The Senate adjourned a few moments after Betty left the gallery. There was little conversation in the cloak-room. The Senators were very tired, and it surely was a brain of bubbles that could indulge in comment upon the climax of the great finished chapter of the old Republic.
North put on his hat and overcoat at once and left the Capitol. After the close confinement in heated and vitiated air for sixteen hours, the thought of a cab was intolerable: he shook his head at the old darky who owned him and whom he never had been able to dodge during his twenty years' service in Washington, plunged his hands into his overcoat pockets, and strode off with an air of aggressive determination which amused him as a fitting anti-climax. The darky grinned and drove home without looking for another fare. His Senator not only had paid him by the month for several years, but had supported his family for the last ten.
North inhaled the pure cool air, the delicious perfume of violet and magnolia, as Betty had done. Once he paused and looked up at the wooded heights surrounding the city, then down at the Potomac and the great expanse of roofs and leaves. The Washington Monument, the purest, coldest, most impersonal monument on earth, looked as gray as the sky, but its outlines were as sharp as at noonday. North often watched it from the window of his Committee Room; he had seen it rosy with the mists of sunset, as dark as granite under stormy skies, as waxen as death. Normally, it was white and pure and inspiring, never companionable, but helpful in its cold and lofty beauty.
"Itisa monument," he thought, to-night, "and to more thanWashington."
He turned into Massachusetts Avenue and strolled along, in no hurry to find himself between walls again. He was not conscious of physical fatigue, and experienced no longing for bed, but his brain was tired and he enjoyed the absence of enforced companionship and continued alertness, the cool air, the quiet morning in her last sleep.
Betty, like all brilliant women who love passionately, had over-imagined, in her solitude and excitement. It is true that North had felt the bitterness of defeat, that his mind had dwelt upon the miserable and blasting thought that after years of unquestioned statesmanship and leadership, of hard work and unremitting devotion, his will had had no weight against hysteria and delirium. But both bitterness and the sense of failure had been dismissed in the moment when he had, once for all, accepted the situation; and that had been several days before. Since then, he had shoved aside the past, and had given his undivided thought to the present and the future. He had uttered his "aye" almost indifferently; it had been given to the President days since.
Nevertheless, his brain, tired as it was, did not wander from the great climax in his country's history. To that country at large this climax meant simply a brief and arrogant chastisement of a cruel little nation; the generals would have been quite justified in sending their dress clothes and golf sticks on to Havana; but North knew that this officious "police duty" was the noisy prologue to a new United States, possibly to the birth of a new Constitution.
"Is this the grand finale of the people's rule?" he thought. "They have screamed for the moon as they never screamed before, and this time they have got it fairly between their teeth. Well, it is a dead old planet; will its decay vitiate their own blood and leave them the half-willing prey of a Circumstance they do not dream of now? Dewey will take the Philippines, of course. He would be an inefficient fool if he did not, and he is the reverse. The Spanish in Cuba will crumble almost before the world realizes that the war has begun. The United States will find itself sitting open-mouthed with two huge prizes in its lap. It may, in a fit of virtue which would convulse history, give them back, present them, with much good advice and more rhetoric, to their rightful owners. And it may not. These prizes are crusted with gold; and the stars and stripes will look so well in the breeze above that the pride of patriotism may decide they must remain there. And if it does—if it does… The extremists in the Senate will grow twenty years in one… With the bit between their teeth and the arrogance of triumph in their blood—"
He found himself in front of his own house. He turned slowly and looked intently for a moment toward I Street. His face softened, then he jerked out his latchkey, let himself in and went directly to the library. He still had no desire for bed, and threw himself into an easy-chair before the andirons. But it was the first time in several days that he had sat in a luxurious chair, and the room was full of soft warmth. He fell asleep, and although he seemed to awaken immediately, he could only conclude, when the experience which followed was over, that he had been dreaming.
