Chapter Five
A RAPTUROUS HOUR WHICH WAS RUDELY INTERRUPTED
When Thorndyke got out of doors the bright morning had changed into a cold, determined downpour of rain. The gray mists hung over the city at the foot of the hill, and the summit of the monument was obscured by sullen driving clouds. Thorndyke’s spirits rose as he surveyed the gloomy prospect. It was not much of an afternoon for visiting—he should find Constance alone.
He went to his rooms, dressed, and before five was at Constance Maitland’s door. The afternoon had grown worse. A sad northeast wind had been added to the rain; the lilac-bushes in the little lawn at the side of the house drooped forlornly, and the dejected syringas looked like young ladies caught out in the rain in their ball-gowns.
The rain, the cold, and the wind outside was the best possible foil for the fire-lighted and flower-scented drawing-room, into which the young negro butler ushered Thorndyke. The walls were of the delicate pale green of the sea, the rug on the polished floor was of the green of the moss. A wood fire danced and sang in a white-tiled fireplace, and laughed at its reflection in the quaint mirrors about the room, and glowed upon family portraits and miniatures on the walls. There were many old-fashioned chairs and tables, and a deep, deep sofa drawn up to the fire. By its side was a tea-table gleaming with antique silver.
Like most men, Thorndyke was highly susceptible to the environment of women without being in the least able to analyse the feeling. It takes a woman to dissect an emotion thoroughly. He became at once conscious that this quaint, pretty, sparkling drawing-room was a home, and that what was in it had no connection whatever with shops for antiques and art-sale catalogues. He had often noticed with dislike the spurious antiquity of many modern drawing-rooms, which are really museums, and represent the desire of the new for the old. But Constance Maitland had inherited the furnishings which made her drawing-room beautiful and distinctive, and in process of use, especially by one family, chairs and tables and tea-kettles acquire a semi-humanity which creates that subtle and enduring thing called atmosphere. The portraits on the walls gave an inhabited look to the room—it was never without company.
While Thorndyke was considering the curious fact that all the mere money in the world could not create a drawing-room like Constance Maitland’s, she herself entered the room with her slow, graceful step. She wore a gown of a delicate gray colour, which trailed upon the floor, and at her breast was a knot of pale yellow cowslips. A bowl of the same old-fashioned flowers was on the tea-table.
Thorndyke had never been able to contemplate without agitation a meeting with Constance Maitland. But, as on the two previous occasions, so soon as he came face to face with her, nothing seemed easier, sweeter, more natural than that they should meet. He placed a chair for her, and they exchanged smilingly the commonplaces of meeting and greeting. At once Thorndyke felt that delicious sense of comfort, security, and well-being which some women can impart so exquisitely in their own homes. The quiet, fire-lighted room seemed a paradise of peace and rest, which was accentuated by the northeast storm without. The surety that he would have the room, the fire, the sweet company of Constance Maitland to himself made Thorndyke feel almost as if he had a place there. And Constance, by not taking too much notice of him, increased the dear illusion. She got into a spirited discussion with the negro butler, who rejoiced in the good old-time name of Scipio, to which Constance had added Africanus. Scipio had his notions of how tea should be made, which were at variance with his mistress’s. After the manner of his race, he proceeded to argue the point. Constance entered with spirit into the controversy, and only settled it by informing Scipio that where tea was concerned he was, and always would be, an idiot, at which Scipio grinned in a superior manner. Thorndyke thought Scipio in the right, and said so, as he drank a very good cup of tea brewed by Constance.
“But I can never let Scipio believe for a moment that I am in the wrong about anything,” replied Constance, with pensive determination. “You dear, good Northern people never can be made to understand that with a negro everything depends on the personal equation. He is not, and never can be made, a human machine. He is a personality, and his usefulness depends entirely on the recognition of that personality.”
“The commonly accepted idea of a servant is a human machine,” said Thorndyke, willing to champion Scipio’s cause for the purpose of having Constance Maitland’s soft eyes glow and sweet voice quicken in discussion. In the old days at Como they had many hot wrangles over the North and the South.
“Ah, if you had been served by human machines for eighteen years, as I was, you would understand how I longed to see an honest, laughing black face once more. My negro servants do much toward making this house a home for me. You would laugh at the way we get on together. When I am in an ill humour they must bear the brunt of it. I am a terrible scold when I am cross. But when the servants are lazy and neglectful, then I bear with them like an angel, and so we hit it off comfortably together. Even Scipio Africanus, who is altogether idle and irresponsible, becomes a hero when I am ill and a gentleman when I am angry.”
“Another cup of tea, please.”
“Already? You will become a tea-drinker like Doctor Johnson. However, my tea is so good that you are excused.”
