There was at this time in the Senate of the United States an eminent and respected gentleman, scholarly, orderly, honorable, and radical,—the fit representative of a scholarly, orderly, honorable, and radical Commonwealth. For many years he had held his trust with conscious rectitude, and a slight depreciation of other forms of merit; and for as many years had been as regularly returned to his seat by his constituency with equally conscious rectitude in themselves and an equal skepticism regarding others. Removed by his nature beyond the reach of certain temptations, and by circumstances beyond even the knowledge of others, his social and political integrity was spotless. An orator and practical debater, his refined tastes kept him from personality, and the public recognition of the complete unselfishness of his motives and the magnitude of his dogmas protected him from scurrility. His principles had never been appealed to by a bribe; he had rarely been approached by an emotion.
A man of polished taste in art and literature, and possessing the means to gratify it, his luxurious home was filled with treasures he had himself collected, and further enhanced by the stamp of his appreciation. His library had not only the elegance of adornment that his wealth could bring and his taste approve, but a certain refined negligence of habitual use, and the easy disorder of the artist's workshop. All this was quickly noted by a young girl who stood on its threshold at the close of a dull January day.
The card that had been brought to the Senator bore the name of “Carmen de Haro”; and modestly in the right hand corner, in almost microscopic script, the further description of herself as “Artist.” Perhaps the picturesqueness of the name, and its historic suggestion caught the scholar's taste, for when to his request, through his servant, that she would be kind enough to state her business, she replied as frankly that her business was personal to himself, he directed that she should be admitted. Then entrenching himself behind his library table, overlooking a bastion of books, and a glacis of pamphlets and papers, and throwing into his forehead and eyes an expression of utter disqualification for anything but the business before him, he calmly awaited the intruder.
She came, and for an instant stood, hesitatingly, framing herself as a picture in the door. Mrs. Hopkinson was right,—she had “no style,” unless an original and half-foreign quaintness could be called so. There was a desperate attempt visible to combine an American shawl with the habits of a mantilla, and it was always slipping from one shoulder, that was so supple and vivacious as to betray the deficiencies of an education in stays. There was a cluster of black curls around her low forehead, fitting her so closely as to seem to be a part of the seal-skin cap she wore.
Once, from the force of habit, she attempted to put her shawl over her head and talk through the folds gathered under her chin, but an astonished look from the Senator checked her. Nevertheless, he felt relieved, and rising, motioned her to a chair with a heartiness he would have scarcely shown to a Parisian toilleta. And when, with two or three quick, long steps, she reached his side, and showed, a frank, innocent, but strong and determined little face, feminine only in its flash of eye and beauty of lip and chin curves, he put down the pamphlet he had taken up somewhat ostentatiously, and gently begged to know her business.
I think I have once before spoken of her voice,—an organ more often cultivated by my fair country-women for singing than for speaking, which, considering that much of our practical relations with the sex are carried on without the aid of an opera score, seems a mistaken notion of theirs,—and of its sweetness, gentle inflexion, and musical emphasis. She had the advantage of having been trained in a musical language, and came of a race with whom catarrhs and sore throats were rare. So that in a few brief phrases she sang the Senator into acquiescence as she imparted the plain libretto of her business,—namely, a “desire to see some of his rare engravings.”
Now the engravings in question were certain etchings of the early Great Apprentices of the art, and were, I am happy to believe, extremely rare. From my unprofessional view they were exceedingly bad,—showing the mere genesis of something since perfected, but dear, of course, to the true collector's soul. I don't believe that Carmen really admired them either. But the minx knew that the Senator prided himself on having the only “pot-hooks” of the great “A,” or the first artistic efforts of “B,”—I leave the real names to be filled in by the connoisseur,—and the Senator became interested. For the last year, two or three of these abominations had been hanging in his study, utterly ignored by the casual visitor. But here was appreciation! “She was,” she added, “only a poor young artist, unable to purchase such treasures, but equally unable to resist the opportunity afforded her, even at the risk of seeming bold, or of obtruding upon a great man's privacy,” &c. &c.
This flattery, which, if offered in the usual legal tender of the country, would have been looked upon as counterfeit, delivered here in a foreign accent, with a slightly tropical warmth, was accepted by the Senator as genuine. These children of the Sun are so impulsive! We, of course, feel a little pity for the person who thus transcends our standard of good taste and violates our conventional canon,—but they are always sincere. The cold New Englander saw nothing wrong in one or two direct and extravagant compliments, that would have insured his visitor's early dismissal if tendered in the clipped metallic phrases of the Commonwealth he represented.
So that in a few moments the black, curly head of the little artist and the white, flowing locks of the Senator were close together bending over the rack that contained the engravings. It was then that Carmen, listening to a graphic description of the early rise of Art in the Netherlands, forgot herself and put her shawl around her head, holding its folds in her little brown hand. In this situation they were, at different times during the next two hours, interrupted by five Congressmen, three Senators, a Cabinet officer, and a Judge of the Supreme Bench,—each of whom was quickly but courteously dismissed. Popular sentiment, however, broke out in the hall.
