, when the entrance doors were swung open by the gorgeous footman, and Mrs. Clavering, leaning upon Anne’s arm, appeared for a walk. When he saw his wife, Clavering’s face grew dark; that old woman, with her bad grammar and her big hands, was always in his way. He said good morning abruptly and went indoors at once.Anne greeted Baskerville with a charming smile, and introduced him at once to her mother. Something in his manner to Mrs. Clavering revealed the antique respect he had for every decent woman, no matter how unattractive she might be. He assisted Mrs. Clavering down the great stone steps as if she were a young and pretty girl instead of a lumbering, ignorant, elderly woman; and Mrs. Clavering found courage to address him, a thing she rarely did to strangers.“I guess,” she said diffidently, “you’ve got an old mother of your own that you help up and down—you do it so easy.”“No, I wish I had,” answered Baskerville, with a kindness in his voice that both the old woman and the young felt. “My mother has been dead a long time; but I have a fine old aunt, Mrs. Luttrell,who makes me fetch and carry like an expressman’s horse, and then she says I am not half so attentive to her as I ought to be. Perhaps Miss Clavering has told you about her—I had the pleasure of dining with Miss Clavering at my aunt’s last night.”“Yes, she did, and she told me you were all real nice,” answered Mrs. Clavering—and was appalled at her own daring.Anne and Baskerville talked about the dinner, as they walked along the sunny, quiet street. Anne had enjoyed every moment spent in Mrs. Luttrell’s house, and said so. Mrs. Clavering walked with difficulty, and the young man’s arm at the street crossings was a real assistance to her; and without talking down to Mrs. Clavering or embarrassing her by direct remarks, he skilfully included her in the conversation.Mrs. Clavering felt increasingly comfortable. Here was a man who did not scorn a woman because she was old and plain. For once the poor woman did not feel in the way with another person besides Anne. She ventured several remarks, such as: “People ought to be kind to poor dumb brutes, who can’t tell what ails them,” and “Washington is a great deal prettier for having so many trees, because trees make any placepretty,”—to all of which Baskerville listened with pleasant courtesy. He began to see in this ordinary, uneducated woman a certain hint of attractiveness in her gentleness of voice and softness of eyes that were reflected and intensified in the slim and graceful daughter by her side. Anne turned her soft, expressive eyes—her only real beauty—on Baskerville with a look of gratitude in them. Her life at home was one long fight for the happiness and dignity of her mother, for whom no one of her family had the least respect, except herself and her brother Reginald; and Reginald was but a poor creature in many ways. If Baskerville had sat up all night for a month, trying to devise a plan to ingratiate himself with Anne Clavering, he could not have done it better than by his courtesy to her mother. And he, appreciating the strong affection, the courage, the absence of false pride, the unselfishness, of Anne Clavering in this particular, admired her the more.As they walked slowly along and talked, a kind of intimacy seemed to spring into being between them. Gratitude is a strong incentive to regard on both sides, and Baskerville’s attitude toward Mrs. Clavering touched Anne to the heart. Their objective point was Dupont Circle, which at that hour was tolerably free fromthe colored gentry and the baby carriages which make it populous eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. But Mrs. Clavering was destined to receive further distinguished attentions during that episode of the walk. When she was seated comfortably on a bench Baskerville proposed to Anne that he show her, on the other side of the Circle, a silver maple tree in great autumnal glory.“Now do go, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering. “I’d like to set here awhile. Do, Mr. Baskerville, take her off—she ain’t left me an hour this day, and she oughter have a little pleasure.”“Come, obey your mother,” Baskerville said; and Anne, smiling, walked off with him.Mrs. Clavering, good soul, was like other mothers, and as her darling child went off with Baskerville she thought: “How nice them two look together! And he is such a civil-spoken, sensible young man. Anne deserves a good husband, and if—“This train of thought was interrupted by General Brandon. He, too, after his luncheon, was out for a Sunday airing, and passing the bench on which Mrs. Clavering sat, the good woman, with new-found courage, looked up at him and actually ventured upon a timid bow. She hadrecognized him from the first time she had seen him, when she moved into their new and splendid house; and she had a perfectly clear recollection of the old sutler days, when General Brandon was a handsome young captain, who always had a polite word for the sutler’s wife. But she had never before, in the two years they had lived opposite each other, had the courage to speak to him. Her success with Baskerville emboldened her, and as General Brandon made her an elaborate, old-fashioned bow Mrs. Clavering said:—“This used to be Cap’n Brandon—a long time ago, just before the war broke out.”“Yes, madam,” replied General Brandon; “and you, I believe, are Mrs. Clavering. I remember quite well when Mr. Clavering brought you, a blooming bride, to the post.”Mrs. Clavering sighed. She was so lonely in the big house, so continually snubbed by her husband, by her daughters Élise and Lydia, by the uppish footman and the giggling maids; she was so cut off from everything she had known before, that the sight of persons connected with those early days was like water in the desert to her. She smiled a deprecating smile, and answered: “I’ve seen you on the streets often enough. You live opposite our house, don’t you?”“Yes,” said General Brandon. Then Mrs. Clavering made a faint indication that he should sit down, and he placed himself on the bench by her side. “I recognized both you and Senator Clavering,” he went on, “but as neither of you showed any recollection of me I hesitated to speak.”Mrs. Clavering sighed. “You are the first person since I came to Washington that I ever seen as far back as them days at the army post.”General Brandon, the most chivalrous of men, saw in Mrs. Clavering the timid longing to talk about old days and old ways, and he himself had a fondness for reminiscences; so the pair of old fogies entered into talk, feeling a greater degree of acquaintanceship in meeting after that long stretch of years than they had ever known before. When Anne and Baskerville returned, twenty minutes later, quite an active conversation was going on.“Anne, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering, actually in a self-possessed manner, “this is General Brandon, who lives opposite our house. I knew him in them old times at the army post; and he’s got a daughter, a widder, come home from England, to live with him. Anne, you must go and call on her.”“I shall with much pleasure,” replied Anne, bestowing on General Brandon her charming smile. Then, after a little more talk, it was time to return. General Brandon gallantly offered Mrs. Clavering his arm, and the poor lady, embarrassed but pleased, was escorted with courtly grace to her door. Anne and Baskerville had meanwhile made vast strides in intimacy. It was not, however, enough for Anne to repeat her invitation to call, but Mrs. Clavering, when she arrived at the door which was by courtesy called hers, plucked up extraordinary courage and said:—“I hope, Mr. Baskerville, you will favor us with your company on Thursday, which is our receiving day. General Brandon has promised to come, and I’ll be real disappointed if you don’t come, too.”It was the first invitation that Mrs. Clavering had ever given on her own initiative, and she gave it so diffidently, and in such simple good faith, that a man would have been a brute to decline it. So Baskerville accepted it with thanks, wondering meanwhile whether he were not a rascal in so doing. But he wanted very much to see Anne Clavering as often as he could, and the Montague and Capulet act came to him quite naturally and agreeably—the more so when hesaw the gleam of gratification in Anne’s eyes at his acceptance. She said simply:—“I shall be glad to see you;” and then, turning to General Brandon, she added, “We shall, I hope, have the pleasure then of meeting Mrs. Darrell.”“My dear young lady, you are most kind,” answered General Brandon, “but my daughter is so lately widowed—not yet a year and a half—that I feel sure it will be quite impossible to her feelings for her to appear at all in society now. Nevertheless, I shall give her your kind invitation, and she will be most gratified. I shall do myself the honor and pleasure of attending your Thursday reception.”And then they parted, Anne and Baskerville each reckoning that day to have been one of the pleasantest of their lives, and wondering when they should have the good fortune to meet in that sweet, companionable manner again.Chapter TenAt dinner that night General Brandon told Elizabeth about his meeting with Mrs. Clavering, and the renewal of their acquaintance. “The poor lady seemed much pleased at meeting some one associated with her former life,” said the General. “She invited me to call on Thursday, which is their first reception day of the season, and especially urged that you should come. I believe their receptions are large and brilliant—the newspapers are always full of them; so I told her that owing to your very recent mourning it would be impossible for you to go to any large or gay entertainment. I have no doubt Sara Luttrell will ask you to many of her parties,—she keeps a very gay house,—and it is a source of the keenest regret to me that you cannot for the present accept invitations. But another winter I shall hope, my dear child, that you will have the spirit to enter once more into the society you are so admirably fitted to adorn.”Good General Brandon was quite unconscious that in the society to which Elizabeth had beenlong accustomed a year was considered the period of a widow’s mourning. He never dreamed for one moment that she could have been induced to go into society at that time. As a matter of fact, it was the one thing which Elizabeth really hoped might rouse her from her torpor of mind and heart into which she had sunk in the last few months. She had a good and comprehensive mind, which had been much improved by reading under Pelham’s direction. Then had come that brilliant year in London, in which she had really seen the best English society and had liked it, as every one must who knows it. During her whole married life she had taken part in the continual round of small gayeties which prevail at army posts all over the world. Her belle-ship had made this particularly gratifying and delightful to her. Society had become a habit, although very far from a passion, with her, and she had expected to return to it, as one resumes one’s daily habits.She had taken a strange interest in the Claverings from the very beginning—they constituted her first impressions of Washington; and she would have found some diversion from her sad and wearying thoughts in Mrs. Luttrell’s brilliant and interesting house. But it was impossible for her to go against her father’s impliedideas of propriety. He had always assumed that she was properly and dutifully heart-broken at her husband’s death. She did indeed mourn good, brave, honest, stupid Jack Darrell as a woman mourns a husband for whom she feels gratitude and tenderness, without being in the least in love with him; all the sentiment which belongs to love she had secretly and hopelessly given to Pelham. She often thought that if she had not been so young, so ignorant, she never would have married Darrell.“I think you should force yourself, however painful it may be to your feelings, to go to see Sara Luttrell some day when she is not formally receiving,” said General Brandon, thinking he was proposing a tremendous sacrifice to Elizabeth; and he felt quite triumphant when she agreed to go.When the Thursday afternoon came, there was no need to tell Elizabeth that the Clavering receptions were large and brilliant. By four o’clock carriages came pouring into the street, and by five there was almost animpasse. Great numbers of stylish men, both foreigners and Americans, passed in and out the splendid doors.While Elizabeth was watching this procession with curious interest, Mrs. Luttrell’s great old-fashionedcoach, with the long-tailed black horses, stopped before the tall, shabby house, and Serena brought up Mrs. Luttrell’s and Baskerville’s cards. Mrs. Luttrell, although militant, was not the sort of woman to hit another woman when she was down, and was most gracious when Elizabeth appeared. The sight of the dingy drawing-room, of Elizabeth’s pallor and evident signs of stress and trial, touched Mrs. Luttrell. She mentioned to Elizabeth that a card would be sent her for a large dinner which she was giving within a fortnight, and when Elizabeth gently declined Mrs. Luttrell was really sorry. Baskerville was sincerely cordial. He had liked Elizabeth as a girl, and her forlornness now touched him as it did Mrs. Luttrell.When the visit was over and they were once more out of the house, Mrs. Luttrell exclaimed: “That’s Dick Brandon’s doings—that poor Elizabeth not going to a place and moping in that hole of a house. If she would but go about a bit, and leave her card at the British Embassy, where she would certainly be invited, she could see something of society and recover her spirits and good looks. By the way, I think she’s really more enticing in her pallor and her black gown than when she was in the flush of her beauty. Of course shelooks much older. Now, as I’m going into the Claverings’ I suppose you will leave me.”Baskerville, with a hangdog look, replied, “I’m going into the Claverings’, too.” Mrs. Luttrell’s handsome mouth came open, and her ermine cape fell from her shoulders without her even so much as knowing it. “Yes,” said Baskerville, assuming a bullying air, now that the cat was out of the bag, “Mrs. Clavering asked me last Sunday, and I accepted.”“Where on earth, Richard Bas—““Did I see Mrs. Clavering? I met her out walking with Miss Clavering. Mrs. Clavering is a most excellent woman—quiet and unobtrusive—and I swear there is something of her in Miss Clavering.”“Richard Baskerville, you are in love with Anne Clavering! I know it; I feel it.”“Don’t be a fool, Sara Luttrell. Because I happen to pay a visit at a house where I have been asked and could have gone a year ago, you at once discover a mare’s nest. That’s Sara Luttrell all over.”“And what becomes of the doubtful propriety of your going to Senator Clavering’s house? And suppose you succeed in driving him out of public life, as you are trying to do?”“I swear you are the most provoking old woman in Washington. Hold your tongue and come along with your dutiful nephew.”Grasping her firmly by the arm, Baskerville marched Mrs. Luttrell up the broad stone steps of the Clavering house. The splendid doors were opened noiselessly by gorgeous footmen who looked like the prize-winners at a chrysanthemum show. The entrance was magnificent, and through the half-drawn silken draperies of the wide doorways they could see the whole superb suite of rooms opening upon the large Moorish hall. Great masses of flowers were everywhere, and the mellow glow of wax lights and tinted lamp globes made the winter twilight softly radiant.Half a dozen butterfly débutantes were serving tea in the huge dining room, furnished with priceless teak-wood and black oak, bright with pictures and mirrors, a magnificent Turkish carpet on the parquet floor and chandeliers from a royal palace lighting the dim splendor of the room. Here, brilliant with candelabra, was set out a great table, from which an expensive collation was served by more gorgeous footmen. This was the doing of Élise and Lydia, who overruled Anne’s desire for a simple tea-table set in the library. There, however, a great gold and silverbowl was constantly replenished with champagne punch, and over this Élise and Lydia presided, much preferring the champagne bowl to the tea-table.The library was thronged with men, old and young, native and foreign. Élise and Lydia, their handsome faces flushed and smiling, their elaborate gowns iridescent with gold and silver embroidery and spangles sweeping the floor, laughed, talked, and flirted to their hearts’ content. They also drank punch with a great many men, who squeezed their hands on the sly, looked meaningly into their large, dark eyes, and always went away laughing.Mrs. Luttrell, escorted by Baskerville, and meeting acquaintances at every turn, entered the great drawing-room, which was a symphony in green and gold. Near the door Anne Clavering, in a simple gray gown, stood by her mother, who was seated. Anne received the guests, and then introduced them to Mrs. Clavering, who made the pretence of receiving, looking the picture of misery meanwhile. The poor soul would much rather have remained upstairs; but on this point Anne was inexorable—her mother must show herself in her own drawing-room. A handsome black gown, appropriate to an elderly lady,showed Mrs. Clavering at her best, and Anne, with perfect tact, grace, and patience, silently demanded and received for her mother the respect which was due her and which there was occasionally some difficulty in exacting. As Anne caught sight of Mrs. Luttrell, she smiled with obvious pleasure; but on seeing Baskerville her face lighted up in a way which by no means escaped Mrs. Luttrell’s sharp eyes.Mrs. Clavering was nearly frightened out of her life on the rare occasions when the redoubtable Mrs. Luttrell called, but on this afternoon Mrs. Luttrell was as soft as milk and as sweet as honey itself. Mrs. Clavering was not the least afraid of Baskerville, and said to him earnestly, as he took her hand, “I’m real glad to see you.”“And I am very glad to be able to come,” answered Baskerville. Then, seating himself by her side, he began to talk to her so gently on subjects the poor lady was interested in that she was more delighted with him than ever. A soft flush came into Anne’s delicate cheeks; she appreciated the sweet and subtle flattery in Baskerville’s attitude. It was not interest in Mrs. Clavering’s conversation, nor even the pity he might have felt for her forlorn condition, whichinduced him to spend twenty minutes of his visit in talking to her.Meantime the dusk was deepening. Many visitors were departing and few coming. Mrs. Luttrell was entertaining a select coterie of men around the large fireplace at the other end of the room, and Baskerville was the only person left near Anne and Mrs. Clavering.“Will you be kind enough,” he said to Anne, “to go with me to get a cup of tea? I see a table in yonder, but I am afraid of so many young girls at once. I think I can count six of them. Now if you will go with me, I shall feel as brave as a lion.”The temptation was strong, but Anne looked down at her mother. Apprehension was written on Mrs. Clavering’s simple, homely face at the notion of being left alone.“Why can’t Mr. Baskerville have his tea with me?” said she. “There ain’t any more folks coming. Make Peer bring a table here, Anne, and we’ll have it comfortable together.”“Yes,” Baskerville added, drawing up a chair. “Mrs. Clavering is far more amiable and hospitable than you. I am sure you would never have thought of so kind a solution.”Anne, with a happy smile, gave Pierre theorder, and in a minute they were sitting about a little table, with an opportunity for a few minutes’ talk at a moderate pitch of voice, differing from those hurried, merry meetings in a crowd of laughing, talking, moving people which usually constitute a Washington call.While they were sitting there, all three enjoying themselves and Mrs. Clavering not the least of the three, a belated caller was announced, General Brandon. The General was in his Sunday frock coat, which had seen good service, and his silk hat, which belonged by rights on the retired list; but each was carefully brushed and clearly belonged to a gentleman. General Brandon himself, handsome, soldierly, his white mustache and hair neatly clipped, was grace, elegance, and amiability personified. His head was none of the best, but for beauty, courage, and gentleness he was unmatched. Anne received him with more than her usual cordiality, and Mrs. Clavering was so pleased at seeing him that she actually invited him to sit down at her tea-table and have tea. This he did, explaining why his daughter had sent her cards instead of coming.“Another year, I hope, my dear madam, my daughter may be persuaded to reënter society,which, if you will pardon a father’s pride, I think she adorns. But at present she is overwhelmed with grief at her loss. It is scarcely eighteen months since she became a widow and lost the best of husbands.”General Brandon prattled on, and presently said: “I had hoped to meet Senator Clavering here this afternoon, and made my visit late on purpose. His exacting senatorial duties, however, must leave him little time for social relaxation.”“I think I hear his step in the hall now,” said Anne. “He will, I know, be very much pleased to meet you again.”As she spoke Clavering’s firm tread was heard, and he entered, smiling, debonair, and distinguished-looking. Nobody would have dreamed from anything in his air or looks that this man was nearing a crisis in his fate, and that even then his conduct was being revealed in the newspapers and examined by his fellow-senators in a way which opened a wide, straight vista to state’s prison.Clavering was surprised, but undeniably pleased, and even amused at seeing Baskerville; and Baskerville felt like a hound, and inwardly swore at himself for letting the wish to see a woman’s eyesbring him to Clavering’s house. He put a bold face upon it, however, shook Clavering’s outstretched hand, and called himself a fool and a rogue for so doing.The warmth of Clavering’s greeting to General Brandon delighted the simple old warrior. Clavering, who had too much sound sense to avoid allusions to his early life or to tell lies about it, recalled the time when he was a sutler and General Brandon was an officer. Then he carried the latter off to an alcove in the library, which was now deserted except by Élise and Lydia. These two young women, reclining like odalisks among the cushions of a luxurious sofa, discussed Rosalka and the rest of their swains in low voices and in terms which luckily their father did not overhear.Into the alcove Clavering caused his choicest brands of whiskey to be brought, and at once plunged into talk; and into that talk he infused all his powers of pleasing, which soon produced upon the simple old General a species of intoxication. If any one had told him that Clavering’s attention was due to the sight, more than once obtained since Sunday, of Elizabeth Darrell’s graceful figure and interesting, melancholy face, General Brandon would have called that person a liar.“You know,” said Clavering, as soon as the two were comfortably established with the whiskey and the cigars, “that I am being badgered and bothered by a set of sharks, calling themselves lawyers, who want to rob me of every dollar of my fortune. You have perhaps read in the newspapers something about this K. F. R. land-grant business.”“I am aware the public prints have given considerable space to it,” replied General Brandon, “but I have no knowledge of the merits of the case.”“Neither have the newspapers. The long and short of it is that the sharks, after fighting me through every court in the country, where I may say I have managed to hold my own pretty well, have contrived by political wire-pulling to get a Senate committee to investigate the matter. Now I don’t want to be lacking in courtesy to my brother senators, but of all the collection of asses, dunderheads, and old women, sneaks, hypocrites, and snivelling dogs, that ever were huddled together, that select committee of my esteemed contemporaries—Good Lord! let’s take a drink.”General Brandon drank solemnly. Whiskey of that brand was not to be treated lightly.“I know well all the country embraced in andcontiguous to that K. F. R. land grant,” said the General, putting down his glass reverently. “I scouted and fought and hunted over all that region more than forty years ago, when I was a young lieutenant just turned loose from West Point.”“Why, then,” cried Clavering, his handsome eyes lighting up with a glow like fire, “you might be of real service to me.” He did not specify what manner of service he meant, and General Brandon innocently thought Clavering meant about the K. F. R. land grants. But no man who ever lived could tell Clavering anything he did not know about any piece of property he had ever owned; least of all could simple, guileless General Brandon tell him anything.“I should be most happy,” replied the General. “I have a considerable quantity of memoranda, maps and surveys of the region, which are quite at your service.”