Part 56 (1/2)

When Rann had gone, and the door had slammed after him, Galt turned, with a laugh.

”Shake!” he exclaimed, and as Nicholas grasped his hand, added lightly, ”My dear friend, you may as well have a quiet conscience, since you'll never have the senators.h.i.+p.”

Nicholas drew his hand away impatiently. ”I'm not beaten yet,” he said.

”I'll fight and I'll win, or my name's not Burr! Do you think I'm afraid of a sneak like that? Why, he offered me the senators.h.i.+p as coolly as if he had it in his pocket!”

Galt laughed. ”I'm not sure he hasn't; at any rate he's the power of the ring, and the ring's the power of the party.”

”Then I'll fight the ring,” said Nicholas, ”and, if need be, I'll fight the party. So long as right and the people are with me the party may go hang.”

”My dear old Nick, history teaches us that the party hangs the people.

By the way, you've done Webb a good turn; Rann is going to fight you fair and foul--mostly foul.”

”Oh, I'm not afraid of Rann, or of Webb.”

”Or yet of the devil!” added Galt. ”When I come to think of it, I never called you timid. But wait a few days and Rann will have this little pa.s.sage reported to his credit. I'll get ahead of him with the story, or I'll find some c.o.c.ked-up account of it circulating in the lobby. It's easier to blacken the best man than to whiten the worst. Well, I'm going. Good day!”

When the door closed, the governor crossed to the window and stood looking down upon the gray drive beneath the leafless trees. The sun was obscured by a sinister cloud that had blotted out all the fugitive brightness of the morning. A fine moisture was in the air, and the atmosphere hung heavily down the naked slopes, where the gra.s.s was colourless and dead. Beyond the gates, the city was lost in a blurred and melancholy distance, from which several indistinct church spires rose and sank in a sea of fog.

But blue and gray were as one to Nicholas. He was not exhilarated by suns.h.i.+ne nor was he depressed by gloom; only the inner forces of his nature had power to quicken or control his moods. His inspiration, like his destiny, lay within, and so long as he maintained his wonted equilibrium of judgment and desire it was, perhaps, impossible that an outside a.s.sault should severely shake the foundations of his life.

Now, while the glow of his anger still lingered in his brain, it was characteristic of the man that he was feeling a pity for Rann's disappointment--for the discomfiture of one whose methods he despised.

In Rann's place, he felt that he should probably have risen to the charge as Rann rose--implacable, unswerving; but he was not in Rann's place, nor could he be so long as personal reward was less to him than personal honour. Yes, he could pity Rann even while he condemned him.

For an instant--a single instant--he had found himself shrinking from the combat, and in the shock of self-contempt which followed he had hurled the shock of his resentment upon the tempter. In that moment of weakness it had seemed to him an easy thing to let one's self go; to yield to a friendly, if distrusted force; to place gratified ambition above the sting of wounded scruples. Was he infallible that he should make his judgment a law, or without reproach that he should set his conscience as an arbiter?

Then in a sudden illumination he had seen the betrayal of his sophistry, and he had stood his ground--for the strong man is not he who is impervious to weaknesses, but he who, scorning his failures, towers over them. He had felt the temptation and he had wavered, but not for long.

In all his periods of storm and stress he had found that his nature rebounded in the end. Disquietude might waste his ardour; but give him time to reorganise his forces, and his moral energy would triumph at the last.

As he looked out upon the great bronze Was.h.i.+ngton against the sad-coloured sky, he realised, with a pang like the thrust of homesickness, the isolation in which he stood. An instinctive need to justify himself had risen within him, and with it awoke the knowledge that beyond that uncertain abstraction which he called ”the People,” he was an alien among his kind. Galt was his friend, Tom Ba.s.sett he could count on, a score of others would stand or fall in his service, but where was the single emotion which bound him to humanity? Where the common claim of kins.h.i.+p which belonged to Galt, to Ba.s.sett, and to all mankind? He had known many men, but he knew not one who was not drawn by some connecting link that was apart from patriotism, or ambition, or desire. Then quickly there came to him, not the judge, who was the parent of his intellect, but the withered little woman, who was not even the mother of his body. The only happiness that rose and set in him was that pitiable happiness that could not think his thoughts or speak his speech. It had never occurred to him that he loved Marthy Burr--his kindness had been wholly compa.s.sionate--it was the knowledge that she loved him that now illuminated her image. It was the old blind craving born again, to be first with somebody--for there are moods in which it is better to be adored by a dog than to adore a divinity. He beheld Eugenia's womanhood as ”A sword afar off”; but with him was the eternal commonplace--his stepmother's sharp, pained eyes and shrivelled hands.