“Well, I'm blanked, but this gets me.” (The speaker was a Territorial delegate.)
“At his time o' life, too, lookin' over pictures with a gal young enough to be his grandchild.” (This from a venerable official, since suspected of various erotic irregularities.)
“She don't handsome any.” (The honorable member from Dakota.)
“This accounts for his protracted silence during the sessions.” (A serious colleague from the Senator's own State.)
“Oh, blank it all!” (Omnes.)
Four went home to tell their wives. There are few things more touching in the matrimonial compact than the superb frankness with which each confides to each the various irregularities of their friends. It is upon these sacred confidences that the firm foundations of marriage rest unshaken.
Of course the objects of this comment, at least ONE of them, were quite oblivious. “I trust,” said Carmen, timidly, when they had for the fourth time regarded in rapt admiration an abominable something by some Dutch wood-chopper, “I trust I am not keeping you from your great friends:”—her pretty eyelids were cast down in tremulous distress:—“I should never forgive myself. Perhaps it is important business of the State?”
“Oh, dear, no! THEY will come again,—it's THEIR business.”
The Senator meant it kindly. It was as near the perilous edge of a compliment as your average cultivated Boston man ever ventures, and Carmen picked it up, femininely, by its sentimental end. “And I suppose I shall not trouble you again?”
“I shall always be proud to place the portfolio at your disposal. Command me at any time,” said the Senator, with dignity.
“You are kind. You are good,” said Carmen, “and I—I'm but,—look you,—only a poor girl from California, that you know not.”
“Pardon me, I know your country well.” And indeed he could have told her the exact number of bushels of wheat to the acre in her own county of Monterey, its voting population, its political bias. Yet of the more important product before him, after the manner of book-read men, he knew nothing.
Carmen was astonished, but respectful. It transpired presently that she was not aware of the rapid growth of the silk worm in her own district, knew nothing of the Chinese question, and very little of the American mining laws. Upon these questions the Senator enlightened her fully. “Your name is historic, by the way,” he said pleasantly. “There was a Knight of Alcantara, a 'De Haro,' one of the emigrants with Las Casas.”
Carmen nodded her head quickly, “Yes; my great-great-great-g-r-e-a-t grandfather!”
The Senator stared.
“Oh, yes. I am the niece of Victor Castro, who married my father's sister.”
“The Victor Castro of the 'Blue Mass' mine?” asked the Senator abruptly.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
Had the Senator been of the Gashwiler type, he would have expressed himself, after the average masculine fashion, by a long-drawn whistle. But his only perceptible appreciation of a sudden astonishment and suspicion in his mind was a lowering of the social thermometer of the room so decided that poor Carmen looked up innocently, chilled, and drew her shawl closer around her shoulders.
“I have something more to ask,” said Carmen, hanging her head,—“it is a great, oh, a very great favor.”
The Senator had retreated behind his bastion of books again, and was visibly preparing for an assault. He saw it all now. He had been, in some vague way, deluded. He had given confidential audience to the niece of one of the Great Claimants before Congress. The inevitable axe had come to the grindstone. What might not this woman dare ask of him? He was the more implacable that he felt he had already been prepossessed—and honestly prepossessed—in her favor. He was angry with her for having pleased him. Under the icy polish of his manner there were certain Puritan callosities caused by early straight-lacing. He was not yet quite free from his ancestor's cheerful ethics that Nature, as represented by an Impulse, was as much to be restrained as Order represented by a Quaker.
Without apparently noticing his manner, Carmen went on, with a certain potential freedom of style, gesture, and manner scarcely to be indicated in her mere words. “You know, then, I am of Spanish blood, and that, what was my adopted country, our motto was, 'God and Liberty.' It was of you, sir,—the great Emancipator,—the apostle of that Liberty,—the friend of the down-trodden and oppressed,—that I, as a child, first knew. In the histories of this great country I have read of you, I have learned your orations. I have longed to hear you in your own pulpit deliver the creed of my ancestors. To hear you, of yourself, speak, ah! Madre de Dios! what shall I say,—speak the oration eloquent,—to make the—what you call—the debate, that is what I have for so long hoped. Eh! Pardon,—you are thinking me foolish,—wild, eh?—a small child,—eh?”
Becoming more and more dialectical as she went on, she said suddenly, “I have you of myself offended. You are mad of me as a bold, bad child? It is so?”
The Senator, as visibly becoming limp and weak again behind his entrenchments, managed to say, “Oh, no!” then, “really!” and finally, “Tha-a-nks!”
“I am here but for a day. I return to California in a day, as it were to-morrow. I shall never, never hear you speak in your place in the Capitol of this great country?”
The Senator said hastily that he feared—he in fact was convinced—that his duty during this session was required more at his desk, in the committee work, than in speaking, &c., &c.