He suddenly became aware that a chair beside him was occupied, and he wheeled about sharply. His sense of companionship was justified; a man sat there. North stared at him, more puzzled than surprised, endeavouring to fit the familiar face to some name on his long list of acquaintances, and wondering who in Washington could have given a fancy-dress ball that night. His visitor wore his hair in a queue and powdered, a stock of soft lawn, and a dress-coat of plum-coloured cloth cut as in the days of the founders of the Republic.
Although it was some moments before North recognized his visitor, his resentment at this unseasonable intrusion passed quickly; the personality in the chair was so charming, so magnetic, so genial. He was a young man, between thirty and forty, with a long nose, a mobile mouth, dark gray-blue eyes full of fire and humour, and a massive head. It was a face of extraordinary power and intellect, but lit up by a spirit so audacious and impulsive and triumphant that it was like a leaping flame of dazzling brilliancy in some forbidding fortress. He was smiling with a delighted expression of good fellowship; but North experienced a profound conviction that the man was weighing and analyzing him, that he would weigh and analyze everybody with whom he came in contact, and make few mistakes.
"Who the deuce can he be?" he thought, "and why doesn't he speak?" And then it occurred to him that he had not spoken, himself. He was about to inquire with somewhat perfunctory courtesy in what manner he could serve his visitor, when his glance fell on the man's hands. He sat erect with a slight exclamation and experienced a stiffening at the roots of his hair. The hands under the lace ruffles were the most beautiful that ever had been given to a man, even to as small a man as this. They were white and strong and delicate, with pointed fingers wide apart, and filbert nails. North knew them well, for they were the hands of the man whom he admired above all men in the history of his country. But until to-night he had seen them on canvas only, in the Treasury Department of the United States. His feeling of terror passed, and he sat forward eagerly.
"The little lion," he said caressingly, for the man before him might have been his son, although he had been in his tomb with a bullet in his heart for nearly a century. But he looked so young, so restless, so indomitable, that the years slipped out of the century, and Hamilton once more was the most brilliant ornament of a country which had never ceased to need him.
"Yes," he said brightly, "here I am, sir, and you see me at last. This is that one moment in the lifetime of the few when the spirit burns through the flesh and recognizes another spirit who has lost that dear and necessary medium. I have been with you a great deal in your life, but you never have been able to see me until to-night." He gave his head an impatient toss. "How I have wished I were alive during the last three or four months!" he exclaimed. "Not that I could have accomplished what you could not, sir, but it would have been such a satisfaction to have been able to make the effort, and then, when I failed, to tell democracy what I thought of it."
North smiled. All sense of the supernatural had left him. His soul and Hamilton's were face to face; that was the one glorified fact. "I have been tempted several times lately to wish that we had your aristocratic republic," he said, "and that I were the head and centre of it. I have felt a strong desire to wring the neck of that many-headed nuisance called 'the people,' and proceed as if it were where the God of nations intended those incapable of governing should be and remain without protest."
"Oh, yes, you are an aristocrat. That is the reason I have enjoyed the society of your mind all these years. You were so like me in many ways when you were my age, and since then I seem to have grown older with you. I died so young. But in you, in the last twenty years, I seem to have lived on. You have built an iron wall all round those terrible fires of your youth, and roofed it over. It is only now and then that a panel melts and the flame leaps out; and the panel is so quickly replaced! I too should have conquered myself like that and made fewer and fewer mistakes."
"God knows what I might not have been able to do for my country. I have been mad to leap into the arena often enough."
"You are not dead. No man is, whose inspiration lives on. More than one of us would be of shorter stature and shorter gait if we never had had your accomplishment to ponder over. And as to what the nation would have been without you—"
"Yes!" cried Hamilton. "Yes! How can any man of ability submit to death without protest, shrug his shoulders cynically, and say that no man's disappearance causes more than a whirl of bubbles on the surface, that the world goes on its old gait undisturbed, and does as well with the new as the old? Look at Great Britain. She hasn't a single great man in all her eleven million square miles to lead her. That is answer enough to a theory which some men are sincere enough in believing. This country always has needed great leaders, and sometimes she has had them and sometimes not. The time is coming when she will need them as she has not done since the days when three or four of us set her on her feet."