“Capital,” said Clavering, his deep eyes shining with a keen delight. “Now as the investigation is going on, which you have seen in the newspapers, I shall have to make immediate use of any information you might be able to give me. Suppose you were to let me come over to your house to-night and take our first view of what you have? And of course you’ll stay and dine with me.”“I thank you very much, Senator, but I cannot leave my daughter to dine alone—she is too much alone, poor child. And immediately after dinner I am engaged to spend an hour with an old friend, General Mayse, a former classmate of mine who is now inflicted with paralysis and to whom I pay a weekly visit. Besides, I should have to rummage among my papers to find those that we require. To-morrow night I shall be at your service.”But it was not Clavering’s nature to delay the accomplishment of any wish. He wanted to see and know Elizabeth Darrell, so he said cordially: “At all events I should like to talk the matter over with you. Would you allow me to come in this evening then, after you have returned from your visit?”“Certainly, Senator. I shall be at home by half after nine.”Then Clavering, seeing that General Brandon was his, began to talk about other things, even to hint at chances of making money. To this General Brandon only sighed and said: “Those enterprises are for men with capital. I have only the equity in my house and my salary, and I cannot, for my daughter’s sake, jeopardize what little I have. She was left with but asmall provision from her husband’s estate, which was strictly entailed.” Clavering could not refrain from smiling at General Brandon’s simplicity in refusing such an offer, if even but a hint, for such a reason; but he said no more on the subject.As the General passed into the drawing-room to say good-by to Mrs. Clavering, he was surprised to find Baskerville still sitting at the tea-table. Baskerville had not been asked to stay to dinner, but when Mrs. Luttrell was ready to leave a very mild invitation from Mrs. Clavering, who had no notion of the duration of fashionable visits, had made him ask permission to remain—a permission which Mrs. Luttrell gave with a wink. Anne was not displeased with him for staying—her eyes and smile conveyed as much; and man-like, Baskerville had succumbed to the temptation. But when General Brandon came in and found him the very last visitor in the drawing-room he felt himself distinctly caught, and made his farewells with more haste than grace. Mrs. Clavering urged him to come again, and Anne’s tones conveyedauf wiedersehento him as eloquently as a tone can without specific words; nevertheless, when Baskerville found himself out in the cool, crisp night, he beganto doubt, as he had ever doubted, the propriety of his going to Senator Clavering’s house at all. But General Brandon was saying to him most earnestly, as they stood under the lamp-post before going their different ways:—“Senator Clavering is a very cruelly maligned man; of that I am certain. And I think, Mr. Baskerville, that most of the testimony you and the Civil Service League and the K. F. R. attorneys have collected will break down when it is introduced before the committee. Why, Senator Clavering tells me that he has been accused, on evidence that wouldn’t hang a dog, of wholesale bribery, of having bought his seat in the Senate, of having bought up courts and legislatures. But he will be triumphantly vindicated—I make no doubt at all of that.”“I wish he might be,” replied Baskerville, with a degree of sincerity that would scarcely have been credited; “but I don’t think he can be.”When General Brandon let himself into his own house, dinner was ready to be served. He was full of enthusiasm about the Claverings. At the table he assured Elizabeth of his entire belief in Clavering and of his respect for him. Mrs. Clavering he pronounced to be a most excellentand unpretending woman, Anne altogether admirable, Reginald Clavering a worthy fellow and a sound churchman, and Élise Denman and Lydia Clavering two much-abused young women, in whom mere high spirits and unconventionality had been mistaken for a degree of imprudence of which he felt sure they could never be guilty. Then he mentioned Clavering’s proposed visit, and asked Elizabeth if she would, the next day, find the trunk in which he kept certain papers, open it, and get out of it everything dated between ’56 and ’61.When dinner was over and General Brandon had gone out to pay his weekly visit to his paralyzed comrade, Elizabeth went upstairs to a small back room, called by courtesy the study. Here were General Brandon’s few books; he was not, and never had been, a man of books, but he liked to be considered bookish. There was in the room an open grate fire, a student’s lamp, and some old-fashioned tables and easy-chairs. To this room Elizabeth had succeeded in imparting an air of comfort. She sat down before the fire to spend the evening alone, as she had spent so many evenings alone in the last eighteen months, and would, she feared, continue to spend her evenings for the rest of her life. She hadexpected to find her life in Washington dull, but the weeks she had been at home had been duller than she had thought possible. Her father’s old friends had called upon her, but they were all staid and elderly persons, and the circle had grown pitifully small in her ten years of absence. Those ten years had practically obliterated her own acquaintances in the ever changing population of Washington, and the few persons left in the gay world whom she knew, like Mrs. Luttrell, it was plain that her father did not expect her to cultivate.One resource—reading—occurred to her on this particular evening. She had a mind well fitted for books, but she had never been thrown with bookish people, except Pelham, and reading had formed no essential part of her life. Pelham was a man of great intelligence, and a reader; but both his intelligence and his reading were confined to his profession. No matter where Elizabeth’s thinking began, Pelham was sure to come into it somewhere. She started up from her chair as the recollection of him, which always hovered near her, took shape in thought and almost in speech, and going to the book-case took out the first volume her hand fell upon. It was an old translation of Herodotus,and Elizabeth, determined upon a mental opiate, opened it at random and read on resolutely. She fell upon that wonderful story of Cyrus, the reputed son of Mithradates the herdsman; and in following the grandly simple old narrative, told with so much of art, of grace, of convincing perspicacity, that not even a translation can wholly destroy its majestic beauty, Elizabeth lost herself in the shadowy, ancient past. She was roused by Serena’s voice and Serena’s hand, as black as the Ethiopians in Herodotus’s time, who worshipped no other gods save Jupiter and Bacchus. Serena produced a card. It was simple and correct, and read: “Mr. James Clavering,” with the address.“It is Senator Clavering,” said Elizabeth, in a moment. “Tell him that General Brandon is not at home.”“De gent’mun seh he got er ’p’intment wid de Gin’l, an’ he gwine ter wait for him. I t’ink, Miss ’Liz’beth, you better lemme ax him up heah. De parlor is jes’ freezin’ col’,” answered Serena, who never forgot that people should be made comfortable.“Ask him up, then,” replied Elizabeth. She was somewhat flurried at the thought of receiving Clavering alone, but there was no help for it.She was not, however, disappointed; on the contrary she felt a deep and curious interest in seeing this man and tracing if possible that singular recollection of him, so sharp yet so impalpable and still actually inexplicable to herself.In a few minutes Serena ushered Clavering into the room. At close range he was even more attractive than at a distance. It was difficult to associate any idea of advancing age with him. Maturity was all that was indicated by his handsome, smooth-shaven face, his compact and elegant figure, his iron-gray hair. Manual labor had left but one mark upon him—his hands were rough and marred by the miner’s tools he had used. He was perfectly well dressed and entirely at his ease. He introduced himself with the natural and unaffected grace which had been his along with his sutler’s license and miner’s tools.“This, I presume, is Mrs. Darrell. I thank you very much for allowing me to wait for General Brandon’s return.” He said no word about his appointment with General Brandon being at half-past nine while then it was only a little past eight.Elizabeth invited him to sit down, and herself took a seat opposite him. The color which came into her pale face very much enhanced her looks,and Clavering thought he had never seen so interesting a woman. Her slender black figure unconsciously assumed a pose of singular grace and ease, the delicate color mounted slowly into her pale cheeks, and she was indeed worthy of any man’s notice. And as her personality had struck Clavering with great force at the very first glimpse he had had of her ten years before, so, seeing her close at hand and her attention fixed on himself, she overpowered him quickly, as the warm, sweet scent of the jessamine flower is overpowering. It was what he would have called, had he been thirty years younger, love at first sight.Clavering’s coming into the room was, like some new, strong force, making itself felt over everything. The small room seemed full of him and nothing else. He was by nature a dominant personality, and he dominated Elizabeth Darrell as strangely and suddenly as she had cast a spell over him.“My father will regret very much not being here when you came. Perhaps he misunderstood the hour of your appointment,” she said.Clavering’s white teeth shone in a smile. “Don’t trouble about that. Besides, it has given me the pleasure of seeing you.”Elizabeth was not unmindful of the fact thatClavering was a married man, with a wife across the street; and his words, which would have been merely those of courtesy in most men, could not be so interpreted, for Clavering was not a man of pretty speeches.He picked up the volume of Herodotus which lay on the table. “So you’ve been reading old Herodotus! That’s pretty heavy reading for a young woman, isn’t it?”“I took it up at random just now, and became interested in it,” answered Elizabeth.“You are a great reader, I suppose?”“N-no. Hardly, that is. But I am very much alone, and I have read a good deal since I have returned to America.”“Why should a woman like you be alone? Why shouldn’t you go about and see people and live like other women of your age?”Elizabeth made no reply to this; she could scarcely admit that her seclusion was more of her father’s doing than her own. She was struck by the beauty of Clavering’s voice and by the correctness of his speech, which was better than that of many college-bred men.“How long have you been a widow?” he asked.“A year and a half.”“And have you any children?”“No, I lost my only child when he was a baby.”“That’s hard on a woman. You women never forget those dead babies. But all your life is before you yet.”“It seems to me it is all behind me.”“Why? Did you love your husband very much?”Elizabeth had suffered Clavering’s questions partly through surprise and partly because Clavering could say and do what he chose without giving offence—a quality which had been one of the great factors in raising him from the shaft of a mine to a seat in the United States Senate. But the question put to Elizabeth was so unexpected,—it had never been asked of her before,—it was so searching, that it completely disconcerted her. She remained silent, while her eyes, turned upon Clavering, wore a look of trouble and uncertainty.“A great many women don’t love their husbands,” said Clavering, “and if they are left widows, their feelings are very complex. They think they ought to grieve for their husbands, but they don’t.”The color fled suddenly out of Elizabeth’s cheeks. Clavering’s words fitted her case so exactly and so suddenly that she was startled andfrightened. It was as if he had looked into her soul and read at a glance her inmost secrets. She half expected him to say next that she had loved another man than her husband. And as for applying the common rules of behavior to a man like Clavering, it was absurd on the face of it. He was leaning toward Elizabeth, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his eyes fixed upon her with a kind of admiring scrutiny. He found her quite as interesting as he had expected, and he ardently desired to know more about her and, what is as great a mark of interest, to tell her more about himself.Elizabeth remained silent for a while, and then forced herself to say: “My husband was one of the best of men. He was as good as my father.”“That settles it,” replied Clavering, with grim humor. “I never knew a woman in my life who spoke of her husband’s goodness first who was really in love with him. When a woman is in love with a man, it isn’t his goodness she thinks of first; it is his love. Now don’t fly off at that; I’m not a conventional man, and you must know it if you ever heard of me before. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful. On the contrary, I want your good opinion—I havewanted it ever since the first time I ever saw you. I was very much struck with you then. I have wanted to know you and I have planned to know you. Have I committed any crime?”“But—but—you are a married man,” said Elizabeth, faltering, and conscious that she was talking like an ingénue.Clavering laughed as he replied: “That’s downright school-girlish. Any boarding-school miss would say the same. Well, I can’t help it now that I married a woman totally unsuited to me before I was twenty-one years old. Come, Mrs. Darrell, we are not children. I wanted to know you, I say, and I always try to do what I want to do. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Well, let us then know each other. I swear to you I know less of women than I do of any subject I have ever tried to master. True, I never had time until lately; and, besides, I was a middle-aged man before I ever met any educated and intelligent women. In the class of life from which I spring women are household drudges and bearers of children, and I never knew them in any other aspect until I was over forty years of age. Then you can’t imagine what a stunning revelation to me a woman was who had never done anything but amuse herself and improve herself.Suppose you had never met any educated men till now—wouldn’t you find them captivating?”When a man talks to a woman as she has never been talked to before he is certain of finding an interested listener, and, it follows, a tolerant listener. So Elizabeth could not disguise her interest in Clavering, nor was it worth while to pretend to be offended with him. The superficial knowledge she had of the vicissitudes of his life was calculated to arouse and fix her attention; and there was so little to do in her present life that she would have been more or less than mortal if she had turned from the first object of interest she had yet met with in her new and changed and dreary life.She paused awhile before answering Clavering’s last question. “I dare say I should feel so,” she answered. “I remember how it was when I was first married and went to India. Everything interested me. I could not look at a native without wanting to ask all manner of questions of him and about him, which of course I could not be allowed to do; and the life there is so strange—their race problem is so different from ours, and all my modes of thought had to be changed. I was in India over eight years, and it was as strange to me when I left it as when I arrived.”Elizabeth had got the talk away from the personal note upon which Clavering had pitched it, and he, seeing he had said enough for a beginning, followed Elizabeth’s conversational lead. He asked her many questions about her life in India, all singularly intelligent and well put, because drinking at the fountain of other people’s talk had been his chief source of education during his whole life. And Clavering, without being widely read, was far from being an ignorant man. Although he knew not a word of any language except his own, nor the history of any country except his own, he was well acquainted with the history of his own times, and he knew who every living man of importance in his own country and Europe was, and what he was doing. Seeing that Elizabeth was susceptible to the charms of conversation and had a distinct intellectual side, Clavering appealed to her on that side. He told her with an inimitable raciness and humor some of the incidents of his early life in the West, his later adventures, even of his career in the Senate.“I think I never worked so hard in my life as I have during the five years I’ve been in the Senate,” he said. “No man can come to the Senate of the United States with the educationof a sutler, miner, promoter, speculator, and what not—such as I have had—and not work hard; that is, if he expects to be anything else than a dummy. But it isn’t in James Clavering to be a dummy anywhere. So I have thought and read and worked and slaved, and bought other men’s brains in the last five years as earnestly as any man ever did. The result is that when I open my mouth now the senators listen. At first the lawyers in the Senate used to hide a grin when I began to speak, and I admit I did make some bad breaks in the beginning. But I saw my way out of that clearly enough. I found a man who was really a great constitutional lawyer, although he had never been able to make more than a bare living out of his profession in Chicago. I have always invested liberally in brains. When you can actually buy brains or news, you are buying the two most valuable commodities on earth. Well, when I took up a question I had my man go over the legal aspects of it and put them down in black and white. Then I knew well enough how to use them, and I may say without boasting that I have done as well, or better, than any man of my opportunities now in the Senate. However, I don’t compare myself with such men as Andrew Johnson. You know his wife taught him to write,and that man rose to be President of the United States. Of course he wasn’t what you would call a scholarly man, like many of the senators, but good Lord! think of the vast propelling force that took an illiterate man from the tailor’s bench and gave him such a career as Andrew Johnson’s, and made him Vice-President of the United States. Those men—and men like me, too—can’t be called all-round men, like Senator Thorndyke, for example. All of us have got great big gaps and holes in our knowledge and judgment and conduct that the normal well-educated man hasn’t. But where we are strong, we are stronger than they. Do you know anything about Thorndyke?”“I have heard my father speak of Mrs. Thorndyke, whose family he knew many years ago, and he visits occasionally at Senator Thorndyke’s. Mrs. Thorndyke sent me a request that I would call to see her, but—but—I don’t pay any visits now.”“It’s a shame you don’t—a woman like you. Mrs. Thorndyke is charming, but not so charming as you. And I lay claim to great nobility of soul when I praise Mrs. Thorndyke, or Thorndyke either, for that matter. Mrs. Thorndyke has no use for me or for anybody of my name, except mysecond daughter. And Thorndyke, although he isn’t leading the pack of hounds who are baying after me to get me out of the Senate, is quietly giving them the scent. Yet I swear I admire Thorndyke—or, rather, I admire his education and training, which have made him what he is. If I had had that training—a gentleman for my father, a lady for my mother, association with the sons of gentlemen and ladies, a university education, and then had married a lady—“Clavering got up and took a turn about the narrow room. Finally he came and sat down in a chair closer to Elizabeth, and continued: “Thorndyke is one of the lawyers in the Senate who used to bother me. It seemed to me at first that every time I opened my mouth in the Senate chamber I butted into the Constitution of the United States. Either I was butting into the shalls or the shall nots, and Thorndyke always let me know it. I could get along from the first well enough in the rough-and-tumble of debate with men like Senator Crane, for example,—a handsome fellow, from the West, too, very showy in every way, but not the man that Thorndyke is. It was the scholarly men that I was a little afraid of, I’m not ashamed to say. I am a long way off from a fool; consequently I know my own limitations,and a want of scholarship is one of those limitations.”Elizabeth listened, more and more beguiled. She could not but see a sort of self-respect in this man; he respected his own intellect because it was worth respecting, and he had very little respect for his own character and honor because he knew they were not worth respecting. As Elizabeth studied him by the mellow lamplight, while his rich voice echoed through the small room, she could not but recognize that here was a considerable man, a considerable force; and she had never known a man of this type before. She noted that he was as well groomed as the most high-bred man she had ever known—as well as Pelham, for example. He had come into the room with ease and grace. No small tricks of manner disfigured him; he was naturally polished, and he had the gift, very rare and very dangerous, of saying what he would without giving offence,—or, rather, of disarming the person who might be offended. And in spite of his frank talking of himself Elizabeth saw in him an absence of small vanity, of restless self-love. Unconsciously she assumed an air of profound interest in what Clavering was saying,—a form of flattery most insidious and effective because of its unconsciousness.Elizabeth herself, in the eighteen months of loneliness, poverty, and desperate anxiety which she had lately known, had almost lost the sweet fluency which had once distinguished her; but presently Clavering chose to make her talk, and succeeded admirably. She found herself speaking frankly about her past life and telling things she had never thought of telling a stranger; but Clavering seemed anything but a stranger. In truth, he had probed her so well that he knew much more about her than she had dreamed of revealing.When at last General Brandon’s step was heard, Elizabeth started like a guilty child; she had forgotten that her father was to return. General Brandon was delighted to see Clavering, and took a quarter of an hour to explain why he had been ten minutes late.“I didn’t expect to see any papers to-night,” replied Clavering, “but I should like to talk over some things with you. Please don’t go, Mrs. Darrell; what I have to say you are at perfect liberty to hear.”Elizabeth hesitated, and so did General Brandon; but Clavering settled the matter by saying: “If I am to drive you out of your sitting room, I shall feel obliged to remain away, and therebybe deprived of General Brandon’s valuable services.” Elizabeth remained.Clavering then began to give the history from his point of view of the K. F. R. land grants. It was a powerfully interesting story, told with much dramatic force. It embraced the history of much of Clavering’s life, which was in itself a long succession of uncommon episodes. It lost nothing in the telling. Then he came to the vindictive and long-continued fight made on him politically, which culminated in the bringing of these matters before a Senate committee by a powerful association of Eastern railway magnates and corporation lawyers, aided by the senators in opposition and others in his own party who, because he was not strictly amenable to party discipline, would be glad to see him driven out of the Senate. But Clavering was a fighting man, and although driven to the wall, he had his back to it; he was very far from surrender, and so he said.Elizabeth listened with breathless interest. Nothing like this had ever come into her experience before. It struck her as being so much larger and stronger than any of the struggles which she had heretofore known that it dwarfed them all. Everybody’s affairs seemed small beside Clavering’s. Yet she was fully conscious allthe time that this was special pleading on Clavering’s part. She admired the ingenuity, the finesse, the daring, that Clavering had shown and was showing; but it all seemed to her as if there must be something as large and as strong on the other side.No such idea, however, came into General Brandon’s kind, simple wooden head. When Clavering had finished speaking, the General rose and, grasping him by the hand, said solemnly: “My dear sir, I sympathize with you profoundly. I am convinced that you have been the victim of misplaced confidence, and that this unprincipled hounding of you on the part of men who wish to rob you, not only of your property and your seat in the Senate, but your high character and your priceless good name, is bound to come to naught. I offer you my sincere sympathy, and I assure you that I place entire credence in every word that you have told me.”This was more than Elizabeth did; and when Clavering thought of it afterward, sitting over his library fire, he laughed to himself. On the strength of it, however, he had secured opportunities of seeing General Brandon’s daughter very often, and he did not mean to let the grass grow under his feet.