“Ah,” said Carmen sadly, “it is true, then, all this that I have heard. It is true that what they have told me,—that you have given up the great party,—that your voice is not longer heard in the old—what you call this—eh—the old ISSUES?”
“If any one has told you that, Miss De Haro,” responded the Senator sharply, “he has spoken foolishly. You have been misinformed. May I ask who—”
“Ah!” said Carmen, “I know not! It is in the air! I am a stranger. Perhaps I am deceived. But it is of all. I say to them, When shall I hear him speak? I go day after day to the Capitol, I watch him,—the great Emancipator,—but it is of business, eh?—it is the claim of that one, it is the tax, eh? it is the impost, it is the post-office, but it is the great speech of human rights—never, NEVER. I say, 'How arrives all this?' And some say, and shake their heads, 'never again he speaks.' He is what you call 'played—yes, it is so, eh?—played out.' I know it not,—it is a word from Bos-ton, perhaps? They say he has—eh, I speak not the English well—the party he has shaken, 'shook,'—yes,—he has the party 'shaken,' eh? It is right,—it is the language of Bos-ton, eh?”
“Permit me to say, Miss De Haro,” returned the Senator, rising with some asperity, “that you seem to have been unfortunate in your selection of acquaintances, and still more so in your ideas of the derivations of the English tongue. The—er—the—er—expressions you have quoted are not common to Boston, but emanate, I believe, from the West.”
Carmen de Haro contritely buried everything but her black eyes in her shawl.
“No one,” he continued, more gently, sitting down again, “has the right to forecast from my past what I intend to do in the future, or designate the means I may choose to serve the principles I hold or the party I represent. Those are MY functions. At the same time, should occasion—or opportunity—for we are within a day or two of the close of the Session—”
“Yes,” interrupted Carmen, sadly, “I see,—it will be some business, some claim, something for somebody,—ah! Madre de Dios,—you will not speak, and I—”
“When do you think of returning?” asked the Senator, with grave politeness; “when are we to lose you?”
“I shall stay to the last,—to the end of the Session,” said Carmen. “And NOW I shall go.” She got up and pulled her shawl viciously over her shoulders, with a pretty pettishness, perhaps the most feminine thing she had done that evening. Possibly, the most genuine.
The Senator smiled affably: “You do not deserve to be disappointed in either case; but it is later than you imagine; let me help you on the shorter distance in my carriage; it is at the door.”
He accompanied her gravely to the carriage. As it rolled away, she buried her little figure in its ample cushions and chuckled to herself, albeit a little hysterically. When she had reached her destination, she found herself crying, and hastily, and somewhat angrily, dried her eyes as she drew up at the door of her lodgings.
“How have you prospered?” asked Mr. Harlowe, of counsel for Royal Thatcher, as he gallantly assisted her from the carriage. “I have been waiting here for two hours; your interview must have been prolonged,—that was a good sign.”
“Don't ask me now,” said Carmen, a little savagely, “I'm worn out and tired.”
Mr. Harlowe bowed. “I trust you will be better to-morrow, for we expect our friend, Mr. Thatcher.”
Carmen's brown cheek flushed slightly. “He should have been here before. Where is he? What was he doing?”
“He was snowed up on the plains. He is coming as fast as steam can carry him; but he may be too late.”
Carmen did not reply.
The lawyer lingered. “How did you find the great New-England Senator?” he asked with a slight professional levity.
Carmen was tired, Carmen was worried, Carmen was a little self-reproachful, and she kindled easily. Consequently she said icily:
“I found him A GENTLEMAN!”
The closing of the —— Congress was not unlike the closing of the several preceding Congresses. There was the same unbusiness-like, impractical haste; the same hurried, unjust, and utterly inadequate adjustment of unfinished, ill-digested business, that would not have been tolerated for a moment by the sovereign people in any private interest they controlled. There were frauds rushed through; there were long-suffering, righteous demands shelved; there were honest, unpaid debts dishonored by scant appropriations; there were closing scenes which only the saving sense of American humor kept from being utterly vile. The actors, the legislators themselves, knew it, and laughed at it; the commentators, the Press, knew it and laughed at it; the audience, the great American people, knew it and laughed at it. And nobody for an instant conceived that it ever, under any circumstances, might be otherwise.
The claim of Roscommon was among the Unfinished Business. The claimant himself, haggard, pathetic, importunate, and obstinate, was among the Unfinished Business. Various Congressmen, more or less interested in the success of the claim, were among the Unfinished Business. The member from Fresno, who had changed his derringer for a speech against the claimant, was among the Unfinished Business. The gifted Gashwiler, uneasy in his soul over certain other Unfinished Business in the shape of his missing letters, but dropping oil and honey as he mingled with his brothers, was King of Misrule and Lord of the Unfinished Business. Pretty Mrs. Hopkinson, prudently escorted by her husband, but imprudently ogled by admiring Congressmen, lent the charm of her presence to the finishing of Unfinished Business. One or two editors, who had dreams of a finished financial business, arising out of Unfinished Business, were there also, like ancient bards, to record with paean or threnody the completion of Unfinished Business. Various unclean birds, scenting carrion in Unfinished Business, hovered in the halls or roosted in the Lobby.
