Chapter SixteenIt was the gayest season Washington had ever known. There was a continuous round of entertaining at the White House, unofficial as well as official. The different embassies vied with one another in the number and splendor of their festivities; and the smart set entered into a merry war among themselves as to which should throw open their doors oftenest, collect the largest number of guests, and make the most lavish and overpowering display of luxury.The Claverings did their part, chiefly engineered by Clavering himself, and abetted by Élise and Lydia. Clavering had good reason to suspect that the report of the investigating committee would be ready within the month. It was now the middle of January. Shrove Tuesday came on the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine’s Day, and this was the evening selected for the grand ball and musical which were to complete the season. Other musicals had been given in Washington, but none like this; other balls, but this was meant to surpassthem all. It had heretofore been enough to get artists from the Metropolitan Opera in New York; it remained for Clavering to import a couple of singers from Paris for the one occasion. A Hungarian band, touring America, was held over a steamer in order to come to Washington and play at the ball. The shops of Vienna were ransacked for favors for the cotillon; and the champagne to be served came from a king’s cellars.All this Anne Clavering regarded with disgust and aversion. She felt sure that her father was soon to be hurled from public life, and deservedly so. Her mother’s health was giving her grave alarm. She was at all times opposed to the excess of luxury and fashion which delighted the pagan souls of Élise and Lydia, and now it was an additional mortification to her on Baskerville’s account. He, she felt convinced, was conscious of the brazen effrontery, the shocking bad taste, of it all, and considerate as he was in not speaking of it, her soul was filled with shame to suppose what he thought. She began to hate the lavish luxury in which she dwelt, and looked forward eagerly to the time when she could live modestly and quietly in a house not so grand as to excite the transports of all the society correspondents who got a sight of its stupendous splendors.Mrs. Clavering’s illness, though slight, continued, and gave Anne a very good excuse for withdrawing somewhat from general society. And it also gave her time for those charming meetings at Mrs. Luttrell’s house, where she and Richard Baskerville tasted the true joy of living. Mrs. Luttrell nobly redeemed her promise, and would have sent every day for Anne to come to tea. As Mrs. Luttrell did not often dine at home without guests, the best tête-à-tête she could offer the lovers was tea in the little morning-room by the firelight. But Anne, with natural modesty, did not always accept Mrs. Luttrell’s urgent invitations. When she did, however, she and Baskerville always had an enchanted hour to themselves in the dusk, while Mrs. Luttrell considerately disappeared, to take the half hour’s beauty sleep which she declared essential, during some part of every day, for the preservation of her charms.The lovers also met more than once at the Thorndykes’, at little dinnersà quatre. Mrs. Thorndyke would write a note to Anne, asking her on various pleas to come and dine with Thorndyke and herself; and as soon as Anne had accepted there would be a frantic call over the telephone for Thorndyke, in which Mrs. Thorndykewould direct him at the peril of his life to go immediately in search of Baskerville and to bring him home to dinner. And Thorndyke, like the obedient American husband, would do as he was bidden, and produce Baskerville with great punctuality. How far Constance Thorndyke’s own acute perceptions were accountable for this, and how far Mrs. Luttrell’s incurable propensity for taking the world into her confidence, nobody could tell. At all events, it made four people happy; and if anything could have made Baskerville and Anne more in love with the ideal of marriage it was to see the serene happiness, the charming home life, of Senator and Mrs. Thorndyke.Baskerville had not ceased to press for an early date for his marriage, but Mrs. Clavering’s indisposition and the position of Clavering’s affairs deferred the actual making of the arrangements. It was to be a very simple wedding, Anne stipulated; and Baskerville, with more than the average man’s dread of a ceremony full of display, agreed promptly. Some morning, when Mrs. Clavering was well, Anne and he would be quietly married, go from the church to the train, and after a few days return to Baskerville’s house. And Anne promised herself, and got Baskervilleto promise her, the indulgence of a quiet domestic life—a thing she had not known since the golden shower descended upon James Clavering.Clavering had said nothing to Anne in regard to Baskerville’s interview with him, nor had the father and daughter exchanged one word with each other, beyond the ordinary civilities of life, since that midnight conversation in which Mr. Clavering had announced his intention of getting a divorce. Neither had he said anything to Mrs. Clavering, and his plans were entirely unknown to his family. By extraordinary good fortune not the smallest suspicion fell on the pale, handsome, silent Mrs. Darrell across the way, with her widow’s veil thrown back from her graceful head.In those weeks, when Anne Clavering saw as little of the world as she could, she occasionally took quiet and solitary walks in which Baskerville would gladly have joined her. But Anne, with the over-delicacy of one who might be open to the suspicion of not being delicate enough, would not agree to see him except under the chaperonage of Mrs. Luttrell. And twice in those solitary walks she met Elizabeth Darrell, also alone. Both women regarded each other curiously, meanwhile averting their eyes.Anne knew quite well who Elizabeth was, andat their second meeting, which was quite close to Elizabeth’s door, Anne was moved by the true spirit of courtesy and neighborly kindness to speak to her. She said, with a pleasant bow and smile: “This, I believe, is Mrs. Darrell, our neighbor, and I am Miss Clavering. I have the pleasure of knowing your father, General Brandon.”Elizabeth received this advance with such apparent haughtiness that Anne, her face flushing, made some casual remark and went into her own house. In truth Elizabeth was frightened and surprised beyond measure, and felt herself so guilty that she knew not where to look or what to say, and literally fled from the sight of James Clavering’s innocent daughter as if she had been an accusing conscience.Meanwhile the preparations for the grand St. Valentine’s musical and ball went gayly on. Clavering himself showed unwonted interest in it. He was as insensible of public approval or disapproval as any man well could be; nevertheless, he hoped that the report of the investigating committee would not be made public until after the great function on Shrove Tuesday. It pleased his fancy for the spectacular to think that the last entertainment he gave in Washington—for he well knew it would be the last—should be fullof gorgeous splendor, so superbly unique that it would be remembered for a decade.He told this to Elizabeth Darrell, for although the investigation was closed Clavering trumped up some specious requests for more of General Brandon’s information and assistance on certain alleged general points, and by this means still contrived to see Elizabeth once or twice a week. He tried to persuade Elizabeth to come to the grand festivity, and was deeply in earnest in his effort. He counted on its effect upon her when he should tell her that she could have similar entertainments whenever she liked, in a much larger and more splendid city than Washington—London or Paris, for example.Elizabeth, however, recoiled with something like horror from the idea of going to Clavering’s house and being hospitably received by his wife and daughters; for she had reached the point when Clavering’s bribes—for so his love-making might be considered—were always in her mind. At one time she would feel so oppressed with her loneliness, her poverty, her disappointments, that she would be almost eager for the splendid destiny which Clavering offered her; at another time she would shrink from it with horror of it and horror of herself. All her social and religious prejudiceswere against divorce and were strong enough to have kept her from marrying Clavering if he had ever really been married to Mrs. Clavering, but as he had never been married to her no moral obligation existed. Elizabeth would also have been incapable of the meanness, the iniquity, of taking Clavering away from another woman who had a much better right to him than she; only she knew that Mrs. Clavering would suffer nothing in parting with Clavering. The feeling that his children might be wounded made no strong appeal to Elizabeth.However, Clavering’s best argument—his stupendous wealth—was always in some form before her eyes. Every time she went out of doors, or even looked out of her window, she saw the evidences of Clavering’s fortune—his magnificent house, his army of servants, his superb equipages, his automobiles of every description. She could not get away from it, and it made her own shabby home seem the shabbier and the narrower every day she lived in it. Moreover, she was at that dangerous age when a woman is brought face to face with her destiny; when she is forced to say good-by to her girlhood and to reckon upon life without first youth or first love.And after Hugh Pelham’s behavior, why shouldshe reckon on love at all? Was there such a thing as love? He had apparently loved her with the noblest love; it had lasted many years, and finally, in a day, in an hour, for the merest paltry consideration of money, he had not only forgotten her, he had persecuted her. If it were not her fate to know the very ultimate sweetness of love, at least she might have known its consolation. Now that Pelham was lost to her she began to think reproachfully, as women will, of what he might have done for her. If he had been true to her, or even decent to her, she would never have been in those desperate straits in London; she would never have been in her present cruel position, for the instant her father knew of her embarrassments she knew he would sell the roof over his head to pay back the debt; and she would never have dreamed of marrying Clavering. All these troubles came from her having believed in love—and perhaps there was no such thing, after all. But in thinking of marrying Clavering and exchanging her present miserable existence for that promised dazzling London life, a shadow would fall across it—Hugh Pelham’s shadow. How would she face him? How could she conceal from him that she had sold herself to this man? And how could she visit him with thescorn lie deserved if she had so easily bartered herself away?Clavering saw the conflict in Elizabeth’s mind, and it gave him a species of sardonic amusement at his own expense. Here he was, ready to sacrifice so much for this woman who had nothing, who could scarcely be brought to look upon what he offered her, and who had kept him at such a distance that he had but once touched her hand in private. He felt himself in many ways at a disadvantage with Elizabeth Darrell. He was, like all men, brought up in humble surroundings, unused to clever and highly organized women, and he did not exactly know how to appeal to such women or how to classify them. One moment Elizabeth would appear to him cleverer than the cleverest man, the next he saw in her some feminine foible that made her seem like a precocious child.Yet all the time Clavering maintained, in his quietly overbearing way, that the whole affair of the marriage was fixed; but he was not so certain as he professed. He would talk of their plans: they would be married and go to London, and Elizabeth might have any sort of an establishment she liked. She was already well known and well connected there, and he candidly admitted to himself that it would probably be a season or twobefore London society would find out exactly what sort of a person he was. He warned Elizabeth not to expect any attention from the American ambassador, and was, in short, perfectly frank with her.He saw that the idea of a life of splendor in London had its attraction for Elizabeth. If she should marry, she would not dare to remain in Washington, and she had no ties elsewhere in her own country. Clavering’s manners, in spite of his origin and career, were admirable, and she would have no occasion to blush for him in society—a point on which well-bred women are sensitive. She knew, in externals, he would compare favorably with any of the self-made Americans who buy their way into English society. For herself, her birth and breeding lifted her far above the average titled American woman, whose papa or mamma has bought her a title as they bought her a French doll in her childhood. And London was so large, and so little was really understood there of American life and manners, that Elizabeth felt they would be comparatively safe in London—if—if—She had taken to reading the newspapers attentively, and had followed the investigation closely. She made herself some sort of a vague promisethat should Clavering be exonerated she would marry him, but if he should be proved a scoundrel she would not. But she was already inwardly convinced that he was guilty. He told her, the first time he had a chance, of Baskerville’s interview with him—told it with such humor, such raciness, such enjoyment of Baskerville’s uncomfortable predicament, that Elizabeth, though little given to merriment, was obliged to laugh.“Of course,” he said, “they will be married shortly. Baskerville has a fine position here—not showy, you know, but the right sort. He has a comfortable fortune, too. Gad! at his age I would have thought myself as rich as Rockefeller if I had had as much. Now it wouldn’t keep me in automobiles. I shall provide for Anne handsomely, and besides she will get everything I give her mother, which will be in itself a handsome fortune. Oh, I’m not mean about giving money to my family. Just as soon as Élise and Lydia get the cash I intend to give them, when I get the divorce, they will both be sure to marry some foreign sprig. They have a whole forest of them here and at those foreign watering-places. I shall give Reginald quite as much as he will know how to use, and that will still leave me enough to make you one of the richest women in the world.”Then he redoubled his urging that Elizabeth should come to the grand musical; but she refused his proposition with such violence that he thought it prudent to say no more about it. General Brandon, however, had accepted with pleasure, and quite looked forward to the event. But the very day before, he came home from his office with a bad attack of rheumatism, and was forced to take to his bed.In the afternoon of the next day, while Elizabeth was sitting by her father’s bedside reading to him, and occasionally giving furtive glances at the great masses of palms and magnificent flowering plants being carried into Clavering’s house, a card was brought up to her. It was inscribed, “Mr. Angus McBean.” So the solicitor had carried out his threat at last. Elizabeth’s heart gave a great jump, and then seemed as if dead within her. But she maintained some outward composure, and said she would see the gentleman in a few moments; and telling General Brandon that it was an acquaintance of other days, she left the room. She went to her own room to recover herself a little before descending to meet the man through whom Hugh Pelham had persecuted her ever since her husband’s death.When she entered the drawing-room, theScotchman rose and greeted her politely. Elizabeth answered his greeting coldly, and McBean, who had seen several Scotch duchesses at a distance, thought he had never beheld anything quite so haughty as this American woman. She remained standing, and Mr. McBean, perceiving she was not likely to ask him to sit, coolly took a chair; and Elizabeth, perforce, sat too.“I have come in the interests of my client, Major Pelham, to endeavor to reach a basis of settlement with you, madam, concerning the matter we have been corresponding about,” blandly remarked Mr. McBean.“So I supposed,” said Elizabeth, icily.Mr. McBean continued, still blandly: “I may recall to you that you have persistently refused to answer my letters or to refer me to a lawyer, and as the affair involves jewels of considerable value, as well as large sums of money, I thought myself justified in coming to America to seek a settlement of the matter. May I inquire if you will now give me the name of your lawyer? For it would be far more to your interests—I may say it is necessary to your interests—that this matter be settled promptly.”These words were of vague but dreadful import to Elizabeth. She remained silent. She knewnothing of law or lawyers, and the mere thought of consulting a lawyer seemed to her to be giving away her case. There was one,—yes, Richard Baskerville,—the only lawyer she knew in Washington, if she might still be said to know him. She recalled the few times she had seen him since her return to Washington. But she had known him well in the old days. He seemed to have retained his former kindness to her; she might consult him. All this passed rapidly through her mind. What she said was in a calm voice: “I think I need not consult any lawyer on the point of retaining my husband’s gift. The pendant to the necklace was my husband’s wedding present to me.”Mr. McBean sighed patiently. He had had many dealings with lady clients, and all of them were like this, quite haughty and impossible, until they were frightened; then they would do anything that was asked of them. The only thing left, then, was to frighten Mrs. Darrell, and to give her to understand that the rights of property were the most sacred rights on earth—from the Scotch point of view.“I think, madam, if you will kindly consent to see your solicitor, or—I believe you use the generic term in the States—your lawyer, and will afterward,have him kindly accord me an interview, you will change your mind upon this matter. The necklace, without counting the additions made to it by your husband, or the pendant, which I understand is of no great value, all of which will be restored to you, is worth at least fifteen hundred pounds. Such a piece of property is not to be disposed of lightly.”So, then, being driven into a corner, helpless and alone, Elizabeth flatteringly consented to consult a lawyer. Mr. McBean left as his address a second-class hotel, and bowed himself out, promising to repeat his call as soon as he was permitted.Had the Scotch solicitor known it, he had done more toward driving Elizabeth into marrying Clavering than any of Clavering’s offers, vows, urgings, and inducements. As she stood, pale and frightened, with a wildly beating heart, her eyes fell involuntarily on the superb house opposite her.At that moment Clavering dashed up in a magnificent automobile, and got out. Elizabeth noticed that he did not walk with his usual graceful and springy step, and that he leaned against one of the stone pillars of the doorway, before the ever ready, gorgeously caparisoned flunky opened the entrance door. In truth, James Clavering had inhis breast pocket a type-written document, which acted like a drag upon his footsteps and a weight upon his shoulders. It was a stolen copy of the report of the committee of investigation, for he always had those in his pay who served him on like occasions.The next moment, Élise and Lydia drove up in a gem of a victoria. They were enveloped in the costliest furs, and so were the immaculate coachman and footman. The pair of perfectly matched bay cobs was worth a fortune. The harness was gold-mounted, with the Clavering initials upon it. As the two girls got out of the victoria Elizabeth caught the gleam of a long chain dotted with diamonds around Élise’s neck. Both of them seemed to radiate wealth; and there stood she, forlorn and despairing for the lack of a few hundred pounds!Nor was this all. Even if the value of the necklace could be raised by her father’s sacrificing everything he had,—his interest in his mortgaged house,—what might not be done to her because she could not produce the necklace itself? Clavering had told her that with money enough it could easily be traced and recovered; but that would mean more money still, and she might as well ask for a star as for any more than the smallsum her father could raise. And when she thought that by saying one word she could step from this unstable, bitter, and humiliating position into the very acme of luxury and all the ease of mind which money could give, it seemed to her almost a paradise. It was well for her that Clavering was not on the spot at that moment.She went back to her father’s bedside and to reading the book she had laid down. She uttered the words, but her mind was far off. As she dwelt upon Mr. McBean’s phrases and thinly disguised threats, she grew more and more panic-stricken. At last Serena brought up General Brandon’s dinner, and Elizabeth went down to her own solitary meal in the dingy dining room. Action was forced upon her; she must see a lawyer, and Richard Baskerville was her only choice. She must try to see him that very night. As she knew he would not be at the Claverings’, she thought her chance of finding him at home was excellent.When dinner was over Elizabeth gave Serena a note to take to Richard Baskerville, asking him to call that evening to see her upon a matter of pressing importance. She put her request upon the ground of old acquaintance, coupled with present necessity. Serena returned within ahalf-hour, with a note from Baskerville saying he would be pleased to call to see Mrs. Darrell that evening at half-past nine o’clock.General Brandon having been made comfortable for the night, Elizabeth descended to the drawing-room. The gas was lighted, but turned low. Elizabeth went to the window, whence she could see the Clavering house blazing with light and an army of liveried servants moving to and fro. A fraction of the cost of that one entertainment would have made her a free woman.Shortly after half-past nine o’clock Baskerville arrived. Like Elizabeth, he gazed with interest at the Clavering house. It was undoubtedly the last great entertainment there at which Anne would preside, and Baskerville had a conviction that it was the last entertainment the Claverings would ever give in Washington. He had private information that the committee of investigation had agreed upon its report, and he believed it would deal severely with Clavering.He had been surprised to receive Elizabeth’s note, but he recognized at once that she was in great trouble, and he had come willingly, as a gentleman should. When he saw Elizabeth, he realized how great was her trouble. Then, sitting in the dimly lighted drawing-room, Elizabeth,with many pauses and palpitations and hesitations, began her story. Baskerville gently assisted her, and the telling of the first part was not so hard. When it came to the further history of it Elizabeth faltered, and asked anxiously, “But wasn’t the necklace mine entirely, after my husband gave it to me?”Baskerville shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Darrell, and I am afraid that Major Darrell made a mistake—a perfectly natural and excusable mistake—in thinking it was his to give you in perpetuity. Of course I am not so well informed on these points as an English lawyer would be, but from what you tell me of the other jewels, and the course of the solicitor concerning them, I cannot but think that he knows what he is doing, and that you will have to give up the necklace, retaining of course your pendant, and perhaps the stones your husband bought.”Elizabeth looked at him with wild, scared eyes; and then, bursting into tears, told him the whole story of pawning the necklace, of finding it gone, and her unwillingness to own what she had done. Baskerville was startled, but allowed her to weep on, without trying to check her. He saw that she was in a state of trembling excitement, excessive even under the circumstances, and she must haveher tears out. She had, so far, avoided mentioning Pelham’s name.“But what of the heirs of Major Darrell? Surely, when they know how you were straitened in London after your husband’s death and the good faith in which you pledged the necklace, they would not wish to distress you unnecessarily about it.”Then Elizabeth was forced to speak of Pelham. “Major Darrell’s heir is his cousin, Major Pelham, the man—next my husband and my father—whom I thought my truest friend. He is in West Africa now, or was when my husband died, and I have not heard of his return to England since. But he has countenanced all this, and seems to delight in persecuting me through this man McBean. And it is quite useless, too, as I have no means of paying the money. I have only a small income, about a hundred pounds a year. But if my father learns of my trouble, as he eventually must if this persecution is kept up, he will certainly sell this house—his only piece of property, and mortgaged at that. Oh, I didn’t think a man could be so cruel as Hugh Pelham has been!”“Does McBean claim to be acting under Major Pelham’s instructions?”“Yes. In everything he writes me or says to me he uses Hugh Pelham’s name.”“There is hut one thing to do, Mrs. Darrell. I shall see McBean to-morrow and endeavor to see what I can do with him. If I fail with him, I shall appeal to Major Pelham.”“Oh, no, not that—not that!”She spoke with so much of feeling, of anger, of mortification in her voice, that Baskerville could not but suspect that there was something more concerning Pelham which Elizabeth had not chosen to tell him; but his duty to her as a friend and a lawyer remained the same. “Pardon me,” he said kindly, “but I think it almost necessary to inform Major Pelham of the state of the case. I shall not, however, do it unless you consent. But I think you will consent.”Elizabeth grew more composed, and they talked some time longer—talked until the rolling of carriages began under the porte-cochère of the Clavering house, and women wrapped in gorgeous ball cloaks and trailing behind them rich brocades and velvets and sparkling chiffons began to pour through the great entrance doors into the regions of light and splendor beyond. The rhythmic swell of music began to be heard; the great festivity had begun.Both Elizabeth and Baskerville, sitting in the quiet room only a stone’s throw away, were thinking about what was going on in the great mansion across the street. Elizabeth was asking herself if, after all, there were any alternative left her but to agree to marry Clavering. One word, and all her troubles and perplexities about money, which had spoiled her life from the time of her girlhood, would disappear. And if she did not marry Clavering—here her dread and apprehension became so strong that she was sickened at the contemplation.In spite of her preoccupation with her own troubles she could not but regard Baskerville with interest, knowing of his relations with Anne Clavering. Here was another man, like Pelham, who seemed the very mirror of manly love and courage; but perhaps he would be no better than Pelham in the long run. He might marry Anne under an impulse of generous feeling and live to repent it. Elizabeth was becoming a sceptic on the subject of man’s love.Baskerville had no suspicion that Elizabeth Darrell knew anything of his relations with Anne Clavering, nor did he connect Clavering in any way with Elizabeth. He was thinking of Anne while talking to Elizabeth, remembering how shehad disliked and dreaded this great function. She was to do the honors of the occasion, Mrs. Clavering being still ailing. The town had been ringing with the magnificence of the coming festivity, but Anne had been so averse to it that Baskerville had said little about it to her. It was out of the question that he should go, and so no card had been sent him; and he agreed fully with Anne that the affair was most unfortunately conspicuous at the present time.A silence had fallen between Baskerville and Elizabeth, while listening to the commotion outside. A sudden wild impulse came to Elizabeth to tell Baskerville, of all men, her struggles about consenting to marry Clavering, without mentioning any name. Baskerville had been kind and helpful to her; he had come to her immediately at her request; and before she knew it she was saying to him, in a nervous voice: “I could be free from all these anxieties about money, my father could end his days in ease—all, all if I would but marry a divorced man—a man to be divorced, that is. And after all, he never was actually married, it was a mistake.”Baskerville had been looking abstractedly out of the window at the carriages flashing past, but at this he turned quickly to Elizabeth. “Youmean Senator Clavering?” Baskerville was a remarkably self-contained man, but in his burst of surprise the name fell from his lips before he knew it.Elizabeth sat dumb. She had yielded to a mad impulse, and would have given a year of her life to have unsaid those words. Baskerville hesitated for a minute or two, and then rose. Elizabeth’s silence, the painful flushing of her face, her whole attitude of conscious guilt, proclaimed the truth of Baskerville’s surmise. He looked at her in pity and commiseration. She had just told him enough to make him understand how great the temptation was to her; and yet so far she had not yielded. But that she would yield he had not the least doubt. And what untold miseries would not she, or any woman like her, bring upon herself by marrying Clavering!It was a question which neither one of them could discuss, and Baskerville’s only words were: “I have no right to offer you my advice, except on the point upon which you have consulted me, but I beg of you to consider well what you are thinking of. You are hovering over dreadful possibilities for yourself. Good night.”He was going, but Elizabeth ran and grasped his arm. “You won’t speak of this to MissClavering! You must not do it! You have no right!”Baskerville smiled rather bitterly. Whether Elizabeth were afraid or ashamed he did not know—probably both.