North stood up suddenly and looked down on Hamilton. "What are we coming to?" he asked abruptly. "Monarchy?"
The guest tapped the toe of his little slipper with the tips of his beautiful fingers. He laughed gayly. "I can see only a little farther ahead than your own far-penetrating brain, sir. What do you think?"
"As I walked home tonight, the situation possessed my mind, which by some process of its own seemed to develop link after link in coming events. It seemed to me that I saw a thoroughly disorganized people, unthinkingly but ruthlessly thrusting aside all ideals, and—consequently—in time—ready for anything."
Hamilton nodded, "If they had begun with my ideal, they would have remained there. Now they will leap far behind that—when there is a strong enough man down there in the White House. Certain radical changes, departures from their traditions and those of their fathers, will school them for greater changes still. In some great critical moment when a dictator seems necessary they will shrug their shoulders and say, 'Why not?'"
"I believe you are right, but I doubt if it comes in my time."
Hamilton shook his head. "Every state in Europe has its upper lip curled back above its teeth, and who knows, when the leashes snap, what our fate will be, now that we have practically abandoned our policy of non-interference in the affairs of the Eastern Hemisphere? If all Europe is at somebody's throat in the next five years, we shall not escape; be sure of that. Then will be the great man's opportunity. You always have despised the office of President. Work for it from this day. The reaction from this madness will help you. Democrats as well as Republicans will turn to you as the one man worthy of the confidence of the entire country."
"Not if they guessed that I meditated treason, sir. Nor should I. I agree with you that your ideal was the best, but there is nothing for me to do but to make the best of the one I've inherited. If I am aristocratic in my preferences, I am also a pretty thoroughgoing American."
"Yes, yes, I know, sir. You never will meditate what, if premeditated, would be treason. But when the great moment comes, when your patriotism and your statesmanship force you to admit that if the country is to be saved it must be rescued from the people, and that you alone can rescue it, then you will tear the Constitution down its middle. This country is past amendments. It must begin over again. And the whole great change must come from one man. The people never could be got to vote for an aristocratic republic. They must be stunned into accepting a monarchy. After the monarchy, then the real, the great Republic."
The two men looked long into each other's eyes. Then North said,—
"I repeat that I never should work nor scheme for the position that such a change might bring me. Nevertheless, believing, as I do, that we are on the threshold of a new and entirely different era in this country, if the time should come when I felt that I, as its most highly trained servant, could best serve the United States by taking her destinies entirely into my own hands, I should do so without an instant's hesitation. I have done all I could to preserve the old order for them, and they have called me traitor and gone their own way. Now let them take the consequences."
Hamilton set his mobile lips in a hard line. His eyes looked like steel. "Yes," he said harshly, "let them take the consequences. They had their day, they have gone mad with democracy, let them now die of their own poison. The greatest Republic the world ever will have known is only in the ante-room of its real history." He stood up suddenly and held out his hand. "Good-bye, sir," he said. "We may or may not meet again before you too are forced to abandon your work. But I often shall be close to you, and I believe, I firmly believe, that you will do exactly as I should do if I stood on solid ground to-day."
North took the exquisite hand that had written the greatest state papers of the century, and looked wonderingly at its white beauty. It suddenly gave him the grip of an iron vise. North returned the pressure. Then the strong hand melted from his, and he stood alone.
Exactly in what the transition from sleep to waking consisted, North was not able to define. There was a brief sense of change, including a lifting of heavy eyelids. Technically he awoke. But he was standing on the hearthrug. And his right hand ached.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"What difference does it make whether he appeared to my waking eyes or passed through my sleeping brain and sat down with my soul?"
He plunged his hands into his pockets and stood thinking for many minutes. He said, half aloud, finally,—
"Not in my time, perhaps. But it will come, it will come."
When Betty awoke at four o'clock in the afternoon, she discovered with some surprise that she had slept soundly for eleven hours. Her head was a trifle heavy, but after her bath she felt so fresh again that the previous day and night seemed like a very long and very ugly dream. She reflected that if she had not written to Burleigh before she went to bed she certainly should do so now. He still seemed the one safeguard for the future; she had convinced herself that with her capacity for violent emotion and nervous exaltation, her head was not to be trusted.