Chapter NineThe next day was a bright November Sunday, and after an early luncheon Baskerville started out for a walk into the country. Anne Clavering was much in his mind, and he was beginning to debate with himself in this wise: if Senator Clavering had no delicacy about inviting him to call, why should he be too delicate-minded to go? Which proves that Baskerville was in love with Anne Clavering, or he would have said that for him to go to a man’s house under the circumstances in which he would enter Senator Clavering’s was an outrageous breach of propriety.When he got well out of the town, he met the scanty congregation of a small Episcopal chapel in the suburbs. Among those strolling homeward he speedily recognized General Brandon and Elizabeth Darrell—and with them Reginald Clavering. This only son of Senator Clavering’s was no more like him than Anne was, and, indeed, very much resembled Anne, except that he had neither her grace nor her intelligence. He had agood and affectionate heart, and in a foolish, blundering way was both an honest man and a gentleman. His life, however, was given over to small and futile things, and even his piety, which was genuine, embodied a childish worship of ecclesiastical trifles. He was the mainstay, chief financial backer, and clerical man-of-all-work in the little chapel, while his sisters, Élise and Lydia, fought with the Brentwood-Baldwins at St. John’s, and Anne, after going to an early morning service at the nearest church, devoted the rest of her Sunday to her mother.Baskerville stopped and spoke with great cordiality to the party. He had known Elizabeth Darrell well in her girlhood, and there was a remote, seventeenth-cousin, Maryland-Virginia connection between the Baskervilles and the Brandons. His first glance at her in her mourning costume showed him that she had suffered much, and her beauty was partially eclipsed. She had gained interest, however, as the case often is, by learning the hard lessons of life, and Baskerville saw that she might regain all and more of her good looks with returning flesh and color, and a loss of the wearied and forlorn expression in her still glorious dark eyes. He asked permission to call upon her, and Elizabeth assented with outward graceand cheerfulness; but, in truth, it mattered little to her then whether she ever saw any one again, except her father, and—humiliating thought!—Pelham, once more. For, deeply incensed as she was with Pelham, the thought of ever again meeting him was profoundly agitating to her. She inquired of Baskerville about Mrs. Luttrell, and sent her a kind message; then they parted and went upon their several ways.Half an hour afterwards, when Elizabeth Darrell was nearing her own door, Senator Clavering—who, sitting at his library window, caught sight of her graceful black figure as she stopped with her father and talked a few minutes with Reginald Clavering—started to his feet, his keen, handsome eyes fixed upon her with admiring approval. He remembered her perfectly well, that beautiful girl he had seen on the icy night ten years ago when he had watched the gay people flocking to the Charity Ball, and the little trinket he had unconsciously crushed under his foot. He had wondered a dozen times since he had been in Washington, and had often asked, what had become of General Brandon’s beautiful daughter, and was told that she had married a British Army man and had disappeared in the wilderness. He had never seen General Brandon from that hour,although they lived opposite, General Brandon’s hours being very different from Senator Clavering’s and their habits being as dissimilar as could possibly be imagined.Clavering was a connoisseur in feminine beauty, and all forms of it appealed to him. He thought Elizabeth twice as beautiful as he had done in that passing glimpse of her, ten years before, in the bloom of her girlhood. Strange to say, the languid, interesting, and somewhat tragic type which Elizabeth Darrell now represented was the most attractive to him—perhaps because it is the rarest. “By Jove, what a woman! I must know her,” was his inward comment. He watched Elizabeth intently, her fragile figure, her peculiar grace of movement, the note of distinction in her whole person and air; and then and there he determined to resurrect his acquaintance with General Brandon, whose relationship to her was obvious, and whom Clavering had no more forgotten than General Brandon had forgotten him.Presently Reginald Clavering entered the house, and the first sound that met his ears was something between a wail and a shout which came from the upper region. Reginald winced at the sound. His mother still held to her original Baptist faith—about the only thing pertainingto her early life which she had not meekly given up. She was at that moment enjoying the spiritual ministrations of a Baptist minister who came sometimes on Sundays to pray with her and sing camp-meeting hymns—to the intense diversion of the smart English footman and gay French maids, of whom Mrs. Clavering was in deadly fear. And to make it worse for Reginald, Anne Clavering, instead of setting her face against this unchurchmanlike proceeding, actually aided and abetted her mother in her plebeian sort of religion, and joined her clear note to the Rev. Mr. Smithers’ bellowing and Mrs. Clavering’s husky contralto. The whole thing offended Reginald Clavering’s æsthetic sense; but it was a proof that he had much that was good in him that he bore these proceedings silently, as became a gentleman, a Christian, and an Anglican, and made no complaint to any one except Anne.As he passed the open library door, Senator Clavering called out to him in that rich and melodious voice which the stenographers in the Senate gallery declared the most agreeable and easily followed voice of any member of the Senate: “Hello! What is the name of that infernally pretty woman whom you were escorting just now?”“Mrs. Darrell, the widowed daughter of GeneralBrandon. General Brandon is one of the vestrymen at St. Gabriel’s Chapel,” replied Reginald, stiffly.“Yes, fine old fellow. I knew him more than thirty years ago when he was a captain of infantry out on the plains and I was a sutler, as it was called then. Handsome old chap still, and his daughter is like him. You show good taste, my boy. I thought you’d find something more entertaining than religion out at that chapel.”Reginald Clavering scorned to reply to this, but went on to his study in another part of the house. In a few minutes he heard his father’s step on the stair, and dutifully opened the door for him. Clavering entered, threw himself in a great chair, and began to look around him with an amused smile. The room was a museum of ecclesiastical pictures and gimcracks.“When I was your age,” said Clavering, laughing openly, “I hadn’t a room like this—I shared a board shanty with a fellow from God knows where, who had served a term in state’s prison. But he was the finest smelter expert I ever saw, and had the best eye for a pretty woman. You couldn’t see the boards in our walls for the pictures of ballet dancers and the like. Nothing in the least like this.” And he laughed.Reginald’s pale face flushed with many emotions. His father’s tone and manner expressed a frank scorn for him and all his surroundings. Clavering kept on:—“My roommate—nobody had a room to himself in those diggings—taught me how to differentiate among pretty women.” Clavering was diverted at the spectacle of a man shrinking from such a discussion. “Now, of your sisters, Anne is really the best looking—the most effective, that is. Élise and Lydia are of the tulip variety. Anne is something more and different.”“Élise and Lydia are both of them strikingly like you, sir,” replied Reginald. It was the nearest approach to sarcasm he had ever made in his life. Clavering enjoyed the cut at himself immensely.“Very neat; thank you. Now I should say that Mrs.—what’s her name?—old Brandon’s daughter is a remarkably attractive, even beautiful woman, although she strikes me at first glance as one of those women, not exactly young, who haven’t yet found themselves. Perhaps you’ll show the lady the way.”“Sir,” said Reginald, after a pause, “you shock me!”Clavering was not in the least annoyed at this.He looked at Reginald as one studies an amusing specimen, and said, as if to himself, “Good God! that you should be my son!” He then took up some of the books on the table and began to turn them over, laughing silently to himself the while. The books corresponded with the pictures and ornaments. Reginald Clavering found all of his family a cross, except his sister Anne, and his father the heaviest cross of all. He was sincerely relieved when Clavering took himself downstairs to his own library again.It was a handsome library, and quite what the library of a senator, if not a statesman, should be. The walls were lined with encyclopædias, histories, and the English classics. Clavering, however, was a student of far more interesting documents than any ever printed in a book. He had studied unceasingly the human subject, and knew men and women as a Greek scholar knows his Sophocles. This knowledge of men had made him not only dazzlingly and superbly successful, but even happy in his way. The most saintly man on earth might have envied James Clavering his mind, ever at ease; for he knew no morals, and was unmoral rather than immoral.Two things only in life disturbed him. One was that he would have liked to get rid of hiswife, whom he had married when he was barely twenty-one. She had served his turn. Although homely, shapeless, and stupid now, she had made him comfortable—in the days when his miner’s wages barely kept a humble roof over his head. She had brought her children up properly. Clavering had enough of justice in him not to hold her accountable for the fastness, the vagaries, the love of splendor, the lack of principle, that made his eldest and youngest daughters the subject of frequent paragraphs in scandalous newspapers, and had landed one in the divorce court. They were like him—so Clavering admitted to himself, without a blush. His one fear was that they would, as he expressed it, “make fools of themselves.” He admired chastity in women and even respected it, so far as he could feel respect for anything; and he would, if he could, have kept all the women in his family strictly virtuous. But he never was quite at ease about either Élise or Lydia; and when he saw the simple way in which Élise had slipped off the matrimonial fetters, Clavering had begun to fear greatly—those two girls were so extremely like himself!He knew well enough from whom Reginald inherited his temperament. Mrs. Clavering’s father had been a weak, well-meaning Baptist preacher,and Reginald was a replica of him, plus a university education and a large allowance superadded. Where Anne came in Clavering frankly acknowledged himself beaten. She inherited his own strong will and her mother’s gentleness of address. But she had an innate delicacy, a singular degree of social sense, a power of making herself felt and respected, that Clavering admired but the origin of which he could not trace. She was the one person in the world whom he feared and respected. It was due to her that the Claverings had any real social status whatever. It was through her, and for her alone, that certain honest, dignified, and punctilious senators and public officials came to the grand Clavering dinners and musicals, and allowed their wives to come. It was Anne who would have to be vanquished when, as Clavering had always intended, he should get a divorce from his wife and marry again. He had not attempted this, merely because, so far, the women who would have married him he did not want or could get on easier terms, and the women he might have wanted would not have him at any price. Anne was known as her mother’s champion, and Clavering knew that she would fight the divorce with all the skill, courage, and pertinacity which, as Baskerville had truly said, was all she had inherited fromher father. She had in her, disguised by much suavity and sweetness, a touch of aggressiveness, a noble wilfulness that would not be reasoned away. Clavering knew that the tussle of his life would come when the divorce was seriously mooted; but he was not the less ready for the tussle.The first sight of Elizabeth Darrell had impressed him wonderfully, and the second vision of her had determined him to renew his acquaintance with General Brandon; and while he was turning the mode of this over in his mind he was summoned to luncheon. At luncheon all of the family assembled—Élise and Lydia in elaborate negligées, Anne simply but properly dressed. She sat next her mother at the table and was that poor creature’s only outspoken champion.“So you had a nice morning, with the psalm-singing and all that,” said Élise to Anne.“Very nice,” replied Anne. “Mamma seemed to enjoy it very much.”“We had a nice morning, too,” replied Élise. “The Brentwood-Baldwins glared at us as we went into church; they will never forgive us for getting that pew in the middle aisle, so close to the President’s. Then, after church, Count Rosalka asked to walk home with me. Lydiagot Laurison, the new British third secretary; so we sent the carriage on and walked out Connecticut Avenue with all the Seventh Street shopkeepers. It was very amusing, though.”“It must have been,” said Clavering, gravely. “You must have recalled the time when you would have thought yourself as rich as Pierpont Morgan and Rockefeller combined if you had been as well dressed as a Seventh Street shopkeeper’s daughter. It was only twelve years ago, you remember, since I struck pay dirt in mines and politics.”Élise and Lydia both smiled pleasantly. They were their father’s own daughters, and along with many of his vices they inherited his superb good humor, which never gave way except to a preconcerted burst of imposing wrath.“I remember those days quite well,” said Anne. Her voice, as well as her looks, was quite different from her sisters’. Instead of their rich and sensuous tones, beautiful like their father’s, Anne’s voice had a dovelike quality of cooing softness; but she could always make herself heard. “I remember,” she continued, touching her mother’s coarse hand outspread on the table, “when mamma used to make our gowns, and we looked quite as nice as the girls whocould afford to have their clothes made by a dressmaker.”“Them was happy days,” said Mrs. Clavering. It was her only remark during luncheon.They talked of their plans for the coming week, as people do to whom pleasure and leisure are new and intoxicating things. Anne was plied with questions about Mrs. Luttrell’s dinner. She told freely all about it, being secretive only concerning Baskerville, merely mentioning that he was present.“A more toploftical, stuck-up F. F. V.—or F. F. M., I suppose he is—I never saw than this same Mr. Baskerville, and as dull as ditchwater besides,” said Lydia.Here Reginald spoke. “Mr. Baskerville is very highly esteemed by the bishop of the diocese,” he said.“And by people of a good deal more brains than the bishop of the diocese,” added Clavering. “Baskerville is one of the brainiest men of his age I ever knew. He is fighting me in this K. F. R. business; but all the same I have a high opinion of his gray matter, and I wish you two girls—Élise and Lydia—knew men like Baskerville instead of foreign rapscallions and fortune-hunters like Rosalka. And I wish you went to dinnerssuch as Anne went to last night, instead of scampering over the town to all sorts of larky places with all sorts of larky people.”To this Lydia replied. So far, she had achieved neither marriage nor divorce, but she was not averse to either. “I think the dinners Anne goes to must be precious dull. Now, our men and our parties, whatever they are, they aren’t dull. I never laughed so much in my life as I did at Rosalka’s stories.”Clavering’s face grew black. He was no better than he should be himself, and ethically he made no objection to his daughters’ amusing themselves in any way but one; but old prejudices and superstitions made him delicate on the one point upon which he suspected two of his daughters were the least squeamish. He said nothing, however, nor did Anne or Reginald; it was a subject none of them cared to discuss. When luncheon was over, Mrs. Clavering and Anne made ready for their early Sunday afternoon walk—a time to which Mrs. Clavering looked forward all the week and with which Anne never allowed any of her own engagements to interfere.Meanwhile Clavering himself, interested for the first time in the tall, shabby house across the way, walked out upon the broad stone steps of his ownplace and watched the windows opposite, hoping for a glimpse of Elizabeth Darrell’s face. While he stood there smoking and apparently engaged in the harmless enjoyment of a lovely autumn afternoon, Richard Baskerville approached. Baskerville denied himself the pleasure of seeking Anne in her own home, but he often found himself, without his own volition, in the places where he would be likely to meet her, and so he was walking along the street in which she lived. Seeing Clavering on the steps Baskerville would have passed with a cool nod, but Clavering stopped him; and the younger man, thinking Anne Clavering might be within sight or might appear, compromised with his conscience and entered into conversation with Clavering. It was always an effort on Baskerville’s part to avoid Clavering, whose extraordinary charm of manner and personality was a part of his capital. Baskerville, deep in the study of Clavering’s career, felt a genuine curiosity about the man and how he did things and what he really thought of himself and his own doings. He reckoned Clavering to be a colossal and very attractive scoundrel, whom he was earnestly seeking to destroy; and his relations were further complicated with Clavering by the fact that Anne Clavering was—a very interestingwoman. This Baskerville admitted to himself; he had got that far on the road to love.The Senator, with the brilliant smile which made him handsomer than ever, said to Baskerville, “We may as well enjoy the privilege of speaking before you do me up in the matter of the K. F. R. land grants.”The younger man cleverly avoided shaking hands with Clavering, but replied, also smiling, “Your attorneys say we shan’t be able to ‘do you up,’ Senator.”“I hope they’re right. I swear, in that business the amount of lying and perjury, if placed on end, would reach to the top of the Washington Monument. Have a cigar?”Such indeed was Baskerville’s own view of the lying and perjury, but he opined that it was all on Senator Clavering’s side, and he was trying to prove it. He got out of taking one of Clavering’s cigars—for he was nice upon points of honor—by taking a cigarette out of his case.“I don’t know what you youngsters are coming to,” said Clavering, as he smoked. “Cigarettes and vermouth, and that sort of thing, instead of a good strong cigar and four fingers of whiskey.”“I was on the foot-ball team at the university for three terms, and we had to lead lives likeboarding-school misses,” replied Baskerville, toying with his cigarette. “Our coach was about the stiffest man against whiskey and cigars I ever knew—and used to preach to us seven days in the week that a couple of cigars a day and four fingers of whiskey would shortly land any fellow at the undertaker’s. I fell from grace, it is true, directly I was graduated; but that coach’s gruesome predictions have stuck to me like the shirt of Nemesis, as your colleague, Senator Jephson, said the other day on the floor of the Senate.”“Jephson’s an ass. He is the sort of man that would define a case of mixed property as a suit for a mule.”“Hardly. And he’s an honest old blunderbuss.”“Still, he’s an ass, as I say. His honesty doesn’t prevent that.”“Well, yes, in a way it does. I’m not a professional moralist, but I don’t believe there is any really good substitute for honesty.” Then Baskerville suddenly turned red; the discussion of honesty with a man whose dishonesty he firmly believed in, and was earnestly trying to prove, was a blunder into which he did not often fall. Clavering, who saw everything, noted the other’s flush, understood it perfectly, and smiled in appreciationof the joke. Baskerville did not propose to emphasize his mistake by running away, and was prepared to stay some minutes longer, when the entrance doors were swung open by the gorgeous footman, and Mrs. Clavering, leaning upon Anne’s arm, appeared for a walk. When he saw his wife, Clavering’s face grew dark; that old woman, with her bad grammar and her big hands, was always in his way. He said good morning abruptly and went indoors at once.Anne greeted Baskerville with a charming smile, and introduced him at once to her mother. Something in his manner to Mrs. Clavering revealed the antique respect he had for every decent woman, no matter how unattractive she might be. He assisted Mrs. Clavering down the great stone steps as if she were a young and pretty girl instead of a lumbering, ignorant, elderly woman; and Mrs. Clavering found courage to address him, a thing she rarely did to strangers.“I guess,” she said diffidently, “you’ve got an old mother of your own that you help up and down—you do it so easy.”“No, I wish I had,” answered Baskerville, with a kindness in his voice that both the old woman and the young felt. “My mother has been dead a long time; but I have a fine old aunt, Mrs. Luttrell,who makes me fetch and carry like an expressman’s horse, and then she says I am not half so attentive to her as I ought to be. Perhaps Miss Clavering has told you about her—I had the pleasure of dining with Miss Clavering at my aunt’s last night.”“Yes, she did, and she told me you were all real nice,” answered Mrs. Clavering—and was appalled at her own daring.Anne and Baskerville talked about the dinner, as they walked along the sunny, quiet street. Anne had enjoyed every moment spent in Mrs. Luttrell’s house, and said so. Mrs. Clavering walked with difficulty, and the young man’s arm at the street crossings was a real assistance to her; and without talking down to Mrs. Clavering or embarrassing her by direct remarks, he skilfully included her in the conversation.Mrs. Clavering felt increasingly comfortable. Here was a man who did not scorn a woman because she was old and plain. For once the poor woman did not feel in the way with another person besides Anne. She ventured several remarks, such as: “People ought to be kind to poor dumb brutes, who can’t tell what ails them,” and “Washington is a great deal prettier for having so many trees, because trees make any placepretty,”—to all of which Baskerville listened with pleasant courtesy. He began to see in this ordinary, uneducated woman a certain hint of attractiveness in her gentleness of voice and softness of eyes that were reflected and intensified in the slim and graceful daughter by her side. Anne turned her soft, expressive eyes—her only real beauty—on Baskerville with a look of gratitude in them. Her life at home was one long fight for the happiness and dignity of her mother, for whom no one of her family had the least respect, except herself and her brother Reginald; and Reginald was but a poor creature in many ways. If Baskerville had sat up all night for a month, trying to devise a plan to ingratiate himself with Anne Clavering, he could not have done it better than by his courtesy to her mother. And he, appreciating the strong affection, the courage, the absence of false pride, the unselfishness, of Anne Clavering in this particular, admired her the more.As they walked slowly along and talked, a kind of intimacy seemed to spring into being between them. Gratitude is a strong incentive to regard on both sides, and Baskerville’s attitude toward Mrs. Clavering touched Anne to the heart. Their objective point was Dupont Circle, which at that hour was tolerably free fromthe colored gentry and the baby carriages which make it populous eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. But Mrs. Clavering was destined to receive further distinguished attentions during that episode of the walk. When she was seated comfortably on a bench Baskerville proposed to Anne that he show her, on the other side of the Circle, a silver maple tree in great autumnal glory.“Now do go, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering. “I’d like to set here awhile. Do, Mr. Baskerville, take her off—she ain’t left me an hour this day, and she oughter have a little pleasure.”“Come, obey your mother,” Baskerville said; and Anne, smiling, walked off with him.Mrs. Clavering, good soul, was like other mothers, and as her darling child went off with Baskerville she thought: “How nice them two look together! And he is such a civil-spoken, sensible young man. Anne deserves a good husband, and if—“This train of thought was interrupted by General Brandon. He, too, after his luncheon, was out for a Sunday airing, and passing the bench on which Mrs. Clavering sat, the good woman, with new-found courage, looked up at him and actually ventured upon a timid bow. She hadrecognized him from the first time she had seen him, when she moved into their new and splendid house; and she had a perfectly clear recollection of the old sutler days, when General Brandon was a handsome young captain, who always had a polite word for the sutler’s wife. But she had never before, in the two years they had lived opposite each other, had the courage to speak to him. Her success with Baskerville emboldened her, and as General Brandon made her an elaborate, old-fashioned bow Mrs. Clavering said:—“This used to be Cap’n Brandon—a long time ago, just before the war broke out.”“Yes, madam,” replied General Brandon; “and you, I believe, are Mrs. Clavering. I remember quite well when Mr. Clavering brought you, a blooming bride, to the post.”Mrs. Clavering sighed. She was so lonely in the big house, so continually snubbed by her husband, by her daughters Élise and Lydia, by the uppish footman and the giggling maids; she was so cut off from everything she had known before, that the sight of persons connected with those early days was like water in the desert to her. She smiled a deprecating smile, and answered: “I’ve seen you on the streets often enough. You live opposite our house, don’t you?”“Yes,” said General Brandon. Then Mrs. Clavering made a faint indication that he should sit down, and he placed himself on the bench by her side. “I recognized both you and Senator Clavering,” he went on, “but as neither of you showed any recollection of me I hesitated to speak.”Mrs. Clavering sighed. “You are the first person since I came to Washington that I ever seen as far back as them days at the army post.”General Brandon, the most chivalrous of men, saw in Mrs. Clavering the timid longing to talk about old days and old ways, and he himself had a fondness for reminiscences; so the pair of old fogies entered into talk, feeling a greater degree of acquaintanceship in meeting after that long stretch of years than they had ever known before. When Anne and Baskerville returned, twenty minutes later, quite an active conversation was going on.“Anne, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering, actually in a self-possessed manner, “this is General Brandon, who lives opposite our house. I knew him in them old times at the army post; and he’s got a daughter, a widder, come home from England, to live with him. Anne, you must go and call on her.”“I shall with much pleasure,” replied Anne, bestowing on General Brandon her charming smile. Then, after a little more talk, it was time to return. General Brandon gallantly offered Mrs. Clavering his arm, and the poor lady, embarrassed but pleased, was escorted with courtly grace to her door. Anne and Baskerville had meanwhile made vast strides in intimacy. It was not, however, enough for Anne to repeat her invitation to call, but Mrs. Clavering, when she arrived at the door which was by courtesy called hers, plucked up extraordinary courage and said:—“I hope, Mr. Baskerville, you will favor us with your company on Thursday, which is our receiving day. General Brandon has promised to come, and I’ll be real disappointed if you don’t come, too.”It was the first invitation that Mrs. Clavering had ever given on her own initiative, and she gave it so diffidently, and in such simple good faith, that a man would have been a brute to decline it. So Baskerville accepted it with thanks, wondering meanwhile whether he were not a rascal in so doing. But he wanted very much to see Anne Clavering as often as he could, and the Montague and Capulet act came to him quite naturally and agreeably—the more so when hesaw the gleam of gratification in Anne’s eyes at his acceptance. She said simply:—“I shall be glad to see you;” and then, turning to General Brandon, she added, “We shall, I hope, have the pleasure then of meeting Mrs. Darrell.”“My dear young lady, you are most kind,” answered General Brandon, “but my daughter is so lately widowed—not yet a year and a half—that I feel sure it will be quite impossible to her feelings for her to appear at all in society now. Nevertheless, I shall give her your kind invitation, and she will be most gratified. I shall do myself the honor and pleasure of attending your Thursday reception.”And then they parted, Anne and Baskerville each reckoning that day to have been one of the pleasantest of their lives, and wondering when they should have the good fortune to meet in that sweet, companionable manner again.