“Certainly I shall not,” he said, and to Elizabeth’s ears his tone expressed the most entire contempt.“And I haven’t promised him—I haven’t agreed yet,” she added, tears coming into her eyes; and then Baskerville was gone.Elizabeth sat, stunned by her own folly, and burning with shame at the scorn she fancied Baskerville had felt for her. He had been kind to her and had agreed to do all that was possible with McBean, but by her own act she had lost his good will and respect. Well, it was part of the web of destiny. She was being driven to marry Clavering by every circumstance of her life—even this last. Pelham’s unkindness was the beginning of it; McBean’s persecution helped it on; General Brandon’s goodness and generosity, Baskerville’s contempt for her—all urged her on; she supposed Baskerville would probably have nothing more to do with her affairs and would leave her to face McBean alone, and that would be the end of her resistance to Clavering.She went up to her own room and, with a cloak huddled about her, sat by the window in the dark, looking out upon the splendid scene of a great ball in a capital city. Elizabeth in the cold and darkness watched it all—watched until the ambassadors’ carriages were called, followed rapidly by the other equipages which were parked in the surrounding streets for blocks. At last, after three o’clock in the morning, the trampling of horses’ hoofs, the closing of carriage doors, and the commotion of footmen and coachmen ceased—the great affair was over. Quickly as in the transformation scene at a theatre, the splendid house grew dark—all except the windows of Clavering’s library. They remained brilliantly lighted long after all else in the street was dark and quiet.Elizabeth, for some reason inexplicable to herself, remained still at her window, looking at the blaze of light from Clavering’s library windows. What was keeping him up so late? Was it good news or bad? Had the report of the committee been made?Within the library sat Clavering in his accustomed chair. In his hand he held a type-written document of many pages, which had cost him many thousands of dollars to have purloined and copied from another one which was locked up in the safe of the secretary of the Senate. Everypage of this document proclaimed in some form or other his guilt, and at the bottom was written in the handwriting of a man he knew well, and who had stolen and copied the report for him:—“Resolution of expulsion will be introduced immediately after reading of report, and will pass by three-fourths majority.”And the hired thief had not played fair with him. He had discovered that at least three newspapers had bought the stolen report, and at that very moment he knew the great presses in the newspaper offices were clanging with the story of his disgrace to be printed on the morrow.Then there was a bunch of telegrams from his state capital. If the Senate did not vote to expel, the legislature would request him to resign; so there was no vindication there. To this, then, had his public career come! Clavering was not honest himself, nor did he believe in honesty in others; but he believed it possible that he might have been more secret in his evil-doing. He had thought that with money, brains, and courage he could brazen anything out. But behold! he could not. He was fairly caught and exposed. Those stray words of Baskerville’s, uttered somemonths before, recurred to him, “There is no real substitute for honesty.”He had heard the news on his way home that afternoon, from an out-of-town expedition. It had unnerved him for a little while; it was that which made him get out of the automobile so heavily when Elizabeth, unseen, was watching him. He had gone through the evening, however, bravely and even cynically. Many senators had been asked to the great function, but scarcely half a dozen had appeared; and all of them were inconsiderable men, dragged there by their womenkind. In the course of some hours of reflection—for Clavering could think in a crowd—a part of his indomitable courage and resource had returned. He had no fear of the criminal prosecution which would certainly follow. William M. Tweed had been caught, but Tweed was a mere vulgar villain and did not know when he was beaten. Clavering rapidly made up his mind that he could afford to restore eight or even ten millions of dollars to the rightful owners, and that would satisfy them; they wouldn’t be likely to spend any part of it in trying to punish him.As for any part the state and federal government might take he was not particularly concerned. The party had done enough to clear itsskirts by expelling him from the Senate, and if he satisfied all the claims against him, nobody would have any object in entering upon a long, expensive, and doubtful trial. But after paying out even ten millions of dollars he would have twice as much left, which nobody and no government could get, though it was as dishonestly made as the rest. With that much money and Elizabeth Darrell—for Elizabeth entered into all his calculations—life would still be worth living.When the mob of gayly dressed people were gone, when the laughter and the dancing and the music and the champagne and the feasting were over, and Clavering sat in his library alone under the brilliant chandelier, he grew positively cheerful. He was not really fond of public life, and although he would have liked to get out of it more gracefully, he was not really sorry to go. He had found himself bound in a thousand conventions since he had been in Washington. He had been hampered by his family: by his wife because she was old and stupid and ignorant, by Élise and Lydia because they were so bad, by Anne and Reginald because they were so honest. It would be rather good to be free once more—free in the great, wide, untamed West, free in the vast, populous, surging cities of Europe. Hewould have Elizabeth with him; he did not much care for any one else’s society. She had never heard him admit his guilt, and he could easily persuade her that he was the victim of untoward circumstances.While he was thinking these things, he heard a commotion overhead. Presently the whole house was roused, and servants were running back and forth. Elizabeth Darrell, still watching at her window, saw the sudden and alarming awakening of the silent house. Mrs. Clavering had been taken violently ill. Before sunrise the poor lady was no longer in any one’s way. A few hours of stupor, a little awakening at the last, a clinging to Anne and Reginald and telling them to be good, and Mrs. Clavering’s gentle spirit was free and in peace.When the undertaker was hanging the streamers of black upon the door-bell, the morning newspaper was laid on the steps. On the first page, with great head-lines, was the announcement that Senator Clavering had been found guilty of the charges against him and that expulsion from the Senate was certain to follow. The newspaper omitted to state how the information was obtained.Chapter SeventeenThe morning of Ash Wednesday dawned cold and damp and cheerless. Baskerville had heard a rumor at the club the night before that there had been a leak between the committee-room, the office of the secretary of the Senate, and the room of the investigating committee; that the big iron safe had been entered and a stolen copy of the report of the committee had been made and would be published in the morning. So he had the morning newspaper brought to him. On the first page, with a huge display head, together with the recommendation of expulsion against Senator Clavering, the report was printed in full.Baskerville immediately wrote a note to Anne Clavering, asking that their engagement might be announced and also suggesting an immediate marriage. Within an hour came back an answer from Anne. In a few agitated lines she told him of her mother’s death. She did not ask Baskerville to come to her; but he, seeing that it was no time for small conventions, replied at once,saying that he would be at her house at twelve o’clock, and begged that she would see him.Elizabeth Darrell was the first person outside of Clavering’s family who knew that he was a free man. There had been no time to get a doctor for Mrs. Clavering, although several had been called. When they arrived, all was over. Elizabeth had seen the sudden shutting of the windows; she knew, almost to a moment, when Mrs. Clavering died.At seven o’clock in the morning Serena, with the morbid anxiety to communicate tragic news which is the characteristic of the African, came up to Elizabeth’s room full of what she had gleaned from the neighboring servants. Elizabeth listened and felt a sense of guilt enveloping her. Then, when General Brandon was dressed, he came up to her door to discuss the startling news, and his was the first card left for the Clavering family. On it the good soul had written:—“With heartfelt sympathy in the overwhelming sorrow which has befallen Senator Clavering and his family.”Elizabeth remained indoors all that day. She drew her window curtains together, so that shecould not see the house which might have been hers, where had lived the dead woman of whom she had considered the spoliation.At twelve o’clock Baskerville came, and was promptly admitted into the Clavering house. There had been no time to remove the festal decorations. The Moorish hall was odorous with flowers; the mantels and even the hand-rail of the staircase were banked with them. Masses of tall palms made a mysterious green light through the whole of the great suite of rooms. The ceilings were draped with greenery, and orchids and roses hung from them. The huge ball-room was just as the dancers had left it, and everywhere were flowers, palms, and burnt-out candles on girandoles and candelabra. The servants, in gorgeous liveries, sat about, more asleep than awake; and over all was that solemn silence which accompanies the presence of that first and greatest of democrats, Death.Baskerville was shown into a little morning-room on the second floor, which had belonged to the poor dead woman. It was very simply furnished and in many ways suggested Mrs. Clavering. Baskerville, remembering her untoward fate in being thrust into a position for which she was unfitted, and her genuine goodness andgentleness, felt a real regret at her death. Being a generous man, he had taken pleasure in the intention of being kind to Mrs. Clavering; he knew that it would add extremely to Anne’s happiness. But, like much other designed good, it was too late. He remembered with satisfaction the little courtesies he had been able to show Mrs. Clavering and Anne’s gratitude for them; and then, before he knew it, Anne, in her black gown, pale and heavy-eyed, was sobbing in his arms.She soon became composed, and told him calmly of the last days. She dwelt with a kind of solemn joy upon her last conversation with her mother about Baskerville, and the message she had sent him. “My mother had not been any too well treated in this life,” added Anne, the smouldering resentment in her heart showing in her eyes, “and you are almost the only man of your class who ever seemed to recognize her beautiful qualities—for my mother had beautiful qualities.”“I know it,” replied Baskerville, with perfect sincerity, “and I tried to show my appreciation of them.”It was plain to Baskerville, after spending some time with Anne, that she knew nothing of the news concerning her father with which all Washingtonwas ringing. Baskerville felt that it would never do for her to hear it by idle gossip or by chance. So, after a while, he told her—told her with all the gentleness, all the tenderness, at his command, softening it so far as he could.Anne listened, tearless and dry-eyed. She followed him fairly well, and asked at last, “Do you mean that—that my father will be expelled from the Senate, and then—there will be no more trouble?”“Dearest, I wish I could say so. But there will be a great deal more of trouble, I am afraid—enough to make it necessary that you and I should be married as soon as possible.”“And you would marry the daughter of a man so disgraced, who may end his days in a prison?”“Yes—since it is you.”He then inquired her plans for the present. Mrs. Clavering’s body was to be taken for burial to her old home in Iowa. Baskerville asked, or rather demanded, that within a month Anne should be prepared to become his wife. “And haven’t you some relations out in Iowa from whose house we can be married?” he said.“Yes,” replied Anne, “I have aunts and cousins there. I warn you they are very plain people, but they are very respectable. I don’t thinkthere is a person in my mother’s family of whom I have any reason to be ashamed, although they are, as I tell you, plain people.”“That is of no consequence whatever. I shall wait until after your mother’s funeral before writing your father and having our engagement announced, and within a month I shall come to Iowa to marry you.”And Anne, seeing this sweet refuge open to her, took heart of grace and comfort.Clavering himself, sitting in his darkened library, was in no way awed by death having invaded his house. He had been brought face to face with it too often to be afraid of it; he was a genuine, throughgoing disbeliever in everything except money and power, and he regarded the end of life as being an interesting but unimportant event.His wife’s death was most opportune for him; it made it certain that Elizabeth Darrell would marry him. He had fully realized that stubborn prejudice on Elizabeth’s part against divorce, and although he had not seriously doubted his ability to overcome it, yet it had been stubborn. Now all was smoothed away. He would act with perfect propriety, under the circumstances; he surmised enough about the women of Elizabeth’s class tounderstand that a breach of decorum would shock her far more than a breach of morals. There would be no outward breach of decorum. He would wait until after the funeral before writing her; but it would be useless, hypocritical, and even dangerous to postpone writing longer.With these thoughts in his mind he sat through the day, receiving and answering telegrams, scanning the newspapers, and digesting his own disgrace as exposed in print. Even that had come at a fortunate time for him—if there is a fortunate time to be branded a thief, a liar, and a perjurer, a suborner of perjury, a corrupter of courts, a purchaser of legislatures. Elizabeth would feel sorry for him; she wouldn’t understand the thing at all. He would insist on being married in the autumn, and Elizabeth would no doubt be glad to be married as far away from Washington as possible. Perhaps she might agree to meet him in London and be married there. He would go over in the summer, take the finest house to be had for money, and transport all the superb equipment of his Washington establishment to London. He also remembered with satisfaction that he had now nothing to fear on the score of divorce from that soft-spoken, wooden-headed, fire-eating old impracticable, General Brandon,with his fatal tendency to settle with the pistol questions concerning “the ladies of his family.”In these reflections and considerations James Clavering passed the first day of his widowerhood. On the third day after Mrs. Clavering’s death the great house was shut up and silent. The Claverings left it, never to return to it. It stood vacant, a monument of man’s vicissitudes.The day after Mrs. Clavering’s burial took place, in the little Iowa town where her family lived, a line appeared in the society column of a leading Washington newspaper, announcing the engagement of Anne Clavering and Richard Baskerville. Coming as it did on the heels of the tragic events in the Clavering family and Baskerville’s share in a part of these events, the announcement was startling though far from unexpected. Mrs. Luttrell took upon herself the office of personally acquainting her friends with the engagement and declaring her entire satisfaction with it. Being by nature an offensive partisan, much given to pernicious activity in causes which engaged her heart, Mrs. Luttrell soon developed into a champion of the whole Clavering family. She discovered many admirable qualities in Clavering himself, and changed her tune completely concerning Élise and Lydia,whom she now spoke of as “a couple of giddy chits, quite harmless, and only a little wild.” These two young women had speedily made up their minds to fly to Europe, and arranged to do so as soon as Anne was married, which was to be within the month.The catastrophes of the Clavering family made a profound impression on Washington. Their meteoric career was a sort of epitome of all the possibilities of the sudden acquisition of wealth and power. Whatever might be said of them, they were at least not cowards—not even Reginald Clavering was a coward. They were boldly bad, or boldly good. Anne Clavering had won for herself a place in the esteem of society which was of great value. Not one disrespectful or unkind word was spoken of her when the day of reckoning for the Claverings came.The Senate allowed James Clavering two weeks to recover from his grief at his wife’s death before annihilating him as a senator. Clavering improved the time not only by arranging for his second marriage, but by forestalling, when he had no fighting ground, the criminal indictments which might be expected to be found against him. He paid out secretly in satisfaction money, and reconveyed in bonds, nearly three millions ofdollars. There were several millions more to be fought over, but that was a matter of time; and he would still have a great fortune remaining, if every suit went against him.It would very much have simplified his property arrangements had Elizabeth Darrell consented to marry him within a few weeks of his widowerhood. But this Clavering knew was not to be thought of. A week after his wife’s death he wrote to Elizabeth. He quietly assumed that all arrangements had been made for their marriage, as soon as he should have got his divorce. In his letter he reminded Elizabeth there could now be no question or scruple in regard to her marrying him. He told her he would be in Washington at the end of the week, when the proceedings in the Senate would take place, and that he should expect to see her. He asked her to write and let him know where they should meet.Elizabeth realized that she had gone too far to refuse Clavering a meeting, nor, in fact, did she desire to avoid him. Her feelings toward him had become more and more chaotic; they did not remain the same for an hour together. She felt that a powerful blow had been dealt her objection to marrying him in the removal of the divorcequestion; she doubted in her heart whether she ever could have been brought to the point of marrying him had his wife not died.And then there had been another interview with McBean. He had told Elizabeth he was about to leave Washington to be absent a month, as he was combining pleasure with business on his visit to America, but that on his return, if the necklace were not forthcoming, he should begin legal proceedings immediately. Mr. McBean was fully persuaded, while he was talking to Elizabeth, that the necklace was around her neck, under her high gown, or in her pocket, or in a secret drawer of her writing-desk—in any one of those strange places where women keep their valuables. Elizabeth, in truth, did not know whether the necklace was in America, Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia.Then Baskerville, in spite of the crisis in his own affairs, had not neglected Elizabeth. He had managed to see McBean, and had discovered that the solicitor was perfectly justified in all he had done, from the legal point of view. When Baskerville came to inquire how far Major Pelham was responsible for what was done, he was met by an icy reticence on the part of Mr. McBean, who replied that Baskerville was asking unprofessionalquestions, and in embarrassment Baskerville desisted. It became clear, however, and Baskerville so wrote to Elizabeth, that her concealment of the pawning of the necklace, and her inability to pay back the money she had raised on it, were very serious matters, and she should at once lay the matter before her father.Elizabeth, however, had not been able to bring herself to that. She thought of all sorts of wild alternatives, such as asking Clavering to lend her the money; but her soul recoiled from that. She even considered writing another letter to Hugh Pelham; but at that, too, her heart cried aloud in protest. She did not know where Pelham was, but surmised that he was still in West Africa. A letter addressed to the War Office would reach him—but when?The more she thought of this, the simplest of alternatives and the one urged by Baskerville, the more impossible it seemed. She had loved Pelham well—loved him with all her soul, her mind, her heart; and that, too, when she was a married woman, loving another than her husband, without the slightest stain of any sort upon her mind, her soul, her heart. She doubted if she would have been half so dutiful a wife, but for Pelham’s love for her and her love for him. It seemed to herthat his respect was as necessary to her as her self-respect. Their unfortunate attachment had been in the highest sense elevating. It had not required the soft consolation, the assurances, of weaker passions; but, lofty and austere, it was as strong and as silent as death, it seemed to be everlasting. And could a thing seem to be for ten years of storm and stress and not be?As Heinrich Heine says, it seemed to Elizabeth as if there were no longer a great God in heaven since he had made his creatures so deceitful. What agony was Elizabeth Darrell’s? To have failed in her duty as a wife would have been the surest way to lower herself in Pelham’s eyes.Clavering had reckoned upon Elizabeth’s neither knowing nor appreciating the effect of the revelations about him; in this, however, he was mistaken. She had read the newspapers diligently and understood his affairs far better than Clavering dreamed. The case had made a tremendous sensation. The tragic circumstances of the catastrophe, the probable action of the Senate which was known in advance, the far-reaching scandals which would result from the making public of the findings, all combined to give the country a profound shock—a shock so profoundthat it was known it would seriously jeopardize for the party in power the states in which Clavering and his gang had operated.Among public men in Washington the feeling was intense. The senators who from a combination of honesty and policy had advocated going to the bottom of the scandals and punishing everybody found guilty, were in the position of doctors who have successfully performed a hazardous operation, but are uncertain whether the patient will survive or not. There was no doubt that many criminal prosecutions would follow, but there was a general belief that Clavering was too able and resourceful a man, and had too much money, to be actually punished for the crimes he had undoubtedly committed. His real punishment was his expulsion from the Senate.Elizabeth Darrell knew all these things, and turned them over in her mind until she was half distracted. Another thing, small to a man but large to a woman, tormented her. She must meet Clavering—but where? Not in her father’s house; that could only be done secretly, and she could not stoop to deceive her father. The only way she could think of was in the little park, far at the other end of the town, where their first momentous meeting had taken place.So, feeling the humiliation of what she was doing, Elizabeth replied to Clavering’s letter, and named a day—the day before the one set for the final proceedings in the Senate—when she would see him; and she named six o’clock in the afternoon, in the little out-of-the-way park.It was March then of a forward spring. The day had been one of those sudden warm and balmy days which come upon Washington at the most unlikely seasons. Already the grass was green and the miles upon miles of shade trees were full of sap and the buds were near to bursting. Six o’clock was not quite dusk, but it was as late as Elizabeth dared to make her appointment. Her heart was heavy as she walked along the quiet, unfamiliar streets toward the park—as heavy as on that day, only a few months before, when she had returned to Washington after her widowhood. Then she had been oppressed with the thought that life was over for her, nothing interesting would ever again happen to her. And what had not happened to her!When Elizabeth reached the park she found Clavering awaiting her. He could not but note the grace of her walk and the beauty of her figure as she approached him. She was one of those women who become more interesting, if less handsome,under the stress of feeling. Her dark eyes were appealing, and she sank rather than sat upon the park bench to which Clavering escorted her.“You seem to have taken my troubles to heart,” he said with the air and manner of an accepted lover.Elizabeth made no reply. She had not been able to discover, in the chaos of her emotions, how far Clavering’s troubles really touched her.“However,” said Clavering, “the worst will be over to-morrow. I wish you could be in the Senate gallery, to see how I bear it. The vote on expulsion takes place to-morrow, directly after the morning hour, and I know precisely the majority against me—it will be quite enough to do the work.” Then he added with a cool smile: “I believe if you could be present, you would realize what a pack of rascals have sacrificed me to political expediency! Unluckily I can’t offer you a seat in the Senators’ Gallery, as I might have done a short while ago. The fools think I will stay away, but I shall be in my seat, and from it I shall make my defence and my promise to return to the Senate by the mandate of my state. It will sound well, but to tell you the truth I have no more wish to return than the legislaturehas the intention of returning me. I have something pleasanter in view—it is life with you.”Elizabeth, beguiled in spite of herself, as women are by courage, glanced at Clavering. Yes, he was not afraid of any man or of anything, while she was consumed with terror over a paltry five hundred pounds and the loss of a necklace worth only a trifle in Clavering’s eyes. She longed that he would break through her prohibition and speak about the necklace. But Clavering did not, and he never intended to do so. He knew very well that Elizabeth’s necessities were his best advocates, and he did not purpose silencing any of them.Elizabeth’s reply, after a pause, to Clavering’s remark was: “I shouldn’t like to see you to-morrow. It will be too tragic.”