The lower house, under the tutelage of the gifted Gashwiler, drank deeply of Roscommon and his intoxicating claim, and passed the half-empty bottle to the Senate as Unfinished Business. But, alas! in the very rush, and storm, and tempest of the unfinishing business, an unlooked-for interruption arose in the person of a great Senator whose power none could oppose, whose right to free and extended utterance at all times none could gainsay. A claim for poultry, violently seized by the army of Sherman during his march through Georgia, from the hen-coop of an alleged loyal Irishman, opened a constitutional question, and with it the lips of the great Senator.
For seven hours he spoke eloquently, earnestly, convincingly. For seven hours the old issues of party and policy were severally taken up and dismissed in the old forcible rhetoric that had early made him famous. Interruptions from other Senators, now forgetful of Unfinished Business, and wild with reanimated party zeal; interruptions from certain Senators mindful of Unfinished Business, and unable to pass the Roscommon bottle, only spurred him to fresh exertion. The tocsin sounded in the Senate was heard in the lower house. Highly-excited members congregated at the doors of the Senate, and left Unfinished Business to take care of itself.
Left to itself for seven hours, Unfinished Business gnashed its false teeth and tore its wig in impotent fury in corridor and hall. For seven hours the gifted Gashwiler had continued the manufacture of oil and honey, whose sweetness, however, was slowly palling upon the congressional lip; for seven hours Roscommon and friends beat with impatient feet the lobby, and shook fists, more or less discolored, at the distinguished Senator. For seven hours the one or two editors were obliged to sit and calmly compliment the great speech which that night flashed over the wires of a continent with the old electric thrill. And, worse than all, they were obliged to record with it the closing of the —— Congress, with more than the usual amount of Unfinished Business.
A little group of friends surrounded the great Senator with hymns of praise and congratulations. Old adversaries saluted him courteously as they passed by with the respect of strong men. A little woman with a shawl drawn over her shoulders, and held with one small brown hand, approached him timidly:
“I speak not the English well,” she said gently, “but I have read much. I have read in the plays of your Shakspeare. I would like to say to you the words of Rosalind to Orlando when he did fight: 'Sir you have wrestled well, and have overthrown more than your enemies.'” And with these words she was gone.
Yet not so quickly but that pretty Mrs. Hopkinson, coming,—as Victrix always comes to Victor, to thank the great Senator, albeit the faces of her escorts were shrouded in gloom,—saw the shawled figure disappear.
“There,” she said, pinching Wiles mischievously, “there! that's the woman you were afraid of. Look at her. Look at that dress. Ah, Heavens! look at that shawl. Didn't I tell you she had no style?”
“Who is she?” said Wiles sullenly.
“Carmen de Haro, of course,” said the lady vivaciously. “What are you hurrying away so for? You're absolutely pulling me along.”
Mr. Wiles had just caught sight of the travel-worn face of Royal Thatcher among the crowd that thronged the stair-case. Thatcher appeared pale and distrait: Mr. Harlowe, his counsel, at his side, rallied him.
“No one would think you had just got a new lease of your property, and escaped a great swindle. What's the matter with you? Miss De Haro passed us just now. It was she who spoke to the Senator. Why did you not recognize her?”
“I was thinking,” said Thatcher gloomily.
“Well, you take things coolly! And certainly you are not very demonstrative towards the woman who saved you to-day. For, as sure as you live, it was she who drew that speech out of the Senator.”
Thatcher did not reply, but moved away. He HAD noticed Carmen de Haro, and was about to greet her with mingled pleasure and embarrassment. But he had heard her compliment to the Senator, and this strong, preoccupied, automatic man, who only ten days before had no thought beyond his property, was now thinking more of that compliment to another than of his success; and was beginning to hate the Senator who had saved him, the lawyer who stood beside him, and even the little figure that had tripped down the steps unconscious of him.
It was somewhat inconsistent with Royal Thatcher's embarrassment and sensitiveness that he should, on leaving the Capitol, order a carriage and drive directly to the lodgings of Miss De Haro. That on finding she was not at home, he should become again sulky and suspicious, and even be ashamed of the honest impulse that led him there, was, I suppose, manlike and natural. He felt that he had done all the courtesy required; he had promptly answered her dispatch with his presence. If she chose to be absent at such a moment, HE had at least done HIS duty. In short, there was scarcely any absurdity of the imagination which this once practical man did not permit himself to indulge in, yet always with a certain consciousness that he was allowing his feelings to run away with him,—a fact that did not tend to make him better humored, and rather inclined him to place the responsibility of the elopement on somebody else. If Miss De Haro had been home, &c. &c., and not going into ecstasies over speeches, &c. &c., and had attended to her business, i. e., being exactly what he had supposed her to be,—all this would not have happened.