The conversation went on fitfully, but to Thorndyke delightfully. Like all women who truly know the world, Constance had a charming and real simplicity about her. She made no effort to entertain him. She talked to him and he replied or was silent according to his mood. Every moment increased Thorndyke’s sense of exquisite comfort and quiet enjoyment. He had reached the inevitable stage of life when amusements are no longer warranted to amuse; when only a few things remained, such as certain books and certain conversations, which were a surety of pleasure. Nor had it been much in his way to enjoy those simple pleasures which are found only in quiet and seclusion. It was as much a feeling of gratitude as of enjoyment which made him say to Constance:
“I did not think there remained for me such an hour of rest and refreshment as you have given me.”
Constance turned toward him, her eyes pensive but not sad. There was something soothing in her very presence. She had known and suffered much, and had led a life far from quiet, and now, in her maturity, she had reached, it seemed to her, a haven of peace and quiet. She had acquired a knowledge worth almost as much as youth itself—the knowledge that never again could she suffer as she had once suffered. And the meeting with Thorndyke had confirmed her in a belief which had been her chief solace under the sorrows of her life of exile and disappointment. She knew he loved her well. For some years of her youth she had been haunted by the thought, cruel to her pride, that Thorndyke, after all, had been only playing at love. But as time went on, and she knew herself and others better, she had become convinced that Thorndyke had truly loved her, and his leaving her was only what any other man of honour, burdened with poverty, would have done. And he had remembered and suffered, too. As this thought came into her mind Thorndyke made some little remark that referred vaguely to their past, something about a song from one of the Italian operas, those simple love-stories told in lyrics which she had often sung in the old days. A blush swept over Constance’s cheek, and after a little pause of silence and hesitation she went to the piano and sang the quaint old song. She had a pleasing, although not a brilliant, voice, and her singing was full of sweetness and feeling, the only kind of singing which the normal man really understands.
When she returned to her chair Thorndyke leaned toward her with eyes which told her he loved her, although he did not utter a word. Constance, in turn, resting her rounded chin on her hand, leaned toward him with a heavenly smile upon her face—the smile a woman only bestows on the man she loves. Even if he could never speak his love she was conscious of it, and that was enough for her woman’s heart. Under the spell of her eyes and smile Thorndyke felt himself losing his head—how could he refrain from touching the soft white hand which hung so temptingly near him!
“Mr. Crane,” announced Scipio Africanus, and Julian Crane walked in.
Every man receives a shock when he finds he has interrupted a tête-à-tête, and Crane’s shock was augmented by finding that Thorndyke was the victim in the present case. Thorndyke had not said a word about going to see Miss Maitland, and Crane had meant to do a magnanimous thing by taking him there! And while outside the door he had heard Constance singing to the piano. She had never mentioned to him that she had such an accomplishment.
Thorndyke behaved as men usually do under the circumstances. He spoke to Crane curtly, assumed an injured air, and took his leave promptly, as much as to say:
“It is impossible for me to stand this man a moment.”
Constance, womanlike, showed perfect composure and politeness, bade Thorndyke good-bye with a smile, and then, by an effort, brought herself to the contemplation of Julian Crane. She saw then that he was very pale, and the hand which he rested on the back of a chair was trembling. The first idea which occurred to her was that Crane had heard bad news; but she could not understand why he should come to her under the circumstances. Perhaps it was only nervousness, the relaxation after great tension. With this in mind, she said pleasantly, as they seated themselves:
“So you waked this morning and found yourself famous.”
“My speech appears to have been well received by the country,” replied Crane, in a strained voice, after a pause.
“It is a pity Mrs. Crane was not present to enjoy your triumph,” she said.
“Mrs. Crane does not care for politics,” replied Crane, still in a strange voice.
“I cannot say that I am especially interested in politics,” replied Constance, “but I am interested in contemporary history of all sorts.”
“And interested in your friends, Miss Maitland, when they are in public life.”
“Extremely. I was at the House yesterday to hear you speak, and read your speech over again this morning in the Congressional Record.”
“Which, no doubt, you received through Thorndyke,” Crane answered, pointedly, after a moment.
Constance felt an inclination, as she often did, to get up and leave the room when Crane was talking with her. He had no reserves or restraints, and said just what was in his mind—a dangerous and alarming practice. She controlled herself, however, and looked closer at Crane. He was evidently deeply agitated, and Constance forbore the rebuke that she was ready to speak. Like a true woman, to feel sorry for a man was to forgive him everything. Suddenly Crane burst out:
“Have you heard the news? Senator Brand—our junior Senator—was run over by a train at Baltimore this morning, and died within an hour.”