“It’s a pity that I’m not divorced instead of being so recent a widower,” Clavering replied. “Then you could marry me at the moment of misfortune, as Richard Baskerville proposes to marry my daughter Anne. It would be a great help to me now, if it were possible. As it is, we shall have to postpone our marriage until the autumn.”“No,” replied Elizabeth, decisively, “it cannot be until next year.”Clavering’s eyes flashed. It was the first time that she had ever fully admitted that she meant to marry him, although he had from the beginning assumed it. He had very little doubt that he could induce her to shorten the time of waiting.“We will talk about that later. Meanwhile I suppose you will stay here with your father. We can’t enjoy the London house this season, but I shall go abroad in June. I shall have straightened things out by that time, and I can select a house. It will be as fine a one as that which I have lived in here. I can ship all the furnishings, pictures, and plate, with the horses and carriages, to London in advance, and have your establishment ready for you when you arrive. Perhaps it would be better for us to be married in London.”Elizabeth Darrell was not what is called a mercenary woman. She had hesitated when offered vast wealth, and had even declined it on the terms first offered to her; nor did she believe that she would ever have agreed to marry Clavering, in the event of his divorce, but for the removal of her scruples of conscience on finding that his first marriage was illegal. But these words of Clavering’s about the London establishment brought to mind her former life there. She made a rapid mental comparison of Clavering withpoor, honest, brave, stupid dead Jack Darrell; with Pelham as he had been; with her father; and the comparison staggered and revolted her. If it were written, however, in the book of destiny that she should marry Clavering, it were better that they should be married in London, as he suggested. She would rather escape her father’s eye when that transaction took place, and nobody else in the world cared how or when she was married or what might become of her.Clavering spent the time of their interview in planning their future life together. He offered her luxury in every form, but he was too astute a man to make his purchase of her too obvious. He by no means left out his love for her, which was in truth the master passion of his life just then. But he did not force it upon Elizabeth, seeing that she was as yet restless and but half tamed to his hand. Elizabeth listened to him, with the conviction growing in her mind that she must marry this man.Their conversation lasted barely half an hour. Clavering urged Elizabeth to meet him again before he left Washington, which would be the next night, at midnight; but to this Elizabeth would not agree. Clavering saw that he must wait at least six months before she would tolerateany attentions from him, and he quickly made up his mind that it was best not to urge her too much now. He had practically received her promise to marry him at the end of a year, and considering the obstacles he had to contend with he felt pretty well satisfied. As on the former occasion when they had met in the little park, Clavering went after a cab for Elizabeth, put her in it, and they separated.Elizabeth spent a solitary evening. The calm which reigned in Clavering’s breast was by no means her portion. She felt that she had finally committed herself to marry him, and the prospect frightened her. She recalled Baskerville’s words—the “dreadful possibilities” which might await a woman married to Clavering. Their contemplation frightened her more than ever. She was so absorbed in her own troubles that she scarcely gave a thought to Clavering’s impending fate on the morrow. She remained up late, and the clock had struck midnight before her light was out.Once in bed, Elizabeth was seized with a maddening restlessness, against which she fought for four hours. When the sky of night was wan and pale with the coming dawn, she rose and, going to her writing-table, began to write steadily. Her letter was to Hugh Pelham. She told him everything,without concealment—the story of the need that made her pawn the necklace, the story of Clavering, the story of her life in Washington, of her grief and amazement at what seemed to be Pelham’s persecution of her, and it closed with a torrent of reproaches that came from the depths of her heart.She sealed the letter and addressed it to Pelham in the care of the War Office at London. She had no idea where Pelham was or when the letter would reach him; but some time or other he would get it, and then he would know how cruel his conduct was and how far-reaching was the effect of his ill-treatment of her. She had glossed over nothing about Clavering, she had painted him in his true colors; and she had told Pelham that but for him there would have been no temptation for her to have married such a man as Clavering.When she had finished and sealed and stamped her letter, Elizabeth went to the window and drew the curtain. The flush that precedes the dawn was over the opaline sky; it was the beginning of an exquisite spring day. The city lay still and quiet; only one footfall was heard, that of the postman collecting the letters from the mail-box at the corner. As he passed briskly along the street under Elizabeth’s window, a letter softlyfluttered down and fell at his feet. He glanced up and saw a window high above him being closed. The postman picked up the letter, put it in his bag, and went on, whistling.Elizabeth, up in her bedroom, threw herself upon her bed and sank into a heavy and dreamless sleep that lasted until Serena knocked at her door at nine o’clock. Elizabeth rose, dressed, and breakfasted like a person in a dream. She remembered her letter instantly, and the recollection of it made her uneasy. Gradually her uneasiness turned to an agony of regret. She would have made almost any sacrifice to recall the letter, but she supposed it was now impossible.Her great concern made her forget all about Clavering’s impending doom that day, until quite noon. As she began to consider it, the spirit of restlessness which seemed to possess her impelled her to wish that she could witness the scene in the Senate chamber. It might take her mind from her letter, which burned in her memory and was eating her heart out with shame and unavailing repentance. She knew there would be vast crowds at the Capitol, but she felt sure that not one of her few acquaintances in Washington would be there.About one o’clock she suddenly resolved to goto the Capitol. Covering her face, as well as her hat, with a thick black veil, she started for the white-domed building on the hill. When she reached the plaza, she found a great crowd surrounding the north wing. Not in the memory of man had such an event as the expulsion of a senator occurred, and it was the very thing to stimulate the unhealthy curiosity of thousands. A steady stream poured into the doorways and jammed the corridors. Elizabeth doubted whether she would ever get nearer than the Senate corridor, much less be able to get into the small public gallery. She noticed, however, that the multitude was pouring into the ground-floor entrance; so she determined to mount the long, wide flight of steps on the east front and enter the rotunda through the great bronze doors.It was a beautiful spring day, and the crowd was a well-dressed and cheerful one. Nobody would have dreamed that they were about to attend a great public tragedy. As Elizabeth reached the top of the flight, she turned involuntarily to look at the beautiful panorama outspread before her in the Southern sunshine. Fair and faintly green lay the park-like gardens around the Capitol, while the golden dome of the National Library flashed and gleamed in the noondayradiance. Never before had she thought Washington a joyous-looking city, but to-day, with sunshine and life and motion, with its animated throng of persons, this continual passing to and fro, it reminded her of Paris on a fête day.While Elizabeth was looking upon the charming scene outspread before her, she heard the sound of trampling hoofs and the roll of a carriage below. Clavering, in his handsomest brougham, with a superb pair of horses, had just driven up. The coachman and footman wore the newest, smartest, and blackest of mourning liveries for the mistress they had seen ignored, when not insulted, during the whole term of their service. Forth from the carriage, a cynosure for the staring, curious crowd, stepped Clavering. He, too, was dressed in new and immaculate mourning, with a crape-covered hat.Elizabeth shrank behind one of the huge pillars, but from it she saw Clavering’s dignified and ever graceful air as he braved the glances of the multitude. The lower entrance being jammed with people, he leisurely mounted the great flight of steps, a thing he had never before done in all his senatorial service. The crowd watched him with admiration and gratitude—it gave them the more time and the better opportunity of seeinghim. He passed close enough to Elizabeth to have touched her, as she stood quaking with shame and fear; but, looking neither to the right nor to the left, he walked on, calm, courageous, and apparently at ease with himself and all the world.Elizabeth, still moved by an impulse stronger than her will, pressed forward through the rotunda into the corridors. They were packed, and the doors to the public galleries had long been closed. Elizabeth found herself in the midst of a surging crowd, in the corridor leading to the reserved gallery, the place to which Clavering had told her he could no longer admit her. While she was standing there, crushed on either side, a pathway was opened, and a party of senators’ wives approached the door. At the same moment it was opened and some people came out. In the slight confusion several tried to get in; the doorkeepers, trying to separate the sheep from the goats, pushed the intruders back and pushed Elizabeth in with the senatorial party.“But I have no right in here,” she said hurriedly to the doorkeeper who shoved her into the gallery.“Just go in, madam, and let me shut these people out,” replied the doorkeeper, seeing thenecessity for closing the door at once. So Elizabeth found herself in the last place either she or Clavering expected her to be, the gallery set apart for the senatorial families.It was then almost two o’clock, when the morning hour expired, and the first business to be taken up was the resolution of expulsion against Senator Clavering. There was a subdued tremor over the whole scene; the senators who were to do a great act of public justice upon one of their own number were deeply moved over it. Not one of them had ever before taken part in such proceedings, and the species of civil death they were about to inflict on a man once counted worthy to sit among them was in some respects worse than the death of the body. The seriousness of the occasion affected every one present; a psychic wave of shame, regret, and solemnity swept over the whole assemblage, and a strange stillness reigned among the people who filled the galleries. Nearly every senator was in his seat, and the space back of them was crowded with members of the other house and persons who had the privileges of the floor.Clavering sat in his accustomed place, a cool and apparently disinterested observer of the proceedings. His presence was highly disconcertingto the committee which had prepared the report, and indeed to every senator present. It had been hoped that Clavering would absent himself; there were no precedents in the present generation for such proceedings, and it would have been altogether easier if Clavering had chosen to remain away. But as he was a senator up to the moment the vote was taken, no one could say him nay.Elizabeth found no trouble in concealing herself behind the large hats and feathers of the ladies in the reserved gallery, and she could observe Clavering closely. She thought she had never seen him look so handsome and even distinguished in appearance. Had he only been honest! Some thoughts like these raced through Clavering’s brain. He recalled Baskerville’s remark, “There is no real substitute for honesty,” and he remembered several occasions when he could have afforded to be honest and had not been, and he regretted it. Most of all he regretted not having taken greater precautions when he was dishonest.At last, the morning hour having expired, the next business on the calendar was the reading of the report of the committee of investigation on the affairs of the K. F. R. land grants and the corporations connected therewith. The Vice-President,looking pale and worried, recognized the chairman of the committee, who looked paler and more worried. The stillness resolved itself into a deathlike silence, broken only by the resonant tones of the reading clerk. It was not a long report—the reading of it lasted scarcely three-quarters of an hour; but it was a terrible one. As the charges were named, and declared proved, a kind of horror appeared to settle down upon the Senate chamber. The senators who had been lukewarm in the matter were shamed for themselves; those who had been charged with the execution of justice were shamed for the cause of popular government. If such things were possible in a government by the people and for the people and of the people, it was an indictment against the whole people.During it all Clavering sat with unshaken calmness. Not by a glance out of his handsome, stern eyes nor the least variation of color in his clear and ruddy complexion did he indicate the smallest agitation. Not even the last clause, which recommended his expulsion from the Senate of the United States, and which every member of the committee signed, without a dissenting voice, had the power to move him from his cool composure.When the reading was concluded, the chairman of the committee rose and made a few explanations of the report. He spoke in an agitated and broken voice. Before introducing the resolution of expulsion, he hesitated and looked toward Clavering. Clavering rose, and on being recognized by the chair, asked to be heard in a brief defence.Although he had always been a hard worker in his committee-room, Clavering had not often got upon his feet to speak in the Senate chamber. As he had told Elizabeth months before, he always knew his limitations as a debater. Having been used to lording over men for many years, the courteous assumption that every senator is a wise man had never sat well on him. When he spoke he had always been listened to, because he always had something to say; but he had shown his usual good sense and judgment by not measuring himself with the giants of debate. To-day, however, he had nothing more to hope or fear from those grave men, whose scorn of him was swallowed up in the execution of justice upon him.As he rose to speak, to many minds came back that old Homeric line, “As the passing leaves, so is the passing of men;” and this man was passing from life into civil death before theireyes. Clavering, in his beautifully clear and well-modulated voice, began his defence, if defence it could be called. He told briefly but impressively of his youthful struggles, of his lack of education, of the wild life of the West into which he was inducted early, of the disregard of written laws in the administration of the justice with which he was familiar, how the strong men ruled by virtue of their strength, how great enterprises were carried through by forces not understood or even known in old and settled communities. His story was like a book out of the “Odyssey.” He described the effect of his operations in large sections of country, which made him hosts of friends and hosts of enemies. He subtly called attention by indirection to that unwritten law, noted by a British general in India, that there were in all partly civilized countries certain necessary and salutary rascalities, to be carried through by the strong and wise against the weak and foolish. Coming down to his own case, he made no appeal for mercy, and offered no plea in abatement. On the contrary, he became distinctly aggressive, and heaped ridicule upon the committee of elderly gentlemen sitting in their luxurious committee-room, passing judgment on the storm and stress of men and things as unknown to them as theinhabitants of another planet. His conclusion was a ringing defiance of his enemies, a promise of vengeance upon them, and a solemn declaration that he would return, rehabilitated, to the Senate of the United States, and every man who believed him guilty might count himself the everlasting enemy of James Clavering from that day forth.When he sat down there was from the public galleries an involuntary burst of applause, which was instantly suppressed. Two or three women wept aloud; an aged senator attempted to rise from his seat, fell back, and was carried out half-fainting. There were a few minutes of nervous quiet and whispering, and then the final proceedings began. They were short and exquisitely painful. The resolution of expulsion was put, and received a three-fourths vote in its favor. Half a dozen senators in a group voted against the resolution, and a few others were absent or refrained from voting. Of the half-dozen senators who voted in Clavering’s favor, some voted in a spirit of sheer perversity, and the rest by absolute stupidity. When the result was declared amid a deathlike silence, Clavering rose and, making a low bow toward the senators who had voted for him, left his seat and went towardthe aisle. As he reached it he turned to the chair and made another bow, full of dignity and respect; and then, without the least flurry or discomposure, retired from the Senate chamber which it had been the summit of his lifelong ambition to enter and of which he was never again to cross the threshold. He was to see no more service of the great Demos. But not Alcibiades, when he called the Athenians a pack of dogs, looked more sincerely contemptuous than did James Clavering of the United States Senate when, a disgraced and branded man, he walked out of the Senate chamber.
Chapter SixteenIt was the gayest season Washington had ever known. There was a continuous round of entertaining at the White House, unofficial as well as official. The different embassies vied with one another in the number and splendor of their festivities; and the smart set entered into a merry war among themselves as to which should throw open their doors oftenest, collect the largest number of guests, and make the most lavish and overpowering display of luxury.The Claverings did their part, chiefly engineered by Clavering himself, and abetted by Élise and Lydia. Clavering had good reason to suspect that the report of the investigating committee would be ready within the month. It was now the middle of January. Shrove Tuesday came on the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine’s Day, and this was the evening selected for the grand ball and musical which were to complete the season. Other musicals had been given in Washington, but none like this; other balls, but this was meant to surpassthem all. It had heretofore been enough to get artists from the Metropolitan Opera in New York; it remained for Clavering to import a couple of singers from Paris for the one occasion. A Hungarian band, touring America, was held over a steamer in order to come to Washington and play at the ball. The shops of Vienna were ransacked for favors for the cotillon; and the champagne to be served came from a king’s cellars.All this Anne Clavering regarded with disgust and aversion. She felt sure that her father was soon to be hurled from public life, and deservedly so. Her mother’s health was giving her grave alarm. She was at all times opposed to the excess of luxury and fashion which delighted the pagan souls of Élise and Lydia, and now it was an additional mortification to her on Baskerville’s account. He, she felt convinced, was conscious of the brazen effrontery, the shocking bad taste, of it all, and considerate as he was in not speaking of it, her soul was filled with shame to suppose what he thought. She began to hate the lavish luxury in which she dwelt, and looked forward eagerly to the time when she could live modestly and quietly in a house not so grand as to excite the transports of all the society correspondents who got a sight of its stupendous splendors.Mrs. Clavering’s illness, though slight, continued, and gave Anne a very good excuse for withdrawing somewhat from general society. And it also gave her time for those charming meetings at Mrs. Luttrell’s house, where she and Richard Baskerville tasted the true joy of living. Mrs. Luttrell nobly redeemed her promise, and would have sent every day for Anne to come to tea. As Mrs. Luttrell did not often dine at home without guests, the best tête-à-tête she could offer the lovers was tea in the little morning-room by the firelight. But Anne, with natural modesty, did not always accept Mrs. Luttrell’s urgent invitations. When she did, however, she and Baskerville always had an enchanted hour to themselves in the dusk, while Mrs. Luttrell considerately disappeared, to take the half hour’s beauty sleep which she declared essential, during some part of every day, for the preservation of her charms.The lovers also met more than once at the Thorndykes’, at little dinnersà quatre. Mrs. Thorndyke would write a note to Anne, asking her on various pleas to come and dine with Thorndyke and herself; and as soon as Anne had accepted there would be a frantic call over the telephone for Thorndyke, in which Mrs. Thorndykewould direct him at the peril of his life to go immediately in search of Baskerville and to bring him home to dinner. And Thorndyke, like the obedient American husband, would do as he was bidden, and produce Baskerville with great punctuality. How far Constance Thorndyke’s own acute perceptions were accountable for this, and how far Mrs. Luttrell’s incurable propensity for taking the world into her confidence, nobody could tell. At all events, it made four people happy; and if anything could have made Baskerville and Anne more in love with the ideal of marriage it was to see the serene happiness, the charming home life, of Senator and Mrs. Thorndyke.Baskerville had not ceased to press for an early date for his marriage, but Mrs. Clavering’s indisposition and the position of Clavering’s affairs deferred the actual making of the arrangements. It was to be a very simple wedding, Anne stipulated; and Baskerville, with more than the average man’s dread of a ceremony full of display, agreed promptly. Some morning, when Mrs. Clavering was well, Anne and he would be quietly married, go from the church to the train, and after a few days return to Baskerville’s house. And Anne promised herself, and got Baskervilleto promise her, the indulgence of a quiet domestic life—a thing she had not known since the golden shower descended upon James Clavering.Clavering had said nothing to Anne in regard to Baskerville’s interview with him, nor had the father and daughter exchanged one word with each other, beyond the ordinary civilities of life, since that midnight conversation in which Mr. Clavering had announced his intention of getting a divorce. Neither had he said anything to Mrs. Clavering, and his plans were entirely unknown to his family. By extraordinary good fortune not the smallest suspicion fell on the pale, handsome, silent Mrs. Darrell across the way, with her widow’s veil thrown back from her graceful head.In those weeks, when Anne Clavering saw as little of the world as she could, she occasionally took quiet and solitary walks in which Baskerville would gladly have joined her. But Anne, with the over-delicacy of one who might be open to the suspicion of not being delicate enough, would not agree to see him except under the chaperonage of Mrs. Luttrell. And twice in those solitary walks she met Elizabeth Darrell, also alone. Both women regarded each other curiously, meanwhile averting their eyes.Anne knew quite well who Elizabeth was, andat their second meeting, which was quite close to Elizabeth’s door, Anne was moved by the true spirit of courtesy and neighborly kindness to speak to her. She said, with a pleasant bow and smile: “This, I believe, is Mrs. Darrell, our neighbor, and I am Miss Clavering. I have the pleasure of knowing your father, General Brandon.”Elizabeth received this advance with such apparent haughtiness that Anne, her face flushing, made some casual remark and went into her own house. In truth Elizabeth was frightened and surprised beyond measure, and felt herself so guilty that she knew not where to look or what to say, and literally fled from the sight of James Clavering’s innocent daughter as if she had been an accusing conscience.Meanwhile the preparations for the grand St. Valentine’s musical and ball went gayly on. Clavering himself showed unwonted interest in it. He was as insensible of public approval or disapproval as any man well could be; nevertheless, he hoped that the report of the investigating committee would not be made public until after the great function on Shrove Tuesday. It pleased his fancy for the spectacular to think that the last entertainment he gave in Washington—for he well knew it would be the last—should be fullof gorgeous splendor, so superbly unique that it would be remembered for a decade.He told this to Elizabeth Darrell, for although the investigation was closed Clavering trumped up some specious requests for more of General Brandon’s information and assistance on certain alleged general points, and by this means still contrived to see Elizabeth once or twice a week. He tried to persuade Elizabeth to come to the grand festivity, and was deeply in earnest in his effort. He counted on its effect upon her when he should tell her that she could have similar entertainments whenever she liked, in a much larger and more splendid city than Washington—London or Paris, for example.Elizabeth, however, recoiled with something like horror from the idea of going to Clavering’s house and being hospitably received by his wife and daughters; for she had reached the point when Clavering’s bribes—for so his love-making might be considered—were always in her mind. At one time she would feel so oppressed with her loneliness, her poverty, her disappointments, that she would be almost eager for the splendid destiny which Clavering offered her; at another time she would shrink from it with horror of it and horror of herself. All her social and religious prejudiceswere against divorce and were strong enough to have kept her from marrying Clavering if he had ever really been married to Mrs. Clavering, but as he had never been married to her no moral obligation existed. Elizabeth would also have been incapable of the meanness, the iniquity, of taking Clavering away from another woman who had a much better right to him than she; only she knew that Mrs. Clavering would suffer nothing in parting with Clavering. The feeling that his children might be wounded made no strong appeal to Elizabeth.However, Clavering’s best argument—his stupendous wealth—was always in some form before her eyes. Every time she went out of doors, or even looked out of her window, she saw the evidences of Clavering’s fortune—his magnificent house, his