Part 2 (1/2)
”No, I must write.”
”You heard me say, to bed with you! A stiff toddy to make you sleep.
Nicholas here may wake you soon enough with his mysterious companion. I think to-morrow will be time enough for you to work, and to-morrow very likely will bring work for you to do.”
Calhoun sighed. ”G.o.d!” he exclaimed, ”if I but had back my strength! If there were more than those scant remaining years!”
”Go!” said he suddenly; and so we others pa.s.sed down his step and out into the semi-lighted streets.
So this, then, was my errand. My mind still tingled at its unwelcome quality. Doctor Ward guessed something of my mental dissatisfaction.
”Never mind, Nicholas,” said he, as we parted at the street corner, where he climbed into the rickety carriage which his colored driver held awaiting him. ”Never mind. I don't myself quite know what Calhoun wants; but he would not ask of you anything personally improper. Do his errand, then. It is part of your work. In any case--” and I thought I saw him grin in the dim light--”you may have a night which you will remember.”
There proved to be truth in what he said.
CHAPTER III
IN ARGUMENT
The egotism of women is always for two.--_Mme. De Stael_.
The thought of missing my meeting with Elisabeth still rankled in my soul. Had it been another man who asked me to carry this message, I must have refused. But this man was my master, my chief, in whose service I had engaged.
Strange enough it may seem to give John Calhoun any t.i.tle showing love or respect. To-day most men call him traitor--call him the man responsible for the war between North and South--call him the arch apostle of that impossible doctrine of slavery, which we all now admit was wrong. Why, then, should I love him as I did? I can not say, except that I always loved, honored and admired courage, uprightness, integrity.
For myself, his agent, I had, as I say, left the old Trist homestead at the foot of South Mountain in Maryland, to seek my fortune in our capital city. I had had some three or four years' semi-diplomatic training when I first met Calhoun and entered his service as a.s.sistant.
It was under him that I finished my studies in law. Meantime, I was his messenger in very many quests, his source of information in many matters where he had no time to go into details.
Strange enough had been some of the circ.u.mstances in which I found myself thrust through this relation with a man so intimately connected for a generation with our public life. Adventures were always to my liking, and surely I had my share. I knew the frontier marches of Tennessee and Alabama, the intricacies of politics of Ohio and New York, mixed as those things were in Tyler's time. I had even been as far west as the Rockies, of which young Fremont was now beginning to write so understandingly. For six months I had been in Mississippi and Texas studying matters and men, and now, just hack from Natchitoches, I felt that I had earned some little rest.
But there was the fascination of it--that big game of politics. No, I will call it by its better name of statesmans.h.i.+p, which sometimes it deserved in those days, as it does not to-day. That was a day of Warwicks. The nominal rulers did not hold the greatest t.i.tles.
Naturally, I knew something of these things, from the nature of my work in Calhoun's office. I have had insight into doc.u.ments which never became public. I have seen treaties made. I have seen the making of maps go forward. This, indeed, I was in part to see that very night, and curiously, too.
How the Baroness von Ritz--beautiful adventuress as she was sometimes credited with being, charming woman as she was elsewhere described, fascinating and in some part dangerous to any man, as all admitted--could care to be concerned with this purely political question of our possible territories, I was not shrewd enough at that moment in advance to guess; for I had nothing more certain than the rumor she was England's spy. I bided my time, knowing that ere long the knowledge must come to me in Calhoun's office even in case I did not first learn more than Calhoun himself.
Vaguely in my conscience I felt that, after all, my errand was justified, even though at some cost to my own wishes and my own pride.
The farther I walked in the dark along Pennsylvania Avenue, into which finally I swung after I had crossed Rock Bridge, the more I realized that perhaps this big game was worth playing in detail and without quibble as the master mind should dictate. As he was servant of a purpose, of an ideal of triumphant democracy, why should not I also serve in a cause so splendid?
I was, indeed, young--Nicholas Trist, of Maryland; six feet tall, thin, lean, always hungry, perhaps a trifle freckled, a little sandy of hair, blue I suppose of eye, although I am not sure; good rider and good marcher, I know; something of an expert with the weapons of my time and people; fond of a horse and a dog and a rifle--yes, and a gla.s.s and a girl, if truth be told. I was not yet thirty, in spite of my western travels. At that age the rustle of silk or dimity, the suspicion of adventure, tempts the worst or the best of us, I fear. Woman!--the very sound of the word made my blood leap then. I went forward rather blithely, as I now blush to confess. ”If there are maps to be made to-night,” said I, ”the Baroness Helena shall do her share in writing on my chief's old mahogany desk, and not on her own dressing case.”
That was an idle boast, though made but to myself. I had not yet met the woman.
CHAPTER IV
THE BARONESS HELENA
Woman is seldom merciful to the man who is timid.