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Helen Briggs felt uncomfortable on leaving Mrs. Burrell. It was true that she had not introduced the subject of Carrie Cora’s love affair, but her conscience troubled her, nevertheless. She did not like interfering in other people’s business. However, victory had probably been won for the girl, unless something should change her mother’s mind. A resentful word, a disagreeable look on Carrie Cora’s part, might shatter the possibility of a lifetime of happiness. On the other hand, Helen argued, Mrs. Burrell might have been justified in opposing her daughter. In spite of her own experience, Helen had grown sceptical with regard to marriage. Many marriages among her friends had begun with every promise of happiness and had been either disappointments or complete failures. So often, she had observed, love seemed to be only an expression of egotism, that soon betrayed itself in selfishness or resentment or bitterness.
On reaching home Helen found the house deserted save by the servants. On the way she had observed the plain and patient Miss Munroe with the children in the Park. She went into the library to get something to read, and her eye fell on the black scrapbooks. Without realizing that she had for hours been resisting the temptation to examine them, she quickly drew one out from the shelf and placed it on her husband’s desk. It happened to be the newest, and it was only half-filled with newspaper clippings. With a nervous impulse she placed it back on the shelf and took the volume at the opposite end of the row. On the fly-leaf she read, in her husband’s handwriting: “My first speeches in Congress.” Most of these had been clipped from the Congressional reports, and many of them she had read. She turned the pages quickly, stopping here and there to read a personal paragraph of praise or criticism. One paragraph contained this statement:
“It is a satisfaction to see that in Douglas Briggs New York has at last sent a man to Congress who gives promise of taking a conspicuous position before the country. Briggs is impulsive, even hot-headed, and consequently injudicious,and his faults would be serious in a man of greater age and experience. But he has decided force of character, invincible determination, remarkable insight into public affairs and an inexhaustible capacity for work. He is sure to cut a great figure if his party stands by him. His danger lies in the chance of his becoming too big a man to be held in check by the party management. He has already overridden several party measures and taken leadership in pushing reforms that are distinctly opposed to the party’s policy.”
“It is a satisfaction to see that in Douglas Briggs New York has at last sent a man to Congress who gives promise of taking a conspicuous position before the country. Briggs is impulsive, even hot-headed, and consequently injudicious,and his faults would be serious in a man of greater age and experience. But he has decided force of character, invincible determination, remarkable insight into public affairs and an inexhaustible capacity for work. He is sure to cut a great figure if his party stands by him. His danger lies in the chance of his becoming too big a man to be held in check by the party management. He has already overridden several party measures and taken leadership in pushing reforms that are distinctly opposed to the party’s policy.”
Helen had an impulse to kiss the paper on which these words were printed. But she checked it and turned the leaves more quickly, letting her eye run down each column. For more than an hour she pored over the volumes. When she had glanced over the first three she noticed a change in the tone of the comments. They began to be sarcastic; they pointed out several inconsistencies in her husband’s course. One paper published in parallel columns quotations from his speeches, contradicting each other. Then followed open charges of corruption against him in connection with a railroad bill then under consideration in Congress. As she read, Helen grew faint. Howdid it happen that she had neither seen nor heard of this article? Why hadn’t Douglas spoken of it to her? Why had he not come out with a public denial, or sued the paper for libel? Then she said to herself that she was foolish to ask these questions. Attacks of this kind were made every day on public men; the higher their position the more bitter the enemies they made.
She heard a sound at the front door, and she started. It was probably Douglas returning early from the House. She was tempted to put the book quickly back in its place; but she sat without moving, waiting for him to come in. He walked up the stairs, however. She rose with a sigh of relief and, closing the book, left it on the table. She made a quiet resolve that she would never tell him of the thoughts that had passed through her mind. She would try never to think of them again. She was ashamed of having thought of them at all.
Douglas Briggs stopped on the upper landing and called, “Helen!” Then he looked down. “Oh, there you are,” he said. He descended quickly, and she met him in the hall. “Rested?” he said, taking her hand and pressing it against his cheek.
“Yes, dear.” Then she suddenly put both her hands on his head and kissed him twice. “I’m glad you came back early,” she said. “Everybody’s out, and I’ve been feeling lonely.”
She returned to the library, and he followed. “I’ve been looking over your scrapbooks,” she said.
“Couldn’t you find anything more interesting?” He dropped into a seat near the table and ran his fingers through his hair. “We’ve been having a great fight to-day. Aspinwall’s new tariff schedule. If I’d known I was going to make a speech I’d have asked you to come. Have you seen the notices of our ball last night in the papers?”
Helen nodded.
“TheStargave us a great send-off. They treated me as if I were a millionaire.” Douglas Briggs sighed. “I wish I were.”
“That reminds me, Douglas,” said Helen. “I want to ask you something.” She was astonished at her own boldness. She felt as if she were speaking at the bidding of someone else. She thought of her resolution, but she felt powerless to keep it.
Briggs looked up. “Well?” Helen didnot answer at once, and he added: “What is it?”
“Since last night,” she began, slowly, seeming to hear her voice in another part of the room, “I’ve been wondering if we weren’t living very extravagantly.”
He looked at her in surprise. Then the expression in his face softened. “I shouldn’t worry about that, dear, if I were you. There’s no need of it.”
“Douglas!” she said.
“Eh?” He observed her sharply.
“How much do you make in a year?”
Briggs smiled and frowned at the same moment. “What?” he said, with astonishment, “how much do I make?”
“Yes. What’s your income? What was it last year? Please tell me. I have a reason for asking.”
Briggs looked vaguely around the room. “’Pon my word, I don’t believe I know myself.”
“Can’t you estimate?”