I am aware that this will not heighten the reader's respect for my hero. But I fancy that the imperceptible progress of a sincere passion in the matured strong man is apt to be marked with even more than the usual haste and absurdity of callous youth.
The fever that runs riot in the veins of the robust is apt to pass your ailing weakling by. Possibly there may be some immunity in inoculation. It is Lothario who is always self-possessed and does and says the right thing, while poor honest Coelebs becomes ridiculous with genuine emotion.
He rejoined his lawyer in no very gracious mood. The chambers occupied by Mr. Harlowe were in the basement of a private dwelling once occupied and made historic by an Honorable Somebody, who, however, was remembered only by the landlord and the last tenant. There were various shelves in the walls divided into compartments, sarcastically known as “pigeon holes,” in which the dove of peace had never rested, but which still perpetuated, in their legends, the feuds and animosities of suitors now but common dust together. There was a portrait, apparently of a cherub, which on nearer inspection turned out to be a famous English Lord Chancellor in his flowing wig.
There were books with dreary, unenlivening titles,—egotistic always, as recording Smith's opinions on this, and Jones's commentaries on that. There was a hand bill tacked on the wall, which at first offered hilarious suggestions of a circus or a steamboat excursion, but which turned out only to be a sheriff's sale. There were several oddly-shaped packages in newspaper wrappings, mysterious and awful in dark corners, that might have contained forgotten law papers or the previous week's washing of the eminent counsel. There were one or two newspapers, which at first offered entertaining prospects to the waiting client, but always proved to be a law record or a Supreme Court decision. There was the bust of a late distinguished jurist, which apparently had never been dusted since he himself became dust, and had already grown a perceptibly dusty moustache on his severely-judicial upper lip. It was a cheerless place in the sunshine of day; at night, when it ought, by every suggestion of its dusty past, to have been left to the vengeful ghosts, the greater part of whose hopes and passions were recorded and gathered there; when in the dark the dead hands of forgotten men were stretched from their dusty graves to fumble once more for their old title deeds; at night, when it was lit up by flaring gaslight, the hollow mockery of this dissipation was so apparent that people in the streets, looking through the illuminated windows, felt as if the privacy of a family vault had been intruded upon by body-snatchers.
Royal Thatcher glanced around the room, took in all its dreary suggestions in a half-weary, half-indifferent sort of way, and dropped into the lawyer's own revolving chair as that gentleman entered from the adjacent room.
“Well, you got back soon, I see,” said Harlowe briskly.
“Yes,” said his client, without looking up, and with this notable distinction between himself and all other previous clients, that he seemed absolutely less interested than the lawyer. “Yes, I'm here; and, upon my soul, I don't exactly know why.”
“You told me of certain papers you had discovered,” said the lawyer suggestively.
“Oh, yes,” returned Thatcher with a slight yawn. “I've got here some papers somewhere;”—he began to feel in his coat pocket languidly;—“but, by the way, this is a rather dreary and God-forsaken sort of place! Let's go up to Welker's, and you can look at them over a bottle of champagne.”
“After I've looked at them, I've something to show you, myself,” said Harlowe; “and as for the champagne, we'll have that in the other room, by and by. At present I want to have my head clear, and yours too,—if you'll oblige me by becoming sufficiently interested in your own affairs to talk to me about them.”
Thatcher was gazing abstractedly at the fire. He started. “I dare say,” he began, “I'm not very interesting; yet it's possible that my affairs have taken up a little too much of my time. However,—” he stopped, took from his pocket an envelope, and threw it on the desk,—“there are some papers. I don't know what value they may be; that is for you to determine. I don't know that I've any legal right to their possession,—that is for you to say, too. They came to me in a queer way. On the overland journey here I lost my bag, containing my few traps and some letters and papers 'of no value,' as the advertisements say, 'to any but the owner.' Well, the bag was lost, but the stage driver declares that it was stolen by a fellow-passenger,—a man by the name of Giles, or Stiles, or Piles—”
“Wiles,” said Harlowe earnestly.
“Yes,” continued Thatcher, suppressing a yawn; “yes, I guess you're right,—Wiles. Well, the stage driver, finally believing this, goes to work and quietly and unostentatiously steals—I say, have you got a cigar?”
“I'll get you one.”
Harlowe disappeared in the adjoining room. Thatcher dragged Harlowe's heavy, revolving desk chair, which never before had been removed from its sacred position, to the fire, and began to poke the coals abstractedly.
Harlowe reappeared with cigars and matches. Thatcher lit one mechanically, and said, between the pulls:
“Do you—ever—talk—to yourself?”
“No!—why?”