She felt calm enough this afternoon, and she opened with no enthusiasm the note which had arrived from Burleigh. She might have drawn some from its superabundant amount, but she frowned and threw it in the fire. Then she went to her mother's room and announced her engagement.
"My dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Madison. "Well!—I am delighted."
Then she looked keenly at Betty and withheld her congratulations. But she asked no questions, although the edge suddenly left her pleasure and she began to wonder if Burleigh were to be congratulated.
"He is coming to dinner," Betty continued, "and I want you to promise me that you will not leave us alone for a moment, and that you will go with me to New York to-morrow."
"I will do anything you like, of course, and I always enjoy New York."
"I want to get away from Washington, and I want to shop more than anything in life. I hate the thought of everything serious,—the country, the war, everybody and everything, and I feel that if I could spend two weeks with shops and dressmakers I'd be quite happy—almost my old self again."
"I wish you were," said Mrs. Madison, with a sigh. "I wish this country never had had any politics."
The instinct of coquetry was deeply rooted in Betty Madison, but that evening she selected her most unbecoming gown. She was one of those women who never look well in black, and look their worst in it when their complexion shows the tear of secret trouble and broken rest. She had a demi-toilette of black chiffon trimmed with jet and relieved about the neck with pink roses. She cut off the roses; and when arrayed had the satisfaction of seeing herself look thirty-five. For a moment she wavered, and Leontine, with tears, begged to be allowed to remove the gown; but Betty set her teeth and went downstairs.
She had the further satisfaction of seeing a brief flash of surprise and disappointment in Burleigh's eyes as he came forward to greet her; and, indeed, the gown seemed to depress the company for the entire evening. Betty tried to rattle on gayly, but the painful certainty that she looked thirty-five (perhaps more), and that Burleigh saw it, and her mother (who was visibly depressed) saw it, and the butler and the footman (both of whom, she knew through Leontine, admired her extravagantly) saw it, dashed her spirits to zero, and she fell into an unreasoning rage with Senator North.
"I am going to New York to-morrow, and you are not to follow me," she said with a final effort at playfulness. "I have been at such a nervous strain over this wretched war that I must be frivolous and feminine for two whole weeks—and what so serious as being engaged?"
Burleigh sighed. His spirits were unaccountably low. He had forgotten his country for an entire day, and rushed up to the house ten minutes before the appointed hour, his spirits as high as a boy's on his way to the cricket field. But his apple had turned to ashes in a funereal gown, and there seemed no colour about it anywhere.
"Of course you want a change," he said, "but I hope you will write to me."
"I'll write you a little note every day," she said with sudden contrition. "I know I'll feel—and look ever so much better in a few days."
"There!" she thought with a sigh, "I've made this wretched sacrifice for nothing, and I'll never forget how I'm looking at the present moment, to my dying day. I know I'll wear my most distracting gown the next time he comes. Well, what difference? I've got to marry him, anyhow."
She shook hands cordially with him when he rose to go, an hour later, but she did not leave her mother's side. He did not attempt to smile, but shook hands silently with both and left the room as rapidly as dignity would permit.
Mrs. Madison put her handkerchief to her eyes and burst into tears.
"Poor dear man!" she exclaimed. "I felt exactly as if we were having our last dinner together before he went off to the war to get killed. I never spent such a dismal evening in my life. And what on earth made you put on that horrid gown? You look a fright—you almost look older than he does."
"Don't turn the knife round, please. I'm rather sorry, to tell the truth, but I didn't want him to be too overjoyed. I couldn't have stood it."
"Are you sorry that you have engaged yourself to him?"
"No, I am glad—very glad." But she said it without enthusiasm. When she went up to her room, she presented the black gown to Leontine and sent her to bed. Then she put on a peignoir of pink silk and lace and examined herself in the mirror. She looked fifteen years younger and wholly charming; there was no doubt of it.