The next day was a bright November Sunday, and after an early luncheon Baskerville started out for a walk into the country. Anne Clavering was much in his mind, and he was beginning to debate with himself in this wise: if Senator Clavering had no delicacy about inviting him to call, why should he be too delicate-minded to go? Which proves that Baskerville was in love with Anne Clavering, or he would have said that for him to go to a man’s house under the circumstances in which he would enter Senator Clavering’s was an outrageous breach of propriety.

When he got well out of the town, he met the scanty congregation of a small Episcopal chapel in the suburbs. Among those strolling homeward he speedily recognized General Brandon and Elizabeth Darrell—and with them Reginald Clavering. This only son of Senator Clavering’s was no more like him than Anne was, and, indeed, very much resembled Anne, except that he had neither her grace nor her intelligence. He had agood and affectionate heart, and in a foolish, blundering way was both an honest man and a gentleman. His life, however, was given over to small and futile things, and even his piety, which was genuine, embodied a childish worship of ecclesiastical trifles. He was the mainstay, chief financial backer, and clerical man-of-all-work in the little chapel, while his sisters, Élise and Lydia, fought with the Brentwood-Baldwins at St. John’s, and Anne, after going to an early morning service at the nearest church, devoted the rest of her Sunday to her mother.

Baskerville stopped and spoke with great cordiality to the party. He had known Elizabeth Darrell well in her girlhood, and there was a remote, seventeenth-cousin, Maryland-Virginia connection between the Baskervilles and the Brandons. His first glance at her in her mourning costume showed him that she had suffered much, and her beauty was partially eclipsed. She had gained interest, however, as the case often is, by learning the hard lessons of life, and Baskerville saw that she might regain all and more of her good looks with returning flesh and color, and a loss of the wearied and forlorn expression in her still glorious dark eyes. He asked permission to call upon her, and Elizabeth assented with outward graceand cheerfulness; but, in truth, it mattered little to her then whether she ever saw any one again, except her father, and—humiliating thought!—Pelham, once more. For, deeply incensed as she was with Pelham, the thought of ever again meeting him was profoundly agitating to her. She inquired of Baskerville about Mrs. Luttrell, and sent her a kind message; then they parted and went upon their several ways.

Half an hour afterwards, when Elizabeth Darrell was nearing her own door, Senator Clavering—who, sitting at his library window, caught sight of her graceful black figure as she stopped with her father and talked a few minutes with Reginald Clavering—started to his feet, his keen, handsome eyes fixed upon her with admiring approval. He remembered her perfectly well, that beautiful girl he had seen on the icy night ten years ago when he had watched the gay people flocking to the Charity Ball, and the little trinket he had unconsciously crushed under his foot. He had wondered a dozen times since he had been in Washington, and had often asked, what had become of General Brandon’s beautiful daughter, and was told that she had married a British Army man and had disappeared in the wilderness. He had never seen General Brandon from that hour,although they lived opposite, General Brandon’s hours being very different from Senator Clavering’s and their habits being as dissimilar as could possibly be imagined.

Clavering was a connoisseur in feminine beauty, and all forms of it appealed to him. He thought Elizabeth twice as beautiful as he had done in that passing glimpse of her, ten years before, in the bloom of her girlhood. Strange to say, the languid, interesting, and somewhat tragic type which Elizabeth Darrell now represented was the most attractive to him—perhaps because it is the rarest. “By Jove, what a woman! I must know her,” was his inward comment. He watched Elizabeth intently, her fragile figure, her peculiar grace of movement, the note of distinction in her whole person and air; and then and there he determined to resurrect his acquaintance with General Brandon, whose relationship to her was obvious, and whom Clavering had no more forgotten than General Brandon had forgotten him.

Presently Reginald Clavering entered the house, and the first sound that met his ears was something between a wail and a shout which came from the upper region. Reginald winced at the sound. His mother still held to her original Baptist faith—about the only thing pertainingto her early life which she had not meekly given up. She was at that moment enjoying the spiritual ministrations of a Baptist minister who came sometimes on Sundays to pray with her and sing camp-meeting hymns—to the intense diversion of the smart English footman and gay French maids, of whom Mrs. Clavering was in deadly fear. And to make it worse for Reginald, Anne Clavering, instead of setting her face against this unchurchmanlike proceeding, actually aided and abetted her mother in her plebeian sort of religion, and joined her clear note to the Rev. Mr. Smithers’ bellowing and Mrs. Clavering’s husky contralto. The whole thing offended Reginald Clavering’s æsthetic sense; but it was a proof that he had much that was good in him that he bore these proceedings silently, as became a gentleman, a Christian, and an Anglican, and made no complaint to any one except Anne.

As he passed the open library door, Senator Clavering called out to him in that rich and melodious voice which the stenographers in the Senate gallery declared the most agreeable and easily followed voice of any member of the Senate: “Hello! What is the name of that infernally pretty woman whom you were escorting just now?”

“Mrs. Darrell, the widowed daughter of GeneralBrandon. General Brandon is one of the vestrymen at St. Gabriel’s Chapel,” replied Reginald, stiffly.

“Yes, fine old fellow. I knew him more than thirty years ago when he was a captain of infantry out on the plains and I was a sutler, as it was called then. Handsome old chap still, and his daughter is like him. You show good taste, my boy. I thought you’d find something more entertaining than religion out at that chapel.”

Reginald Clavering scorned to reply to this, but went on to his study in another part of the house. In a few minutes he heard his father’s step on the stair, and dutifully opened the door for him. Clavering entered, threw himself in a great chair, and began to look around him with an amused smile. The room was a museum of ecclesiastical pictures and gimcracks.

“When I was your age,” said Clavering, laughing openly, “I hadn’t a room like this—I shared a board shanty with a fellow from God knows where, who had served a term in state’s prison. But he was the finest smelter expert I ever saw, and had the best eye for a pretty woman. You couldn’t see the boards in our walls for the pictures of ballet dancers and the like. Nothing in the least like this.” And he laughed.

Reginald’s pale face flushed with many emotions. His father’s tone and manner expressed a frank scorn for him and all his surroundings. Clavering kept on:—

“My roommate—nobody had a room to himself in those diggings—taught me how to differentiate among pretty women.” Clavering was diverted at the spectacle of a man shrinking from such a discussion. “Now, of your sisters, Anne is really the best looking—the most effective, that is. Élise and Lydia are of the tulip variety. Anne is something more and different.”

“Élise and Lydia are both of them strikingly like you, sir,” replied Reginald. It was the nearest approach to sarcasm he had ever made in his life. Clavering enjoyed the cut at himself immensely.

“Very neat; thank you. Now I should say that Mrs.—what’s her name?—old Brandon’s daughter is a remarkably attractive, even beautiful woman, although she strikes me at first glance as one of those women, not exactly young, who haven’t yet found themselves. Perhaps you’ll show the lady the way.”

“Sir,” said Reginald, after a pause, “you shock me!”

Clavering was not in the least annoyed at this.He looked at Reginald as one studies an amusing specimen, and said, as if to himself, “Good God! that you should be my son!” He then took up some of the books on the table and began to turn them over, laughing silently to himself the while. The books corresponded with the pictures and ornaments. Reginald Clavering found all of his family a cross, except his sister Anne, and his father the heaviest cross of all. He was sincerely relieved when Clavering took himself downstairs to his own library again.

It was a handsome library, and quite what the library of a senator, if not a statesman, should be. The walls were lined with encyclopædias, histories, and the English classics. Clavering, however, was a student of far more interesting documents than any ever printed in a book. He had studied unceasingly the human subject, and knew men and women as a Greek scholar knows his Sophocles. This knowledge of men had made him not only dazzlingly and superbly successful, but even happy in his way. The most saintly man on earth might have envied James Clavering his mind, ever at ease; for he knew no morals, and was unmoral rather than immoral.

Two things only in life disturbed him. One was that he would have liked to get rid of hiswife, whom he had married when he was barely twenty-one. She had served his turn. Although homely, shapeless, and stupid now, she had made him comfortable—in the days when his miner’s wages barely kept a humble roof over his head. She had brought her children up properly. Clavering had enough of justice in him not to hold her accountable for the fastness, the vagaries, the love of splendor, the lack of principle, that made his eldest and youngest daughters the subject of frequent paragraphs in scandalous newspapers, and had landed one in the divorce court. They were like him—so Clavering admitted to himself, without a blush. His one fear was that they would, as he expressed it, “make fools of themselves.” He admired chastity in women and even respected it, so far as he could feel respect for anything; and he would, if he could, have kept all the women in his family strictly virtuous. But he never was quite at ease about either Élise or Lydia; and when he saw the simple way in which Élise had slipped off the matrimonial fetters, Clavering had begun to fear greatly—those two girls were so extremely like himself!

He knew well enough from whom Reginald inherited his temperament. Mrs. Clavering’s father had been a weak, well-meaning Baptist preacher,and Reginald was a replica of him, plus a university education and a large allowance superadded. Where Anne came in Clavering frankly acknowledged himself beaten. She inherited his own strong will and her mother’s gentleness of address. But she had an innate delicacy, a singular degree of social sense, a power of making herself felt and respected, that Clavering admired but the origin of which he could not trace. She was the one person in the world whom he feared and respected. It was due to her that the Claverings had any real social status whatever. It was through her, and for her alone, that certain honest, dignified, and punctilious senators and public officials came to the grand Clavering dinners and musicals, and allowed their wives to come. It was Anne who would have to be vanquished when, as Clavering had always intended, he should get a divorce from his wife and marry again. He had not attempted this, merely because, so far, the women who would have married him he did not want or could get on easier terms, and the women he might have wanted would not have him at any price. Anne was known as her mother’s champion, and Clavering knew that she would fight the divorce with all the skill, courage, and pertinacity which, as Baskerville had truly said, was all she had inherited fromher father. She had in her, disguised by much suavity and sweetness, a touch of aggressiveness, a noble wilfulness that would not be reasoned away. Clavering knew that the tussle of his life would come when the divorce was seriously mooted; but he was not the less ready for the tussle.

The first sight of Elizabeth Darrell had impressed him wonderfully, and the second vision of her had determined him to renew his acquaintance with General Brandon; and while he was turning the mode of this over in his mind he was summoned to luncheon. At luncheon all of the family assembled—Élise and Lydia in elaborate negligées, Anne simply but properly dressed. She sat next her mother at the table and was that poor creature’s only outspoken champion.

“So you had a nice morning, with the psalm-singing and all that,” said Élise to Anne.

“Very nice,” replied Anne. “Mamma seemed to enjoy it very much.”

“We had a nice morning, too,” replied Élise. “The Brentwood-Baldwins glared at us as we went into church; they will never forgive us for getting that pew in the middle aisle, so close to the President’s. Then, after church, Count Rosalka asked to walk home with me. Lydiagot Laurison, the new British third secretary; so we sent the carriage on and walked out Connecticut Avenue with all the Seventh Street shopkeepers. It was very amusing, though.”

“It must have been,” said Clavering, gravely. “You must have recalled the time when you would have thought yourself as rich as Pierpont Morgan and Rockefeller combined if you had been as well dressed as a Seventh Street shopkeeper’s daughter. It was only twelve years ago, you remember, since I struck pay dirt in mines and politics.”

Élise and Lydia both smiled pleasantly. They were their father’s own daughters, and along with many of his vices they inherited his superb good humor, which never gave way except to a preconcerted burst of imposing wrath.

“I remember those days quite well,” said Anne. Her voice, as well as her looks, was quite different from her sisters’. Instead of their rich and sensuous tones, beautiful like their father’s, Anne’s voice had a dovelike quality of cooing softness; but she could always make herself heard. “I remember,” she continued, touching her mother’s coarse hand outspread on the table, “when mamma used to make our gowns, and we looked quite as nice as the girls whocould afford to have their clothes made by a dressmaker.”

“Them was happy days,” said Mrs. Clavering. It was her only remark during luncheon.

They talked of their plans for the coming week, as people do to whom pleasure and leisure are new and intoxicating things. Anne was plied with questions about Mrs. Luttrell’s dinner. She told freely all about it, being secretive only concerning Baskerville, merely mentioning that he was present.

“A more toploftical, stuck-up F. F. V.—or F. F. M., I suppose he is—I never saw than this same Mr. Baskerville, and as dull as ditchwater besides,” said Lydia.

Here Reginald spoke. “Mr. Baskerville is very highly esteemed by the bishop of the diocese,” he said.

“And by people of a good deal more brains than the bishop of the diocese,” added Clavering. “Baskerville is one of the brainiest men of his age I ever knew. He is fighting me in this K. F. R. business; but all the same I have a high opinion of his gray matter, and I wish you two girls—Élise and Lydia—knew men like Baskerville instead of foreign rapscallions and fortune-hunters like Rosalka. And I wish you went to dinnerssuch as Anne went to last night, instead of scampering over the town to all sorts of larky places with all sorts of larky people.”

To this Lydia replied. So far, she had achieved neither marriage nor divorce, but she was not averse to either. “I think the dinners Anne goes to must be precious dull. Now, our men and our parties, whatever they are, they aren’t dull. I never laughed so much in my life as I did at Rosalka’s stories.”