army of servants, his superb equipages, his automobiles of every description. She could not get away from it, and it made her own shabby home seem the shabbier and the narrower every day she lived in it. Moreover, she was at that dangerous age when a woman is brought face to face with her destiny; when she is forced to say good-by to her girlhood and to reckon upon life without first youth or first love.And after Hugh Pelham’s behavior, why shouldshe reckon on love at all? Was there such a thing as love? He had apparently loved her with the noblest love; it had lasted many years, and finally, in a day, in an hour, for the merest paltry consideration of money, he had not only forgotten her, he had persecuted her. If it were not her fate to know the very ultimate sweetness of love, at least she might have known its consolation. Now that Pelham was lost to her she began to think reproachfully, as women will, of what he might have done for her. If he had been true to her, or even decent to her, she would never have been in those desperate straits in London; she would never have been in her present cruel position, for the instant her father knew of her embarrassments she knew he would sell the roof over his head to pay back the debt; and she would never have dreamed of marrying Clavering. All these troubles came from her having believed in love—and perhaps there was no such thing, after all. But in thinking of marrying Clavering and exchanging her present miserable existence for that promised dazzling London life, a shadow would fall across it—Hugh Pelham’s shadow. How would she face him? How could she conceal from him that she had sold herself to this man? And how could she visit him with thescorn lie deserved if she had so easily bartered herself away?Clavering saw the conflict in Elizabeth’s mind, and it gave him a species of sardonic amusement at his own expense. Here he was, ready to sacrifice so much for this woman who had nothing, who could scarcely be brought to look upon what he offered her, and who had kept him at such a distance that he had but once touched her hand in private. He felt himself in many ways at a disadvantage with Elizabeth Darrell. He was, like all men, brought up in humble surroundings, unused to clever and highly organized women, and he did not exactly know how to appeal to such women or how to classify them. One moment Elizabeth would appear to him cleverer than the cleverest man, the next he saw in her some feminine foible that made her seem like a precocious child.Yet all the time Clavering maintained, in his quietly overbearing way, that the whole affair of the marriage was fixed; but he was not so certain as he professed. He would talk of their plans: they would be married and go to London, and Elizabeth might have any sort of an establishment she liked. She was already well known and well connected there, and he candidly admitted to himself that it would probably be a season or twobefore London society would find out exactly what sort of a person he was. He warned Elizabeth not to expect any attention from the American ambassador, and was, in short, perfectly frank with her.He saw that the idea of a life of splendor in London had its attraction for Elizabeth. If she should marry, she would not dare to remain in Washington, and she had no ties elsewhere in her own country. Clavering’s manners, in spite of his origin and career, were admirable, and she would have no occasion to blush for him in society—a point on which well-bred women are sensitive. She knew, in externals, he would compare favorably with any of the self-made Americans who buy their way into English society. For herself, her birth and breeding lifted her far above the average titled American woman, whose papa or mamma has bought her a title as they bought her a French doll in her childhood. And London was so large, and so little was really understood there of American life and manners, that Elizabeth felt they would be comparatively safe in London—if—if—She had taken to reading the newspapers attentively, and had followed the investigation closely. She made herself some sort of a vague promisethat should Clavering be exonerated she would marry him, but if he should be proved a scoundrel she would not. But she was already inwardly convinced that he was guilty. He told her, the first time he had a chance, of Baskerville’s interview with him—told it with such humor, such raciness, such enjoyment of Baskerville’s uncomfortable predicament, that Elizabeth, though little given to merriment, was obliged to laugh.“Of course,” he said, “they will be married shortly. Baskerville has a fine position here—not showy, you know, but the right sort. He has a comfortable fortune, too. Gad! at his age I would have thought myself as rich as Rockefeller if I had had as much. Now it wouldn’t keep me in automobiles. I shall provide for Anne handsomely, and besides she will get everything I give her mother, which will be in itself a handsome fortune. Oh, I’m not mean about giving money to my family. Just as soon as Élise and Lydia get the cash I intend to give them, when I get the divorce, they will both be sure to marry some foreign sprig. They have a whole forest of them here and at those foreign watering-places. I shall give Reginald quite as much as he will know how to use, and that will still leave me enough to make you one of the richest women in the world.”Then he redoubled his urging that Elizabeth should come to the grand musical; but she refused his proposition with such violence that he thought it prudent to say no more about it. General Brandon, however, had accepted with pleasure, and quite looked forward to the event. But the very day before, he came home from his office with a bad attack of rheumatism, and was forced to take to his bed.In the afternoon of the next day, while Elizabeth was sitting by her father’s bedside reading to him, and occasionally giving furtive glances at the great masses of palms and magnificent flowering plants being carried into Clavering’s house, a card was brought up to her. It was inscribed, “Mr. Angus McBean.” So the solicitor had carried out his threat at last. Elizabeth’s heart gave a great jump, and then seemed as if dead within her. But she maintained some outward composure, and said she would see the gentleman in a few moments; and telling General Brandon that it was an acquaintance of other days, she left the room. She went to her own room to recover herself a little before descending to meet the man through whom Hugh Pelham had persecuted her ever since her husband’s death.When she entered the drawing-room, theScotchman rose and greeted her politely. Elizabeth answered his greeting coldly, and McBean, who had seen several Scotch duchesses at a distance, thought he had never beheld anything quite so haughty as this American woman. She remained standing, and Mr. McBean, perceiving she was not likely to ask him to sit, coolly took a chair; and Elizabeth, perforce, sat too.“I have come in the interests of my client, Major Pelham, to endeavor to reach a basis of settlement with you, madam, concerning the matter we have been corresponding about,” blandly remarked Mr. McBean.“So I supposed,” said Elizabeth, icily.Mr. McBean continued, still blandly: “I may recall to you that you have persistently refused to answer my letters or to refer me to a lawyer, and as the affair involves jewels of considerable value, as well as large sums of money, I thought myself justified in coming to America to seek a settlement of the matter. May I inquire if you will now give me the name of your lawyer? For it would be far more to your interests—I may say it is necessary to your interests—that this matter be settled promptly.”These words were of vague but dreadful import to Elizabeth. She remained silent. She knewnothing of law or lawyers, and the mere thought of consulting a lawyer seemed to her to be giving away her case. There was one,—yes, Richard Baskerville,—the only lawyer she knew in Washington, if she might still be said to know him. She recalled the few times she had seen him since her return to Washington. But she had known him well in the old days. He seemed to have retained his former kindness to her; she might consult him. All this passed rapidly through her mind. What she said was in a calm voice: “I think I need not consult any lawyer on the point of retaining my husband’s gift. The pendant to the necklace was my husband’s wedding present to me.”Mr. McBean sighed patiently. He had had many dealings with lady clients, and all of them were like this, quite haughty and impossible, until they were frightened; then they would do anything that was asked of them. The only thing left, then, was to frighten Mrs. Darrell, and to give her to understand that the rights of property were the most sacred rights on earth—from the Scotch point of view.“I think, madam, if you will kindly consent to see your solicitor, or—I believe you use the generic term in the States—your lawyer, and will afterward,have him kindly accord me an interview, you will change your mind upon this matter. The necklace, without counting the additions made to it by your husband, or the pendant, which I understand is of no great value, all of which will be restored to you, is worth at least fifteen hundred pounds. Such a piece of property is not to be disposed of lightly.”So, then, being driven into a corner, helpless and alone, Elizabeth flatteringly consented to consult a lawyer. Mr. McBean left as his address a second-class hotel, and bowed himself out, promising to repeat his call as soon as he was permitted.Had the Scotch solicitor known it, he had done more toward driving Elizabeth into marrying Clavering than any of Clavering’s offers, vows, urgings, and inducements. As she stood, pale and frightened, with a wildly beating heart, her eyes fell involuntarily on the superb house opposite her.At that moment Clavering dashed up in a magnificent automobile, and got out. Elizabeth noticed that he did not walk with his usual graceful and springy step, and that he leaned against one of the stone pillars of the doorway, before the ever ready, gorgeously caparisoned flunky opened the entrance door. In truth, James Clavering had inhis breast pocket a type-written document, which acted like a drag upon his footsteps and a weight upon his shoulders. It was a stolen copy of the report of the committee of investigation, for he always had those in his pay who served him on like occasions.The next moment, Élise and Lydia drove up in a gem of a victoria. They were enveloped in the costliest furs, and so were the immaculate coachman and footman. The pair of perfectly matched bay cobs was worth a fortune. The harness was gold-mounted, with the Clavering initials upon it. As the two girls got out of the victoria Elizabeth caught the gleam of a long chain dotted with diamonds around Élise’s neck. Both of them seemed to radiate wealth; and there stood she, forlorn and despairing for the lack of a few hundred pounds!Nor was this all. Even if the value of the necklace could be raised by her father’s sacrificing everything he had,—his interest in his mortgaged house,—what might not be done to her because she could not produce the necklace itself? Clavering had told her that with money enough it could easily be traced and recovered; but that would mean more money still, and she might as well ask for a star as for any more than the smallsum her father could raise. And when she thought that by saying one word she could step from this unstable, bitter, and humiliating position into the very acme of luxury and all the ease of mind which money could give, it seemed to her almost a paradise. It was well for her that Clavering was not on the spot at that moment.She went back to her father’s bedside and to reading the book she had laid down. She uttered the words, but her mind was far off. As she dwelt upon Mr. McBean’s phrases and thinly disguised threats, she grew more and more panic-stricken. At last Serena brought up General Brandon’s dinner, and Elizabeth went down to her own solitary meal in the dingy dining room. Action was forced upon her; she must see a lawyer, and Richard Baskerville was her only choice. She must try to see him that very night. As she knew he would not be at the Claverings’, she thought her chance of finding him at home was excellent.When dinner was over Elizabeth gave Serena a note to take to Richard Baskerville, asking him to call that evening to see her upon a matter of pressing importance. She put her request upon the ground of old acquaintance, coupled with present necessity. Serena returned within ahalf-hour, with a note from Baskerville saying he would be pleased to call to see Mrs. Darrell that evening at half-past nine o’clock.General Brandon having been made comfortable for the night, Elizabeth descended to the drawing-room. The gas was lighted, but turned low. Elizabeth went to the window, whence she could see the Clavering house blazing with light and an army of liveried servants moving to and fro. A fraction of the cost of that one entertainment would have made her a free woman.Shortly after half-past nine o’clock Baskerville arrived. Like Elizabeth, he gazed with interest at the Clavering house. It was undoubtedly the last great entertainment there at which Anne would preside, and Baskerville had a conviction that it was the last entertainment the Claverings would ever give in Washington. He had private information that the committee of investigation had agreed upon its report, and he believed it would deal severely with Clavering.He had been surprised to receive Elizabeth’s note, but he recognized at once that she was in great trouble, and he had come willingly, as a gentleman should. When he saw Elizabeth, he realized how great was her trouble. Then, sitting in the dimly lighted drawing-room, Elizabeth,with many pauses and palpitations and hesitations, began her story. Baskerville gently assisted her, and the telling of the first part was not so hard. When it came to the further history of it Elizabeth faltered, and asked anxiously, “But wasn’t the necklace mine entirely, after my husband gave it to me?”Baskerville shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Darrell, and I am afraid that Major Darrell made a mistake—a perfectly natural and excusable mistake—in thinking it was his to give you in perpetuity. Of course I am not so well informed on these points as an English lawyer would be, but from what you tell me of the other jewels, and the course of the solicitor concerning them, I cannot but think that he knows what he is doing, and that you will have to give up the necklace, retaining of course your pendant, and perhaps the stones your husband bought.”Elizabeth looked at him with wild, scared eyes; and then, bursting into tears, told him the whole story of pawning the necklace, of finding it gone, and her unwillingness to own what she had done. Baskerville was startled, but allowed her to weep on, without trying to check her. He saw that she was in a state of trembling excitement, excessive even under the circumstances, and she must haveher tears out. She had, so far, avoided mentioning Pelham’s name.“But what of the heirs of Major Darrell? Surely, when they know how you were straitened in London after your husband’s death and the good faith in which you pledged the necklace, they would not wish to distress you unnecessarily about it.”Then Elizabeth was forced to speak of Pelham. “Major Darrell’s heir is his cousin, Major Pelham, the man—next my husband and my father—whom I thought my truest friend. He is in West Africa now, or was when my husband died, and I have not heard of his return to England since. But he has countenanced all this, and seems to delight in persecuting me through this man McBean. And it is quite useless, too, as I have no means of paying the money. I have only a small income, about a hundred pounds a year. But if my father learns of my trouble, as he eventually must if this persecution is kept up, he will certainly sell this house—his only piece of property, and mortgaged at that. Oh, I didn’t think a man could be so cruel as Hugh Pelham has been!”“Does McBean claim to be acting under Major Pelham’s instructions?”“Yes. In everything he writes me or says to me he uses Hugh Pelham’s name.”“There is hut one thing to do, Mrs. Darrell. I shall see McBean to-morrow and endeavor to see what I can do with him. If I fail with him, I shall appeal to Major Pelham.”“Oh, no, not that—not that!”She spoke with so much of feeling, of anger, of mortification in her voice, that Baskerville could not but suspect that there was something more concerning Pelham which Elizabeth had not chosen to tell him; but his duty to her as a friend and a lawyer remained the same. “Pardon me,” he said kindly, “but I think it almost necessary to inform Major Pelham of the state of the case. I shall not, however, do it unless you consent. But I think you will consent.”Elizabeth grew more composed, and they talked some time longer—talked until the rolling of carriages began under the porte-cochère of the Clavering house, and women wrapped in gorgeous ball cloaks and trailing behind them rich brocades and velvets and sparkling chiffons began to pour through the great entrance doors into the regions of light and splendor beyond. The rhythmic swell of music began to be heard; the great festivity had begun.Both Elizabeth and Baskerville, sitting in the quiet room only a stone’s throw away, were thinking about what was going on in the great mansion across the street. Elizabeth was asking herself if, after all, there were any alternative left her but to agree to marry Clavering. One word, and all her troubles and perplexities about money, which had spoiled her life from the time of her girlhood, would disappear. And if she did not marry Clavering—here her dread and apprehension became so strong that she was sickened at the contemplation.In spite of her preoccupation with her own troubles she could not but regard Baskerville with interest, knowing of his relations with Anne Clavering. Here was another man, like Pelham, who seemed the very mirror of manly love and courage; but perhaps he would be no better than Pelham in the long run. He might marry Anne under an impulse of generous feeling and live to repent it. Elizabeth was becoming a sceptic on the subject of man’s love.Baskerville had no suspicion that Elizabeth Darrell knew anything of his relations with Anne Clavering, nor did he connect Clavering in any way with Elizabeth. He was thinking of Anne while talking to Elizabeth, remembering how shehad disliked and dreaded this great function. She was to do the honors of the occasion, Mrs. Clavering being still ailing. The town had been ringing with the magnificence of the coming festivity, but Anne had been so averse to it that Baskerville had said little about it to her. It was out of the question that he should go, and so no card had been sent him; and he agreed fully with Anne that the affair was most unfortunately conspicuous at the present time.A silence had fallen between Baskerville and Elizabeth, while listening to the commotion outside. A sudden wild impulse came to Elizabeth to tell Baskerville, of all men, her struggles about consenting to marry Clavering, without mentioning any name. Baskerville had been kind and helpful to her; he had come to her immediately at her request; and before she knew it she was saying to him, in a nervous voice: “I could be free from all these anxieties about money, my father could end his days in ease—all, all if I would but marry a divorced man—a man to be divorced, that is. And after all, he never was actually married, it was a mistake.”Baskerville had been looking abstractedly out of the window at the carriages flashing past, but at this he turned quickly to Elizabeth. “Youmean Senator Clavering?” Baskerville was a remarkably self-contained man, but in his burst of surprise the name fell from his lips before he knew it.Elizabeth sat dumb. She had yielded to a mad impulse, and would have given a year of her life to have unsaid those words. Baskerville hesitated for a minute or two, and then rose. Elizabeth’s silence, the painful flushing of her face, her whole attitude of conscious guilt, proclaimed the truth of Baskerville’s surmise. He looked at her in pity and commiseration. She had just told him enough to make him understand how great the temptation was to her; and yet so far she had not yielded. But that she would yield he had not the least doubt. And what untold miseries would not she, or any woman like her, bring upon herself by marrying Clavering!It was a question which neither one of them could discuss, and Baskerville’s only words were: “I have no right to offer you my advice, except on the point upon which you have consulted me, but I beg of you to consider well what you are thinking of. You are hovering over dreadful possibilities for yourself. Good night.”He was going, but Elizabeth ran and grasped his arm. “You won’t speak of this to MissClavering! You must not do it! You have no right!”Baskerville smiled rather bitterly. Whether Elizabeth were afraid or ashamed he did not know—probably both.“Certainly I shall not,” he said, and to Elizabeth’s ears his tone expressed the most entire contempt.“And I haven’t promised him—I haven’t agreed yet,” she added, tears coming into her eyes; and then Baskerville was gone.Elizabeth sat, stunned by her own folly, and burning with shame at the scorn she fancied Baskerville had felt for her. He had been kind to her and had agreed to do all that was possible with McBean, but by her own act she had lost his good will and respect. Well, it was part of the web of destiny. She was being driven to marry Clavering by every circumstance of her life—even this last. Pelham’s unkindness was the beginning of it; McBean’s persecution helped it on; General Brandon’s goodness and generosity, Baskerville’s contempt for her—all urged her on; she supposed Baskerville would probably have nothing more to do with her affairs and would leave her to face McBean alone, and that would be the end of her resistance to Clavering.She went up to her own room and, with a cloak huddled about her, sat by the window in the dark, looking out upon the splendid scene of a great ball in a capital city. Elizabeth in the cold and darkness watched it all—watched until the ambassadors’ carriages were called, followed rapidly by the other equipages which were parked in the surrounding streets for blocks. At last, after three o’clock in the morning, the trampling of horses’ hoofs, the closing of carriage doors, and the commotion of footmen and coachmen ceased—the great affair was over. Quickly as in the transformation scene at a theatre, the splendid house grew dark—all except the windows of Clavering’s library. They remained brilliantly lighted long after all else in the street was dark and quiet.Elizabeth, for some reason inexplicable to herself, remained still at her window, looking at the blaze of light from Clavering’s library windows. What was keeping him up so late? Was it good news or bad? Had the report of the committee been made?Within the library sat Clavering in his accustomed chair. In his hand he held a type-written document of many pages, which had cost him many thousands of dollars to have purloined and copied from another one which was locked up in the safe of the secretary of the Senate. Everypage of this document proclaimed in some form or other his guilt, and at the bottom was written in the handwriting of a man he knew well, and who had stolen and copied the report for him:—“Resolution of expulsion will be introduced immediately after reading of report, and will pass by three-fourths majority.”And the hired thief had not played fair with him. He had discovered that at least three newspapers had bought the stolen report, and at that very moment he knew the great presses in the newspaper offices were clanging with the story of his disgrace to be printed on the morrow.Then there was a bunch of telegrams from his state capital. If the Senate did not vote to expel, the legislature would request him to resign; so there was no vindication there. To this, then, had his public career come! Clavering was not honest himself, nor did he believe in honesty in others; but he believed it possible that he might have been more secret in his evil-doing. He had thought that with money, brains, and courage he could brazen anything out. But behold! he could not. He was fairly caught and exposed. Those stray words of Baskerville’s, uttered somemonths before, recurred to him, “There is no real substitute for honesty.”He had heard the news on his way home that afternoon, from an out-of-town expedition. It had unnerved him for a little while; it was that which made him get out of the automobile so heavily when Elizabeth, unseen, was watching him. He had gone through the evening, however, bravely and even cynically. Many senators had been asked to the great function, but scarcely half a dozen had appeared; and all of them were inconsiderable men, dragged there by their womenkind. In the course of some hours of reflection—for Clavering could think in a crowd—a part of his indomitable courage and resource had returned. He had no fear of the criminal prosecution which would certainly follow. William M. Tweed had been caught, but Tweed was a mere vulgar villain and did not know when he was beaten. Clavering rapidly made up his mind that he could afford to restore eight or even ten millions of dollars to the rightful owners, and that would satisfy them; they wouldn’t be likely to spend any part of it in trying to punish him.As for any part the state and federal government might take he was not particularly concerned. The party had done enough to clear itsskirts by expelling him from the Senate, and if he satisfied all the claims against him, nobody would have any object in entering upon a long, expensive, and doubtful trial. But after paying out even ten millions of dollars he would have twice as much left, which nobody and no government could get, though it was as dishonestly made as the rest. With that much money and Elizabeth Darrell—for Elizabeth entered into all his calculations—life would still be worth living.When the mob of gayly dressed people were gone, when the laughter and the dancing and the music and the champagne and the feasting were over, and Clavering sat in his library alone under the brilliant chandelier, he grew positively cheerful. He was not really fond of public life, and although he would have liked to get out of it more gracefully, he was not really sorry to go. He had found himself bound in a thousand conventions since he had been in Washington. He had been hampered by his family: by his wife because she was old and stupid and ignorant, by Élise and Lydia because they were so bad, by Anne and Reginald because they were so honest. It would be rather good to be free once more—free in the great, wide, untamed West, free in the vast, populous, surging cities of Europe. Hewould have Elizabeth with him; he did not much care for any one else’s society. She had never heard him admit his guilt, and he could easily persuade her that he was the victim of untoward circumstances.While he was thinking these things, he heard a commotion overhead. Presently the whole house was roused, and servants were running back and forth. Elizabeth Darrell, still watching at her window, saw the sudden and alarming awakening of the silent house. Mrs. Clavering had been taken violently ill. Before sunrise the poor lady was no longer in any one’s way. A few hours of stupor, a little awakening at the last, a clinging to Anne and Reginald and telling them to be good, and Mrs. Clavering’s gentle spirit was free and in peace.When the undertaker was hanging the streamers of black upon the door-bell, the morning newspaper was laid on the steps. On the first page, with great head-lines, was the announcement that Senator Clavering had been found guilty of the charges against him and that expulsion from the Senate was certain to follow. The newspaper omitted to state how the information was obtained.