The next day, before starting for New York, she wrote a note to SenatorNorth:—
I am going to marry Robert Burleigh. On Tuesday morning I almost went to your house—to bring you back with me here. I came to my senses in time; but I might not again. I want you to understand.
I wish he were not on the winning side. But he is the only man I can even think of marrying.
I do not think this much is disloyal to him. But I will not say other things. B. M.
Burleigh came to the train to see her off, and Betty looked so charming in her rich brown travelling frock and little turban, and smiled so gayly upon him, that his heavy spirit lifted its wings and he begged to be allowed to go to New York on Saturday. But to this she would not listen, and he was forced to content himself with making elaborate preparations for her comfort in the little drawing-room, and buying a copy of every paper and magazine the newsboy had on sale.
"I am sure he will make an ideal husband," said Mrs. Madison, as she waved her hand to him from the window. "He certainly is very much of a man," admitted Betty, "but what on earth are we to do with all these papers? I haven't room to turn round."
The excitement in Washington, great as it was, had been mostly within doors; in New York it appeared to be entirely in the streets, if one excepted the corridors of the hotels. The population, still pale and nervously talkative, surged up and down the sidewalks. On the morrow the city put forth her hundred thousand flags. The very air seemed to turn to stars and stripes.
The Madisons went to the Waldorf-Astoria, and in its refreshing solitudes felt for the first time in months that they must go in search of excitement if they wanted it; none would reach them here.
"Now that the war is declared, I am sorry;" admitted Mrs. Madison, "for so many Americans will be killed."
"Instead of Cubans. I've done with the war. I won't even regret."
For three days Betty shopped furiously, or held long consultations with her dressmaker. On Sunday, after church, she read to her mother, but refused to discuss her engagement, and on Monday she resumed her shopping. She wrote to Burleigh immediately after breakfast every morning, then dismissed him from her mind for twenty-four hours.
The beautiful spring fabrics were in the shops, and she bought so many things she did not want, even for a trousseau, that she wondered if Mrs. Mudd would accept a trunk full of "things." She envied Mrs. Mudd, and would find a contradictory pleasure in making her happy. Miss Trumbull never had manifested any false pride, and matrimony had altered her little in other ways.
At night she slept very well, and if she did not think of Burleigh, neither would she think of Senator North.
She did not open a newspaper. What the country did now had no interest for her; it was marching to its drums, and nothing could stop it. And she would have her fill of politics for the rest of her natural life. As Mrs. Madison always was content with a novel, she made no complaint at the absence of newspapers, particularly as the fighting had not begun. Moreover, Betty took her to the theatre every evening, a dissipation which her invalidism endured without a protest.
It was on Wednesday afternoon that Betty, returning to her rooms, met Sally Carter in a corridor of the hotel. The two girls kissed as if no war had come between them, and Miss Carter announced that she was going to Cuba to nurse the American soldier.
"I almost feel conscience-stricken," she remarked, "now that we actually are in for it. I don't think I believed it ever really could happen. It was more like a great drama that was about to take place somewhere on the horizon. But if the American boys have to be shot, I'm going to be there to do what I can."
They entered the parlor of Mrs. Madison's suite, and that good lady, who had read until her eyes ached, welcomed Sally with effusion and demanded news of Washington.
"We haven't seen a paper or a soul," she said. "We have our meals up here, and I feel as if I were a Catholic in retreat. It's been a relief in a way, especially after thesalon, but I should like to know if Washington has burned down, or anything."
"Washington is still there and still excited," said Miss Carter, dropping into a chair and taking off her hat, which she ran the pin through and flung on the floor. "How it keeps it up is beyond the comprehension of one poor set of nerves. I am now dead to all emotion and longing for work. I'm even sorry I painted my best French handkerchiefs red, white, and blue. If you haven't seen the papers I suppose you don't know that Mrs. North is dead. She died suddenly of paralysis on the twenty-second. The strength she got in the Adirondacks soon began to leave her by degrees; the doctor—who is mine, you know—told me the other day that it meant nothing but a temporary improvement at any time; but he had hoped that she would live for several years yet. Betty, what on earth do you find so interesting in Fifth Avenue? I hate it, with its sixty different architectures."