Clavering’s face grew black. He was no better than he should be himself, and ethically he made no objection to his daughters’ amusing themselves in any way but one; but old prejudices and superstitions made him delicate on the one point upon which he suspected two of his daughters were the least squeamish. He said nothing, however, nor did Anne or Reginald; it was a subject none of them cared to discuss. When luncheon was over, Mrs. Clavering and Anne made ready for their early Sunday afternoon walk—a time to which Mrs. Clavering looked forward all the week and with which Anne never allowed any of her own engagements to interfere.

Meanwhile Clavering himself, interested for the first time in the tall, shabby house across the way, walked out upon the broad stone steps of his ownplace and watched the windows opposite, hoping for a glimpse of Elizabeth Darrell’s face. While he stood there smoking and apparently engaged in the harmless enjoyment of a lovely autumn afternoon, Richard Baskerville approached. Baskerville denied himself the pleasure of seeking Anne in her own home, but he often found himself, without his own volition, in the places where he would be likely to meet her, and so he was walking along the street in which she lived. Seeing Clavering on the steps Baskerville would have passed with a cool nod, but Clavering stopped him; and the younger man, thinking Anne Clavering might be within sight or might appear, compromised with his conscience and entered into conversation with Clavering. It was always an effort on Baskerville’s part to avoid Clavering, whose extraordinary charm of manner and personality was a part of his capital. Baskerville, deep in the study of Clavering’s career, felt a genuine curiosity about the man and how he did things and what he really thought of himself and his own doings. He reckoned Clavering to be a colossal and very attractive scoundrel, whom he was earnestly seeking to destroy; and his relations were further complicated with Clavering by the fact that Anne Clavering was—a very interestingwoman. This Baskerville admitted to himself; he had got that far on the road to love.

The Senator, with the brilliant smile which made him handsomer than ever, said to Baskerville, “We may as well enjoy the privilege of speaking before you do me up in the matter of the K. F. R. land grants.”

The younger man cleverly avoided shaking hands with Clavering, but replied, also smiling, “Your attorneys say we shan’t be able to ‘do you up,’ Senator.”

“I hope they’re right. I swear, in that business the amount of lying and perjury, if placed on end, would reach to the top of the Washington Monument. Have a cigar?”

Such indeed was Baskerville’s own view of the lying and perjury, but he opined that it was all on Senator Clavering’s side, and he was trying to prove it. He got out of taking one of Clavering’s cigars—for he was nice upon points of honor—by taking a cigarette out of his case.

“I don’t know what you youngsters are coming to,” said Clavering, as he smoked. “Cigarettes and vermouth, and that sort of thing, instead of a good strong cigar and four fingers of whiskey.”

“I was on the foot-ball team at the university for three terms, and we had to lead lives likeboarding-school misses,” replied Baskerville, toying with his cigarette. “Our coach was about the stiffest man against whiskey and cigars I ever knew—and used to preach to us seven days in the week that a couple of cigars a day and four fingers of whiskey would shortly land any fellow at the undertaker’s. I fell from grace, it is true, directly I was graduated; but that coach’s gruesome predictions have stuck to me like the shirt of Nemesis, as your colleague, Senator Jephson, said the other day on the floor of the Senate.”

“Jephson’s an ass. He is the sort of man that would define a case of mixed property as a suit for a mule.”

“Hardly. And he’s an honest old blunderbuss.”

“Still, he’s an ass, as I say. His honesty doesn’t prevent that.”

“Well, yes, in a way it does. I’m not a professional moralist, but I don’t believe there is any really good substitute for honesty.” Then Baskerville suddenly turned red; the discussion of honesty with a man whose dishonesty he firmly believed in, and was earnestly trying to prove, was a blunder into which he did not often fall. Clavering, who saw everything, noted the other’s flush, understood it perfectly, and smiled in appreciationof the joke. Baskerville did not propose to emphasize his mistake by running away, and was prepared to stay some minutes longer, when the entrance doors were swung open by the gorgeous footman, and Mrs. Clavering, leaning upon Anne’s arm, appeared for a walk. When he saw his wife, Clavering’s face grew dark; that old woman, with her bad grammar and her big hands, was always in his way. He said good morning abruptly and went indoors at once.

Anne greeted Baskerville with a charming smile, and introduced him at once to her mother. Something in his manner to Mrs. Clavering revealed the antique respect he had for every decent woman, no matter how unattractive she might be. He assisted Mrs. Clavering down the great stone steps as if she were a young and pretty girl instead of a lumbering, ignorant, elderly woman; and Mrs. Clavering found courage to address him, a thing she rarely did to strangers.

“I guess,” she said diffidently, “you’ve got an old mother of your own that you help up and down—you do it so easy.”

“No, I wish I had,” answered Baskerville, with a kindness in his voice that both the old woman and the young felt. “My mother has been dead a long time; but I have a fine old aunt, Mrs. Luttrell,who makes me fetch and carry like an expressman’s horse, and then she says I am not half so attentive to her as I ought to be. Perhaps Miss Clavering has told you about her—I had the pleasure of dining with Miss Clavering at my aunt’s last night.”

“Yes, she did, and she told me you were all real nice,” answered Mrs. Clavering—and was appalled at her own daring.

Anne and Baskerville talked about the dinner, as they walked along the sunny, quiet street. Anne had enjoyed every moment spent in Mrs. Luttrell’s house, and said so. Mrs. Clavering walked with difficulty, and the young man’s arm at the street crossings was a real assistance to her; and without talking down to Mrs. Clavering or embarrassing her by direct remarks, he skilfully included her in the conversation.

Mrs. Clavering felt increasingly comfortable. Here was a man who did not scorn a woman because she was old and plain. For once the poor woman did not feel in the way with another person besides Anne. She ventured several remarks, such as: “People ought to be kind to poor dumb brutes, who can’t tell what ails them,” and “Washington is a great deal prettier for having so many trees, because trees make any placepretty,”—to all of which Baskerville listened with pleasant courtesy. He began to see in this ordinary, uneducated woman a certain hint of attractiveness in her gentleness of voice and softness of eyes that were reflected and intensified in the slim and graceful daughter by her side. Anne turned her soft, expressive eyes—her only real beauty—on Baskerville with a look of gratitude in them. Her life at home was one long fight for the happiness and dignity of her mother, for whom no one of her family had the least respect, except herself and her brother Reginald; and Reginald was but a poor creature in many ways. If Baskerville had sat up all night for a month, trying to devise a plan to ingratiate himself with Anne Clavering, he could not have done it better than by his courtesy to her mother. And he, appreciating the strong affection, the courage, the absence of false pride, the unselfishness, of Anne Clavering in this particular, admired her the more.

As they walked slowly along and talked, a kind of intimacy seemed to spring into being between them. Gratitude is a strong incentive to regard on both sides, and Baskerville’s attitude toward Mrs. Clavering touched Anne to the heart. Their objective point was Dupont Circle, which at that hour was tolerably free fromthe colored gentry and the baby carriages which make it populous eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. But Mrs. Clavering was destined to receive further distinguished attentions during that episode of the walk. When she was seated comfortably on a bench Baskerville proposed to Anne that he show her, on the other side of the Circle, a silver maple tree in great autumnal glory.

“Now do go, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering. “I’d like to set here awhile. Do, Mr. Baskerville, take her off—she ain’t left me an hour this day, and she oughter have a little pleasure.”

“Come, obey your mother,” Baskerville said; and Anne, smiling, walked off with him.

Mrs. Clavering, good soul, was like other mothers, and as her darling child went off with Baskerville she thought: “How nice them two look together! And he is such a civil-spoken, sensible young man. Anne deserves a good husband, and if—“

This train of thought was interrupted by General Brandon. He, too, after his luncheon, was out for a Sunday airing, and passing the bench on which Mrs. Clavering sat, the good woman, with new-found courage, looked up at him and actually ventured upon a timid bow. She hadrecognized him from the first time she had seen him, when she moved into their new and splendid house; and she had a perfectly clear recollection of the old sutler days, when General Brandon was a handsome young captain, who always had a polite word for the sutler’s wife. But she had never before, in the two years they had lived opposite each other, had the courage to speak to him. Her success with Baskerville emboldened her, and as General Brandon made her an elaborate, old-fashioned bow Mrs. Clavering said:—

“This used to be Cap’n Brandon—a long time ago, just before the war broke out.”

“Yes, madam,” replied General Brandon; “and you, I believe, are Mrs. Clavering. I remember quite well when Mr. Clavering brought you, a blooming bride, to the post.”

Mrs. Clavering sighed. She was so lonely in the big house, so continually snubbed by her husband, by her daughters Élise and Lydia, by the uppish footman and the giggling maids; she was so cut off from everything she had known before, that the sight of persons connected with those early days was like water in the desert to her. She smiled a deprecating smile, and answered: “I’ve seen you on the streets often enough. You live opposite our house, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said General Brandon. Then Mrs. Clavering made a faint indication that he should sit down, and he placed himself on the bench by her side. “I recognized both you and Senator Clavering,” he went on, “but as neither of you showed any recollection of me I hesitated to speak.”

Mrs. Clavering sighed. “You are the first person since I came to Washington that I ever seen as far back as them days at the army post.”

General Brandon, the most chivalrous of men, saw in Mrs. Clavering the timid longing to talk about old days and old ways, and he himself had a fondness for reminiscences; so the pair of old fogies entered into talk, feeling a greater degree of acquaintanceship in meeting after that long stretch of years than they had ever known before. When Anne and Baskerville returned, twenty minutes later, quite an active conversation was going on.

“Anne, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering, actually in a self-possessed manner, “this is General Brandon, who lives opposite our house. I knew him in them old times at the army post; and he’s got a daughter, a widder, come home from England, to live with him. Anne, you must go and call on her.”

“I shall with much pleasure,” replied Anne, bestowing on General Brandon her charming smile. Then, after a little more talk, it was time to return. General Brandon gallantly offered Mrs. Clavering his arm, and the poor lady, embarrassed but pleased, was escorted with courtly grace to her door. Anne and Baskerville had meanwhile made vast strides in intimacy. It was not, however, enough for Anne to repeat her invitation to call, but Mrs. Clavering, when she arrived at the door which was by courtesy called hers, plucked up extraordinary courage and said:—

“I hope, Mr. Baskerville, you will favor us with your company on Thursday, which is our receiving day. General Brandon has promised to come, and I’ll be real disappointed if you don’t come, too.”

It was the first invitation that Mrs. Clavering had ever given on her own initiative, and she gave it so diffidently, and in such simple good faith, that a man would have been a brute to decline it. So Baskerville accepted it with thanks, wondering meanwhile whether he were not a rascal in so doing. But he wanted very much to see Anne Clavering as often as he could, and the Montague and Capulet act came to him quite naturally and agreeably—the more so when hesaw the gleam of gratification in Anne’s eyes at his acceptance. She said simply:—

“I shall be glad to see you;” and then, turning to General Brandon, she added, “We shall, I hope, have the pleasure then of meeting Mrs. Darrell.”

“My dear young lady, you are most kind,” answered General Brandon, “but my daughter is so lately widowed—not yet a year and a half—that I feel sure it will be quite impossible to her feelings for her to appear at all in society now. Nevertheless, I shall give her your kind invitation, and she will be most gratified. I shall do myself the honor and pleasure of attending your Thursday reception.”

And then they parted, Anne and Baskerville each reckoning that day to have been one of the pleasantest of their lives, and wondering when they should have the good fortune to meet in that sweet, companionable manner again.