It was the gayest season Washington had ever known. There was a continuous round of entertaining at the White House, unofficial as well as official. The different embassies vied with one another in the number and splendor of their festivities; and the smart set entered into a merry war among themselves as to which should throw open their doors oftenest, collect the largest number of guests, and make the most lavish and overpowering display of luxury.
The Claverings did their part, chiefly engineered by Clavering himself, and abetted by Élise and Lydia. Clavering had good reason to suspect that the report of the investigating committee would be ready within the month. It was now the middle of January. Shrove Tuesday came on the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine’s Day, and this was the evening selected for the grand ball and musical which were to complete the season. Other musicals had been given in Washington, but none like this; other balls, but this was meant to surpassthem all. It had heretofore been enough to get artists from the Metropolitan Opera in New York; it remained for Clavering to import a couple of singers from Paris for the one occasion. A Hungarian band, touring America, was held over a steamer in order to come to Washington and play at the ball. The shops of Vienna were ransacked for favors for the cotillon; and the champagne to be served came from a king’s cellars.
All this Anne Clavering regarded with disgust and aversion. She felt sure that her father was soon to be hurled from public life, and deservedly so. Her mother’s health was giving her grave alarm. She was at all times opposed to the excess of luxury and fashion which delighted the pagan souls of Élise and Lydia, and now it was an additional mortification to her on Baskerville’s account. He, she felt convinced, was conscious of the brazen effrontery, the shocking bad taste, of it all, and considerate as he was in not speaking of it, her soul was filled with shame to suppose what he thought. She began to hate the lavish luxury in which she dwelt, and looked forward eagerly to the time when she could live modestly and quietly in a house not so grand as to excite the transports of all the society correspondents who got a sight of its stupendous splendors.
Mrs. Clavering’s illness, though slight, continued, and gave Anne a very good excuse for withdrawing somewhat from general society. And it also gave her time for those charming meetings at Mrs. Luttrell’s house, where she and Richard Baskerville tasted the true joy of living. Mrs. Luttrell nobly redeemed her promise, and would have sent every day for Anne to come to tea. As Mrs. Luttrell did not often dine at home without guests, the best tête-à-tête she could offer the lovers was tea in the little morning-room by the firelight. But Anne, with natural modesty, did not always accept Mrs. Luttrell’s urgent invitations. When she did, however, she and Baskerville always had an enchanted hour to themselves in the dusk, while Mrs. Luttrell considerately disappeared, to take the half hour’s beauty sleep which she declared essential, during some part of every day, for the preservation of her charms.
The lovers also met more than once at the Thorndykes’, at little dinnersà quatre. Mrs. Thorndyke would write a note to Anne, asking her on various pleas to come and dine with Thorndyke and herself; and as soon as Anne had accepted there would be a frantic call over the telephone for Thorndyke, in which Mrs. Thorndykewould direct him at the peril of his life to go immediately in search of Baskerville and to bring him home to dinner. And Thorndyke, like the obedient American husband, would do as he was bidden, and produce Baskerville with great punctuality. How far Constance Thorndyke’s own acute perceptions were accountable for this, and how far Mrs. Luttrell’s incurable propensity for taking the world into her confidence, nobody could tell. At all events, it made four people happy; and if anything could have made Baskerville and Anne more in love with the ideal of marriage it was to see the serene happiness, the charming home life, of Senator and Mrs. Thorndyke.
Baskerville had not ceased to press for an early date for his marriage, but Mrs. Clavering’s indisposition and the position of Clavering’s affairs deferred the actual making of the arrangements. It was to be a very simple wedding, Anne stipulated; and Baskerville, with more than the average man’s dread of a ceremony full of display, agreed promptly. Some morning, when Mrs. Clavering was well, Anne and he would be quietly married, go from the church to the train, and after a few days return to Baskerville’s house. And Anne promised herself, and got Baskervilleto promise her, the indulgence of a quiet domestic life—a thing she had not known since the golden shower descended upon James Clavering.
Clavering had said nothing to Anne in regard to Baskerville’s interview with him, nor had the father and daughter exchanged one word with each other, beyond the ordinary civilities of life, since that midnight conversation in which Mr. Clavering had announced his intention of getting a divorce. Neither had he said anything to Mrs. Clavering, and his plans were entirely unknown to his family. By extraordinary good fortune not the smallest suspicion fell on the pale, handsome, silent Mrs. Darrell across the way, with her widow’s veil thrown back from her graceful head.
In those weeks, when Anne Clavering saw as little of the world as she could, she occasionally took quiet and solitary walks in which Baskerville would gladly have joined her. But Anne, with the over-delicacy of one who might be open to the suspicion of not being delicate enough, would not agree to see him except under the chaperonage of Mrs. Luttrell. And twice in those solitary walks she met Elizabeth Darrell, also alone. Both women regarded each other curiously, meanwhile averting their eyes.
Anne knew quite well who Elizabeth was, andat their second meeting, which was quite close to Elizabeth’s door, Anne was moved by the true spirit of courtesy and neighborly kindness to speak to her. She said, with a pleasant bow and smile: “This, I believe, is Mrs. Darrell, our neighbor, and I am Miss Clavering. I have the pleasure of knowing your father, General Brandon.”
Elizabeth received this advance with such apparent haughtiness that Anne, her face flushing, made some casual remark and went into her own house. In truth Elizabeth was frightened and surprised beyond measure, and felt herself so guilty that she knew not where to look or what to say, and literally fled from the sight of James Clavering’s innocent daughter as if she had been an accusing conscience.
Meanwhile the preparations for the grand St. Valentine’s musical and ball went gayly on. Clavering himself showed unwonted interest in it. He was as insensible of public approval or disapproval as any man well could be; nevertheless, he hoped that the report of the investigating committee would not be made public until after the great function on Shrove Tuesday. It pleased his fancy for the spectacular to think that the last entertainment he gave in Washington—for he well knew it would be the last—should be fullof gorgeous splendor, so superbly unique that it would be remembered for a decade.
He told this to Elizabeth Darrell, for although the investigation was closed Clavering trumped up some specious requests for more of General Brandon’s information and assistance on certain alleged general points, and by this means still contrived to see Elizabeth once or twice a week. He tried to persuade Elizabeth to come to the grand festivity, and was deeply in earnest in his effort. He counted on its effect upon her when he should tell her that she could have similar entertainments whenever she liked, in a much larger and more splendid city than Washington—London or Paris, for example.
Elizabeth, however, recoiled with something like horror from the idea of going to Clavering’s house and being hospitably received by his wife and daughters; for she had reached the point when Clavering’s bribes—for so his love-making might be considered—were always in her mind. At one time she would feel so oppressed with her loneliness, her poverty, her disappointments, that she would be almost eager for the splendid destiny which Clavering offered her; at another time she would shrink from it with horror of it and horror of herself. All her social and religious prejudiceswere against divorce and were strong enough to have kept her from marrying Clavering if he had ever really been married to Mrs. Clavering, but as he had never been married to her no moral obligation existed. Elizabeth would also have been incapable of the meanness, the iniquity, of taking Clavering away from another woman who had a much better right to him than she; only she knew that Mrs. Clavering would suffer nothing in parting with Clavering. The feeling that his children might be wounded made no strong appeal to Elizabeth.
However, Clavering’s best argument—his stupendous wealth—was always in some form before her eyes. Every time she went out of doors, or even looked out of her window, she saw the evidences of Clavering’s fortune—his magnificent house, his army of servants, his superb equipages, his automobiles of every description. She could not get away from it, and it made her own shabby home seem the shabbier and the narrower every day she lived in it. Moreover, she was at that dangerous age when a woman is brought face to face with her destiny; when she is forced to say good-by to her girlhood and to reckon upon life without first youth or first love.
And after Hugh Pelham’s behavior, why shouldshe reckon on love at all? Was there such a thing as love? He had apparently loved her with the noblest love; it had lasted many years, and finally, in a day, in an hour, for the merest paltry consideration of money, he had not only forgotten her, he had persecuted her. If it were not her fate to know the very ultimate sweetness of love, at least she might have known its consolation. Now that Pelham was lost to her she began to think reproachfully, as women will, of what he might have done for her. If he had been true to her, or even decent to her, she would never have been in those desperate straits in London; she would never have been in her present cruel position, for the instant her father knew of her embarrassments she knew he would sell the roof over his head to pay back the debt; and she would never have dreamed of marrying Clavering. All these troubles came from her having believed in love—and perhaps there was no such thing, after all. But in thinking of marrying Clavering and exchanging her present miserable existence for that promised dazzling London life, a shadow would fall across it—Hugh Pelham’s shadow. How would she face him? How could she conceal from him that she had sold herself to this man? And how could she visit him with thescorn lie deserved if she had so easily bartered herself away?
Clavering saw the conflict in Elizabeth’s mind, and it gave him a species of sardonic amusement at his own expense. Here he was, ready to sacrifice so much for this woman who had nothing, who could scarcely be brought to look upon what he offered her, and who had kept him at such a distance that he had but once touched her hand in private. He felt himself in many ways at a disadvantage with Elizabeth Darrell. He was, like all men, brought up in humble surroundings, unused to clever and highly organized women, and he did not exactly know how to appeal to such women or how to classify them. One moment Elizabeth would appear to him cleverer than the cleverest man, the next he saw in her some feminine foible that made her seem like a precocious child.
Yet all the time Clavering maintained, in his quietly overbearing way, that the whole affair of the marriage was fixed; but he was not so certain as he professed. He would talk of their plans: they would be married and go to London, and Elizabeth might have any sort of an establishment she liked. She was already well known and well connected there, and he candidly admitted to himself that it would probably be a season or twobefore London society would find out exactly what sort of a person he was. He warned Elizabeth not to expect any attention from the American ambassador, and was, in short, perfectly frank with her.
He saw that the idea of a life of splendor in London had its attraction for Elizabeth. If she should marry, she would not dare to remain in Washington, and she had no ties elsewhere in her own country. Clavering’s manners, in spite of his origin and career, were admirable, and she would have no occasion to blush for him in society—a point on which well-bred women are sensitive. She knew, in externals, he would compare favorably with any of the self-made Americans who buy their way into English society. For herself, her birth and breeding lifted her far above the average titled American woman, whose papa or mamma has bought her a title as they bought her a French doll in her childhood. And London was so large, and so little was really understood there of American life and manners, that Elizabeth felt they would be comparatively safe in London—if—if—
She had taken to reading the newspapers attentively, and had followed the investigation closely. She made herself some sort of a vague promisethat should Clavering be exonerated she would marry him, but if he should be proved a scoundrel she would not. But she was already inwardly convinced that he was guilty. He told her, the first time he had a chance, of Baskerville’s interview with him—told it with such humor, such raciness, such enjoyment of Baskerville’s uncomfortable predicament, that Elizabeth, though little given to merriment, was obliged to laugh.
“Of course,” he said, “they will be married shortly. Baskerville has a fine position here—not showy, you know, but the right sort. He has a comfortable fortune, too. Gad! at his age I would have thought myself as rich as Rockefeller if I had had as much. Now it wouldn’t keep me in automobiles. I shall provide for Anne handsomely, and besides she will get everything I give her mother, which will be in itself a handsome fortune. Oh, I’m not mean about giving money to my family. Just as soon as Élise and Lydia get the cash I intend to give them, when I get the divorce, they will both be sure to marry some foreign sprig. They have a whole forest of them here and at those foreign watering-places. I shall give Reginald quite as much as he will know how to use, and that will still leave me enough to make you one of the richest women in the world.”
Then he redoubled his urging that Elizabeth should come to the grand musical; but she refused his proposition with such violence that he thought it prudent to say no more about it. General Brandon, however, had accepted with pleasure, and quite looked forward to the event. But the very day before, he came home from his office with a bad attack of rheumatism, and was forced to take to his bed.
In the afternoon of the next day, while Elizabeth was sitting by her father’s bedside reading to him, and occasionally giving furtive glances at the great masses of palms and magnificent flowering plants being carried into Clavering’s house, a card was brought up to her. It was inscribed, “Mr. Angus McBean.” So the solicitor had carried out his threat at last. Elizabeth’s heart gave a great jump, and then seemed as if dead within her. But she maintained some outward composure, and said she would see the gentleman in a few moments; and telling General Brandon that it was an acquaintance of other days, she left the room. She went to her own room to recover herself a little before descending to meet the man through whom Hugh Pelham had persecuted her ever since her husband’s death.
When she entered the drawing-room, theScotchman rose and greeted her politely. Elizabeth answered his greeting coldly, and McBean, who had seen several Scotch duchesses at a distance, thought he had never beheld anything quite so haughty as this American woman. She remained standing, and Mr. McBean, perceiving she was not likely to ask him to sit, coolly took a chair; and Elizabeth, perforce, sat too.
“I have come in the interests of my client, Major Pelham, to endeavor to reach a basis of settlement with you, madam, concerning the matter we have been corresponding about,” blandly remarked Mr. McBean.
“So I supposed,” said Elizabeth, icily.
Mr. McBean continued, still blandly: “I may recall to you that you have persistently refused to answer my letters or to refer me to a lawyer, and as the affair involves jewels of considerable value, as well as large sums of money, I thought myself justified in coming to America to seek a settlement of the matter. May I inquire if you will now give me the name of your lawyer? For it would be far more to your interests—I may say it is necessary to your interests—that this matter be settled promptly.”
These words were of vague but dreadful import to Elizabeth. She remained silent. She knewnothing of law or lawyers, and the mere thought of consulting a lawyer seemed to her to be giving away her case. There was one,—yes, Richard Baskerville,—the only lawyer she knew in Washington, if she might still be said to know him. She recalled the few times she had seen him since her return to Washington. But she had known him well in the old days. He seemed to have retained his former kindness to her; she might consult him. All this passed rapidly through her mind. What she said was in a calm voice: “I think I need not consult any lawyer on the point of retaining my husband’s gift. The pendant to the necklace was my husband’s wedding present to me.”
Mr. McBean sighed patiently. He had had many dealings with lady clients, and all of them were like this, quite haughty and impossible, until they were frightened; then they would do anything that was asked of them. The only thing left, then, was to frighten Mrs. Darrell, and to give her to understand that the rights of property were the most sacred rights on earth—from the Scotch point of view.
“I think, madam, if you will kindly consent to see your solicitor, or—I believe you use the generic term in the States—your lawyer, and will afterward,have him kindly accord me an interview, you will change your mind upon this matter. The necklace, without counting the additions made to it by your husband, or the pendant, which I understand is of no great value, all of which will be restored to you, is worth at least fifteen hundred pounds. Such a piece of property is not to be disposed of lightly.”
So, then, being driven into a corner, helpless and alone, Elizabeth flatteringly consented to consult a lawyer. Mr. McBean left as his address a second-class hotel, and bowed himself out, promising to repeat his call as soon as he was permitted.
Had the Scotch solicitor known it, he had done more toward driving Elizabeth into marrying Clavering than any of Clavering’s offers, vows, urgings, and inducements. As she stood, pale and frightened, with a wildly beating heart, her eyes fell involuntarily on the superb house opposite her.
At that moment Clavering dashed up in a magnificent automobile, and got out. Elizabeth noticed that he did not walk with his usual graceful and springy step, and that he leaned against one of the stone pillars of the doorway, before the ever ready, gorgeously caparisoned flunky opened the entrance door. In truth, James Clavering had inhis breast pocket a type-written document, which acted like a drag upon his footsteps and a weight upon his shoulders. It was a stolen copy of the report of the committee of investigation, for he always had those in his pay who served him on like occasions.
The next moment, Élise and Lydia drove up in a gem of a victoria. They were enveloped in the costliest furs, and so were the immaculate coachman and footman. The pair of perfectly matched bay cobs was worth a fortune. The harness was gold-mounted, with the Clavering initials upon it. As the two girls got out of the victoria Elizabeth caught the gleam of a long chain dotted with diamonds around Élise’s neck. Both of them seemed to radiate wealth; and there stood she, forlorn and despairing for the lack of a few hundred pounds!
Nor was this all. Even if the value of the necklace could be raised by her father’s sacrificing everything he had,—his interest in his mortgaged house,—what might not be done to her because she could not produce the necklace itself? Clavering had told her that with money enough it could easily be traced and recovered; but that would mean more money still, and she might as well ask for a star as for any more than the smallsum her father could raise. And when she thought that by saying one word she could step from this unstable, bitter, and humiliating position into the very acme of luxury and all the ease of mind which money could give, it seemed to her almost a paradise. It was well for her that Clavering was not on the spot at that moment.
She went back to her father’s bedside and to reading the book she had laid down. She uttered the words, but her mind was far off. As she dwelt upon Mr. McBean’s phrases and thinly disguised threats, she grew more and more panic-stricken. At last Serena brought up General Brandon’s dinner, and Elizabeth went down to her own solitary meal in the dingy dining room. Action was forced upon her; she must see a lawyer, and Richard Baskerville was her only choice. She must try to see him that very night. As she knew he would not be at the Claverings’, she thought her chance of finding him at home was excellent.
When dinner was over Elizabeth gave Serena a note to take to Richard Baskerville, asking him to call that evening to see her upon a matter of pressing importance. She put her request upon the ground of old acquaintance, coupled with present necessity. Serena returned within ahalf-hour, with a note from Baskerville saying he would be pleased to call to see Mrs. Darrell that evening at half-past nine o’clock.
General Brandon having been made comfortable for the night, Elizabeth descended to the drawing-room. The gas was lighted, but turned low. Elizabeth went to the window, whence she could see the Clavering house blazing with light and an army of liveried servants moving to and fro. A fraction of the cost of that one entertainment would have made her a free woman.
Shortly after half-past nine o’clock Baskerville arrived. Like Elizabeth, he gazed with interest at the Clavering house. It was undoubtedly the last great entertainment there at which Anne would preside, and Baskerville had a conviction that it was the last entertainment the Claverings would ever give in Washington. He had private information that the committee of investigation had agreed upon its report, and he believed it would deal severely with Clavering.
He had been surprised to receive Elizabeth’s note, but he recognized at once that she was in great trouble, and he had come willingly, as a gentleman should. When he saw Elizabeth, he realized how great was her trouble. Then, sitting in the dimly lighted drawing-room, Elizabeth,with many pauses and palpitations and hesitations, began her story. Baskerville gently assisted her, and the telling of the first part was not so hard. When it came to the further history of it Elizabeth faltered, and asked anxiously, “But wasn’t the necklace mine entirely, after my husband gave it to me?”
Baskerville shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Darrell, and I am afraid that Major Darrell made a mistake—a perfectly natural and excusable mistake—in thinking it was his to give you in perpetuity. Of course I am not so well informed on these points as an English lawyer would be, but from what you tell me of the other jewels, and the course of the solicitor concerning them, I cannot but think that he knows what he is doing, and that you will have to give up the necklace, retaining of course your pendant, and perhaps the stones your husband bought.”
Elizabeth looked at him with wild, scared eyes; and then, bursting into tears, told him the whole story of pawning the necklace, of finding it gone, and her unwillingness to own what she had done. Baskerville was startled, but allowed her to weep on, without trying to check her. He saw that she was in a state of trembling excitement, excessive even under the circumstances, and she must haveher tears out. She had, so far, avoided mentioning Pelham’s name.
“But what of the heirs of Major Darrell? Surely, when they know how you were straitened in London after your husband’s death and the good faith in which you pledged the necklace, they would not wish to distress you unnecessarily about it.”
Then Elizabeth was forced to speak of Pelham. “Major Darrell’s heir is his cousin, Major Pelham, the man—next my husband and my father—whom I thought my truest friend. He is in West Africa now, or was when my husband died, and I have not heard of his return to England since. But he has countenanced all this, and seems to delight in persecuting me through this man McBean. And it is quite useless, too, as I have no means of paying the money. I have only a small income, about a hundred pounds a year. But if my father learns of my trouble, as he eventually must if this persecution is kept up, he will certainly sell this house—his only piece of property, and mortgaged at that. Oh, I didn’t think a man could be so cruel as Hugh Pelham has been!”
“Does McBean claim to be acting under Major Pelham’s instructions?”
“Yes. In everything he writes me or says to me he uses Hugh Pelham’s name.”
“There is hut one thing to do, Mrs. Darrell. I shall see McBean to-morrow and endeavor to see what I can do with him. If I fail with him, I shall appeal to Major Pelham.”
“Oh, no, not that—not that!”
She spoke with so much of feeling, of anger, of mortification in her voice, that Baskerville could not but suspect that there was something more concerning Pelham which Elizabeth had not chosen to tell him; but his duty to her as a friend and a lawyer remained the same. “Pardon me,” he said kindly, “but I think it almost necessary to inform Major Pelham of the state of the case. I shall not, however, do it unless you consent. But I think you will consent.”
Elizabeth grew more composed, and they talked some time longer—talked until the rolling of carriages began under the porte-cochère of the Clavering house, and women wrapped in gorgeous ball cloaks and trailing behind them rich brocades and velvets and sparkling chiffons began to pour through the great entrance doors into the regions of light and splendor beyond. The rhythmic swell of music began to be heard; the great festivity had begun.
Both Elizabeth and Baskerville, sitting in the quiet room only a stone’s throw away, were thinking about what was going on in the great mansion across the street. Elizabeth was asking herself if, after all, there were any alternative left her but to agree to marry Clavering. One word, and all her troubles and perplexities about money, which had spoiled her life from the time of her girlhood, would disappear. And if she did not marry Clavering—here her dread and apprehension became so strong that she was sickened at the contemplation.
In spite of her preoccupation with her own troubles she could not but regard Baskerville with interest, knowing of his relations with Anne Clavering. Here was another man, like Pelham, who seemed the very mirror of manly love and courage; but perhaps he would be no better than Pelham in the long run. He might marry Anne under an impulse of generous feeling and live to repent it. Elizabeth was becoming a sceptic on the subject of man’s love.