“I thought I heard your voice just now in the other room. Anyhow, this is an awful spooky place. If I stayed here alone half an hour, I'd fancy that the Lord Chancellor up there would step down in his robes, out of his frame, to keep me company.”
“Nonsense! When I'm busy, I often sit here and write until after midnight. It's so quiet!”
“D—mnably so!”
“Well, to go back to the papers. Somebody stole your bag, or you lost it. YOU stole—”
“The driver stole,” suggested Thatcher, so languidly that it could hardly be called an interruption.
“Well, we'll say the driver stole, and passed over to you as his accomplice, confederate, or receiver, certain papers belonging—”
“See here, Harlowe, I don't feel like joking in a ghostly law office after midnight. Here are your facts. Yuba Bill, the driver, stole a bag from this passenger, Wiles, or Smiles, and handed it to me to insure the return of my own. I found in it some papers concerning my case. There they are. Do with them what you like.”
Thatcher turned his eyes again abstractedly to the fire.
Harlowe took out the first paper:
“A-w, this seems to be a telegram. Yes, eh? 'Come to Washington at once.—Carmen de Haro.'”
Thatcher started, blushed like a girl, and hurriedly reached for the paper.
“Nonsense. That's a mistake. A dispatch I mislaid in the envelope.”
“I see,” said the lawyer dryly.
“I thought I had torn it up,” continued Thatcher, after an awkward pause. I regret to say that here that usually truthful man elaborated a fiction. He had consulted it a dozen times a day on the journey, and it was quite worn in its enfoldings. Harlowe's quick eye had noticed this, but he speedily became interested and absorbed in the other papers. Thatcher lapsed into contemplation of the fire.
“Well,” said Harlowe, finally turning to his client, “here's enough to unseat Gashwiler, or close his mouth. As to the rest, it's good reading—but I needn't tell you—no LEGAL evidence. But it's proof enough to stop them from ever trying it again,—when the existence of this record is made known. Bribery is a hard thing to fix on a man; the only witness is naturally particeps criminis;—but it would not be easy for them to explain away this rascal's record. One or two things I don't understand: What's this opposite the Hon. X's name, 'Took the medicine nicely, and feels better?' and here, just in the margin, after Y's, 'Must be labored with?'”
“I suppose our California slang borrows largely from the medical and spiritual profession,” returned Thatcher. “But isn't it odd that a man should keep a conscientious record of his own villainy?”
Harlowe, a little abashed at his want of knowledge of American metaphor, now felt himself at home. “Well, no. It's not unusual. In one of those books yonder there is the record of a case where a man, who had committed a series of nameless atrocities, extending over a period of years, absolutely kept a memorandum of them in his pocket diary. It was produced in Court. Why, my dear fellow, one half our business arises from the fact that men and women are in the habit of keeping letters and documents that they might—I don't say, you know, that they OUGHT, that's a question of sentiment or ethics—but that they MIGHT destroy.”
Thatcher half-mechanically took the telegram of poor Carmen and threw it in the fire. Harlowe noticed the act and smiled.
“I'll venture to say, however, that there's nothing in the bag that YOU lost that need give you a moment's uneasiness. It's only your rascal or fool who carries with him that which makes him his own detective.”
“I had a friend,” continued Harlowe, “a clever fellow enough, but who was so foolish as to seriously complicate himself with a woman. He was himself the soul of honor, and at the beginning of their correspondence he proposed that they should each return the other's letters with their answer. They did so for years, but it cost him ten thousand dollars and no end of trouble after all.”
“Why?” asked Thatcher simply.
“Because he was such an egotistical ass as TO KEEP THE LETTER PROPOSING IT, which she had duly returned, among his papers as a sentimental record. Of course somebody eventually found it.”
“Good night,” said Thatcher, rising abruptly. “If I stayed here much longer I should begin to disbelieve my own mother.”
“I have known of such hereditary traits,” returned Harlowe with a laugh. “But come, you must not go without the champagne.” He led the way to the adjacent room, which proved to be only the ante-chamber of another, on the threshold of which Thatcher stopped with genuine surprise. It was an elegantly furnished library.
“Sybarite! Why was I never here before?”
“Because you came as a client; to-night you are my guest. All who enter here leave their business, with their hats, in the hall. Look; there isn't a law book on those shelves; that table never was defaced by a title deed or parchment. You look puzzled? Well, it was a whim of mine to put my residence and my work-shop under the same roof, yet so distinct that they would never interfere with each other. You know the house above is let out to lodgers. I occupy the first floor with my mother and sister, and this is my parlor. I do my work in that severe room that fronts the street: here is where I play. A man must have something else in life than mere business. I find it less harmful and expensive to have my pleasure here.”