“I suppose I could,” Briggs replied, with a note of irritation in his voice. “But what do you want to know for?”
“I think I ought to know.”
“Don’t you have everything you want?” he asked, inconsequently.
“Yes.”
“Have I stinted you in anything?”
“No, Douglas, never. You’ve been perfect. No woman ever had a more generous husband.”
Briggs thrust his hands into his pockets and burlesqued an attitude of extreme self-satisfaction. “There! Then there’s nothing more to be said, since I’m such a paragon.”
“But I want to know, really,” Helen insisted. For the first time she had known him she suspected that he was not quite sincere. And yet she could not believe that he was capable of acting with her—with anyone.
Briggs turned quickly. “I told you I didn’t know myself.”
“But I’m serious about this,” Helen went on. “Now, your salary is five thousand, isn’t it?”
“M’m—h’m!”
“And the property Aunt Lena left me—how much does that bring in?”
Briggs lifted his shoulders. “Last year it brought in only two thousand. We might have got more out of it——”
“Please don’t reproach me about that. Youknow how much I want to keep it safe for the children!”
“Well, if that isn’t just like a woman!” Briggs retorted, laughing. “When she might have more for the children!”
“Or nothing at all,” Helen remarked, quietly.
Briggs drew his hands from his pockets and sat erect. “Helen,” he said, leaning toward his wife, “if you weren’t a woman you’d be a parson, like your father and your two younger brothers. It’s in your blood.”
Helen ignored the remark. “That makes seven thousand, doesn’t it?”
“But I never touchthatmoney. I add it to the principal.”
“So we have only five thousand to live on!” Helen exclaimed, in a startled voice.
Her husband smiled with patient superiority. “No, no! Now you talk as if you were a millionaire’s daughter. How much did your father live on, I’d like to know?”
“Eighteen hundred a year.”
“Well, I dare say he was just as happy on that as we are on——” He stopped, looking at her with an expression in his eyes that she had never seen there before.
“On what?” she asked, quietly.
“On what we spend,” he replied.
“The ball we gave last night must have cost at least eighteen hundred,” Helen persisted.
“Well, I guess we’re good for it,” Briggs replied, complacently.
Helen lost control of herself. “That’s what I can’t understand,” she cried, excitedly. “How are we good for it?”
Douglas Briggs rose and walked slowly toward his wife. He laid his hand gently on her shoulder. “My dear child, that’s not a nice way to speak to your husband!”
“Please don’t call me your dear child again, Douglas. Now, I have a reason for asking these questions, and I want you to give me direct answers.”
Briggs let his hand drop. Helen rose and walked to the edge of the desk.
“I think you must be ill, dear,” he said, looking at her solicitously.
She tried to keep the tears from her voice. “I shall be, unless you tell me the truth.”
Douglas Briggs kept his eyes on her for a long time. She turned from him. “Do you meanthat you want to know whether I am an honest man or not?” he asked, in a low voice.
“I have never questioned your honesty, Douglas.”
He hesitated. “I will tell you the truth,” he said, as if he had just passed through a struggle. “Last year I must have spent nearly thirty thousand dollars. It was all I had. At the end of the year I was five thousand dollars in debt. That has since been paid.”
“How did you make that money?” she asked, facing him.
Briggs looked down at the table. His eyes wandered over his papers and over the black scrapbook. “That’s a cruel question for a wife to ask her husband,” he remarked at last.
“Not when she knows he will be able to answer it,” Helen said, firmly.
“Well, I—I made it mostly through my law practice.”
Helen began to breathe quickly. “But I heard you say the other day that since you came to Washington you had been forced to give up your practice.”
“So I have—very largely, almost wholly, in fact,” he replied, growing impatient again. “Butthere are some interests that I have to look out for here.”
“Such as what?”
“Well, there’s the—there are some railroad interests.”
“Some railroad interests!” Helen repeated, blankly.
“Yes.”
“The railroad thatMr.West is concerned in, do you mean?”
“Why, yes. You know that perfectly well. I’ve been associated with that railroad for years, in one way or another.”
“That’s the road that receives so much favor from the Government, isn’t it?”
“Oh, that’s mere gossip. There’s no such thing.”
Helen looked straight into her husband’s face. Her figure had become rigid. “What do you do for the railroad, Douglas?”
His eyes flashed; his nostrils turned white. “You’re going too far, Helen,” he cried.
She did not stir. “I have a right to ask these questions,” she continued, keeping her voice low. “Oh, I know you consider that I can’t understand these things. You acknowledge that you receivethousands of dollars a year from that railroad—five times as much as your salary.”
“I made no such acknowledgment,” Briggs replied, angrily.
“But it’s true; you know it’s true, Douglas. You can’t deny it.”
“I won’t take the trouble to deny it, since you evidently want to believe it.”
“And you know you don’t give the road an hour a day of your time.”
His lips curled. “My dear girl, lawyers aren’t paid by the hour, like your seamstresses.”
“And the railroad’s regular attorney isMr.West,” Helen went on. “You know that.”
“Well, West does all the dirty work,” he said, with a laugh.
“And what do you do, Douglas?” She hesitated. “Answer me, Douglas—what do you do?”
“Wait a minute,” he said, in a low voice. He raised his hand. “I warn you that you are interfering with matters that don’t concern you, that you can’t even comprehend. You are doing it at your peril.”
“What do you do for that company?” she repeated.
He extended both hands in a gesture of deprecation. “I simply look after its interests in the House. There’s the truth, now. It’s perfectly legitimate. There are plenty of men who do the same thing for other corporations—men in big positions.”
Her face grew pale and she swayed forward slightly. Then she stood erect and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Douglas!” she said.