Baskerville had no suspicion that Elizabeth Darrell knew anything of his relations with Anne Clavering, nor did he connect Clavering in any way with Elizabeth. He was thinking of Anne while talking to Elizabeth, remembering how shehad disliked and dreaded this great function. She was to do the honors of the occasion, Mrs. Clavering being still ailing. The town had been ringing with the magnificence of the coming festivity, but Anne had been so averse to it that Baskerville had said little about it to her. It was out of the question that he should go, and so no card had been sent him; and he agreed fully with Anne that the affair was most unfortunately conspicuous at the present time.
A silence had fallen between Baskerville and Elizabeth, while listening to the commotion outside. A sudden wild impulse came to Elizabeth to tell Baskerville, of all men, her struggles about consenting to marry Clavering, without mentioning any name. Baskerville had been kind and helpful to her; he had come to her immediately at her request; and before she knew it she was saying to him, in a nervous voice: “I could be free from all these anxieties about money, my father could end his days in ease—all, all if I would but marry a divorced man—a man to be divorced, that is. And after all, he never was actually married, it was a mistake.”
Baskerville had been looking abstractedly out of the window at the carriages flashing past, but at this he turned quickly to Elizabeth. “Youmean Senator Clavering?” Baskerville was a remarkably self-contained man, but in his burst of surprise the name fell from his lips before he knew it.
Elizabeth sat dumb. She had yielded to a mad impulse, and would have given a year of her life to have unsaid those words. Baskerville hesitated for a minute or two, and then rose. Elizabeth’s silence, the painful flushing of her face, her whole attitude of conscious guilt, proclaimed the truth of Baskerville’s surmise. He looked at her in pity and commiseration. She had just told him enough to make him understand how great the temptation was to her; and yet so far she had not yielded. But that she would yield he had not the least doubt. And what untold miseries would not she, or any woman like her, bring upon herself by marrying Clavering!
It was a question which neither one of them could discuss, and Baskerville’s only words were: “I have no right to offer you my advice, except on the point upon which you have consulted me, but I beg of you to consider well what you are thinking of. You are hovering over dreadful possibilities for yourself. Good night.”
He was going, but Elizabeth ran and grasped his arm. “You won’t speak of this to MissClavering! You must not do it! You have no right!”
Baskerville smiled rather bitterly. Whether Elizabeth were afraid or ashamed he did not know—probably both.
“Certainly I shall not,” he said, and to Elizabeth’s ears his tone expressed the most entire contempt.
“And I haven’t promised him—I haven’t agreed yet,” she added, tears coming into her eyes; and then Baskerville was gone.
Elizabeth sat, stunned by her own folly, and burning with shame at the scorn she fancied Baskerville had felt for her. He had been kind to her and had agreed to do all that was possible with McBean, but by her own act she had lost his good will and respect. Well, it was part of the web of destiny. She was being driven to marry Clavering by every circumstance of her life—even this last. Pelham’s unkindness was the beginning of it; McBean’s persecution helped it on; General Brandon’s goodness and generosity, Baskerville’s contempt for her—all urged her on; she supposed Baskerville would probably have nothing more to do with her affairs and would leave her to face McBean alone, and that would be the end of her resistance to Clavering.
She went up to her own room and, with a cloak huddled about her, sat by the window in the dark, looking out upon the splendid scene of a great ball in a capital city. Elizabeth in the cold and darkness watched it all—watched until the ambassadors’ carriages were called, followed rapidly by the other equipages which were parked in the surrounding streets for blocks. At last, after three o’clock in the morning, the trampling of horses’ hoofs, the closing of carriage doors, and the commotion of footmen and coachmen ceased—the great affair was over. Quickly as in the transformation scene at a theatre, the splendid house grew dark—all except the windows of Clavering’s library. They remained brilliantly lighted long after all else in the street was dark and quiet.
Elizabeth, for some reason inexplicable to herself, remained still at her window, looking at the blaze of light from Clavering’s library windows. What was keeping him up so late? Was it good news or bad? Had the report of the committee been made?
Within the library sat Clavering in his accustomed chair. In his hand he held a type-written document of many pages, which had cost him many thousands of dollars to have purloined and copied from another one which was locked up in the safe of the secretary of the Senate. Everypage of this document proclaimed in some form or other his guilt, and at the bottom was written in the handwriting of a man he knew well, and who had stolen and copied the report for him:—
“Resolution of expulsion will be introduced immediately after reading of report, and will pass by three-fourths majority.”
And the hired thief had not played fair with him. He had discovered that at least three newspapers had bought the stolen report, and at that very moment he knew the great presses in the newspaper offices were clanging with the story of his disgrace to be printed on the morrow.
Then there was a bunch of telegrams from his state capital. If the Senate did not vote to expel, the legislature would request him to resign; so there was no vindication there. To this, then, had his public career come! Clavering was not honest himself, nor did he believe in honesty in others; but he believed it possible that he might have been more secret in his evil-doing. He had thought that with money, brains, and courage he could brazen anything out. But behold! he could not. He was fairly caught and exposed. Those stray words of Baskerville’s, uttered somemonths before, recurred to him, “There is no real substitute for honesty.”
He had heard the news on his way home that afternoon, from an out-of-town expedition. It had unnerved him for a little while; it was that which made him get out of the automobile so heavily when Elizabeth, unseen, was watching him. He had gone through the evening, however, bravely and even cynically. Many senators had been asked to the great function, but scarcely half a dozen had appeared; and all of them were inconsiderable men, dragged there by their womenkind. In the course of some hours of reflection—for Clavering could think in a crowd—a part of his indomitable courage and resource had returned. He had no fear of the criminal prosecution which would certainly follow. William M. Tweed had been caught, but Tweed was a mere vulgar villain and did not know when he was beaten. Clavering rapidly made up his mind that he could afford to restore eight or even ten millions of dollars to the rightful owners, and that would satisfy them; they wouldn’t be likely to spend any part of it in trying to punish him.
As for any part the state and federal government might take he was not particularly concerned. The party had done enough to clear itsskirts by expelling him from the Senate, and if he satisfied all the claims against him, nobody would have any object in entering upon a long, expensive, and doubtful trial. But after paying out even ten millions of dollars he would have twice as much left, which nobody and no government could get, though it was as dishonestly made as the rest. With that much money and Elizabeth Darrell—for Elizabeth entered into all his calculations—life would still be worth living.
When the mob of gayly dressed people were gone, when the laughter and the dancing and the music and the champagne and the feasting were over, and Clavering sat in his library alone under the brilliant chandelier, he grew positively cheerful. He was not really fond of public life, and although he would have liked to get out of it more gracefully, he was not really sorry to go. He had found himself bound in a thousand conventions since he had been in Washington. He had been hampered by his family: by his wife because she was old and stupid and ignorant, by Élise and Lydia because they were so bad, by Anne and Reginald because they were so honest. It would be rather good to be free once more—free in the great, wide, untamed West, free in the vast, populous, surging cities of Europe. Hewould have Elizabeth with him; he did not much care for any one else’s society. She had never heard him admit his guilt, and he could easily persuade her that he was the victim of untoward circumstances.
While he was thinking these things, he heard a commotion overhead. Presently the whole house was roused, and servants were running back and forth. Elizabeth Darrell, still watching at her window, saw the sudden and alarming awakening of the silent house. Mrs. Clavering had been taken violently ill. Before sunrise the poor lady was no longer in any one’s way. A few hours of stupor, a little awakening at the last, a clinging to Anne and Reginald and telling them to be good, and Mrs. Clavering’s gentle spirit was free and in peace.
When the undertaker was hanging the streamers of black upon the door-bell, the morning newspaper was laid on the steps. On the first page, with great head-lines, was the announcement that Senator Clavering had been found guilty of the charges against him and that expulsion from the Senate was certain to follow. The newspaper omitted to state how the information was obtained.
Chapter SeventeenThe morning of Ash Wednesday dawned cold and damp and cheerless. Baskerville had heard a rumor at the club the night before that there had been a leak between the committee-room, the office of the secretary of the Senate, and the room of the investigating committee; that the big iron safe had been entered and a stolen copy of the report of the committee had been made and would be published in the morning. So he had the morning newspaper brought to him. On the first page, with a huge display head, together with the recommendation of expulsion against Senator Clavering, the report was printed in full.Baskerville immediately wrote a note to Anne Clavering, asking that their engagement might be announced and also suggesting an immediate marriage. Within an hour came back an answer from Anne. In a few agitated lines she told him of her mother’s death. She did not ask Baskerville to come to her; but he, seeing that it was no time for small conventions, replied at once,saying that he would be at her house at twelve o’clock, and begged that she would see him.Elizabeth Darrell was the first person outside of Clavering’s family who knew that he was a free man. There had been no time to get a doctor for Mrs. Clavering, although several had been called. When they arrived, all was over. Elizabeth had seen the sudden shutting of the windows; she knew, almost to a moment, when Mrs. Clavering died.At seven o’clock in the morning Serena, with the morbid anxiety to communicate tragic news which is the characteristic of the African, came up to Elizabeth’s room full of what she had gleaned from the neighboring servants. Elizabeth listened and felt a sense of guilt enveloping her. Then, when General Brandon was dressed, he came up to her door to discuss the startling news, and his was the first card left for the Clavering family. On it the good soul had written:—“With heartfelt sympathy in the overwhelming sorrow which has befallen Senator Clavering and his family.”Elizabeth remained indoors all that day. She drew her window curtains together, so that shecould not see the house which might have been hers, where had lived the dead woman of whom she had considered the spoliation.At twelve o’clock Baskerville came, and was promptly admitted into the Clavering house. There had been no time to remove the festal decorations. The Moorish hall was odorous with flowers; the mantels and even the hand-rail of the staircase were banked with them. Masses of tall palms made a mysterious green light through the whole of the great suite of rooms. The ceilings were draped with greenery, and orchids and roses hung from them. The huge ball-room was just as the dancers had left it, and everywhere were flowers, palms, and burnt-out candles on girandoles and candelabra. The servants, in gorgeous liveries, sat about, more asleep than awake; and over all was that solemn silence which accompanies the presence of that first and greatest of democrats, Death.Baskerville was shown into a little morning-room on the second floor, which had belonged to the poor dead woman. It was very simply furnished and in many ways suggested Mrs. Clavering. Baskerville, remembering her untoward fate in being thrust into a position for which she was unfitted, and her genuine goodness andgentleness, felt a real regret at her death. Being a generous man, he had taken pleasure in the intention of being kind to Mrs. Clavering; he knew that it would add extremely to Anne’s happiness. But, like much other designed good, it was too late. He remembered with satisfaction the little courtesies he had been able to show Mrs. Clavering and Anne’s gratitude for them; and then, before he knew it, Anne, in her black gown, pale and heavy-eyed, was sobbing in his arms.She soon became composed, and told him calmly of the last days. She dwelt with a kind of solemn joy upon her last conversation with her mother about Baskerville, and the message she had sent him. “My mother had not been any too well treated in this life,” added Anne, the smouldering resentment in her heart showing in her eyes, “and you are almost the only man of your class who ever seemed to recognize her beautiful qualities—for my mother had beautiful qualities.”“I know it,” replied Baskerville, with perfect sincerity, “and I tried to show my appreciation of them.”It was plain to Baskerville, after spending some time with Anne, that she knew nothing of the news concerning her father with which all Washingtonwas ringing. Baskerville felt that it would never do for her to hear it by idle gossip or by chance. So, after a while, he told her—told her with all the gentleness, all the tenderness, at his command, softening it so far as he could.Anne listened, tearless and dry-eyed. She followed him fairly well, and asked at last, “Do you mean that—that my father will be expelled from the Senate, and then—there will be no more trouble?”“Dearest, I wish I could say so. But there will be a great deal more of trouble, I am afraid—enough to make it necessary that you and I should be married as soon as possible.”“And you would marry the daughter of a man so disgraced, who may end his days in a prison?”“Yes—since it is you.”He then inquired her plans for the present. Mrs. Clavering’s body was to be taken for burial to her old home in Iowa. Baskerville asked, or rather demanded, that within a month Anne should be prepared to become his wife. “And haven’t you some relations out in Iowa from whose house we can be married?” he said.“Yes,” replied Anne, “I have aunts and cousins there. I warn you they are very plain people, but they are very respectable. I don’t thinkthere is a person in my mother’s family of whom I have any reason to be ashamed, although they are, as I tell you, plain people.”“That is of no consequence whatever. I shall wait until after your mother’s funeral before writing your father and having our engagement announced, and within a month I shall come to Iowa to marry you.”And Anne, seeing this sweet refuge open to her, took heart of grace and comfort.Clavering himself, sitting in his darkened library, was in no way awed by death having invaded his house. He had been brought face to face with it too often to be afraid of it; he was a genuine, throughgoing disbeliever in everything except money and power, and he regarded the end of life as being an interesting but unimportant event.His wife’s death was most opportune for him; it made it certain that Elizabeth Darrell would marry him. He had fully realized that stubborn prejudice on Elizabeth’s part against divorce, and although he had not seriously doubted his ability to overcome it, yet it had been stubborn. Now all was smoothed away. He would act with perfect propriety, under the circumstances; he surmised enough about the women of Elizabeth’s class tounderstand that a breach of decorum would shock her far more than a breach of morals. There would be no outward breach of decorum. He would wait until after the funeral before writing her; but it would be useless, hypocritical, and even dangerous to postpone writing longer.With these thoughts in his mind he sat through the day, receiving and answering telegrams, scanning the newspapers, and digesting his own disgrace as exposed in print. Even that had come at a fortunate time for him—if there is a fortunate time to be branded a thief, a liar, and a perjurer, a suborner of perjury, a corrupter of courts, a purchaser of legislatures. Elizabeth would feel sorry for him; she wouldn’t understand the thing at all. He would insist on being married in the autumn, and Elizabeth would no doubt be glad to be married as far away from Washington as possible. Perhaps she might agree to meet him in London and be married there. He would go over in the summer, take the finest house to be had for money, and transport all the superb equipment of his Washington establishment to London. He also remembered with satisfaction that he had now nothing to fear on the score of divorce from that soft-spoken, wooden-headed, fire-eating old impracticable, General Brandon,with his fatal tendency to settle with the pistol questions concerning “the ladies of his family.”In these reflections and considerations James Clavering passed the first day of his widowerhood. On the third day after Mrs. Clavering’s death the great house was shut up and silent. The Claverings left it, never to return to it. It stood vacant, a monument of man’s vicissitudes.The day after Mrs. Clavering’s burial took place, in the little Iowa town where her family lived, a line appeared in the society column of a leading Washington newspaper, announcing the engagement of Anne Clavering and Richard Baskerville. Coming as it did on the heels of the tragic events in the Clavering family and Baskerville’s share in a part of these events, the announcement was startling though far from unexpected. Mrs. Luttrell took upon herself the office of personally acquainting her friends with the engagement and declaring her entire satisfaction with it. Being by nature an offensive partisan, much given to pernicious activity in causes which engaged her heart, Mrs. Luttrell soon developed into a champion of the whole Clavering family. She discovered many admirable qualities in Clavering himself, and changed her tune completely concerning Élise and Lydia,whom she now spoke of as “a couple of giddy chits, quite harmless, and only a little wild.” These two young women had speedily made up their minds to fly to Europe, and arranged to do so as soon as Anne was married, which was to be within the month.The catastrophes of the Clavering family made a profound impression on Washington. Their meteoric career was a sort of epitome of all the possibilities of the sudden acquisition of wealth and power. Whatever might be said of them, they were at least not cowards—not even Reginald Clavering was a coward. They were boldly bad, or boldly good. Anne Clavering had won for herself a place in the esteem of society which was of great value. Not one disrespectful or unkind word was spoken of her when the day of reckoning for the Claverings came.The Senate allowed James Clavering two weeks to recover from his grief at his wife’s death before annihilating him as a senator. Clavering improved the time not only by arranging for his second marriage, but by forestalling, when he had no fighting ground, the criminal indictments which might be expected to be found against him. He paid out secretly in satisfaction money, and reconveyed in bonds, nearly three millions ofdollars. There were several millions more to be fought over, but that was a matter of time; and he would still have a great fortune remaining, if every suit went against him.It would very much have simplified his property arrangements had Elizabeth Darrell consented to marry him within a few weeks of his widowerhood. But this Clavering knew was not to be thought of. A week after his wife’s death he wrote to Elizabeth. He quietly assumed that all arrangements had been made for their marriage, as soon as he should have got his divorce. In his letter he reminded Elizabeth there could now be no question or scruple in regard to her marrying him. He told her he would be in Washington at the end of the week, when the proceedings in the Senate would take place, and that he should expect to see her. He asked her to write and let him know where they should meet.Elizabeth realized that she had gone too far to refuse Clavering a meeting, nor, in fact, did she desire to avoid him. Her feelings toward him had become more and more chaotic; they did not remain the same for an hour together. She felt that a powerful blow had been dealt her objection to marrying him in the removal of the divorcequestion; she doubted in her heart whether she ever could have been brought to the point of marrying him had his wife not died.And then there had been another interview with McBean. He had told Elizabeth he was about to leave Washington to be absent a month, as he was combining pleasure with business on his visit to America, but that on his return, if the necklace were not forthcoming, he should begin legal proceedings immediately. Mr. McBean was fully persuaded, while he was talking to Elizabeth, that the necklace was around her neck, under her high gown, or in her pocket, or in a secret drawer of her writing-desk—in any one of those strange places where women keep their valuables. Elizabeth, in truth, did not know whether the necklace was in America, Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia.Then Baskerville, in spite of the crisis in his own affairs, had not neglected Elizabeth. He had managed to see McBean, and had discovered that the solicitor was perfectly justified in all he had done, from the legal point of view. When Baskerville came to inquire how far Major Pelham was responsible for what was done, he was met by an icy reticence on the part of Mr. McBean, who replied that Baskerville was asking unprofessionalquestions, and in embarrassment Baskerville desisted. It became clear, however, and Baskerville so wrote to Elizabeth, that her concealment of the pawning of the necklace, and her inability to pay back the money she had raised on it, were very serious matters, and she should at once lay the matter before her father.Elizabeth, however, had not been able to bring herself to that. She thought of all sorts of wild alternatives, such as asking Clavering to lend her the money; but her soul recoiled from that. She even considered writing another letter to Hugh Pelham; but at that, too, her heart cried aloud in protest. She did not know where Pelham was, but surmised that he was still in West Africa. A letter addressed to the War Office would reach him—but when?The more she thought of this, the simplest of alternatives and the one urged by Baskerville, the more impossible it seemed. She had loved Pelham well—loved him with all her soul, her mind, her heart; and that, too, when she was a married woman, loving another than her husband, without the slightest stain of any sort upon her mind, her soul, her heart. She doubted if she would have been half so dutiful a wife, but for Pelham’s love for her and her love for him. It seemed to herthat his respect was as necessary to her as her self-respect. Their unfortunate attachment had been in the highest sense elevating. It had not required the soft consolation, the assurances, of weaker passions; but, lofty and austere, it was as strong and as silent as death, it seemed to be everlasting. And could a thing seem to be for ten years of storm and stress and not be?As Heinrich Heine says, it seemed to Elizabeth as if there were no longer a great God in heaven since he had made his creatures so deceitful. What agony was Elizabeth Darrell’s? To have failed in her duty as a wife would have been the surest way to lower herself in Pelham’s eyes.Clavering had reckoned upon Elizabeth’s neither knowing nor appreciating the effect of the revelations about him; in this, however, he was mistaken. She had read the newspapers diligently and understood his affairs far better than Clavering dreamed. The case had made a tremendous sensation. The tragic circumstances of the catastrophe, the probable action of the Senate which was known in advance, the far-reaching scandals which would result from the making public of the findings, all combined to give the country a profound shock—a shock so profoundthat it was known it would seriously jeopardize for the party in power the states in which Clavering and his gang had operated.Among public men in Washington the feeling was intense. The senators who from a combination of honesty and policy had advocated going to the bottom of the scandals and punishing everybody found guilty, were in the position of doctors who have successfully performed a hazardous operation, but are uncertain whether the patient will survive or not. There was no doubt that many criminal prosecutions would follow, but there was a general belief that Clavering was too able and resourceful a man, and had too much money, to be actually punished for the crimes he had undoubtedly committed. His real punishment was his expulsion from the Senate.Elizabeth Darrell knew all these things, and turned them over in her mind until she was half distracted. Another thing, small to a man but large to a woman, tormented her. She must meet Clavering—but where? Not in her father’s house; that could only be done secretly, and she could not stoop to deceive her father. The only way she could think of was in the little park, far at the other end of the town, where their first momentous meeting had taken place.So, feeling the humiliation of what she was doing, Elizabeth replied to Clavering’s letter, and named a day—the day before the one set for the final proceedings in the Senate—when she would see him; and she named six o’clock in the afternoon, in the little out-of-the-way park.It was March then of a forward spring. The day had been one of those sudden warm and balmy days which come upon Washington at the most unlikely seasons. Already the grass was green and the miles upon miles of shade trees were full of sap and the buds were near to bursting. Six o’clock was not quite dusk, but it was as late as Elizabeth dared to make her appointment. Her heart was heavy as she walked along the quiet, unfamiliar streets toward the park—as heavy as on that day, only a few months before, when she had returned to Washington after her widowhood. Then she had been oppressed with the thought that life was over for her, nothing interesting would ever again happen to her. And what had not happened to her!When Elizabeth reached the park she found Clavering awaiting her. He could not but note the grace of her walk and the beauty of her figure as she approached him. She was one of those women who become more interesting, if less handsome,under the stress of feeling. Her dark eyes were appealing, and she sank rather than sat upon the park bench to which Clavering escorted her.“You seem to have taken my troubles to heart,” he said with the air and manner of an accepted lover.Elizabeth made no reply. She had not been able to discover, in the chaos of her emotions, how far Clavering’s troubles really touched her.