Part 43 (1/2)

As he looked at her he held out his arms.

”Eugie--poor girl! dear girl!”

In the desolation of her life he stood to her as the hearth of home to a wanderer in the frozen North.

For an instant she held back, and then, with a sob, she yielded.

”I must be loved,” she said. ”I must be loved or I shall die.”

Around them the winter landscape reddened as the sunset broke, and above their heads the crows flew, cawing, across the snow.

BOOK IV

THE MAN AND THE TIMES

I

The Democratic State Convention had taken an hour's recess. From the doors of the opera house of Powhatan City the a.s.sembled delegates emerged, heated, clamorous, out of breath. The morning session, despite its noise, had not been interesting--awaiting the report of the Committee on Credentials, the panting body had fumed away the opening hours. Of the fifteen hundred representatives of absent voters, the favoured few who had held the floor had been needlessly discursive and undeniably dull. There had been overmuch of the party platform, and an absence of the wit which is the soul of political speaking; and, though the average Virginia Convention is able to breast triumphantly the most encompa.s.sing wave of oratory, the present one had shown unmistakable signs of suffocation. At the end of the third speech, metaphor had failed to move it, and alliteration had ceased to evoke applause. It had heard without emotion similes that concerned the colour of Cleopatra's hair, and had yawned through perorations that ranged from Socrates to the Senior Senator, who sat upon the stage. Attacks upon the ”cormorants and harpies that roost in Wall Street” had roused no thrill in the mind of the majority that knew not rhetoric. The most patient of the silent members had observed that ”after all, their business was to nominate a candidate for governor,” while the unruly spirits, as they brandished palm-leaf fans, had wished ”that blamed committee would come on.”

Now, after hours of restless waiting, they emerged, stiff-kneed and perspiring, into the blazing suns.h.i.+ne that filled the little street.

Once outside, they opened their lungs to the warm air in an attempt to banish the tainted atmosphere of the interior; but the original motive of expansion was lost in a flow of words. On the sidewalk the crowd divided into streams, pulsing in opposite directions. Heated, noisy, pervasive, it surged to dinners in hotels and boarding-houses, and overflowed where Moloney's restaurant displayed its bill of fare. It came out talking, it divided talking; still talking, it swept, a roaring sea of flesh, into the far-off buzz of the distance. In a group of three men pa.s.sing into the lobby of the largest hotel, there was a slender man of fifty years, with a well-knit figure, half closed, indifferent eyes, and an emphatic mouth. In the insistent hum of words about him, his voice sounded in a brisk utterance that carried a hint of important issues.

”Oh, I don't think Hartley's much account,” he was saying. ”I'd bet on a close shave between Webb and Crutchfield, with Webb in the lead. Small will get the lieutenant-governors.h.i.+p, of course. Davis ought to be attorney-general, but he'll be beaten by Wray. It's the party reward.

Davis is the better lawyer, by long odds, but Wray has stuck to the party like a burr--I don't mean a pun, if you please.”

The younger of his two companions, a spirited youth with high-standing auburn hair, laughed uproariously.

”The trouble is they're afraid Burr won't stick to the party,” he protested. ”Major Simms, who is marshalling Crutchfield's forces, you know, said to me last night--'Oh, Burr's all right when you let him lead, but he's d.a.m.ned mulish if you begin to pull the other way.'”

The third man, a sunburned farmer, with a dogged mouth overhung by a tobacco-stained mustache, a.s.sented with a nod.

”There's not a better Democrat in Virginia than Nick Burr,” he said. ”If the party's got anything against him it had better out with it at once.

He made the most successful chairman the State ever had--and he's honest--there's not a more honest man in politics or out.”

”Oh, I know all that,” broke in the auburn-haired young fellow, whose name was d.i.c.kson; ”I'd back Burr against any candidate in the field, and I'm sorry he kept out of it. I hoped he'd come forward with you to manage his campaign, Mr. Galt,” he said to the first speaker.

Galt waived the remark.

”Perhaps he thought his chances too slim for a walkover,” he said in non-committal fas.h.i.+on, as Burr's best friend. ”I hear, by the way, that the delegation from his old home is instructed to vote for him on the first ballot, whether or not.”

”He has a great name down in my parts,” put in the farmer. ”The people think he has the agricultural interests at heart. They wanted to send him to Congress in Webb's place, you know.”

”Yes, I know,” said Galt. ”h.e.l.lo, Ba.s.sett,” as Tom Ba.s.sett joined him.

”Where've you been? Lost sight of you this morning.”

”Oh, I was out with the Committee on Credentials. A member? I should say not. I wanted to hear that Madison County case, so I got made sergeant-at-arms. By the way, d.i.c.k,” to d.i.c.kson, ”I hear you held the floor for five minutes this morning and got off five distinct stories that landed with Columbus.”