There is a way of announcing a death which shows that the speaker is contemplating the dead man’s shoes with particular interest. Without fully taking in what it meant to Crane and what he wished to convey, Constance at once saw that in Senator Brand’s death lay some possible great good for Crane. She remained silent a minute or two, her mind involuntarily reconstructing the horror and pity of the dead man’s taking off.
Crane rose and walked up and down the room, his face working.
“I have committed a great, a stupendous folly,” he said. “At the very outset of my real career I may have ruined it. I couldn’t describe to you what I have suffered this day—yet no one has suspected it. I felt the necessity for sympathy, the necessity to tell my story to some one, and I came to you. I know I have no right to do it—but it seems to me, Constance, that ever since the day I first saw you, you have had some strange power of sustaining and comforting me.”
As Crane spoke her name, Constance involuntarily rose and assumed an air of offended dignity. But Crane’s distress was so real, his offence so unconscious, that her indignation could not hold against him.
Without noticing her offended silence he came and sat down heavily in the chair that Thorndyke had just vacated.
“You know,” he said, “in cases like this of Senator Brand’s death, the Governor appoints a senator until the Legislature meets and can elect, which will not be until the first of next January. Just as I had heard the news about poor Brand at my hotel I ran into Sanders, our Governor. I didn’t know he was in Washington. Sanders is a brute—always thinking of himself first. He button-holed me, took me into his bedroom, locked the door, and closed the transom. There were three other men present—all of whom I would not wish to offend. One of them has indorsed two unpaid notes for me. Sanders told me he had been looking for me, and with these other fellows—practical politicians every one of them—had already formulated a plan of campaign. The Governor would appoint me to fill the vacancy until the Legislature met in January and elected a senator for the short term, provided I would give him a clear track then. In further recompense, he agreed to support me for the long term—the election is only two years off. Sanders has had the senatorial bee in his bonnet for a long time, but the State organisation is not over-kindly to him, and Senator Bicknell is a little bit afraid of him, and naturally wouldn’t encourage his aspirations. And do you know, after an hour’s talk I allowed Sanders and those three fellows to wheedle me into that arrangement—and, of course, I can’t, in two years, supplant Senator Bicknell. Sanders is a long-headed rascal, and he knew very well that I was under money obligations to those men, and among them, aided and abetted by my own folly, I was buncoed—yes, regularly buncoed.”
The rage and shame that possessed him seemed to overpower Crane for a moment, and he covered his face with his hands. Then he dashed them down and continued:
“Of course I could have made a good showing in the race in January, and after my success of yesterday I believe I could have won. Senator Bicknell is not by any means the czar in the State which he would wish people to believe. But because Sanders dangled before my eyes the bauble of the appointment to the Senate—a present mess of pottage—and because I owed money I could not pay, I gave up the finest prospect of success any man of my age has had for forty years!”
Crane struck the arm of his chair with his clinched fist. His furious and sombre eyes showed the agony of his disappointment.
“As soon as it was done I knew my folly, and since then I have been almost like a madman. I went to my room to recover myself before going to the Capitol, and managed not to betray myself while I was there. But I couldn’t stand the strain until adjournment; I had to come to you.”
Constance sat looking at him; pity, annoyance, and a kind of disgust struggled within her. This, then, was politics. Accomplished woman of the world that she was, this natural and untutored man thoroughly disconcerted her. If only she had not felt such pity for him! And while she was contemplating the spectacle of these elemental passions of hatred, disappointment, revenge, and self-seeking, Crane’s eyes, fixed on her, lost some of their fury, and became more melancholy than angry, and he continued, as if thinking aloud:
“Suddenly I felt the desire to see you. You would know how insane was my folly, but you would not despise me for it. That’s the greatest power in the world a woman has over a man: when he can show her all his heart, and she will pity him without scorn or contempt. Ah, if Fate had given me a wife like you, I could have reached the heights of greatness!”
At those words Constance Maitland moved a little closer to him so that she could bring him under the full effect of her large, clear gaze.
“I think,” she said, in a cool, soft voice, with a rebuke in it, but without contempt, “that you are forgetting yourself strangely. I have often noticed in you a want of reticence. You should begin now to cultivate reticence. What you have just said has in it something insulting to me as well as to your wife—a person you seem to have forgotten. As for the political arrangement which you regret so much, I can only say that it seems to me to have been cold-blooded and unfeeling on both sides to a remarkable degree. You have spoken plainly; I speak plainly.”
Constance leaned back quietly in her chair to watch the effect of what she had said. She felt then a hundred years older than Crane, who was older than she, and who knew both law and politics well, but was a child in the science of knowing the world and the people in it—a science in which Constance Maitland excelled. But even her rebuke had a fascination for him. No other woman had ever rebuked him—his wife least of all.