“However,” said Clavering, “the worst will be over to-morrow. I wish you could be in the Senate gallery, to see how I bear it. The vote on expulsion takes place to-morrow, directly after the morning hour, and I know precisely the majority against me—it will be quite enough to do the work.” Then he added with a cool smile: “I believe if you could be present, you would realize what a pack of rascals have sacrificed me to political expediency! Unluckily I can’t offer you a seat in the Senators’ Gallery, as I might have done a short while ago. The fools think I will stay away, but I shall be in my seat, and from it I shall make my defence and my promise to return to the Senate by the mandate of my state. It will sound well, but to tell you the truth I have no more wish to return than the legislaturehas the intention of returning me. I have something pleasanter in view—it is life with you.”Elizabeth, beguiled in spite of herself, as women are by courage, glanced at Clavering. Yes, he was not afraid of any man or of anything, while she was consumed with terror over a paltry five hundred pounds and the loss of a necklace worth only a trifle in Clavering’s eyes. She longed that he would break through her prohibition and speak about the necklace. But Clavering did not, and he never intended to do so. He knew very well that Elizabeth’s necessities were his best advocates, and he did not purpose silencing any of them.Elizabeth’s reply, after a pause, to Clavering’s remark was: “I shouldn’t like to see you to-morrow. It will be too tragic.”“It’s a pity that I’m not divorced instead of being so recent a widower,” Clavering replied. “Then you could marry me at the moment of misfortune, as Richard Baskerville proposes to marry my daughter Anne. It would be a great help to me now, if it were possible. As it is, we shall have to postpone our marriage until the autumn.”“No,” replied Elizabeth, decisively, “it cannot be until next year.”Clavering’s eyes flashed. It was the first time that she had ever fully admitted that she meant to marry him, although he had from the beginning assumed it. He had very little doubt that he could induce her to shorten the time of waiting.“We will talk about that later. Meanwhile I suppose you will stay here with your father. We can’t enjoy the London house this season, but I shall go abroad in June. I shall have straightened things out by that time, and I can select a house. It will be as fine a one as that which I have lived in here. I can ship all the furnishings, pictures, and plate, with the horses and carriages, to London in advance, and have your establishment ready for you when you arrive. Perhaps it would be better for us to be married in London.”Elizabeth Darrell was not what is called a mercenary woman. She had hesitated when offered vast wealth, and had even declined it on the terms first offered to her; nor did she believe that she would ever have agreed to marry Clavering, in the event of his divorce, but for the removal of her scruples of conscience on finding that his first marriage was illegal. But these words of Clavering’s about the London establishment brought to mind her former life there. She made a rapid mental comparison of Clavering withpoor, honest, brave, stupid dead Jack Darrell; with Pelham as he had been; with her father; and the comparison staggered and revolted her. If it were written, however, in the book of destiny that she should marry Clavering, it were better that they should be married in London, as he suggested. She would rather escape her father’s eye when that transaction took place, and nobody else in the world cared how or when she was married or what might become of her.Clavering spent the time of their interview in planning their future life together. He offered her luxury in every form, but he was too astute a man to make his purchase of her too obvious. He by no means left out his love for her, which was in truth the master passion of his life just then. But he did not force it upon Elizabeth, seeing that she was as yet restless and but half tamed to his hand. Elizabeth listened to him, with the conviction growing in her mind that she must marry this man.Their conversation lasted barely half an hour. Clavering urged Elizabeth to meet him again before he left Washington, which would be the next night, at midnight; but to this Elizabeth would not agree. Clavering saw that he must wait at least six months before she would tolerateany attentions from him, and he quickly made up his mind that it was best not to urge her too much now. He had practically received her promise to marry him at the end of a year, and considering the obstacles he had to contend with he felt pretty well satisfied. As on the former occasion when they had met in the little park, Clavering went after a cab for Elizabeth, put her in it, and they separated.Elizabeth spent a solitary evening. The calm which reigned in Clavering’s breast was by no means her portion. She felt that she had finally committed herself to marry him, and the prospect frightened her. She recalled Baskerville’s words—the “dreadful possibilities” which might await a woman married to Clavering. Their contemplation frightened her more than ever. She was so absorbed in her own troubles that she scarcely gave a thought to Clavering’s impending fate on the morrow. She remained up late, and the clock had struck midnight before her light was out.Once in bed, Elizabeth was seized with a maddening restlessness, against which she fought for four hours. When the sky of night was wan and pale with the coming dawn, she rose and, going to her writing-table, began to write steadily. Her letter was to Hugh Pelham. She told him everything,without concealment—the story of the need that made her pawn the necklace, the story of Clavering, the story of her life in Washington, of her grief and amazement at what seemed to be Pelham’s persecution of her, and it closed with a torrent of reproaches that came from the depths of her heart.She sealed the letter and addressed it to Pelham in the care of the War Office at London. She had no idea where Pelham was or when the letter would reach him; but some time or other he would get it, and then he would know how cruel his conduct was and how far-reaching was the effect of his ill-treatment of her. She had glossed over nothing about Clavering, she had painted him in his true colors; and she had told Pelham that but for him there would have been no temptation for her to have married such a man as Clavering.When she had finished and sealed and stamped her letter, Elizabeth went to the window and drew the curtain. The flush that precedes the dawn was over the opaline sky; it was the beginning of an exquisite spring day. The city lay still and quiet; only one footfall was heard, that of the postman collecting the letters from the mail-box at the corner. As he passed briskly along the street under Elizabeth’s window, a letter softlyfluttered down and fell at his feet. He glanced up and saw a window high above him being closed. The postman picked up the letter, put it in his bag, and went on, whistling.Elizabeth, up in her bedroom, threw herself upon her bed and sank into a heavy and dreamless sleep that lasted until Serena knocked at her door at nine o’clock. Elizabeth rose, dressed, and breakfasted like a person in a dream. She remembered her letter instantly, and the recollection of it made her uneasy. Gradually her uneasiness turned to an agony of regret. She would have made almost any sacrifice to recall the letter, but she supposed it was now impossible.Her great concern made her forget all about Clavering’s impending doom that day, until quite noon. As she began to consider it, the spirit of restlessness which seemed to possess her impelled her to wish that she could witness the scene in the Senate chamber. It might take her mind from her letter, which burned in her memory and was eating her heart out with shame and unavailing repentance. She knew there would be vast crowds at the Capitol, but she felt sure that not one of her few acquaintances in Washington would be there.About one o’clock she suddenly resolved to goto the Capitol. Covering her face, as well as her hat, with a thick black veil, she started for the white-domed building on the hill. When she reached the plaza, she found a great crowd surrounding the north wing. Not in the memory of man had such an event as the expulsion of a senator occurred, and it was the very thing to stimulate the unhealthy curiosity of thousands. A steady stream poured into the doorways and jammed the corridors. Elizabeth doubted whether she would ever get nearer than the Senate corridor, much less be able to get into the small public gallery. She noticed, however, that the multitude was pouring into the ground-floor entrance; so she determined to mount the long, wide flight of steps on the east front and enter the rotunda through the great bronze doors.It was a beautiful spring day, and the crowd was a well-dressed and cheerful one. Nobody would have dreamed that they were about to attend a great public tragedy. As Elizabeth reached the top of the flight, she turned involuntarily to look at the beautiful panorama outspread before her in the Southern sunshine. Fair and faintly green lay the park-like gardens around the Capitol, while the golden dome of the National Library flashed and gleamed in the noondayradiance. Never before had she thought Washington a joyous-looking city, but to-day, with sunshine and life and motion, with its animated throng of persons, this continual passing to and fro, it reminded her of Paris on a fête day.While Elizabeth was looking upon the charming scene outspread before her, she heard the sound of trampling hoofs and the roll of a carriage below. Clavering, in his handsomest brougham, with a superb pair of horses, had just driven up. The coachman and footman wore the newest, smartest, and blackest of mourning liveries for the mistress they had seen ignored, when not insulted, during the whole term of their service. Forth from the carriage, a cynosure for the staring, curious crowd, stepped Clavering. He, too, was dressed in new and immaculate mourning, with a crape-covered hat.Elizabeth shrank behind one of the huge pillars, but from it she saw Clavering’s dignified and ever graceful air as he braved the glances of the multitude. The lower entrance being jammed with people, he leisurely mounted the great flight of steps, a thing he had never before done in all his senatorial service. The crowd watched him with admiration and gratitude—it gave them the more time and the better opportunity of seeinghim. He passed close enough to Elizabeth to have touched her, as she stood quaking with shame and fear; but, looking neither to the right nor to the left, he walked on, calm, courageous, and apparently at ease with himself and all the world.Elizabeth, still moved by an impulse stronger than her will, pressed forward through the rotunda into the corridors. They were packed, and the doors to the public galleries had long been closed. Elizabeth found herself in the midst of a surging crowd, in the corridor leading to the reserved gallery, the place to which Clavering had told her he could no longer admit her. While she was standing there, crushed on either side, a pathway was opened, and a party of senators’ wives approached the door. At the same moment it was opened and some people came out. In the slight confusion several tried to get in; the doorkeepers, trying to separate the sheep from the goats, pushed the intruders back and pushed Elizabeth in with the senatorial party.“But I have no right in here,” she said hurriedly to the doorkeeper who shoved her into the gallery.“Just go in, madam, and let me shut these people out,” replied the doorkeeper, seeing thenecessity for closing the door at once. So Elizabeth found herself in the last place either she or Clavering expected her to be, the gallery set apart for the senatorial families.It was then almost two o’clock, when the morning hour expired, and the first business to be taken up was the resolution of expulsion against Senator Clavering. There was a subdued tremor over the whole scene; the senators who were to do a great act of public justice upon one of their own number were deeply moved over it. Not one of them had ever before taken part in such proceedings, and the species of civil death they were about to inflict on a man once counted worthy to sit among them was in some respects worse than the death of the body. The seriousness of the occasion affected every one present; a psychic wave of shame, regret, and solemnity swept over the whole assemblage, and a strange stillness reigned among the people who filled the galleries. Nearly every senator was in his seat, and the space back of them was crowded with members of the other house and persons who had the privileges of the floor.Clavering sat in his accustomed place, a cool and apparently disinterested observer of the proceedings. His presence was highly disconcertingto the committee which had prepared the report, and indeed to every senator present. It had been hoped that Clavering would absent himself; there were no precedents in the present generation for such proceedings, and it would have been altogether easier if Clavering had chosen to remain away. But as he was a senator up to the moment the vote was taken, no one could say him nay.Elizabeth found no trouble in concealing herself behind the large hats and feathers of the ladies in the reserved gallery, and she could observe Clavering closely. She thought she had never seen him look so handsome and even distinguished in appearance. Had he only been honest! Some thoughts like these raced through Clavering’s brain. He recalled Baskerville’s remark, “There is no real substitute for honesty,” and he remembered several occasions when he could have afforded to be honest and had not been, and he regretted it. Most of all he regretted not having taken greater precautions when he was dishonest.At last, the morning hour having expired, the next business on the calendar was the reading of the report of the committee of investigation on the affairs of the K. F. R. land grants and the corporations connected therewith. The Vice-President,looking pale and worried, recognized the chairman of the committee, who looked paler and more worried. The stillness resolved itself into a deathlike silence, broken only by the resonant tones of the reading clerk. It was not a long report—the reading of it lasted scarcely three-quarters of an hour; but it was a terrible one. As the charges were named, and declared proved, a kind of horror appeared to settle down upon the Senate chamber. The senators who had been lukewarm in the matter were shamed for themselves; those who had been charged with the execution of justice were shamed for the cause of popular government. If such things were possible in a government by the people and for the people and of the people, it was an indictment against the whole people.During it all Clavering sat with unshaken calmness. Not by a glance out of his handsome, stern eyes nor the least variation of color in his clear and ruddy complexion did he indicate the smallest agitation. Not even the last clause, which recommended his expulsion from the Senate of the United States, and which every member of the committee signed, without a dissenting voice, had the power to move him from his cool composure.When the reading was concluded, the chairman of the committee rose and made a few explanations of the report. He spoke in an agitated and broken voice. Before introducing the resolution of expulsion, he hesitated and looked toward Clavering. Clavering rose, and on being recognized by the chair, asked to be heard in a brief defence.Although he had always been a hard worker in his committee-room, Clavering had not often got upon his feet to speak in the Senate chamber. As he had told Elizabeth months before, he always knew his limitations as a debater. Having been used to lording over men for many years, the courteous assumption that every senator is a wise man had never sat well on him. When he spoke he had always been listened to, because he always had something to say; but he had shown his usual good sense and judgment by not measuring himself with the giants of debate. To-day, however, he had nothing more to hope or fear from those grave men, whose scorn of him was swallowed up in the execution of justice upon him.As he rose to speak, to many minds came back that old Homeric line, “As the passing leaves, so is the passing of men;” and this man was passing from life into civil death before theireyes. Clavering, in his beautifully clear and well-modulated voice, began his defence, if defence it could be called. He told briefly but impressively of his youthful struggles, of his lack of education, of the wild life of the West into which he was inducted early, of the disregard of written laws in the administration of the justice with which he was familiar, how the strong men ruled by virtue of their strength, how great enterprises were carried through by forces not understood or even known in old and settled communities. His story was like a book out of the “Odyssey.” He described the effect of his operations in large sections of country, which made him hosts of friends and hosts of enemies. He subtly called attention by indirection to that unwritten law, noted by a British general in India, that there were in all partly civilized countries certain necessary and salutary rascalities, to be carried through by the strong and wise against the weak and foolish. Coming down to his own case, he made no appeal for mercy, and offered no plea in abatement. On the contrary, he became distinctly aggressive, and heaped ridicule upon the committee of elderly gentlemen sitting in their luxurious committee-room, passing judgment on the storm and stress of men and things as unknown to them as theinhabitants of another planet. His conclusion was a ringing defiance of his enemies, a promise of vengeance upon them, and a solemn declaration that he would return, rehabilitated, to the Senate of the United States, and every man who believed him guilty might count himself the everlasting enemy of James Clavering from that day forth.When he sat down there was from the public galleries an involuntary burst of applause, which was instantly suppressed. Two or three women wept aloud; an aged senator attempted to rise from his seat, fell back, and was carried out half-fainting. There were a few minutes of nervous quiet and whispering, and then the final proceedings began. They were short and exquisitely painful. The resolution of expulsion was put, and received a three-fourths vote in its favor. Half a dozen senators in a group voted against the resolution, and a few others were absent or refrained from voting. Of the half-dozen senators who voted in Clavering’s favor, some voted in a spirit of sheer perversity, and the rest by absolute stupidity. When the result was declared amid a deathlike silence, Clavering rose and, making a low bow toward the senators who had voted for him, left his seat and went towardthe aisle. As he reached it he turned to the chair and made another bow, full of dignity and respect; and then, without the least flurry or discomposure, retired from the Senate chamber which it had been the summit of his lifelong ambition to enter and of which he was never again to cross the threshold. He was to see no more service of the great Demos. But not Alcibiades, when he called the Athenians a pack of dogs, looked more sincerely contemptuous than did James Clavering of the United States Senate when, a disgraced and branded man, he walked out of the Senate chamber.
The morning of Ash Wednesday dawned cold and damp and cheerless. Baskerville had heard a rumor at the club the night before that there had been a leak between the committee-room, the office of the secretary of the Senate, and the room of the investigating committee; that the big iron safe had been entered and a stolen copy of the report of the committee had been made and would be published in the morning. So he had the morning newspaper brought to him. On the first page, with a huge display head, together with the recommendation of expulsion against Senator Clavering, the report was printed in full.
Baskerville immediately wrote a note to Anne Clavering, asking that their engagement might be announced and also suggesting an immediate marriage. Within an hour came back an answer from Anne. In a few agitated lines she told him of her mother’s death. She did not ask Baskerville to come to her; but he, seeing that it was no time for small conventions, replied at once,saying that he would be at her house at twelve o’clock, and begged that she would see him.
Elizabeth Darrell was the first person outside of Clavering’s family who knew that he was a free man. There had been no time to get a doctor for Mrs. Clavering, although several had been called. When they arrived, all was over. Elizabeth had seen the sudden shutting of the windows; she knew, almost to a moment, when Mrs. Clavering died.
At seven o’clock in the morning Serena, with the morbid anxiety to communicate tragic news which is the characteristic of the African, came up to Elizabeth’s room full of what she had gleaned from the neighboring servants. Elizabeth listened and felt a sense of guilt enveloping her. Then, when General Brandon was dressed, he came up to her door to discuss the startling news, and his was the first card left for the Clavering family. On it the good soul had written:—
“With heartfelt sympathy in the overwhelming sorrow which has befallen Senator Clavering and his family.”
Elizabeth remained indoors all that day. She drew her window curtains together, so that shecould not see the house which might have been hers, where had lived the dead woman of whom she had considered the spoliation.
At twelve o’clock Baskerville came, and was promptly admitted into the Clavering house. There had been no time to remove the festal decorations. The Moorish hall was odorous with flowers; the mantels and even the hand-rail of the staircase were banked with them. Masses of tall palms made a mysterious green light through the whole of the great suite of rooms. The ceilings were draped with greenery, and orchids and roses hung from them. The huge ball-room was just as the dancers had left it, and everywhere were flowers, palms, and burnt-out candles on girandoles and candelabra. The servants, in gorgeous liveries, sat about, more asleep than awake; and over all was that solemn silence which accompanies the presence of that first and greatest of democrats, Death.
Baskerville was shown into a little morning-room on the second floor, which had belonged to the poor dead woman. It was very simply furnished and in many ways suggested Mrs. Clavering. Baskerville, remembering her untoward fate in being thrust into a position for which she was unfitted, and her genuine goodness andgentleness, felt a real regret at her death. Being a generous man, he had taken pleasure in the intention of being kind to Mrs. Clavering; he knew that it would add extremely to Anne’s happiness. But, like much other designed good, it was too late. He remembered with satisfaction the little courtesies he had been able to show Mrs. Clavering and Anne’s gratitude for them; and then, before he knew it, Anne, in her black gown, pale and heavy-eyed, was sobbing in his arms.
She soon became composed, and told him calmly of the last days. She dwelt with a kind of solemn joy upon her last conversation with her mother about Baskerville, and the message she had sent him. “My mother had not been any too well treated in this life,” added Anne, the smouldering resentment in her heart showing in her eyes, “and you are almost the only man of your class who ever seemed to recognize her beautiful qualities—for my mother had beautiful qualities.”
“I know it,” replied Baskerville, with perfect sincerity, “and I tried to show my appreciation of them.”
It was plain to Baskerville, after spending some time with Anne, that she knew nothing of the news concerning her father with which all Washingtonwas ringing. Baskerville felt that it would never do for her to hear it by idle gossip or by chance. So, after a while, he told her—told her with all the gentleness, all the tenderness, at his command, softening it so far as he could.
Anne listened, tearless and dry-eyed. She followed him fairly well, and asked at last, “Do you mean that—that my father will be expelled from the Senate, and then—there will be no more trouble?”
“Dearest, I wish I could say so. But there will be a great deal more of trouble, I am afraid—enough to make it necessary that you and I should be married as soon as possible.”
“And you would marry the daughter of a man so disgraced, who may end his days in a prison?”
“Yes—since it is you.”
He then inquired her plans for the present. Mrs. Clavering’s body was to be taken for burial to her old home in Iowa. Baskerville asked, or rather demanded, that within a month Anne should be prepared to become his wife. “And haven’t you some relations out in Iowa from whose house we can be married?” he said.
“Yes,” replied Anne, “I have aunts and cousins there. I warn you they are very plain people, but they are very respectable. I don’t thinkthere is a person in my mother’s family of whom I have any reason to be ashamed, although they are, as I tell you, plain people.”
“That is of no consequence whatever. I shall wait until after your mother’s funeral before writing your father and having our engagement announced, and within a month I shall come to Iowa to marry you.”
And Anne, seeing this sweet refuge open to her, took heart of grace and comfort.
Clavering himself, sitting in his darkened library, was in no way awed by death having invaded his house. He had been brought face to face with it too often to be afraid of it; he was a genuine, throughgoing disbeliever in everything except money and power, and he regarded the end of life as being an interesting but unimportant event.
His wife’s death was most opportune for him; it made it certain that Elizabeth Darrell would marry him. He had fully realized that stubborn prejudice on Elizabeth’s part against divorce, and although he had not seriously doubted his ability to overcome it, yet it had been stubborn. Now all was smoothed away. He would act with perfect propriety, under the circumstances; he surmised enough about the women of Elizabeth’s class tounderstand that a breach of decorum would shock her far more than a breach of morals. There would be no outward breach of decorum. He would wait until after the funeral before writing her; but it would be useless, hypocritical, and even dangerous to postpone writing longer.
With these thoughts in his mind he sat through the day, receiving and answering telegrams, scanning the newspapers, and digesting his own disgrace as exposed in print. Even that had come at a fortunate time for him—if there is a fortunate time to be branded a thief, a liar, and a perjurer, a suborner of perjury, a corrupter of courts, a purchaser of legislatures. Elizabeth would feel sorry for him; she wouldn’t understand the thing at all. He would insist on being married in the autumn, and Elizabeth would no doubt be glad to be married as far away from Washington as possible. Perhaps she might agree to meet him in London and be married there. He would go over in the summer, take the finest house to be had for money, and transport all the superb equipment of his Washington establishment to London. He also remembered with satisfaction that he had now nothing to fear on the score of divorce from that soft-spoken, wooden-headed, fire-eating old impracticable, General Brandon,with his fatal tendency to settle with the pistol questions concerning “the ladies of his family.”
In these reflections and considerations James Clavering passed the first day of his widowerhood. On the third day after Mrs. Clavering’s death the great house was shut up and silent. The Claverings left it, never to return to it. It stood vacant, a monument of man’s vicissitudes.
The day after Mrs. Clavering’s burial took place, in the little Iowa town where her family lived, a line appeared in the society column of a leading Washington newspaper, announcing the engagement of Anne Clavering and Richard Baskerville. Coming as it did on the heels of the tragic events in the Clavering family and Baskerville’s share in a part of these events, the announcement was startling though far from unexpected. Mrs. Luttrell took upon herself the office of personally acquainting her friends with the engagement and declaring her entire satisfaction with it. Being by nature an offensive partisan, much given to pernicious activity in causes which engaged her heart, Mrs. Luttrell soon developed into a champion of the whole Clavering family. She discovered many admirable qualities in Clavering himself, and changed her tune completely concerning Élise and Lydia,whom she now spoke of as “a couple of giddy chits, quite harmless, and only a little wild.” These two young women had speedily made up their minds to fly to Europe, and arranged to do so as soon as Anne was married, which was to be within the month.