"But it looks so beautiful with all the flags," said Betty, "and the one opposite is really magnificent."
It was a half-hour before Sally ceased from chattering and went in search of her father. Betty had managed to control both her face and her knees, and listened as politely as a person may who longs to strangle the intruder and achieve solitude. The moment Sally had gone Betty went straight to her room, avoiding her mother's eyes, which turned themselves intently upon her.
She did not reappear for dinner, as her mother was made cheerful by the society of the Carters; but as Sally passed her room on her way to bed, she called her in, and the two girls had a few moments' conversation.
"Molly," said Betty, the next morning, "I should like to go up to theAdirondacks alone for a few weeks. Would you mind staying here with theColonel and Sally for another ten days and then returning with them?Sally says she will move into my room and that she and the Colonel willtake you to the theatre and do everything they can to make you happy.You know the Colonel delights to be with you."
"I understand, of course, that you are going," said Mrs. Madison. "I shall not be bored, if that is what you mean. I hope you will telegraph at once, so that the house will be warmed at least a day before you arrive. I suppose you have got to a point in your affairs where you must have solitude, but I wish you had not, and I wish you would go where it is warmer."
"Oh, I shall be comfortable enough." She added in a moment, "Don't think I do not appreciate your consideration, for I do."
Then she sat down at the desk and wrote a note to Burleigh. It was a brief epistle, but she was a long while writing it. Her previous notes had been dashed off in ten minutes, and usually related to the play of the previous evening. His replies had been a curious mingling of half-offended pride and a passion which was only restrained by the fear that the lady was not yet ready for it.
Finally Betty concocted the missive to the satisfaction of her mind's diplomatic condition. She had not yet brought herself to begin any of her notes to him formally. "Dear Robert" was as yet unnatural, and "Dear Mr. Burleigh" absurd; so she ignored the convention.
"I suddenly have made up my mind to go to the Adirondacks for a month,quite alone," she wrote. "When one is going to take a tremendous step, one needs solitude that one may do a great deal of hard thinking. I don't wonder that some Catholic women go into retreat. At all events, Washington, 'the world,' even my mother, even you, who always are so kind and considerate, seem impossible to me at present; and if I am to live with some one else for the rest of my life, I must have one uninterrupted month of solitary myself. Doubtless that will do me till the end of my time! So would you mind if I asked you not even to write to me? I have enjoyed your notes so much, but I want to feel absolutely alone. Don't think this is petty egoism. It goes far deeper than that! If we ever are to understand each other I am sure I need not explain myself further. B. M."
"It has a rather heartless ring," she thought with a sigh, "but it will intrigue him, and—who knows? As heaven is my witness, I do not. But I do know this, that unless I get away from them all and fairly inside of myself, whatever I do will seem the wrong thing and I might end by making a dramatic fool of myself."
The ice was on the lake this time, although it was melting rapidly, but the sun shone all day. She had to wear her furs in the woods, but the greens had never looked so vivid and fresh, and save for an occasional woodchopper and her own servants, there was not a soul to be met in that high solitude. The hotel across the lake would not open for a month. Even the birds still lingered in the South.
After she had been alone for two days she wondered why, when in trouble before, she had not turned instinctively to solitude in the forest. It is only the shallow mind that dislikes and fears the lonely places of Nature: the intellect, no matter what vapours may be sent up from the heart, finds not only solace in retirement, but another form of that companionship of the ego which the deeply religious find in retreat. The intellectual may lack the supreme self-satisfaction of the religious, but they find a keen pleasure in being able to make the very most of the results of years of consistent effort.
Betty, whether alone by a roaring fire of pine cones in the living-room, or wandering along the edge of the lake in the cold brilliant sunshine, or in the more mysterious depths of the forest, listening to the silence or watching the drops of light fall through the matted treetops, felt more at peace with the world than she had done since her fatal embarkation on the political sea. She put the memory of Harriet Walker, insistent at first, impatiently aside, and in a day or two that shadow crept back to its grave.