Thatcher had sunk moodily in the embracing arms of an easy chair. He was thinking deeply; he was fond of books too, and, like all men who have fared hard and led wandering lives, he knew the value of cultivated repose. Like all men who have been obliged to sleep under blankets and in the open air, he appreciated the luxuries of linen sheets and a frescoed roof. It is, by the way, only your sick city clerk or your dyspeptic clergyman who fancy that they have found in the bad bread, fried steaks, and frowzy flannels of mountain picknicking the true art of living. And it is a somewhat notable fact that your true mountaineer or your gentleman who has been obliged to honestly “rough it,” does not, as a general thing, write books about its advantages, or implore their fellow mortals to come and share their solitude and their discomforts.
Thoroughly appreciating the taste and comfort of Harlowe's library, yet half-envious of its owner, and half-suspicious that his own earnest life for the past few years might have been different, Thatcher suddenly started from his seat and walked towards a parlor easel, whereon stood a picture. It was Carmen de Haro's first sketch of the furnace and the mine.
“I see you are taken with that picture,” said Harlowe, pausing with the champagne bottle in his hand. “You show your good taste. It's been much admired. Observe how splendidly that firelight plays over the sleeping face of that figure, yet brings out by very contrast its almost death-like repose. Those rocks are powerfully handled; what a suggestion of mystery in those shadows! You know the painter?”
Thatcher murmured, “Miss De Haro,” with a new and rather odd self-consciousness in speaking her name.
“Yes. And you know the story of the picture of course?”
Thatcher thought he didn't. Well, no; in fact, he did not remember.
“Why, this recumbent figure was an old Spanish lover of hers, whom she believed to have been murdered there. It's a ghastly fancy, isn't it?”
Two things annoyed Thatcher: first the epithet “lover,” as applied to Concho by another man; second, that the picture belonged to him: and what the d—-l did she mean by—
“Yes,” he broke out finally, “but how did YOU get it?”
“Oh, I bought it of her. I've been a sort of patron of her ever since I found out how she stood towards us. As she was quite alone here in Washington, my mother and sister have taken her up, and have been doing the social thing.”
“How long since?” asked Thatcher.
“Oh, not long. The day she telegraphed you, she came here to know what she could do for us, and when I said nothing could be done except to keep Congress off, why, she went and DID IT. For SHE, and she alone, got that speech out of the Senator. But,” he added, a little mischievously, “you seem to know very little about her?”
“No!—I—that is—I've been very busy lately,” returned Thatcher, staring at the picture. “Does she come here often?”
“Yes, lately, quite often; she was here this evening with mother; was here, I think, when you came.”
Thatcher looked intently at Harlowe. But that gentleman's face betrayed no confusion. Thatcher refilled his glass a little awkwardly, tossed off the liquor at a draught, and rose to his feet.
“Come, old fellow, you're not going now. I shan't permit it,” said Harlowe, laying his hand kindly on his client's shoulder. “You're out of sorts! Stay here with me to-night. Our accommodations are not large, but are elastic. I can bestow you comfortably until morning. Wait here a moment while I give the necessary orders.”
Thatcher was not sorry to be left alone. In the last half hour he had become convinced that his love for Carmen de Haro had been in some way most dreadfully abused. While HE was hard at work in California, she was being introduced in Washington society by parties with eligible brothers who bought her paintings. It is a relief to the truly jealous mind to indulge in plurals. Thatcher liked to think that she was already beset by hundreds of brothers.
He still kept staring at the picture. By and by it faded away in part, and a very vivid recollection of the misty, midnight, moonlit walk he had once taken with her came back, and refilled the canvas with its magic. He saw the ruined furnace; the dark, overhanging masses of rock, the trembling intricacies of foliage, and, above all, the flash of dark eyes under a mantilla at his shoulder. What a fool he had been! Had he not really been as senseless and stupid as this very Concho, lying here like a log? And she had loved that man. What a fool she must have thought him that evening! What a snob she must think him now!
He was startled by a slight rustling in the passage, that ceased almost as he turned. Thatcher looked towards the door of the outer office, as if half expecting that the Lord Chancellor, like the commander in Don Juan, might have accepted his thoughtless invitation. He listened again; everything was still. He was conscious of feeling ill at ease and a trifle nervous. What a long time Harlowe took to make his preparations. He would look out in the hall. To do this it was necessary to turn up the gas. He did so, and in his confusion turned it out!
Where were the matches? He remembered that there was a bronze something on the table that, in the irony of modern decorative taste, might hold ashes or matches, or anything of an unpicturesque character. He knocked something over, evidently the ink,—something else,—this time a champagne glass. Becoming reckless, and now groping at random in the ruins, he overturned the bronze Mercury on the center table, and then sat down hopelessly in his chair. And then a pair of velvet fingers slid into his, with the matches, and this audible, musical statement:
“It is a match you are seeking? Here is of them.”
Thatcher flushed, embarrassed, nervous,—feeling the ridiculousness of saying, “Thank you” to a dark somebody,—struck the match, beheld by its brief, uncertain glimmer Carmen de Haro beside him, burned his fingers, coughed, dropped the match, and was cast again into outer darkness.
“Let me try!”