The catastrophes of the Clavering family made a profound impression on Washington. Their meteoric career was a sort of epitome of all the possibilities of the sudden acquisition of wealth and power. Whatever might be said of them, they were at least not cowards—not even Reginald Clavering was a coward. They were boldly bad, or boldly good. Anne Clavering had won for herself a place in the esteem of society which was of great value. Not one disrespectful or unkind word was spoken of her when the day of reckoning for the Claverings came.
The Senate allowed James Clavering two weeks to recover from his grief at his wife’s death before annihilating him as a senator. Clavering improved the time not only by arranging for his second marriage, but by forestalling, when he had no fighting ground, the criminal indictments which might be expected to be found against him. He paid out secretly in satisfaction money, and reconveyed in bonds, nearly three millions ofdollars. There were several millions more to be fought over, but that was a matter of time; and he would still have a great fortune remaining, if every suit went against him.
It would very much have simplified his property arrangements had Elizabeth Darrell consented to marry him within a few weeks of his widowerhood. But this Clavering knew was not to be thought of. A week after his wife’s death he wrote to Elizabeth. He quietly assumed that all arrangements had been made for their marriage, as soon as he should have got his divorce. In his letter he reminded Elizabeth there could now be no question or scruple in regard to her marrying him. He told her he would be in Washington at the end of the week, when the proceedings in the Senate would take place, and that he should expect to see her. He asked her to write and let him know where they should meet.
Elizabeth realized that she had gone too far to refuse Clavering a meeting, nor, in fact, did she desire to avoid him. Her feelings toward him had become more and more chaotic; they did not remain the same for an hour together. She felt that a powerful blow had been dealt her objection to marrying him in the removal of the divorcequestion; she doubted in her heart whether she ever could have been brought to the point of marrying him had his wife not died.
And then there had been another interview with McBean. He had told Elizabeth he was about to leave Washington to be absent a month, as he was combining pleasure with business on his visit to America, but that on his return, if the necklace were not forthcoming, he should begin legal proceedings immediately. Mr. McBean was fully persuaded, while he was talking to Elizabeth, that the necklace was around her neck, under her high gown, or in her pocket, or in a secret drawer of her writing-desk—in any one of those strange places where women keep their valuables. Elizabeth, in truth, did not know whether the necklace was in America, Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia.
Then Baskerville, in spite of the crisis in his own affairs, had not neglected Elizabeth. He had managed to see McBean, and had discovered that the solicitor was perfectly justified in all he had done, from the legal point of view. When Baskerville came to inquire how far Major Pelham was responsible for what was done, he was met by an icy reticence on the part of Mr. McBean, who replied that Baskerville was asking unprofessionalquestions, and in embarrassment Baskerville desisted. It became clear, however, and Baskerville so wrote to Elizabeth, that her concealment of the pawning of the necklace, and her inability to pay back the money she had raised on it, were very serious matters, and she should at once lay the matter before her father.
Elizabeth, however, had not been able to bring herself to that. She thought of all sorts of wild alternatives, such as asking Clavering to lend her the money; but her soul recoiled from that. She even considered writing another letter to Hugh Pelham; but at that, too, her heart cried aloud in protest. She did not know where Pelham was, but surmised that he was still in West Africa. A letter addressed to the War Office would reach him—but when?
The more she thought of this, the simplest of alternatives and the one urged by Baskerville, the more impossible it seemed. She had loved Pelham well—loved him with all her soul, her mind, her heart; and that, too, when she was a married woman, loving another than her husband, without the slightest stain of any sort upon her mind, her soul, her heart. She doubted if she would have been half so dutiful a wife, but for Pelham’s love for her and her love for him. It seemed to herthat his respect was as necessary to her as her self-respect. Their unfortunate attachment had been in the highest sense elevating. It had not required the soft consolation, the assurances, of weaker passions; but, lofty and austere, it was as strong and as silent as death, it seemed to be everlasting. And could a thing seem to be for ten years of storm and stress and not be?
As Heinrich Heine says, it seemed to Elizabeth as if there were no longer a great God in heaven since he had made his creatures so deceitful. What agony was Elizabeth Darrell’s? To have failed in her duty as a wife would have been the surest way to lower herself in Pelham’s eyes.
Clavering had reckoned upon Elizabeth’s neither knowing nor appreciating the effect of the revelations about him; in this, however, he was mistaken. She had read the newspapers diligently and understood his affairs far better than Clavering dreamed. The case had made a tremendous sensation. The tragic circumstances of the catastrophe, the probable action of the Senate which was known in advance, the far-reaching scandals which would result from the making public of the findings, all combined to give the country a profound shock—a shock so profoundthat it was known it would seriously jeopardize for the party in power the states in which Clavering and his gang had operated.
Among public men in Washington the feeling was intense. The senators who from a combination of honesty and policy had advocated going to the bottom of the scandals and punishing everybody found guilty, were in the position of doctors who have successfully performed a hazardous operation, but are uncertain whether the patient will survive or not. There was no doubt that many criminal prosecutions would follow, but there was a general belief that Clavering was too able and resourceful a man, and had too much money, to be actually punished for the crimes he had undoubtedly committed. His real punishment was his expulsion from the Senate.
Elizabeth Darrell knew all these things, and turned them over in her mind until she was half distracted. Another thing, small to a man but large to a woman, tormented her. She must meet Clavering—but where? Not in her father’s house; that could only be done secretly, and she could not stoop to deceive her father. The only way she could think of was in the little park, far at the other end of the town, where their first momentous meeting had taken place.So, feeling the humiliation of what she was doing, Elizabeth replied to Clavering’s letter, and named a day—the day before the one set for the final proceedings in the Senate—when she would see him; and she named six o’clock in the afternoon, in the little out-of-the-way park.
It was March then of a forward spring. The day had been one of those sudden warm and balmy days which come upon Washington at the most unlikely seasons. Already the grass was green and the miles upon miles of shade trees were full of sap and the buds were near to bursting. Six o’clock was not quite dusk, but it was as late as Elizabeth dared to make her appointment. Her heart was heavy as she walked along the quiet, unfamiliar streets toward the park—as heavy as on that day, only a few months before, when she had returned to Washington after her widowhood. Then she had been oppressed with the thought that life was over for her, nothing interesting would ever again happen to her. And what had not happened to her!
When Elizabeth reached the park she found Clavering awaiting her. He could not but note the grace of her walk and the beauty of her figure as she approached him. She was one of those women who become more interesting, if less handsome,under the stress of feeling. Her dark eyes were appealing, and she sank rather than sat upon the park bench to which Clavering escorted her.
“You seem to have taken my troubles to heart,” he said with the air and manner of an accepted lover.
Elizabeth made no reply. She had not been able to discover, in the chaos of her emotions, how far Clavering’s troubles really touched her.
“However,” said Clavering, “the worst will be over to-morrow. I wish you could be in the Senate gallery, to see how I bear it. The vote on expulsion takes place to-morrow, directly after the morning hour, and I know precisely the majority against me—it will be quite enough to do the work.” Then he added with a cool smile: “I believe if you could be present, you would realize what a pack of rascals have sacrificed me to political expediency! Unluckily I can’t offer you a seat in the Senators’ Gallery, as I might have done a short while ago. The fools think I will stay away, but I shall be in my seat, and from it I shall make my defence and my promise to return to the Senate by the mandate of my state. It will sound well, but to tell you the truth I have no more wish to return than the legislaturehas the intention of returning me. I have something pleasanter in view—it is life with you.”
Elizabeth, beguiled in spite of herself, as women are by courage, glanced at Clavering. Yes, he was not afraid of any man or of anything, while she was consumed with terror over a paltry five hundred pounds and the loss of a necklace worth only a trifle in Clavering’s eyes. She longed that he would break through her prohibition and speak about the necklace. But Clavering did not, and he never intended to do so. He knew very well that Elizabeth’s necessities were his best advocates, and he did not purpose silencing any of them.
Elizabeth’s reply, after a pause, to Clavering’s remark was: “I shouldn’t like to see you to-morrow. It will be too tragic.”
“It’s a pity that I’m not divorced instead of being so recent a widower,” Clavering replied. “Then you could marry me at the moment of misfortune, as Richard Baskerville proposes to marry my daughter Anne. It would be a great help to me now, if it were possible. As it is, we shall have to postpone our marriage until the autumn.”
“No,” replied Elizabeth, decisively, “it cannot be until next year.”
Clavering’s eyes flashed. It was the first time that she had ever fully admitted that she meant to marry him, although he had from the beginning assumed it. He had very little doubt that he could induce her to shorten the time of waiting.
“We will talk about that later. Meanwhile I suppose you will stay here with your father. We can’t enjoy the London house this season, but I shall go abroad in June. I shall have straightened things out by that time, and I can select a house. It will be as fine a one as that which I have lived in here. I can ship all the furnishings, pictures, and plate, with the horses and carriages, to London in advance, and have your establishment ready for you when you arrive. Perhaps it would be better for us to be married in London.”
Elizabeth Darrell was not what is called a mercenary woman. She had hesitated when offered vast wealth, and had even declined it on the terms first offered to her; nor did she believe that she would ever have agreed to marry Clavering, in the event of his divorce, but for the removal of her scruples of conscience on finding that his first marriage was illegal. But these words of Clavering’s about the London establishment brought to mind her former life there. She made a rapid mental comparison of Clavering withpoor, honest, brave, stupid dead Jack Darrell; with Pelham as he had been; with her father; and the comparison staggered and revolted her. If it were written, however, in the book of destiny that she should marry Clavering, it were better that they should be married in London, as he suggested. She would rather escape her father’s eye when that transaction took place, and nobody else in the world cared how or when she was married or what might become of her.
Clavering spent the time of their interview in planning their future life together. He offered her luxury in every form, but he was too astute a man to make his purchase of her too obvious. He by no means left out his love for her, which was in truth the master passion of his life just then. But he did not force it upon Elizabeth, seeing that she was as yet restless and but half tamed to his hand. Elizabeth listened to him, with the conviction growing in her mind that she must marry this man.
Their conversation lasted barely half an hour. Clavering urged Elizabeth to meet him again before he left Washington, which would be the next night, at midnight; but to this Elizabeth would not agree. Clavering saw that he must wait at least six months before she would tolerateany attentions from him, and he quickly made up his mind that it was best not to urge her too much now. He had practically received her promise to marry him at the end of a year, and considering the obstacles he had to contend with he felt pretty well satisfied. As on the former occasion when they had met in the little park, Clavering went after a cab for Elizabeth, put her in it, and they separated.
Elizabeth spent a solitary evening. The calm which reigned in Clavering’s breast was by no means her portion. She felt that she had finally committed herself to marry him, and the prospect frightened her. She recalled Baskerville’s words—the “dreadful possibilities” which might await a woman married to Clavering. Their contemplation frightened her more than ever. She was so absorbed in her own troubles that she scarcely gave a thought to Clavering’s impending fate on the morrow. She remained up late, and the clock had struck midnight before her light was out.
Once in bed, Elizabeth was seized with a maddening restlessness, against which she fought for four hours. When the sky of night was wan and pale with the coming dawn, she rose and, going to her writing-table, began to write steadily. Her letter was to Hugh Pelham. She told him everything,without concealment—the story of the need that made her pawn the necklace, the story of Clavering, the story of her life in Washington, of her grief and amazement at what seemed to be Pelham’s persecution of her, and it closed with a torrent of reproaches that came from the depths of her heart.
She sealed the letter and addressed it to Pelham in the care of the War Office at London. She had no idea where Pelham was or when the letter would reach him; but some time or other he would get it, and then he would know how cruel his conduct was and how far-reaching was the effect of his ill-treatment of her. She had glossed over nothing about Clavering, she had painted him in his true colors; and she had told Pelham that but for him there would have been no temptation for her to have married such a man as Clavering.
When she had finished and sealed and stamped her letter, Elizabeth went to the window and drew the curtain. The flush that precedes the dawn was over the opaline sky; it was the beginning of an exquisite spring day. The city lay still and quiet; only one footfall was heard, that of the postman collecting the letters from the mail-box at the corner. As he passed briskly along the street under Elizabeth’s window, a letter softlyfluttered down and fell at his feet. He glanced up and saw a window high above him being closed. The postman picked up the letter, put it in his bag, and went on, whistling.
Elizabeth, up in her bedroom, threw herself upon her bed and sank into a heavy and dreamless sleep that lasted until Serena knocked at her door at nine o’clock. Elizabeth rose, dressed, and breakfasted like a person in a dream. She remembered her letter instantly, and the recollection of it made her uneasy. Gradually her uneasiness turned to an agony of regret. She would have made almost any sacrifice to recall the letter, but she supposed it was now impossible.
Her great concern made her forget all about Clavering’s impending doom that day, until quite noon. As she began to consider it, the spirit of restlessness which seemed to possess her impelled her to wish that she could witness the scene in the Senate chamber. It might take her mind from her letter, which burned in her memory and was eating her heart out with shame and unavailing repentance. She knew there would be vast crowds at the Capitol, but she felt sure that not one of her few acquaintances in Washington would be there.
About one o’clock she suddenly resolved to goto the Capitol. Covering her face, as well as her hat, with a thick black veil, she started for the white-domed building on the hill. When she reached the plaza, she found a great crowd surrounding the north wing. Not in the memory of man had such an event as the expulsion of a senator occurred, and it was the very thing to stimulate the unhealthy curiosity of thousands. A steady stream poured into the doorways and jammed the corridors. Elizabeth doubted whether she would ever get nearer than the Senate corridor, much less be able to get into the small public gallery. She noticed, however, that the multitude was pouring into the ground-floor entrance; so she determined to mount the long, wide flight of steps on the east front and enter the rotunda through the great bronze doors.
It was a beautiful spring day, and the crowd was a well-dressed and cheerful one. Nobody would have dreamed that they were about to attend a great public tragedy. As Elizabeth reached the top of the flight, she turned involuntarily to look at the beautiful panorama outspread before her in the Southern sunshine. Fair and faintly green lay the park-like gardens around the Capitol, while the golden dome of the National Library flashed and gleamed in the noondayradiance. Never before had she thought Washington a joyous-looking city, but to-day, with sunshine and life and motion, with its animated throng of persons, this continual passing to and fro, it reminded her of Paris on a fête day.
While Elizabeth was looking upon the charming scene outspread before her, she heard the sound of trampling hoofs and the roll of a carriage below. Clavering, in his handsomest brougham, with a superb pair of horses, had just driven up. The coachman and footman wore the newest, smartest, and blackest of mourning liveries for the mistress they had seen ignored, when not insulted, during the whole term of their service. Forth from the carriage, a cynosure for the staring, curious crowd, stepped Clavering. He, too, was dressed in new and immaculate mourning, with a crape-covered hat.
Elizabeth shrank behind one of the huge pillars, but from it she saw Clavering’s dignified and ever graceful air as he braved the glances of the multitude. The lower entrance being jammed with people, he leisurely mounted the great flight of steps, a thing he had never before done in all his senatorial service. The crowd watched him with admiration and gratitude—it gave them the more time and the better opportunity of seeinghim. He passed close enough to Elizabeth to have touched her, as she stood quaking with shame and fear; but, looking neither to the right nor to the left, he walked on, calm, courageous, and apparently at ease with himself and all the world.
Elizabeth, still moved by an impulse stronger than her will, pressed forward through the rotunda into the corridors. They were packed, and the doors to the public galleries had long been closed. Elizabeth found herself in the midst of a surging crowd, in the corridor leading to the reserved gallery, the place to which Clavering had told her he could no longer admit her. While she was standing there, crushed on either side, a pathway was opened, and a party of senators’ wives approached the door. At the same moment it was opened and some people came out. In the slight confusion several tried to get in; the doorkeepers, trying to separate the sheep from the goats, pushed the intruders back and pushed Elizabeth in with the senatorial party.
“But I have no right in here,” she said hurriedly to the doorkeeper who shoved her into the gallery.
“Just go in, madam, and let me shut these people out,” replied the doorkeeper, seeing thenecessity for closing the door at once. So Elizabeth found herself in the last place either she or Clavering expected her to be, the gallery set apart for the senatorial families.
It was then almost two o’clock, when the morning hour expired, and the first business to be taken up was the resolution of expulsion against Senator Clavering. There was a subdued tremor over the whole scene; the senators who were to do a great act of public justice upon one of their own number were deeply moved over it. Not one of them had ever before taken part in such proceedings, and the species of civil death they were about to inflict on a man once counted worthy to sit among them was in some respects worse than the death of the body. The seriousness of the occasion affected every one present; a psychic wave of shame, regret, and solemnity swept over the whole assemblage, and a strange stillness reigned among the people who filled the galleries. Nearly every senator was in his seat, and the space back of them was crowded with members of the other house and persons who had the privileges of the floor.
Clavering sat in his accustomed place, a cool and apparently disinterested observer of the proceedings. His presence was highly disconcertingto the committee which had prepared the report, and indeed to every senator present. It had been hoped that Clavering would absent himself; there were no precedents in the present generation for such proceedings, and it would have been altogether easier if Clavering had chosen to remain away. But as he was a senator up to the moment the vote was taken, no one could say him nay.
Elizabeth found no trouble in concealing herself behind the large hats and feathers of the ladies in the reserved gallery, and she could observe Clavering closely. She thought she had never seen him look so handsome and even distinguished in appearance. Had he only been honest! Some thoughts like these raced through Clavering’s brain. He recalled Baskerville’s remark, “There is no real substitute for honesty,” and he remembered several occasions when he could have afforded to be honest and had not been, and he regretted it. Most of all he regretted not having taken greater precautions when he was dishonest.
At last, the morning hour having expired, the next business on the calendar was the reading of the report of the committee of investigation on the affairs of the K. F. R. land grants and the corporations connected therewith. The Vice-President,looking pale and worried, recognized the chairman of the committee, who looked paler and more worried. The stillness resolved itself into a deathlike silence, broken only by the resonant tones of the reading clerk. It was not a long report—the reading of it lasted scarcely three-quarters of an hour; but it was a terrible one. As the charges were named, and declared proved, a kind of horror appeared to settle down upon the Senate chamber. The senators who had been lukewarm in the matter were shamed for themselves; those who had been charged with the execution of justice were shamed for the cause of popular government. If such things were possible in a government by the people and for the people and of the people, it was an indictment against the whole people.
During it all Clavering sat with unshaken calmness. Not by a glance out of his handsome, stern eyes nor the least variation of color in his clear and ruddy complexion did he indicate the smallest agitation. Not even the last clause, which recommended his expulsion from the Senate of the United States, and which every member of the committee signed, without a dissenting voice, had the power to move him from his cool composure.
When the reading was concluded, the chairman of the committee rose and made a few explanations of the report. He spoke in an agitated and broken voice. Before introducing the resolution of expulsion, he hesitated and looked toward Clavering. Clavering rose, and on being recognized by the chair, asked to be heard in a brief defence.
Although he had always been a hard worker in his committee-room, Clavering had not often got upon his feet to speak in the Senate chamber. As he had told Elizabeth months before, he always knew his limitations as a debater. Having been used to lording over men for many years, the courteous assumption that every senator is a wise man had never sat well on him. When he spoke he had always been listened to, because he always had something to say; but he had shown his usual good sense and judgment by not measuring himself with the giants of debate. To-day, however, he had nothing more to hope or fear from those grave men, whose scorn of him was swallowed up in the execution of justice upon him.
As he rose to speak, to many minds came back that old Homeric line, “As the passing leaves, so is the passing of men;” and this man was passing from life into civil death before theireyes. Clavering, in his beautifully clear and well-modulated voice, began his defence, if defence it could be called. He told briefly but impressively of his youthful struggles, of his lack of education, of the wild life of the West into which he was inducted early, of the disregard of written laws in the administration of the justice with which he was familiar, how the strong men ruled by virtue of their strength, how great enterprises were carried through by forces not understood or even known in old and settled communities. His story was like a book out of the “Odyssey.” He described the effect of his operations in large sections of country, which made him hosts of friends and hosts of enemies. He subtly called attention by indirection to that unwritten law, noted by a British general in India, that there were in all partly civilized countries certain necessary and salutary rascalities, to be carried through by the strong and wise against the weak and foolish. Coming down to his own case, he made no appeal for mercy, and offered no plea in abatement. On the contrary, he became distinctly aggressive, and heaped ridicule upon the committee of elderly gentlemen sitting in their luxurious committee-room, passing judgment on the storm and stress of men and things as unknown to them as theinhabitants of another planet. His conclusion was a ringing defiance of his enemies, a promise of vengeance upon them, and a solemn declaration that he would return, rehabilitated, to the Senate of the United States, and every man who believed him guilty might count himself the everlasting enemy of James Clavering from that day forth.
When he sat down there was from the public galleries an involuntary burst of applause, which was instantly suppressed. Two or three women wept aloud; an aged senator attempted to rise from his seat, fell back, and was carried out half-fainting. There were a few minutes of nervous quiet and whispering, and then the final proceedings began. They were short and exquisitely painful. The resolution of expulsion was put, and received a three-fourths vote in its favor. Half a dozen senators in a group voted against the resolution, and a few others were absent or refrained from voting. Of the half-dozen senators who voted in Clavering’s favor, some voted in a spirit of sheer perversity, and the rest by absolute stupidity. When the result was declared amid a deathlike silence, Clavering rose and, making a low bow toward the senators who had voted for him, left his seat and went towardthe aisle. As he reached it he turned to the chair and made another bow, full of dignity and respect; and then, without the least flurry or discomposure, retired from the Senate chamber which it had been the summit of his lifelong ambition to enter and of which he was never again to cross the threshold. He was to see no more service of the great Demos. But not Alcibiades, when he called the Athenians a pack of dogs, looked more sincerely contemptuous than did James Clavering of the United States Senate when, a disgraced and branded man, he walked out of the Senate chamber.