For a few days her mind, in its grateful repose, hesitated to grapple with the question which had sent her to the mountains; and on one of them, while thinking idly on the great political questions which had magnetized so much of her thought during the past year, the inspiration for which she had so often longed shot up from the concentrated results of thinking and experience, and revealed in what manner she could be of service to her country. This was, whatever her personal life, to gather about her, once a week, as many bright boys of her own condition as she could find, and interest and educate them in the principles of patriotic statesmanship. With her own burning interest in the subject and her personal fascination, she could accomplish far more than any weary professor could do.
She had come up to these fastnesses to decide the future happiness of one or two of three people, and she felt sober enough; but for almost a week she wished that she could live here alone for the rest of her life: she believed that in time she would be serenely content. She had the largest capacity for human happiness, but she guessed that the imagination could be so trained that when far from worldly conditions it could create a world of its own, and would shrink more and more from the practical realities. For Imagination has the instinct of a nun in its depths and loves the cloister of a picturesque solitude. It is a Fool's Paradise, but not inferior to the one which mortals are at liberty to enter and ruin.
But Betty could not live here alone, she could not ignore her responsibilities in any such primitive fashion; and so long as her heart was alive it would make battle for real and tangible happiness.
She had a question to decide which involved not only the heart but the mind: if she made a mistake now, she would be at odds with her higher faculties for the rest of her life. She dreaded the sophistry which sat on either side of the subject; and it was a question whether the very strength of her impulse toward the man she had loved for a year was not the strongest argument in its favour.
But she had given her word to another man, and she had the high and almost fanatical sense of honour of the Southern race. On the other hand, she had a practical modern brain, and during the last year she had been living in close contact with much hard common-sense. She had imagination, and she knew that she already had made Burleigh suffer deeply, and had it in her power to raise that suffering to acuteness; and if that buoyant nature were soured, a useful career might be seriously impaired. On the other hand, she had made a greater man more miserable still, and while he was finding life black enough she had rushed into the camp of the enemy; and his capacity for suffering was far deeper and more enduring than that of the younger man.
She tried to put herself as much aside from the question as possible, but she had her rights and they made themselves heard. She knew, had known at once, that she had outraged all she held most dear, in engaging herself to one man when she loved another, and she had begun to wonder—in irresistible flashes—before the news had come which sent her to the mountains, if she should falter at the last moment. But breeding has carried many a woman over the ploughshares of life, and her mind was probably strong enough to go on to the inevitable without theatric climax. At the same time the idea of marriage with one man when she loved another was abhorrent; that it was particularly so since marriage with the other had become possible, she understood perfectly. And although she continued to reason and to argue, she had a lurking suspicion that while she might be strong enough to conquer a desire she might not be able to conquer a physical revolt, and that it would rout her standards and decide the issue.
She had made up her mind that she would hesitate for a month and no longer, and she also had determined that she would decide the question for herself and throw none of the responsibility on Senator North; she felt the impulse to write to him impersonally more than once. (Perhaps her sense of humour also restrained her.) She wondered if it were one year or twenty years since she had gone to him for advice; and she knew that whichever way she decided, the desire for his good opinion would have something to do with it.
There are only a certain number of arguments in any brain, and after they have been reiterated a sufficient number of times they pall. From argument Betty lapsed naturally into meditation, and the subject of these meditations, tender, regretful, and impassioned, was one man only; and Burleigh had no place in them. Occasionally she forced him into her mind, but he seemed as anxious to get out as she was to drive him; and after the ice melted and she was able to spend hours on the lake, and rest under spreading oaks, where she had only to shut her eyes to imagine herself companioned, she felt herself unfaithful if she cast a solitary thought to Burleigh.
At the end of the month she was not tired of solitude, but she was tired of her intellectual attitude. She was human first and mental afterward; and she wanted nothing on earth but to be the wife of the man whom she had loved for a lifetime in a year. The moment she formulated this wish, hesitation fled and she could not wind up her engagement with Burleigh rapidly enough. Her letter, however, was very sweet and apologetic, and it was also very honest. She knew that unless she told him she loved another man and intended to marry him, he would take the next train for the Adirondacks and plead his cause in person. His reply was characteristic.