Chapter TenAt dinner that night General Brandon told Elizabeth about his meeting with Mrs. Clavering, and the renewal of their acquaintance. “The poor lady seemed much pleased at meeting some one associated with her former life,” said the General. “She invited me to call on Thursday, which is their first reception day of the season, and especially urged that you should come. I believe their receptions are large and brilliant—the newspapers are always full of them; so I told her that owing to your very recent mourning it would be impossible for you to go to any large or gay entertainment. I have no doubt Sara Luttrell will ask you to many of her parties,—she keeps a very gay house,—and it is a source of the keenest regret to me that you cannot for the present accept invitations. But another winter I shall hope, my dear child, that you will have the spirit to enter once more into the society you are so admirably fitted to adorn.”Good General Brandon was quite unconscious that in the society to which Elizabeth had beenlong accustomed a year was considered the period of a widow’s mourning. He never dreamed for one moment that she could have been induced to go into society at that time. As a matter of fact, it was the one thing which Elizabeth really hoped might rouse her from her torpor of mind and heart into which she had sunk in the last few months. She had a good and comprehensive mind, which had been much improved by reading under Pelham’s direction. Then had come that brilliant year in London, in which she had really seen the best English society and had liked it, as every one must who knows it. During her whole married life she had taken part in the continual round of small gayeties which prevail at army posts all over the world. Her belle-ship had made this particularly gratifying and delightful to her. Society had become a habit, although very far from a passion, with her, and she had expected to return to it, as one resumes one’s daily habits.She had taken a strange interest in the Claverings from the very beginning—they constituted her first impressions of Washington; and she would have found some diversion from her sad and wearying thoughts in Mrs. Luttrell’s brilliant and interesting house. But it was impossible for her to go against her father’s impliedideas of propriety. He had always assumed that she was properly and dutifully heart-broken at her husband’s death. She did indeed mourn good, brave, honest, stupid Jack Darrell as a woman mourns a husband for whom she feels gratitude and tenderness, without being in the least in love with him; all the sentiment which belongs to love she had secretly and hopelessly given to Pelham. She often thought that if she had not been so young, so ignorant, she never would have married Darrell.“I think you should force yourself, however painful it may be to your feelings, to go to see Sara Luttrell some day when she is not formally receiving,” said General Brandon, thinking he was proposing a tremendous sacrifice to Elizabeth; and he felt quite triumphant when she agreed to go.When the Thursday afternoon came, there was no need to tell Elizabeth that the Clavering receptions were large and brilliant. By four o’clock carriages came pouring into the street, and by five there was almost animpasse. Great numbers of stylish men, both foreigners and Americans, passed in and out the splendid doors.While Elizabeth was watching this procession with curious interest, Mrs. Luttrell’s great old-fashionedcoach, with the long-tailed black horses, stopped before the tall, shabby house, and Serena brought up Mrs. Luttrell’s and Baskerville’s cards. Mrs. Luttrell, although militant, was not the sort of woman to hit another woman when she was down, and was most gracious when Elizabeth appeared. The sight of the dingy drawing-room, of Elizabeth’s pallor and evident signs of stress and trial, touched Mrs. Luttrell. She mentioned to Elizabeth that a card would be sent her for a large dinner which she was giving within a fortnight, and when Elizabeth gently declined Mrs. Luttrell was really sorry. Baskerville was sincerely cordial. He had liked Elizabeth as a girl, and her forlornness now touched him as it did Mrs. Luttrell.When the visit was over and they were once more out of the house, Mrs. Luttrell exclaimed: “That’s Dick Brandon’s doings—that poor Elizabeth not going to a place and moping in that hole of a house. If she would but go about a bit, and leave her card at the British Embassy, where she would certainly be invited, she could see something of society and recover her spirits and good looks. By the way, I think she’s really more enticing in her pallor and her black gown than when she was in the flush of her beauty. Of course shelooks much older. Now, as I’m going into the Claverings’ I suppose you will leave me.”Baskerville, with a hangdog look, replied, “I’m going into the Claverings’, too.” Mrs. Luttrell’s handsome mouth came open, and her ermine cape fell from her shoulders without her even so much as knowing it. “Yes,” said Baskerville, assuming a bullying air, now that the cat was out of the bag, “Mrs. Clavering asked me last Sunday, and I accepted.”“Where on earth, Richard Bas—““Did I see Mrs. Clavering? I met her out walking with Miss Clavering. Mrs. Clavering is a most excellent woman—quiet and unobtrusive—and I swear there is something of her in Miss Clavering.”“Richard Baskerville, you are in love with Anne Clavering! I know it; I feel it.”“Don’t be a fool, Sara Luttrell. Because I happen to pay a visit at a house where I have been asked and could have gone a year ago, you at once discover a mare’s nest. That’s Sara Luttrell all over.”“And what becomes of the doubtful propriety of your going to Senator Clavering’s house? And suppose you succeed in driving him out of public life, as you are trying to do?”“I swear you are the most provoking old woman in Washington. Hold your tongue and come along with your dutiful nephew.”Grasping her firmly by the arm, Baskerville marched Mrs. Luttrell up the broad stone steps of the Clavering house. The splendid doors were opened noiselessly by gorgeous footmen who looked like the prize-winners at a chrysanthemum show. The entrance was magnificent, and through the half-drawn silken draperies of the wide doorways they could see the whole superb suite of rooms opening upon the large Moorish hall. Great masses of flowers were everywhere, and the mellow glow of wax lights and tinted lamp globes made the winter twilight softly radiant.Half a dozen butterfly débutantes were serving tea in the huge dining room, furnished with priceless teak-wood and black oak, bright with pictures and mirrors, a magnificent Turkish carpet on the parquet floor and chandeliers from a royal palace lighting the dim splendor of the room. Here, brilliant with candelabra, was set out a great table, from which an expensive collation was served by more gorgeous footmen. This was the doing of Élise and Lydia, who overruled Anne’s desire for a simple tea-table set in the library. There, however, a great gold and silverbowl was constantly replenished with champagne punch, and over this Élise and Lydia presided, much preferring the champagne bowl to the tea-table.The library was thronged with men, old and young, native and foreign. Élise and Lydia, their handsome faces flushed and smiling, their elaborate gowns iridescent with gold and silver embroidery and spangles sweeping the floor, laughed, talked, and flirted to their hearts’ content. They also drank punch with a great many men, who squeezed their hands on the sly, looked meaningly into their large, dark eyes, and always went away laughing.Mrs. Luttrell, escorted by Baskerville, and meeting acquaintances at every turn, entered the great drawing-room, which was a symphony in green and gold. Near the door Anne Clavering, in a simple gray gown, stood by her mother, who was seated. Anne received the guests, and then introduced them to Mrs. Clavering, who made the pretence of receiving, looking the picture of misery meanwhile. The poor soul would much rather have remained upstairs; but on this point Anne was inexorable—her mother must show herself in her own drawing-room. A handsome black gown, appropriate to an elderly lady,showed Mrs. Clavering at her best, and Anne, with perfect tact, grace, and patience, silently demanded and received for her mother the respect which was due her and which there was occasionally some difficulty in exacting. As Anne caught sight of Mrs. Luttrell, she smiled with obvious pleasure; but on seeing Baskerville her face lighted up in a way which by no means escaped Mrs. Luttrell’s sharp eyes.Mrs. Clavering was nearly frightened out of her life on the rare occasions when the redoubtable Mrs. Luttrell called, but on this afternoon Mrs. Luttrell was as soft as milk and as sweet as honey itself. Mrs. Clavering was not the least afraid of Baskerville, and said to him earnestly, as he took her hand, “I’m real glad to see you.”“And I am very glad to be able to come,” answered Baskerville. Then, seating himself by her side, he began to talk to her so gently on subjects the poor lady was interested in that she was more delighted with him than ever. A soft flush came into Anne’s delicate cheeks; she appreciated the sweet and subtle flattery in Baskerville’s attitude. It was not interest in Mrs. Clavering’s conversation, nor even the pity he might have felt for her forlorn condition, whichinduced him to spend twenty minutes of his visit in talking to her.Meantime the dusk was deepening. Many visitors were departing and few coming. Mrs. Luttrell was entertaining a select coterie of men around the large fireplace at the other end of the room, and Baskerville was the only person left near Anne and Mrs. Clavering.“Will you be kind enough,” he said to Anne, “to go with me to get a cup of tea? I see a table in yonder, but I am afraid of so many young girls at once. I think I can count six of them. Now if you will go with me, I shall feel as brave as a lion.”The temptation was strong, but Anne looked down at her mother. Apprehension was written on Mrs. Clavering’s simple, homely face at the notion of being left alone.“Why can’t Mr. Baskerville have his tea with me?” said she. “There ain’t any more folks coming. Make Peer bring a table here, Anne, and we’ll have it comfortable together.”“Yes,” Baskerville added, drawing up a chair. “Mrs. Clavering is far more amiable and hospitable than you. I am sure you would never have thought of so kind a solution.”Anne, with a happy smile, gave Pierre theorder, and in a minute they were sitting about a little table, with an opportunity for a few minutes’ talk at a moderate pitch of voice, differing from those hurried, merry meetings in a crowd of laughing, talking, moving people which usually constitute a Washington call.While they were sitting there, all three enjoying themselves and Mrs. Clavering not the least of the three, a belated caller was announced, General Brandon. The General was in his Sunday frock coat, which had seen good service, and his silk hat, which belonged by rights on the retired list; but each was carefully brushed and clearly belonged to a gentleman. General Brandon himself, handsome, soldierly, his white mustache and hair neatly clipped, was grace, elegance, and amiability personified. His head was none of the best, but for beauty, courage, and gentleness he was unmatched. Anne received him with more than her usual cordiality, and Mrs. Clavering was so pleased at seeing him that she actually invited him to sit down at her tea-table and have tea. This he did, explaining why his daughter had sent her cards instead of coming.“Another year, I hope, my dear madam, my daughter may be persuaded to reënter society,which, if you will pardon a father’s pride, I think she adorns. But at present she is overwhelmed with grief at her loss. It is scarcely eighteen months since she became a widow and lost the best of husbands.”General Brandon prattled on, and presently said: “I had hoped to meet Senator Clavering here this afternoon, and made my visit late on purpose. His exacting senatorial duties, however, must leave him little time for social relaxation.”“I think I hear his step in the hall now,” said Anne. “He will, I know, be very much pleased to meet you again.”As she spoke Clavering’s firm tread was heard, and he entered, smiling, debonair, and distinguished-looking. Nobody would have dreamed from anything in his air or looks that this man was nearing a crisis in his fate, and that even then his conduct was being revealed in the newspapers and examined by his fellow-senators in a way which opened a wide, straight vista to state’s prison.Clavering was surprised, but undeniably pleased, and even amused at seeing Baskerville; and Baskerville felt like a hound, and inwardly swore at himself for letting the wish to see a woman’s eyesbring him to Clavering’s house. He put a bold face upon it, however, shook Clavering’s outstretched hand, and called himself a fool and a rogue for so doing.The warmth of Clavering’s greeting to General Brandon delighted the simple old warrior. Clavering, who had too much sound sense to avoid allusions to his early life or to tell lies about it, recalled the time when he was a sutler and General Brandon was an officer. Then he carried the latter off to an alcove in the library, which was now deserted except by Élise and Lydia. These two young women, reclining like odalisks among the cushions of a luxurious sofa, discussed Rosalka and the rest of their swains in low voices and in terms which luckily their father did not overhear.Into the alcove Clavering caused his choicest brands of whiskey to be brought, and at once plunged into talk; and into that talk he infused all his powers of pleasing, which soon produced upon the simple old General a species of intoxication. If any one had told him that Clavering’s attention was due to the sight, more than once obtained since Sunday, of Elizabeth Darrell’s graceful figure and interesting, melancholy face, General Brandon would have called that person a liar.“You know,” said Clavering, as soon as the two were comfortably established with the whiskey and the cigars, “that I am being badgered and bothered by a set of sharks, calling themselves lawyers, who want to rob me of every dollar of my fortune. You have perhaps read in the newspapers something about this K. F. R. land-grant business.”“I am aware the public prints have given considerable space to it,” replied General Brandon, “but I have no knowledge of the merits of the case.”“Neither have the newspapers. The long and short of it is that the sharks, after fighting me through every court in the country, where I may say I have managed to hold my own pretty well, have contrived by political wire-pulling to get a Senate committee to investigate the matter. Now I don’t want to be lacking in courtesy to my brother senators, but of all the collection of asses, dunderheads, and old women, sneaks, hypocrites, and snivelling dogs, that ever were huddled together, that select committee of my esteemed contemporaries—Good Lord! let’s take a drink.”General Brandon drank solemnly. Whiskey of that brand was not to be treated lightly.“I know well all the country embraced in andcontiguous to that K. F. R. land grant,” said the General, putting down his glass reverently. “I scouted and fought and hunted over all that region more than forty years ago, when I was a young lieutenant just turned loose from West Point.”“Why, then,” cried Clavering, his handsome eyes lighting up with a glow like fire, “you might be of real service to me.” He did not specify what manner of service he meant, and General Brandon innocently thought Clavering meant about the K. F. R. land grants. But no man who ever lived could tell Clavering anything he did not know about any piece of property he had ever owned; least of all could simple, guileless General Brandon tell him anything.“I should be most happy,” replied the General. “I have a considerable quantity of memoranda, maps and surveys of the region, which are quite at your service.”“Capital,” said Clavering, his deep eyes shining with a keen delight. “Now as the investigation is going on, which you have seen in the newspapers, I shall have to make immediate use of any information you might be able to give me. Suppose you were to let me come over to your house to-night and take our first view of what you have? And of course you’ll stay and dine with me.”“I thank you very much, Senator, but I cannot leave my daughter to dine alone—she is too much alone, poor child. And immediately after dinner I am engaged to spend an hour with an old friend, General Mayse, a former classmate of mine who is now inflicted with paralysis and to whom I pay a weekly visit. Besides, I should have to rummage among my papers to find those that we require. To-morrow night I shall be at your service.”But it was not Clavering’s nature to delay the accomplishment of any wish. He wanted to see and know Elizabeth Darrell, so he said cordially: “At all events I should like to talk the matter over with you. Would you allow me to come in this evening then, after you have returned from your visit?”“Certainly, Senator. I shall be at home by half after nine.”Then Clavering, seeing that General Brandon was his, began to talk about other things, even to hint at chances of making money. To this General Brandon only sighed and said: “Those enterprises are for men with capital. I have only the equity in my house and my salary, and I cannot, for my daughter’s sake, jeopardize what little I have. She was left with but asmall provision from her husband’s estate, which was strictly entailed.” Clavering could not refrain from smiling at General Brandon’s simplicity in refusing such an offer, if even but a hint, for such a reason; but he said no more on the subject.As the General passed into the drawing-room to say good-by to Mrs. Clavering, he was surprised to find Baskerville still sitting at the tea-table. Baskerville had not been asked to stay to dinner, but when Mrs. Luttrell was ready to leave a very mild invitation from Mrs. Clavering, who had no notion of the duration of fashionable visits, had made him ask permission to remain—a permission which Mrs. Luttrell gave with a wink. Anne was not displeased with him for staying—her eyes and smile conveyed as much; and man-like, Baskerville had succumbed to the temptation. But when General Brandon came in and found him the very last visitor in the drawing-room he felt himself distinctly caught, and made his farewells with more haste than grace. Mrs. Clavering urged him to come again, and Anne’s tones conveyedauf wiedersehento him as eloquently as a tone can without specific words; nevertheless, when Baskerville found himself out in the cool, crisp night, he beganto doubt, as he had ever doubted, the propriety of his going to Senator Clavering’s house at all. But General Brandon was saying to him most earnestly, as they stood under the lamp-post before going their different ways:—“Senator Clavering is a very cruelly maligned man; of that I am certain. And I think, Mr. Baskerville, that most of the testimony you and the Civil Service League and the K. F. R. attorneys have collected will break down when it is introduced before the committee. Why, Senator Clavering tells me that he has been accused, on evidence that wouldn’t hang a dog, of wholesale bribery, of having bought his seat in the Senate, of having bought up courts and legislatures. But he will be triumphantly vindicated—I make no doubt at all of that.”“I wish he might be,” replied Baskerville, with a degree of sincerity that would scarcely have been credited; “but I don’t think he can be.”When General Brandon let himself into his own house, dinner was ready to be served. He was full of enthusiasm about the Claverings. At the table he assured Elizabeth of his entire belief in Clavering and of his respect for him. Mrs. Clavering he pronounced to be a most excellentand unpretending woman, Anne altogether admirable, Reginald Clavering a worthy fellow and a sound churchman, and Élise Denman and Lydia Clavering two much-abused young women, in whom mere high spirits and unconventionality had been mistaken for a degree of imprudence of which he felt sure they could never be guilty. Then he mentioned Clavering’s proposed visit, and asked Elizabeth if she would, the next day, find the trunk in which he kept certain papers, open it, and get out of it everything dated between ’56 and ’61.When dinner was over and General Brandon had gone out to pay his weekly visit to his paralyzed comrade, Elizabeth went upstairs to a small back room, called by courtesy the study. Here were General Brandon’s few books; he was not, and never had been, a man of books, but he liked to be considered bookish. There was in the room an open grate fire, a student’s lamp, and some old-fashioned tables and easy-chairs. To this room Elizabeth had succeeded in imparting an air of comfort. She sat down before the fire to spend the evening alone, as she had spent so many evenings alone in the last eighteen months, and would, she feared, continue to spend her evenings for the rest of her life. She hadexpected to find her life in Washington dull, but the weeks she had been at home had been duller than she had thought possible. Her father’s old friends had called upon her, but they were all staid and elderly persons, and the circle had grown pitifully small in her ten years of absence. Those ten years had practically obliterated her own acquaintances in the ever changing population of Washington, and the few persons left in the gay world whom she knew, like Mrs. Luttrell, it was plain that her father did not expect her to cultivate.One resource—reading—occurred to her on this particular evening. She had a mind well fitted for books, but she had never been thrown with bookish people, except Pelham, and reading had formed no essential part of her life. Pelham was a man of great intelligence, and a reader; but both his intelligence and his reading were confined to his profession. No matter where Elizabeth’s thinking began, Pelham was sure to come into it somewhere. She started up from her chair as the recollection of him, which always hovered near her, took shape in thought and almost in speech, and going to the book-case took out the first volume her hand fell upon. It was an old translation of Herodotus,and Elizabeth, determined upon a mental opiate, opened it at random and read on resolutely. She fell upon that wonderful story of Cyrus, the reputed son of Mithradates the herdsman; and in following the grandly simple old narrative, told with so much of art, of grace, of convincing perspicacity, that not even a translation can wholly destroy its majestic beauty, Elizabeth lost herself in the shadowy, ancient past. She was roused by Serena’s voice and Serena’s hand, as black as the Ethiopians in Herodotus’s time, who worshipped no other gods save Jupiter and Bacchus. Serena produced a card. It was simple and correct, and read: “Mr. James Clavering,” with the address.“It is Senator Clavering,” said Elizabeth, in a moment. “Tell him that General Brandon is not at home.”“De gent’mun seh he got er ’p’intment wid de Gin’l, an’ he gwine ter wait for him. I t’ink, Miss ’Liz’beth, you better lemme ax him up heah. De parlor is jes’ freezin’ col’,” answered Serena, who never forgot that people should be made comfortable.“Ask him up, then,” replied Elizabeth. She was somewhat flurried at the thought of receiving Clavering alone, but there was no help for it.She was not, however, disappointed; on the contrary she felt a deep and curious interest in seeing this man and tracing if possible that singular recollection of him, so sharp yet so impalpable and still actually inexplicable to herself.In a few minutes Serena ushered Clavering into the room. At close range he was even more attractive than at a distance. It was difficult to associate any idea of advancing age with him. Maturity was all that was indicated by his handsome, smooth-shaven face, his compact and elegant figure, his iron-gray hair. Manual labor had left but one mark upon him—his hands were rough and marred by the miner’s tools he had used. He was perfectly well dressed and entirely at his ease. He introduced himself with the natural and unaffected grace which had been his along with his sutler’s license and miner’s tools.“This, I presume, is Mrs. Darrell. I thank you very much for allowing me to wait for General Brandon’s return.” He said no word about his appointment with General Brandon being at half-past nine while then it was only a little past eight.Elizabeth invited him to sit down, and herself took a seat opposite him. The color which came into her pale face very much enhanced her looks,and Clavering thought he had never seen so interesting a woman. Her slender black figure unconsciously assumed a pose of singular grace and ease, the delicate color mounted slowly into her pale cheeks, and she was indeed worthy of any man’s notice. And as her personality had struck Clavering with great force at the very first glimpse he had had of her ten years before, so, seeing her close at hand and her attention fixed on himself, she overpowered him quickly, as the warm, sweet scent of the jessamine flower is overpowering. It was what he would have called, had he been thirty years younger, love at first sight.Clavering’s coming into the room was, like some new, strong force, making itself felt over everything. The small room seemed full of him and nothing else. He was by nature a dominant personality, and he dominated Elizabeth Darrell as strangely and suddenly as she had cast a spell over him.“My father will regret very much not being here when you came. Perhaps he misunderstood the hour of your appointment,” she said.Clavering’s white teeth shone in a smile. “Don’t trouble about that. Besides, it has given me the pleasure of seeing you.”Elizabeth was not unmindful of the fact thatClavering was a married man, with a wife across the street; and his words, which would have been merely those of courtesy in most men, could not be so interpreted, for Clavering was not a man of pretty speeches.He picked up the volume of Herodotus which lay on the table. “So you’ve been reading old Herodotus! That’s pretty heavy reading for a young woman, isn’t it?”“I took it up at random just now, and became interested in it,” answered Elizabeth.“You are a great reader, I suppose?”“N-no. Hardly, that is. But I am very much alone, and I have read a good deal since I have returned to America.”“Why should a woman like you be alone? Why shouldn’t you go about and see people and live like other women of your age?”Elizabeth made no reply to this; she could scarcely admit that her seclusion was more of her father’s doing than her own. She was struck by the beauty of Clavering’s voice and by the correctness of his speech, which was better than that of many college-bred men.“How long have you been a widow?” he asked.“A year and a half.”“And have you any children?”“No, I lost my only child when he was a baby.”“That’s hard on a woman. You women never forget those dead babies. But all your life is before you yet.”“It seems to me it is all behind me.”“Why? Did you love your husband very much?”Elizabeth had suffered Clavering’s questions partly through surprise and partly because Clavering could say and do what he chose without giving offence—a quality which had been one of the great factors in raising him from the shaft of a mine to a seat in the United States Senate. But the question put to Elizabeth was so unexpected,—it had never been asked of her before,—it was so searching, that it completely disconcerted her. She remained silent, while her eyes, turned upon Clavering, wore a look of trouble and uncertainty.“A great many women don’t love their husbands,” said Clavering, “and if they are left widows, their feelings are very complex. They think they ought to grieve for their husbands, but they don’t.”The color fled suddenly out of Elizabeth’s cheeks. Clavering’s words fitted her case so exactly and so suddenly that she was startled andfrightened. It was as if he had looked into her soul and read at a glance her inmost secrets. She half expected him to say next that she had loved another man than her husband. And as for applying the common rules of behavior to a man like Clavering, it was absurd on the face of it. He was leaning toward Elizabeth, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his eyes fixed upon her with a kind of admiring scrutiny. He found her quite as interesting as he had expected, and he ardently desired to know more about her and, what is as great a mark of interest, to tell her more about himself.Elizabeth remained silent for a while, and then forced herself to say: “My husband was one of the best of men. He was as good as my father.”“That settles it,” replied Clavering, with grim humor. “I never knew a woman in my life who spoke of her husband’s goodness first who was really in love with him. When a woman is in love with a man, it isn’t his goodness she thinks of first; it is his love. Now don’t fly off at that; I’m not a conventional man, and you must know it if you ever heard of me before. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful. On the contrary, I want your good opinion—I havewanted it ever since the first time I ever saw you. I was very much struck with you then. I have wanted to know you and I have planned to know you. Have I committed any crime?”“But—but—you are a married man,” said Elizabeth, faltering, and conscious that she was talking like an ingénue.Clavering laughed as he replied: “That’s downright school-girlish. Any boarding-school miss would say the same. Well, I can’t help it now that I married a woman totally unsuited to me before I was twenty-one years old. Come, Mrs. Darrell, we are not children. I wanted to know you, I say, and I always try to do what I want to do. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Well, let us then know each other. I swear to you I know less of women than I do of any subject I have ever tried to master. True, I never had time until lately; and, besides, I was a middle-aged man before I ever met any educated and intelligent women. In the class of life from which I spring women are household drudges and bearers of children, and I never knew them in any other aspect until I was over forty years of age. Then you can’t imagine what a stunning revelation to me a woman was who had never done anything but amuse herself and improve herself.Suppose you had never met any educated men till now—wouldn’t you find them captivating?”When a man talks to a woman as she has never been talked to before he is certain of finding an interested listener, and, it follows, a tolerant listener. So Elizabeth could not disguise her interest in Clavering, nor was it worth while to pretend to be offended with him. The superficial knowledge she had of the vicissitudes of his life was calculated to arouse and fix her attention; and there was so little to do in her present life that she would have been more or less than mortal if she had turned from the first object of interest she had yet met with in her new and changed and dreary life.She paused awhile before answering Clavering’s last question. “I dare say I should feel so,” she answered. “I remember how it was when I was first married and went to India. Everything interested me. I could not look at a native without wanting to ask all manner of questions of him and about him, which of course I could not be allowed to do; and the life there is so strange—their race problem is so different from ours, and all my modes of thought had to be changed. I was in India over eight years, and it was as strange to me when I left it as when I arrived.”Elizabeth had got the talk away from the personal note upon which Clavering had pitched it, and he, seeing he had said enough for a beginning, followed Elizabeth’s conversational lead. He asked her many questions about her life in India, all singularly intelligent and well put, because drinking at the fountain of other people’s talk had been his chief source of education during his whole life. And Clavering, without being widely read, was far from being an ignorant man. Although he knew not a word of any language except his own, nor the history of any country except his own, he was well acquainted with the history of his own times, and he knew who every living man of importance in his own country and Europe was, and what he was doing. Seeing that Elizabeth was susceptible to the charms of conversation and had a distinct intellectual side, Clavering appealed to her on that side. He told her with an inimitable raciness and humor some of the incidents of his early life in the West, his later adventures, even of his career in the Senate.“I think I never worked so hard in my life as I have during the five years I’ve been in the Senate,” he said. “No man can come to the Senate of the United States with the educationof a sutler, miner, promoter, speculator, and what not—such as I have had—and not work hard; that is, if he expects to be anything else than a dummy. But it isn’t in James Clavering to be a dummy anywhere. So I have thought and read and worked and slaved, and bought other men’s brains in the last five years as earnestly as any man ever did. The result is that when I open my mouth now the senators listen. At first the lawyers in the Senate used to hide a grin when I began to speak, and I admit I did make some bad breaks in the beginning. But I saw my way out of that clearly enough. I found a man who was really a great constitutional lawyer, although he had never been able to make more than a bare living out of his profession in Chicago. I have always invested liberally in brains. When you can actually buy brains or news, you are buying the two most valuable commodities on earth. Well, when I took up a question I had my man go over the legal aspects of it and put them down in black and white. Then I knew well enough how to use them, and I may say without boasting that I have done as well, or better, than any man of my opportunities now in the Senate. However, I don’t compare myself with such men as Andrew Johnson. You know his wife taught him to write,and that man rose to be President of the United States. Of course he wasn’t what you would call a scholarly man, like many of the senators, but good Lord! think of the vast propelling force that took an illiterate man from the tailor’s bench and gave him such a career as Andrew Johnson’s, and made him Vice-President of the United States. Those men—and men like me, too—can’t be called all-round men, like Senator Thorndyke, for example. All of us have got great big gaps and holes in our knowledge and judgment and conduct that the normal well-educated man hasn’t. But where we are strong, we are stronger than they. Do you know anything about Thorndyke?”“I have heard my father speak of Mrs. Thorndyke, whose family he knew many years ago, and he visits occasionally at Senator Thorndyke’s. Mrs. Thorndyke sent me a request that I would call to see her, but—but—I don’t pay any visits now.”“It’s a shame you don’t—a woman like you. Mrs. Thorndyke is charming, but not so charming as you. And I lay claim to great nobility of soul when I praise Mrs. Thorndyke, or Thorndyke either, for that matter. Mrs. Thorndyke has no use for me or for anybody of my name, except mysecond daughter. And Thorndyke, although he isn’t leading the pack of hounds who are baying after me to get me out of the Senate, is quietly giving them the scent. Yet I swear I admire Thorndyke—or, rather, I admire his education and training, which have made him what he is. If I had had that training—a gentleman for my father, a lady for my mother, association with the sons of gentlemen and ladies, a university education, and then had married a lady—“Clavering got up and took a turn about the narrow room. Finally he came and sat down in a chair closer to Elizabeth, and continued: “Thorndyke is one of the lawyers in the Senate who used to bother me. It seemed to me at first that every time I opened my mouth in the Senate chamber I butted into the Constitution of the United States. Either I was butting into the shalls or the shall nots, and Thorndyke always let me know it. I could get along from the first well enough in the rough-and-tumble of debate with men like Senator Crane, for example,—a handsome fellow, from the West, too, very showy in every way, but not the man that Thorndyke is. It was the scholarly men that I was a little afraid of, I’m not ashamed to say. I am a long way off from a fool; consequently I know my own limitations,and a want of scholarship is one of those limitations.”Elizabeth listened, more and more beguiled. She could not but see a sort of self-respect in this man; he respected his own intellect because it was worth respecting, and he had very little respect for his own character and honor because he knew they were not worth respecting. As Elizabeth studied him by the mellow lamplight, while his rich voice echoed through the small room, she could not but recognize that here was a considerable man, a considerable force; and she had never known a man of this type before. She noted that he was as well groomed as the most high-bred man she had ever known—as well as Pelham, for example. He had come into the room with ease and grace. No small tricks of manner disfigured him; he was naturally polished, and he had the gift, very rare and very dangerous, of saying what he would without giving offence,—or, rather, of disarming the person who might be offended. And in spite of his frank talking of himself Elizabeth saw in him an absence of small vanity, of restless self-love. Unconsciously she assumed an air of profound interest in what Clavering was saying,—a form of flattery most insidious and effective because of its unconsciousness.Elizabeth herself, in the eighteen months of loneliness, poverty, and desperate anxiety which she had lately known, had almost lost the sweet fluency which had once distinguished her; but presently Clavering chose to make her talk, and succeeded admirably. She found herself speaking frankly about her past life and telling things she had never thought of telling a stranger; but Clavering seemed anything but a stranger. In truth, he had probed her so well that he knew much more about her than she had dreamed of revealing.When at last General Brandon’s step was heard, Elizabeth started like a guilty child; she had forgotten that her father was to return. General Brandon was delighted to see Clavering, and took a quarter of an hour to explain why he had been ten minutes late.“I didn’t expect to see any papers to-night,” replied Clavering, “but I should like to talk over some things with you. Please don’t go, Mrs. Darrell; what I have to say you are at perfect liberty to hear.”Elizabeth hesitated, and so did General Brandon; but Clavering settled the matter by saying: “If I am to drive you out of your sitting room, I shall feel obliged to remain away, and therebybe deprived of General Brandon’s valuable services.” Elizabeth remained.Clavering then began to give the history from his point of view of the K. F. R. land grants. It was a powerfully interesting story, told with much dramatic force. It embraced the history of much of Clavering’s life, which was in itself a long succession of uncommon episodes. It lost nothing in the telling. Then he came to the vindictive and long-continued fight made on him politically, which culminated in the bringing of these matters before a Senate committee by a powerful association of Eastern railway magnates and corporation lawyers, aided by the senators in opposition and others in his own party who, because he was not strictly amenable to party discipline, would be glad to see him driven out of the Senate. But Clavering was a fighting man, and although driven to the wall, he had his back to it; he was very far from surrender, and so he said.Elizabeth listened with breathless interest. Nothing like this had ever come into her experience before. It struck her as being so much larger and stronger than any of the struggles which she had heretofore known that it dwarfed them all. Everybody’s affairs seemed small beside Clavering’s. Yet she was fully conscious allthe time that this was special pleading on Clavering’s part. She admired the ingenuity, the finesse, the daring, that Clavering had shown and was showing; but it all seemed to her as if there must be something as large and as strong on the other side.No such idea, however, came into General Brandon’s kind, simple wooden head. When Clavering had finished speaking, the General rose and, grasping him by the hand, said solemnly: “My dear sir, I sympathize with you profoundly. I am convinced that you have been the victim of misplaced confidence, and that this unprincipled hounding of you on the part of men who wish to rob you, not only of your property and your seat in the Senate, but your high character and your priceless good name, is bound to come to naught. I offer you my sincere sympathy, and I assure you that I place entire credence in every word that you have told me.”This was more than Elizabeth did; and when Clavering thought of it afterward, sitting over his library fire, he laughed to himself. On the strength of it, however, he had secured opportunities of seeing General Brandon’s daughter very often, and he did not mean to let the grass grow under his feet.