Carmen struck a match, jumped briskly on the chair, lit the gas, jumped lightly down again, and said: “You do like to sit in the dark,—eh? So am I—sometimes—alone.”
“Miss De Haro,” said Thatcher, with sudden, honest earnestness, advancing with outstretched hands, “believe me I am sincerely delighted, overjoyed, again to meet—”
She had, however, quickly retreated as he approached, ensconcing herself behind the high back of a large antique chair, on the cushion of which she knelt. I regret to add also that she slapped his outstretched fingers a little sharply with her inevitable black fan as he still advanced.
“We are not in California. It is Washington. It is after midnight. I am a poor girl, and I have to lose—what you call—'a character.' You shall sit over there,”—she pointed to the sofa,—“and I shall sit here;” she rested her boyish head on the top of the chair; “and we shall talk, for I have to speak to you, Don Royal.”
Thatcher took the seat indicated, contritely, humbly, submissively. Carmen's little heart was touched. But she still went on over the back of the chair.
“Don Royal,” she said, emphasizing each word at him with her fan, “before I saw you,—ever knew of you,—I was a child. Yes, I was but a child! I was a bold, bad child;—and I was what you call a—a—'forgaire'!”
“A what?” asked Thatcher, hesitating between a smile and a sigh.
“A forgaire!” continued Carmen demurely. “I did of myself write the names of ozzer peoples;” when Carmen was excited she lost the control of the English tongue; “I did write just to please myself;—it was my onkle that did make of it money;—you understand, eh? Shall you not speak? Must I again hit you?”
“Go on,” said Thatcher laughing.
“I did find out, when I came to you at the mine, that I had forged against you the name of Micheltorena. I to the lawyer went, and found that it was so—of a verity—so! so! all the time. Look at me not now, Don Royal;—it is a 'forgaire' you stare at.”
“Carmen!”
“Hoosh! Shall I have to hit you again? I did overlook all the papers. I found the application: it was written by me. There.”
She tossed over the back of her chair an envelope to Thatcher. He opened it.
“I see,” he said gently, “you repossessed yourself of it!”
“What is that—'r-r-r-e—possess'?”
“Why!”—Thatcher hesitated—“you got possession of this paper,—this innocent forgery,—again.”
“Oh! You think me a thief as well as a 'forgaire.' Go away! Get up. Get out.”
“My dear girl—”
“Look at the paper! Will you? Oh, you silly!”
Thatcher looked at the paper. In paper, handwriting, age, and stamp it was identical with the formal, clerical application of Garcia for the grant. The indorsement of Micheltorena was unquestionably genuine. BUT THE APPLICATION WAS MADE FOR ROYAL THATCHER. And his own signature was imitated to the life.
“I had but one letter of yours wiz your name,” said Carmen apologetically; “and it was the best poor me could do.”
“Why, you blessed little goose and angel,” said Thatcher, with the bold, mixed metaphor of amatory genius, “don't you see—”
“Ah, you don't like it,—it is not good?”
“My darling!”
“Hoosh! There is also an 'old cat' up stairs. And now I have here a character. WILL you sit down? Is it of a necessity that up and down you should walk and awaken the whole house? There!”—she had given him a vicious dab with her fan as he passed. He sat down.
“And you have not seen me nor written to me for a year?”
“Carmen!”
“Sit down, you bold, bad boy. Don't you see it is of business that you and I talk down here; and it is of business that ozzer people up stairs are thinking. Eh?”
“D—n business! See here, Carmen, my darling, tell me”—I regret to say he had by this time got hold of the back of Carmen's chair—“tell me, my own little girl,—about—about that Senator. You remember what you said to him?”
“Oh, the old man? Oh, THAT was business. And you say of business, 'd—n.'”
“Carmen!”
“Don Royal!”
Although Miss Carmen had recourse to her fan frequently during this interview, the air must have been chilly, for a moment later, on his way down stairs, poor Harlowe, a sufferer from bronchitis, was attacked with a violent fit of coughing, which troubled him all the way down.
“Well,” he said, as he entered the room, “I see you have found Mr. Thatcher, and shown those papers. I trust you have, for you've certainly had time enough. I am sent by mother to dismiss you all to bed.”
Carmen still in the arm chair, covered with her mantilla, did not speak.
“I suppose you are by this time lawyer enough to know,” continued Harlowe, “that Miss De Haro's papers, though ingenious, are not legally available, unless—”
“I chose to make her a witness. Harlowe! you're a good fellow! I don't mind saying to you that these are papers I prefer that my WIFE should not use. We'll leave it for the present—Unfinished Business.”
They did. But one evening our hero brought Mrs. Royal Thatcher a paper containing a touching and beautiful tribute to the dead Senator.
“There, Carmen, love, read that. Don't you feel a little ashamed of your—your—your lobbying—”
“No,” said Carmen promptly. “It was business,—and if all lobbying business was as honest,—well?—”