He had loved Eugenia until there was nothing left; now he wanted to be loved, if by a dog.

He raised his head and smiled upon the bronze Was.h.i.+ngton and the sad-coloured sky. In the drive below men were pa.s.sing, and from time to time he recognised a figure. He saw only men down there, and the thought came to him that his was a man's world--only in the outside circle might he catch the flutter of a woman's dress. He turned and went back to his desk and his work.

Two days later the papers chronicled without comment his opposition to Rann's bill. He was aware that Rann possessed no uncertain influence with the editors of the ”Morning Standard,” and he was surprised at the apparent indifference displayed by the curt announcement. Did Rann's resentment hang fire? Or was the press prepared to uphold the governor?

On the morning of the same day a member of the legislature with whom he was slightly acquainted came in to congratulate him upon his stand. His name was Saunders, and he was a man of some ability, whom Nicholas had always regarded as a partisan of Webb.

”I've been fighting that bill this whole session,” he said emphatically, ”and I'd given up all hope of defeating it when you had the pluck to knock it over. You've made enemies, Governor, but you've made friends, and I'm one of them. Give me the man who dares!” He held out his hand as he rose, and Nicholas responded with a hearty grip. Before the legislature closed he found that Saunders spoke the truth--he had made friends as well as enemies. The inborn Anglo-Saxon love of ”the man who dares” was with him--a regard for daring for its own heroic sake. The hour was his, and he braved his s.h.i.+fting popularity as he would brave its final outcome.

II

One afternoon in early May, Dudley Webb came out upon his front steps and paused to light a cigar before descending to the street. A spring of happy promise was unfolding, for overhead the poplars bloomed against an enchanted sky. In the shadow of the church across the way, children were romping, their ecstatic trebles floating like bird-song on the air.

With the cigar between his teeth, Dudley heaved a sudden reminiscent sigh--the sigh of a man who possesses an excellent digestion and a complacent conscience. Things had gone well with him of late--the fact that a trivial domestic interest darkened for the moment his serene horizon proved it to be the solitary cloud of a clear day. The cloud in question had gathered in the shape of no less a person than Mrs. Jane Dudley Webb. She had been on a visit to Richmond, and he had seen her only two hours before safely started on her homeward journey. The truth was that Mrs. Webb and Eugenia had a.s.serted for the past two days an implacable hostility, and Dudley's genial efforts at pacification had resulted merely in diverting a share of the unpleasantness upon his own head. It was a lamentable fact that Eugenia, who was amiable to the point of weakness where members of the Battle family were concerned, found it impossible to harmonise with the elder Mrs. Webb. They had disagreed upon such important subjects as Miss Chris's housekeeping and Dudley's moral welfare, until Eugenia, after an inglorious defeat, had relapsed into silence--a silence broken only upon Dudley's return from the station, when she had unbosomed herself of the declaration that she ”couldn't stand his mother, and it was as much as she could do to stand him.” Dudley had met this alarming outburst with its logical retort, ”Hadn't you better see a doctor, Eugie?” whereupon Eugenia had protested that ”if she wasn't fit for an asylum, he needn't thank Mrs. Webb,” and had dissolved in tears.

At the moment Dudley had experienced a warm recognition of his generosity in refraining from the use of his own endurance of many Battles, as an ill.u.s.tration of the opposite and virtuous course; but upon later reflection he frankly admitted that the cases were by no means similar. It had not occurred to him, he recalled, to deny that Mrs. Webb was singularly trying, though he wondered, half resentfully, why Eugenia could not be brought to regard that lady's foibles from his own gently humorous point of view. He was not in the least disconcerted by his mother's solicitude as to the condition of his soul, or by the fact that she still felt constrained to allude to the governor of the State as ”a person of low antecedents.” Personally, he was inclined to admire--and frankly to admit it--the ability which had brought Burr into prominence from a position of evident obscurity, while he regarded Mrs.