At dinner that night General Brandon told Elizabeth about his meeting with Mrs. Clavering, and the renewal of their acquaintance. “The poor lady seemed much pleased at meeting some one associated with her former life,” said the General. “She invited me to call on Thursday, which is their first reception day of the season, and especially urged that you should come. I believe their receptions are large and brilliant—the newspapers are always full of them; so I told her that owing to your very recent mourning it would be impossible for you to go to any large or gay entertainment. I have no doubt Sara Luttrell will ask you to many of her parties,—she keeps a very gay house,—and it is a source of the keenest regret to me that you cannot for the present accept invitations. But another winter I shall hope, my dear child, that you will have the spirit to enter once more into the society you are so admirably fitted to adorn.”

Good General Brandon was quite unconscious that in the society to which Elizabeth had beenlong accustomed a year was considered the period of a widow’s mourning. He never dreamed for one moment that she could have been induced to go into society at that time. As a matter of fact, it was the one thing which Elizabeth really hoped might rouse her from her torpor of mind and heart into which she had sunk in the last few months. She had a good and comprehensive mind, which had been much improved by reading under Pelham’s direction. Then had come that brilliant year in London, in which she had really seen the best English society and had liked it, as every one must who knows it. During her whole married life she had taken part in the continual round of small gayeties which prevail at army posts all over the world. Her belle-ship had made this particularly gratifying and delightful to her. Society had become a habit, although very far from a passion, with her, and she had expected to return to it, as one resumes one’s daily habits.

She had taken a strange interest in the Claverings from the very beginning—they constituted her first impressions of Washington; and she would have found some diversion from her sad and wearying thoughts in Mrs. Luttrell’s brilliant and interesting house. But it was impossible for her to go against her father’s impliedideas of propriety. He had always assumed that she was properly and dutifully heart-broken at her husband’s death. She did indeed mourn good, brave, honest, stupid Jack Darrell as a woman mourns a husband for whom she feels gratitude and tenderness, without being in the least in love with him; all the sentiment which belongs to love she had secretly and hopelessly given to Pelham. She often thought that if she had not been so young, so ignorant, she never would have married Darrell.

“I think you should force yourself, however painful it may be to your feelings, to go to see Sara Luttrell some day when she is not formally receiving,” said General Brandon, thinking he was proposing a tremendous sacrifice to Elizabeth; and he felt quite triumphant when she agreed to go.

When the Thursday afternoon came, there was no need to tell Elizabeth that the Clavering receptions were large and brilliant. By four o’clock carriages came pouring into the street, and by five there was almost animpasse. Great numbers of stylish men, both foreigners and Americans, passed in and out the splendid doors.

While Elizabeth was watching this procession with curious interest, Mrs. Luttrell’s great old-fashionedcoach, with the long-tailed black horses, stopped before the tall, shabby house, and Serena brought up Mrs. Luttrell’s and Baskerville’s cards. Mrs. Luttrell, although militant, was not the sort of woman to hit another woman when she was down, and was most gracious when Elizabeth appeared. The sight of the dingy drawing-room, of Elizabeth’s pallor and evident signs of stress and trial, touched Mrs. Luttrell. She mentioned to Elizabeth that a card would be sent her for a large dinner which she was giving within a fortnight, and when Elizabeth gently declined Mrs. Luttrell was really sorry. Baskerville was sincerely cordial. He had liked Elizabeth as a girl, and her forlornness now touched him as it did Mrs. Luttrell.

When the visit was over and they were once more out of the house, Mrs. Luttrell exclaimed: “That’s Dick Brandon’s doings—that poor Elizabeth not going to a place and moping in that hole of a house. If she would but go about a bit, and leave her card at the British Embassy, where she would certainly be invited, she could see something of society and recover her spirits and good looks. By the way, I think she’s really more enticing in her pallor and her black gown than when she was in the flush of her beauty. Of course shelooks much older. Now, as I’m going into the Claverings’ I suppose you will leave me.”

Baskerville, with a hangdog look, replied, “I’m going into the Claverings’, too.” Mrs. Luttrell’s handsome mouth came open, and her ermine cape fell from her shoulders without her even so much as knowing it. “Yes,” said Baskerville, assuming a bullying air, now that the cat was out of the bag, “Mrs. Clavering asked me last Sunday, and I accepted.”

“Where on earth, Richard Bas—“

“Did I see Mrs. Clavering? I met her out walking with Miss Clavering. Mrs. Clavering is a most excellent woman—quiet and unobtrusive—and I swear there is something of her in Miss Clavering.”

“Richard Baskerville, you are in love with Anne Clavering! I know it; I feel it.”

“Don’t be a fool, Sara Luttrell. Because I happen to pay a visit at a house where I have been asked and could have gone a year ago, you at once discover a mare’s nest. That’s Sara Luttrell all over.”

“And what becomes of the doubtful propriety of your going to Senator Clavering’s house? And suppose you succeed in driving him out of public life, as you are trying to do?”

“I swear you are the most provoking old woman in Washington. Hold your tongue and come along with your dutiful nephew.”

Grasping her firmly by the arm, Baskerville marched Mrs. Luttrell up the broad stone steps of the Clavering house. The splendid doors were opened noiselessly by gorgeous footmen who looked like the prize-winners at a chrysanthemum show. The entrance was magnificent, and through the half-drawn silken draperies of the wide doorways they could see the whole superb suite of rooms opening upon the large Moorish hall. Great masses of flowers were everywhere, and the mellow glow of wax lights and tinted lamp globes made the winter twilight softly radiant.

Half a dozen butterfly débutantes were serving tea in the huge dining room, furnished with priceless teak-wood and black oak, bright with pictures and mirrors, a magnificent Turkish carpet on the parquet floor and chandeliers from a royal palace lighting the dim splendor of the room. Here, brilliant with candelabra, was set out a great table, from which an expensive collation was served by more gorgeous footmen. This was the doing of Élise and Lydia, who overruled Anne’s desire for a simple tea-table set in the library. There, however, a great gold and silverbowl was constantly replenished with champagne punch, and over this Élise and Lydia presided, much preferring the champagne bowl to the tea-table.

The library was thronged with men, old and young, native and foreign. Élise and Lydia, their handsome faces flushed and smiling, their elaborate gowns iridescent with gold and silver embroidery and spangles sweeping the floor, laughed, talked, and flirted to their hearts’ content. They also drank punch with a great many men, who squeezed their hands on the sly, looked meaningly into their large, dark eyes, and always went away laughing.

Mrs. Luttrell, escorted by Baskerville, and meeting acquaintances at every turn, entered the great drawing-room, which was a symphony in green and gold. Near the door Anne Clavering, in a simple gray gown, stood by her mother, who was seated. Anne received the guests, and then introduced them to Mrs. Clavering, who made the pretence of receiving, looking the picture of misery meanwhile. The poor soul would much rather have remained upstairs; but on this point Anne was inexorable—her mother must show herself in her own drawing-room. A handsome black gown, appropriate to an elderly lady,showed Mrs. Clavering at her best, and Anne, with perfect tact, grace, and patience, silently demanded and received for her mother the respect which was due her and which there was occasionally some difficulty in exacting. As Anne caught sight of Mrs. Luttrell, she smiled with obvious pleasure; but on seeing Baskerville her face lighted up in a way which by no means escaped Mrs. Luttrell’s sharp eyes.

Mrs. Clavering was nearly frightened out of her life on the rare occasions when the redoubtable Mrs. Luttrell called, but on this afternoon Mrs. Luttrell was as soft as milk and as sweet as honey itself. Mrs. Clavering was not the least afraid of Baskerville, and said to him earnestly, as he took her hand, “I’m real glad to see you.”

“And I am very glad to be able to come,” answered Baskerville. Then, seating himself by her side, he began to talk to her so gently on subjects the poor lady was interested in that she was more delighted with him than ever. A soft flush came into Anne’s delicate cheeks; she appreciated the sweet and subtle flattery in Baskerville’s attitude. It was not interest in Mrs. Clavering’s conversation, nor even the pity he might have felt for her forlorn condition, whichinduced him to spend twenty minutes of his visit in talking to her.

Meantime the dusk was deepening. Many visitors were departing and few coming. Mrs. Luttrell was entertaining a select coterie of men around the large fireplace at the other end of the room, and Baskerville was the only person left near Anne and Mrs. Clavering.

“Will you be kind enough,” he said to Anne, “to go with me to get a cup of tea? I see a table in yonder, but I am afraid of so many young girls at once. I think I can count six of them. Now if you will go with me, I shall feel as brave as a lion.”

The temptation was strong, but Anne looked down at her mother. Apprehension was written on Mrs. Clavering’s simple, homely face at the notion of being left alone.

“Why can’t Mr. Baskerville have his tea with me?” said she. “There ain’t any more folks coming. Make Peer bring a table here, Anne, and we’ll have it comfortable together.”

“Yes,” Baskerville added, drawing up a chair. “Mrs. Clavering is far more amiable and hospitable than you. I am sure you would never have thought of so kind a solution.”

Anne, with a happy smile, gave Pierre theorder, and in a minute they were sitting about a little table, with an opportunity for a few minutes’ talk at a moderate pitch of voice, differing from those hurried, merry meetings in a crowd of laughing, talking, moving people which usually constitute a Washington call.

While they were sitting there, all three enjoying themselves and Mrs. Clavering not the least of the three, a belated caller was announced, General Brandon. The General was in his Sunday frock coat, which had seen good service, and his silk hat, which belonged by rights on the retired list; but each was carefully brushed and clearly belonged to a gentleman. General Brandon himself, handsome, soldierly, his white mustache and hair neatly clipped, was grace, elegance, and amiability personified. His head was none of the best, but for beauty, courage, and gentleness he was unmatched. Anne received him with more than her usual cordiality, and Mrs. Clavering was so pleased at seeing him that she actually invited him to sit down at her tea-table and have tea. This he did, explaining why his daughter had sent her cards instead of coming.

“Another year, I hope, my dear madam, my daughter may be persuaded to reënter society,which, if you will pardon a father’s pride, I think she adorns. But at present she is overwhelmed with grief at her loss. It is scarcely eighteen months since she became a widow and lost the best of husbands.”

General Brandon prattled on, and presently said: “I had hoped to meet Senator Clavering here this afternoon, and made my visit late on purpose. His exacting senatorial duties, however, must leave him little time for social relaxation.”

“I think I hear his step in the hall now,” said Anne. “He will, I know, be very much pleased to meet you again.”

As she spoke Clavering’s firm tread was heard, and he entered, smiling, debonair, and distinguished-looking. Nobody would have dreamed from anything in his air or looks that this man was nearing a crisis in his fate, and that even then his conduct was being revealed in the newspapers and examined by his fellow-senators in a way which opened a wide, straight vista to state’s prison.

Clavering was surprised, but undeniably pleased, and even amused at seeing Baskerville; and Baskerville felt like a hound, and inwardly swore at himself for letting the wish to see a woman’s eyesbring him to Clavering’s house. He put a bold face upon it, however, shook Clavering’s outstretched hand, and called himself a fool and a rogue for so doing.

The warmth of Clavering’s greeting to General Brandon delighted the simple old warrior. Clavering, who had too much sound sense to avoid allusions to his early life or to tell lies about it, recalled the time when he was a sutler and General Brandon was an officer. Then he carried the latter off to an alcove in the library, which was now deserted except by Élise and Lydia. These two young women, reclining like odalisks among the cushions of a luxurious sofa, discussed Rosalka and the rest of their swains in low voices and in terms which luckily their father did not overhear.

Into the alcove Clavering caused his choicest brands of whiskey to be brought, and at once plunged into talk; and into that talk he infused all his powers of pleasing, which soon produced upon the simple old General a species of intoxication. If any one had told him that Clavering’s attention was due to the sight, more than once obtained since Sunday, of Elizabeth Darrell’s graceful figure and interesting, melancholy face, General Brandon would have called that person a liar.

“You know,” said Clavering, as soon as the two were comfortably established with the whiskey and the cigars, “that I am being badgered and bothered by a set of sharks, calling themselves lawyers, who want to rob me of every dollar of my fortune. You have perhaps read in the newspapers something about this K. F. R. land-grant business.”

“I am aware the public prints have given considerable space to it,” replied General Brandon, “but I have no knowledge of the merits of the case.”

“Neither have the newspapers. The long and short of it is that the sharks, after fighting me through every court in the country, where I may say I have managed to hold my own pretty well, have contrived by political wire-pulling to get a Senate committee to investigate the matter. Now I don’t want to be lacking in courtesy to my brother senators, but of all the collection of asses, dunderheads, and old women, sneaks, hypocrites, and snivelling dogs, that ever were huddled together, that select committee of my esteemed contemporaries—Good Lord! let’s take a drink.”

General Brandon drank solemnly. Whiskey of that brand was not to be treated lightly.

“I know well all the country embraced in andcontiguous to that K. F. R. land grant,” said the General, putting down his glass reverently. “I scouted and fought and hunted over all that region more than forty years ago, when I was a young lieutenant just turned loose from West Point.”

“Why, then,” cried Clavering, his handsome eyes lighting up with a glow like fire, “you might be of real service to me.” He did not specify what manner of service he meant, and General Brandon innocently thought Clavering meant about the K. F. R. land grants. But no man who ever lived could tell Clavering anything he did not know about any piece of property he had ever owned; least of all could simple, guileless General Brandon tell him anything.

“I should be most happy,” replied the General. “I have a considerable quantity of memoranda, maps and surveys of the region, which are quite at your service.”

“Capital,” said Clavering, his deep eyes shining with a keen delight. “Now as the investigation is going on, which you have seen in the newspapers, I shall have to make immediate use of any information you might be able to give me. Suppose you were to let me come over to your house to-night and take our first view of what you have? And of course you’ll stay and dine with me.”

“I thank you very much, Senator, but I cannot leave my daughter to dine alone—she is too much alone, poor child. And immediately after dinner I am engaged to spend an hour with an old friend, General Mayse, a former classmate of mine who is now inflicted with paralysis and to whom I pay a weekly visit. Besides, I should have to rummage among my papers to find those that we require. To-morrow night I shall be at your service.”