"Very well," it ran. "I do not pretend to say I was not prepared after your last letter from New York. And although I could not guess your motive in accepting me, I knew that you did not love me. But if I am not overwhelmed with surprise, the pain is no easier on that account, and will not be until the grass has had time to grow over it a little. And at least it is a relief to know the worst. Of course I forgive you. I doubt if any man could feel bitterly toward you. You compel too much love for that.
"Don't worry about me. I have work enough to do—a State to talk sense into and a nation to which to devote my poor energies. My brain such as it is will be constantly occupied, which is the next best good a man can have." ROBERT BURLEIGH.
Betty wrote him four pages of enthusiastic friendliness in reply, and paid him the compliment of postponing her letter to Senator North until the following day.
But on that day she rose with the feeling that the sun never would set.
She was as brief as possible, for she knew that he hated long letters. Nevertheless, she conveyed an exact impression of her weeks of deliberation and analysis.
"I want you to understand," she went on, "that my only wish when I came here for solitary thought was to do the right thing, irrespective of my own wishes in the matter. But it seems to me there is exactly as much to be said on one side as on the other, and it all comes to this: right or wrong, I have decided for you because I love you; and if you no longer can admire me, if you think that I have violated my sense of honour, then at least I shall marry no one else. B. M."
And as her imagination was strong she did allow herself to be tortured by doubts during the three days that elapsed before she heard from him. She had hoped he would telegraph, but he did not, and her imagination and her common-sense had a long and indecisive argument which threatened ultimate depression. On the third night, however, a messenger from the hotel opposite brought her a note from Senator North.
"I don't know that your mental exercise has done you any harm," he had written, "but it certainly was thrown away. You have too much common-sense and too thorough a capacity for loving to do anything so foolish or so outrageous as to marry the wrong man. If you had followed a romantic impulse—induced by nervous excitement—and married him the day you learned that your word might be put to too severe a test, you would have been miserable, and so would Burleigh. A mistaken sense of duty has been the cause of quite one fourth of the unhappiness of mankind, and few have been so bigoted as not to acknowledge this when too late. And a broken engagement is a small injustice to a man compared to a lifetime with an unloving wife. Burleigh is unhappy now, but it is no lack of admiration which prompts me to say that if he had married you he would have been unhappier still. You could do nothing by halves.
"Formalities with us would be an affectation unworthy of either, and I have come to you at once. I knew that you would send for me, but I preferred to wait until you wrote that your engagement was broken. What I felt when I received your note announcing it, I leave to your imagination, and I forgot it as quickly as possible. I understood perfectly, but you exaggerated the dangers; for my love for you is so great and so absorbing, so complete in all its parts, that nothing but marriage would satisfy me. I should have preferred a memory to a failure.
"If your mother were with you, I should go over to-night. But I shall wait for you at five to-morrow morning where you were in the habit of letting me board your boat. And the day will not be long enough! R. N."
Betty slept little that night, but felt no lack of freshness the next morning when she rose shortly after four. A broken night meant little to her now, and happiness would have stimulated every faculty if she had not slept for a week.
She rowed swiftly across the lake. It was almost June now, and the warmth of summer was in the air, the paler greens among the grim old trees of the forest. The birds had come from the South and were singing to the accompaniment of the pines, the roar of distant cataracts; and yet the world seemed still. The stars were white and faint; the moon was tangled in a treetop on the highest peak.
He might have been the only man awake as he stood with the forest behind him, and she recalled her fancy that although her horizon was thick with flying mist his figure stood there, immovable, always. He looked as if he had not moved since he stood there last, but the mist was gone.
As he stepped into the boat, she moved back that he might take the oars.
"I have on a white frock, and a blue ribbon in my hair," she said nervously, but smiling, "else I could not have forgotten that a year has come and gone."
He too was smiling. "I think it is the only year we ever shall want to forget," he said. And he rowed up the lake.