“Do you complain of me,” he said, “for telling you my weaknesses, my misfortunes? Don’t you see that what you have just told me is proof of all I have said? You see my faults, you tell me of them, you inspire me with a desire to correct them. No other woman ever did so much for me. Is it forbidden to any one to utter a regret?”
“Very often it is forbidden,” replied Constance, promptly. “Unavailing regrets are among the most undignified things on earth. Is it possible that you have lived past your fortieth birthday without getting rid of that school-boy idea that our environment makes us—that a man is made by his wife, or by any other human agent except himself? So long as self-love is the master passion, so long will we heed our own persuasions more than any one else’s.”
“I hardly think you understand how things are with me,” replied Crane, his eyes again growing sombre. “Yesterday was an epoch-making day with me. To-day, the first of the new epoch, I make a hideous mistake. It unmans me; it unnerves me. Not often do two such catastrophes befall a man together. I follow an impulse and come to you and you are angry with me. Bah! How narrow and conventional are women, after all! Nevertheless,” he kept on, rising to his feet and suddenly throwing aside his dejection, “no man ever yet rose to greatness without making vast mistakes and retrieving them. This moment the way of retrieving my mistake has come to me. I will go to Sanders—no, I will write and keep a certified copy of the letter—saying that I shall withdraw from my engagements with him. I will refuse to accept the appointment as Senator and will contest the election with him before the Legislature. But—but—if only the man who indorsed my notes hadn’t been in the combine!”
As suddenly as he had rallied, Crane again sank into dejection.
“You don’t know what it is to want money desperately—desperately, I say,” he added.
“N-no,” replied Constance, slowly. “I think I know the want of everything else almost which is necessary to happiness—except only the want of money.”
“Then you have escaped hell itself, Miss Maitland. This American Government, which you think so impeccable, is the most niggardly on the face of the globe. With untold wealth, it pays the men who conduct its affairs a miserable pittance—a bare living. How can a man give his whole mind to great governmental and economic problems when nine out of ten public men owe more than they can pay? I owe more than I can pay, and I owe, besides, a host of obligations of all sorts which the borrower of money, especially if he is a public man, cannot escape.”
Constance, at this, felt more real pity and sympathy for Crane than she had yet felt. Women being in the main intensely practical, and in their own singular way more material than men, the want of money always appeals to them. And Constance had an income much greater than her wants—that is, unless she happened to want an American husband. Every other luxury was within her reach. This idea occurred to her grotesquely enough at the moment. She said, after a moment’s pause:
“It seems to me that to make your disentanglement complete, you should, if possible, pay your debt to the man that you say helped to wheedle you into the arrangement. You might easily borrow the money; it is probably not a large sum. If—if—perhaps Mr. Thorndyke—might arrange——”
Crane instantly divined the generous thought in Constance Maitland’s heart.
“No,” he said. “I know what you would do—through Thorndyke. But it is not to be thought of. With all my shortcomings, I can’t think of borrowing money from a woman. But your suggestion is admirable—the payment of the money is necessary. It is not much.”
Crane named something under a thousand dollars—and then fell silent.
“Mr. Crane,” said Constance, after a while, “what advice do you think your wife would give you as to that money?”
Crane smiled a little.
“Annette is a regular Spartan when it comes to practical matters. She would advise me to give up my rooms at the expensive hotel and go into the country near-by for the balance of the session.”
“Could any advice be more judicious?” asked Constance. “And is it any disadvantage to a public man, who is known to be a poor man, to live plainly?”
“By Heaven!” exclaimed Crane. “You are right! It would show those fellows in the Legislature next January that I have clean hands. What an admirable suggestion! And I can save at least enough to pay half what I owe on that note before the end of the session!”
“You forget,” said Constance, gently, “that the suggestion really is your wife’s. Perhaps, if you had listened to her oftener, you would have found life easier. You are, perhaps, like many another man—he marries a pretty little thing, and she remains to him a pretty little thing. Meanwhile, she may have developed a capacity for affairs far superior to his.”
Crane did not like the hint that perhaps Annette’s head for affairs was better than his, but he had heard several home-truths that afternoon.
He rose to go, and his changed aspect confirmed his words when he said earnestly to Constance:
“I came in here with shame and despair in my heart. I go away enlightened and encouraged and comforted beyond words. You will at least let me say that it is to you I owe it.”
“Good-bye,” replied Constance, cheerfully.
The feeling that another woman’s husband or lover can be enlightened, encouraged, and comforted by her is a very awkward circumstance to a woman of sense.