But it was not Clavering’s nature to delay the accomplishment of any wish. He wanted to see and know Elizabeth Darrell, so he said cordially: “At all events I should like to talk the matter over with you. Would you allow me to come in this evening then, after you have returned from your visit?”

“Certainly, Senator. I shall be at home by half after nine.”

Then Clavering, seeing that General Brandon was his, began to talk about other things, even to hint at chances of making money. To this General Brandon only sighed and said: “Those enterprises are for men with capital. I have only the equity in my house and my salary, and I cannot, for my daughter’s sake, jeopardize what little I have. She was left with but asmall provision from her husband’s estate, which was strictly entailed.” Clavering could not refrain from smiling at General Brandon’s simplicity in refusing such an offer, if even but a hint, for such a reason; but he said no more on the subject.

As the General passed into the drawing-room to say good-by to Mrs. Clavering, he was surprised to find Baskerville still sitting at the tea-table. Baskerville had not been asked to stay to dinner, but when Mrs. Luttrell was ready to leave a very mild invitation from Mrs. Clavering, who had no notion of the duration of fashionable visits, had made him ask permission to remain—a permission which Mrs. Luttrell gave with a wink. Anne was not displeased with him for staying—her eyes and smile conveyed as much; and man-like, Baskerville had succumbed to the temptation. But when General Brandon came in and found him the very last visitor in the drawing-room he felt himself distinctly caught, and made his farewells with more haste than grace. Mrs. Clavering urged him to come again, and Anne’s tones conveyedauf wiedersehento him as eloquently as a tone can without specific words; nevertheless, when Baskerville found himself out in the cool, crisp night, he beganto doubt, as he had ever doubted, the propriety of his going to Senator Clavering’s house at all. But General Brandon was saying to him most earnestly, as they stood under the lamp-post before going their different ways:—

“Senator Clavering is a very cruelly maligned man; of that I am certain. And I think, Mr. Baskerville, that most of the testimony you and the Civil Service League and the K. F. R. attorneys have collected will break down when it is introduced before the committee. Why, Senator Clavering tells me that he has been accused, on evidence that wouldn’t hang a dog, of wholesale bribery, of having bought his seat in the Senate, of having bought up courts and legislatures. But he will be triumphantly vindicated—I make no doubt at all of that.”

“I wish he might be,” replied Baskerville, with a degree of sincerity that would scarcely have been credited; “but I don’t think he can be.”

When General Brandon let himself into his own house, dinner was ready to be served. He was full of enthusiasm about the Claverings. At the table he assured Elizabeth of his entire belief in Clavering and of his respect for him. Mrs. Clavering he pronounced to be a most excellentand unpretending woman, Anne altogether admirable, Reginald Clavering a worthy fellow and a sound churchman, and Élise Denman and Lydia Clavering two much-abused young women, in whom mere high spirits and unconventionality had been mistaken for a degree of imprudence of which he felt sure they could never be guilty. Then he mentioned Clavering’s proposed visit, and asked Elizabeth if she would, the next day, find the trunk in which he kept certain papers, open it, and get out of it everything dated between ’56 and ’61.

When dinner was over and General Brandon had gone out to pay his weekly visit to his paralyzed comrade, Elizabeth went upstairs to a small back room, called by courtesy the study. Here were General Brandon’s few books; he was not, and never had been, a man of books, but he liked to be considered bookish. There was in the room an open grate fire, a student’s lamp, and some old-fashioned tables and easy-chairs. To this room Elizabeth had succeeded in imparting an air of comfort. She sat down before the fire to spend the evening alone, as she had spent so many evenings alone in the last eighteen months, and would, she feared, continue to spend her evenings for the rest of her life. She hadexpected to find her life in Washington dull, but the weeks she had been at home had been duller than she had thought possible. Her father’s old friends had called upon her, but they were all staid and elderly persons, and the circle had grown pitifully small in her ten years of absence. Those ten years had practically obliterated her own acquaintances in the ever changing population of Washington, and the few persons left in the gay world whom she knew, like Mrs. Luttrell, it was plain that her father did not expect her to cultivate.

One resource—reading—occurred to her on this particular evening. She had a mind well fitted for books, but she had never been thrown with bookish people, except Pelham, and reading had formed no essential part of her life. Pelham was a man of great intelligence, and a reader; but both his intelligence and his reading were confined to his profession. No matter where Elizabeth’s thinking began, Pelham was sure to come into it somewhere. She started up from her chair as the recollection of him, which always hovered near her, took shape in thought and almost in speech, and going to the book-case took out the first volume her hand fell upon. It was an old translation of Herodotus,and Elizabeth, determined upon a mental opiate, opened it at random and read on resolutely. She fell upon that wonderful story of Cyrus, the reputed son of Mithradates the herdsman; and in following the grandly simple old narrative, told with so much of art, of grace, of convincing perspicacity, that not even a translation can wholly destroy its majestic beauty, Elizabeth lost herself in the shadowy, ancient past. She was roused by Serena’s voice and Serena’s hand, as black as the Ethiopians in Herodotus’s time, who worshipped no other gods save Jupiter and Bacchus. Serena produced a card. It was simple and correct, and read: “Mr. James Clavering,” with the address.

“It is Senator Clavering,” said Elizabeth, in a moment. “Tell him that General Brandon is not at home.”

“De gent’mun seh he got er ’p’intment wid de Gin’l, an’ he gwine ter wait for him. I t’ink, Miss ’Liz’beth, you better lemme ax him up heah. De parlor is jes’ freezin’ col’,” answered Serena, who never forgot that people should be made comfortable.

“Ask him up, then,” replied Elizabeth. She was somewhat flurried at the thought of receiving Clavering alone, but there was no help for it.She was not, however, disappointed; on the contrary she felt a deep and curious interest in seeing this man and tracing if possible that singular recollection of him, so sharp yet so impalpable and still actually inexplicable to herself.

In a few minutes Serena ushered Clavering into the room. At close range he was even more attractive than at a distance. It was difficult to associate any idea of advancing age with him. Maturity was all that was indicated by his handsome, smooth-shaven face, his compact and elegant figure, his iron-gray hair. Manual labor had left but one mark upon him—his hands were rough and marred by the miner’s tools he had used. He was perfectly well dressed and entirely at his ease. He introduced himself with the natural and unaffected grace which had been his along with his sutler’s license and miner’s tools.

“This, I presume, is Mrs. Darrell. I thank you very much for allowing me to wait for General Brandon’s return.” He said no word about his appointment with General Brandon being at half-past nine while then it was only a little past eight.

Elizabeth invited him to sit down, and herself took a seat opposite him. The color which came into her pale face very much enhanced her looks,and Clavering thought he had never seen so interesting a woman. Her slender black figure unconsciously assumed a pose of singular grace and ease, the delicate color mounted slowly into her pale cheeks, and she was indeed worthy of any man’s notice. And as her personality had struck Clavering with great force at the very first glimpse he had had of her ten years before, so, seeing her close at hand and her attention fixed on himself, she overpowered him quickly, as the warm, sweet scent of the jessamine flower is overpowering. It was what he would have called, had he been thirty years younger, love at first sight.

Clavering’s coming into the room was, like some new, strong force, making itself felt over everything. The small room seemed full of him and nothing else. He was by nature a dominant personality, and he dominated Elizabeth Darrell as strangely and suddenly as she had cast a spell over him.

“My father will regret very much not being here when you came. Perhaps he misunderstood the hour of your appointment,” she said.

Clavering’s white teeth shone in a smile. “Don’t trouble about that. Besides, it has given me the pleasure of seeing you.”

Elizabeth was not unmindful of the fact thatClavering was a married man, with a wife across the street; and his words, which would have been merely those of courtesy in most men, could not be so interpreted, for Clavering was not a man of pretty speeches.

He picked up the volume of Herodotus which lay on the table. “So you’ve been reading old Herodotus! That’s pretty heavy reading for a young woman, isn’t it?”

“I took it up at random just now, and became interested in it,” answered Elizabeth.

“You are a great reader, I suppose?”

“N-no. Hardly, that is. But I am very much alone, and I have read a good deal since I have returned to America.”

“Why should a woman like you be alone? Why shouldn’t you go about and see people and live like other women of your age?”

Elizabeth made no reply to this; she could scarcely admit that her seclusion was more of her father’s doing than her own. She was struck by the beauty of Clavering’s voice and by the correctness of his speech, which was better than that of many college-bred men.

“How long have you been a widow?” he asked.

“A year and a half.”

“And have you any children?”

“No, I lost my only child when he was a baby.”

“That’s hard on a woman. You women never forget those dead babies. But all your life is before you yet.”

“It seems to me it is all behind me.”

“Why? Did you love your husband very much?”

Elizabeth had suffered Clavering’s questions partly through surprise and partly because Clavering could say and do what he chose without giving offence—a quality which had been one of the great factors in raising him from the shaft of a mine to a seat in the United States Senate. But the question put to Elizabeth was so unexpected,—it had never been asked of her before,—it was so searching, that it completely disconcerted her. She remained silent, while her eyes, turned upon Clavering, wore a look of trouble and uncertainty.

“A great many women don’t love their husbands,” said Clavering, “and if they are left widows, their feelings are very complex. They think they ought to grieve for their husbands, but they don’t.”

The color fled suddenly out of Elizabeth’s cheeks. Clavering’s words fitted her case so exactly and so suddenly that she was startled andfrightened. It was as if he had looked into her soul and read at a glance her inmost secrets. She half expected him to say next that she had loved another man than her husband. And as for applying the common rules of behavior to a man like Clavering, it was absurd on the face of it. He was leaning toward Elizabeth, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his eyes fixed upon her with a kind of admiring scrutiny. He found her quite as interesting as he had expected, and he ardently desired to know more about her and, what is as great a mark of interest, to tell her more about himself.

Elizabeth remained silent for a while, and then forced herself to say: “My husband was one of the best of men. He was as good as my father.”

“That settles it,” replied Clavering, with grim humor. “I never knew a woman in my life who spoke of her husband’s goodness first who was really in love with him. When a woman is in love with a man, it isn’t his goodness she thinks of first; it is his love. Now don’t fly off at that; I’m not a conventional man, and you must know it if you ever heard of me before. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful. On the contrary, I want your good opinion—I havewanted it ever since the first time I ever saw you. I was very much struck with you then. I have wanted to know you and I have planned to know you. Have I committed any crime?”

“But—but—you are a married man,” said Elizabeth, faltering, and conscious that she was talking like an ingénue.

Clavering laughed as he replied: “That’s downright school-girlish. Any boarding-school miss would say the same. Well, I can’t help it now that I married a woman totally unsuited to me before I was twenty-one years old. Come, Mrs. Darrell, we are not children. I wanted to know you, I say, and I always try to do what I want to do. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Well, let us then know each other. I swear to you I know less of women than I do of any subject I have ever tried to master. True, I never had time until lately; and, besides, I was a middle-aged man before I ever met any educated and intelligent women. In the class of life from which I spring women are household drudges and bearers of children, and I never knew them in any other aspect until I was over forty years of age. Then you can’t imagine what a stunning revelation to me a woman was who had never done anything but amuse herself and improve herself.Suppose you had never met any educated men till now—wouldn’t you find them captivating?”

When a man talks to a woman as she has never been talked to before he is certain of finding an interested listener, and, it follows, a tolerant listener. So Elizabeth could not disguise her interest in Clavering, nor was it worth while to pretend to be offended with him. The superficial knowledge she had of the vicissitudes of his life was calculated to arouse and fix her attention; and there was so little to do in her present life that she would have been more or less than mortal if she had turned from the first object of interest she had yet met with in her new and changed and dreary life.

She paused awhile before answering Clavering’s last question. “I dare say I should feel so,” she answered. “I remember how it was when I was first married and went to India. Everything interested me. I could not look at a native without wanting to ask all manner of questions of him and about him, which of course I could not be allowed to do; and the life there is so strange—their race problem is so different from ours, and all my modes of thought had to be changed. I was in India over eight years, and it was as strange to me when I left it as when I arrived.”

Elizabeth had got the talk away from the personal note upon which Clavering had pitched it, and he, seeing he had said enough for a beginning, followed Elizabeth’s conversational lead. He asked her many questions about her life in India, all singularly intelligent and well put, because drinking at the fountain of other people’s talk had been his chief source of education during his whole life. And Clavering, without being widely read, was far from being an ignorant man. Although he knew not a word of any language except his own, nor the history of any country except his own, he was well acquainted with the history of his own times, and he knew who every living man of importance in his own country and Europe was, and what he was doing. Seeing that Elizabeth was susceptible to the charms of conversation and had a distinct intellectual side, Clavering appealed to her on that side. He told her with an inimitable raciness and humor some of the incidents of his early life in the West, his later adventures, even of his career in the Senate.

“I think I never worked so hard in my life as I have during the five years I’ve been in the Senate,” he said. “No man can come to the Senate of the United States with the educationof a sutler, miner, promoter, speculator, and what not—such as I have had—and not work hard; that is, if he expects to be anything else than a dummy. But it isn’t in James Clavering to be a dummy anywhere. So I have thought and read and worked and slaved, and bought other men’s brains in the last five years as earnestly as any man ever did. The result is that when I open my mouth now the senators listen. At first the lawyers in the Senate used to hide a grin when I began to speak, and I admit I did make some bad breaks in the beginning. But I saw my way out of that clearly enough. I found a man who was really a great constitutional lawyer, although he had never been able to make more than a bare living out of his profession in Chicago. I have always invested liberally in brains. When you can actually buy brains or news, you are buying the two most valuable commodities on earth. Well, when I took up a question I had my man go over the legal aspects of it and put them down in black and white. Then I knew well enough how to use them, and I may say without boasting that I have done as well, or better, than any man of my opportunities now in the Senate. However, I don’t compare myself with such men as Andrew Johnson. You know his wife taught him to write,and that man rose to be President of the United States. Of course he wasn’t what you would call a scholarly man, like many of the senators, but good Lord! think of the vast propelling force that took an illiterate man from the tailor’s bench and gave him such a career as Andrew Johnson’s, and made him Vice-President of the United States. Those men—and men like me, too—can’t be called all-round men, like Senator Thorndyke, for example. All of us have got great big gaps and holes in our knowledge and judgment and conduct that the normal well-educated man hasn’t. But where we are strong, we are stronger than they. Do you know anything about Thorndyke?”

“I have heard my father speak of Mrs. Thorndyke, whose family he knew many years ago, and he visits occasionally at Senator Thorndyke’s. Mrs. Thorndyke sent me a request that I would call to see her, but—but—I don’t pay any visits now.”

“It’s a shame you don’t—a woman like you. Mrs. Thorndyke is charming, but not so charming as you. And I lay claim to great nobility of soul when I praise Mrs. Thorndyke, or Thorndyke either, for that matter. Mrs. Thorndyke has no use for me or for anybody of my name, except mysecond daughter. And Thorndyke, although he isn’t leading the pack of hounds who are baying after me to get me out of the Senate, is quietly giving them the scent. Yet I swear I admire Thorndyke—or, rather, I admire his education and training, which have made him what he is. If I had had that training—a gentleman for my father, a lady for my mother, association with the sons of gentlemen and ladies, a university education, and then had married a lady—“

Clavering got up and took a turn about the narrow room. Finally he came and sat down in a chair closer to Elizabeth, and continued: “Thorndyke is one of the lawyers in the Senate who used to bother me. It seemed to me at first that every time I opened my mouth in the Senate chamber I butted into the Constitution of the United States. Either I was butting into the shalls or the shall nots, and Thorndyke always let me know it. I could get along from the first well enough in the rough-and-tumble of debate with men like Senator Crane, for example,—a handsome fellow, from the West, too, very showy in every way, but not the man that Thorndyke is. It was the scholarly men that I was a little afraid of, I’m not ashamed to say. I am a long way off from a fool; consequently I know my own limitations,and a want of scholarship is one of those limitations.”

Elizabeth listened, more and more beguiled. She could not but see a sort of self-respect in this man; he respected his own intellect because it was worth respecting, and he had very little respect for his own character and honor because he knew they were not worth respecting. As Elizabeth studied him by the mellow lamplight, while his rich voice echoed through the small room, she could not but recognize that here was a considerable man, a considerable force; and she had never known a man of this type before. She noted that he was as well groomed as the most high-bred man she had ever known—as well as Pelham, for example. He had come into the room with ease and grace. No small tricks of manner disfigured him; he was naturally polished, and he had the gift, very rare and very dangerous, of saying what he would without giving offence,—or, rather, of disarming the person who might be offended. And in spite of his frank talking of himself Elizabeth saw in him an absence of small vanity, of restless self-love. Unconsciously she assumed an air of profound interest in what Clavering was saying,—a form of flattery most insidious and effective because of its unconsciousness.

Elizabeth herself, in the eighteen months of loneliness, poverty, and desperate anxiety which she had lately known, had almost lost the sweet fluency which had once distinguished her; but presently Clavering chose to make her talk, and succeeded admirably. She found herself speaking frankly about her past life and telling things she had never thought of telling a stranger; but Clavering seemed anything but a stranger. In truth, he had probed her so well that he knew much more about her than she had dreamed of revealing.

When at last General Brandon’s step was heard, Elizabeth started like a guilty child; she had forgotten that her father was to return. General Brandon was delighted to see Clavering, and took a quarter of an hour to explain why he had been ten minutes late.

“I didn’t expect to see any papers to-night,” replied Clavering, “but I should like to talk over some things with you. Please don’t go, Mrs. Darrell; what I have to say you are at perfect liberty to hear.”

Elizabeth hesitated, and so did General Brandon; but Clavering settled the matter by saying: “If I am to drive you out of your sitting room, I shall feel obliged to remain away, and therebybe deprived of General Brandon’s valuable services.” Elizabeth remained.

Clavering then began to give the history from his point of view of the K. F. R. land grants. It was a powerfully interesting story, told with much dramatic force. It embraced the history of much of Clavering’s life, which was in itself a long succession of uncommon episodes. It lost nothing in the telling. Then he came to the vindictive and long-continued fight made on him politically, which culminated in the bringing of these matters before a Senate committee by a powerful association of Eastern railway magnates and corporation lawyers, aided by the senators in opposition and others in his own party who, because he was not strictly amenable to party discipline, would be glad to see him driven out of the Senate. But Clavering was a fighting man, and although driven to the wall, he had his back to it; he was very far from surrender, and so he said.

Elizabeth listened with breathless interest. Nothing like this had ever come into her experience before. It struck her as being so much larger and stronger than any of the struggles which she had heretofore known that it dwarfed them all. Everybody’s affairs seemed small beside Clavering’s. Yet she was fully conscious allthe time that this was special pleading on Clavering’s part. She admired the ingenuity, the finesse, the daring, that Clavering had shown and was showing; but it all seemed to her as if there must be something as large and as strong on the other side.

No such idea, however, came into General Brandon’s kind, simple wooden head. When Clavering had finished speaking, the General rose and, grasping him by the hand, said solemnly: “My dear sir, I sympathize with you profoundly. I am convinced that you have been the victim of misplaced confidence, and that this unprincipled hounding of you on the part of men who wish to rob you, not only of your property and your seat in the Senate, but your high character and your priceless good name, is bound to come to naught. I offer you my sincere sympathy, and I assure you that I place entire credence in every word that you have told me.”

This was more than Elizabeth did; and when Clavering thought of it afterward, sitting over his library fire, he laughed to himself. On the strength of it, however, he had secured opportunities of seeing General Brandon’s daughter very often, and he did not mean to let the grass grow under his feet.

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