Part 10

"Oh, you needn't pity me at all!" Marie-Aimée laughed harshly through her tears. "When I think that I might--that there could have been the possibility--that those three years should so have changed me, that I should have grown so cold and dry-hearted, and proud of my dry-hearted coldness, and supposed it a virtue, and called it morality, that when he turned to his old comrade for a little cheer against the thickening shadows, the fast-coming gray hairs, the lost voice, the domestic _misères_, I might have refused, I am glad and grateful for the ill-name and the snubs that may follow me the rest of my life because I didn't." Whereupon her voice came utterly to wreck; she subsided into soft unrestrained weeping.

Mrs. Bronson with a distressed frown left her seat for the corner of a divan which was nearer Marie-Aimée. After listening helplessly a moment, fidgeting, embarrassed by her life-habit of undemonstrativeness, she put out her hands, quick as darting swallows, and enclosed one of Marie-Aimée's, pressing it, stroking it, murmuring, "Don't! Don't! You are a dear!"

Without a word Marie-Aimée turned her wet face to kiss the cheek of the consoler. Mrs. Bronson pressed closer to her; and the two sat crushed against each other with interlocked, hands--and so, silently drifted into a different relation. It was as if the thoughts of their blood had communed through their hands, and there were no need more to conceal anything.

"Imagine," Marie-Aimée said, in a voice cracked with rueful laughter, "that when I was in the convent I had reached the point of believing that it was one of the laws of nature which was being accomplished in me! I said that love was like a plant, and if it got neither sunshine nor rain, it perished. I was not in the least happy over it, you know. But I became philosophical about it, and was glad, as one might be over something one owned which was not beautiful, but had a practical use. When I went into that place, you know, I honestly believed I should never come out of it again; and I used to read his old letters, and pore upon photographs of him, and play over and over all the music associated with him.

"But one day I found them flatly wearying me. I shall never understand it! I could picture seeing him again, meeting him in company with you at his side, and not minding. I could picture meeting him again, free, and anxious that all should be as before, and I could be calm over it, inclined, if anything, to refuse. I was worn out, I suppose. I imagined it was my illusion about him which had worn out. I judged him! But in the same breath I judged myself, as likewise incapable of any but shallow feelings; and I despised us both equally, and forgave him, as one forgives offences one no longer suffers from. And so, foolhardily, I come forth again. And when I see him, all I know is that it is he, the same one, who was all the romance of life to me once; that the same door is still open between our eyes through which we come and go familiarly into each other. All that I had thought dead and buried comes to life again. And I know that I may go into a convent for twenty years, that I might be buried and dust as many more, but when Anthony Bronson comes by, and we are face to face again, it will be all as nothing. And the marvel is that though it can only mean a return to suffering, I can only be glad. Isn't it strange?"

"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bronson pressed one of her hands across her tearless eyes; her cheek was pale. "Strange, and beautiful. But terrible too!"

She got up abruptly, as if to escape an oppression from the atmosphere down on Marie-Aimée's level; she made a motion with her head as if to disengage it; and walking to the window, stood looking out across the snowy roofs and the steeples, to the dull distance, the bank of purplish dun hanging at the horizon over the enormous city, her eyes full of gloomy distances too.

In the long silence ensuing there developed small homely noises of tea-making, over yonder, near the fire.

"But it's all really wasted!" Mrs. Bronson exclaimed unexpectedly, as if in expostulation with herself as much as with Marie-Aimée, "I know it! You saw him again, he had grown older, it shocked you. His hair had turned--it is his time of life--it saddened you. You say he has lost his voice. That is a manner of speaking; nothing is wrong with his throat. But he has never cared to sing since he was married. A little careful practice, and he could sing very acceptably still--I won't say in public, but for his own pleasure--if he cared anything for music, and for that of others who have had a cult for his singing. You have thought him blue, and it has moved you. I understand it. But do believe me that he is a little bit of a humbug. Why should he be so blue? Everything is his own fault. Do you really believe that I have never tried? He is blue when he is with you, just because it will move you. He is not so very blue when among others. I can imagine circumstances, with which you would have nothing to do, you, nor music, nor the past, but simple, sordid, material circumstances, in which he would be perfectly happy, perfectly content--"

She had said this staring out of the window. She turned, feeling Marie-Aimée at her elbow. Marie-Aimée held toward her a cup of tea and a piece of thin bread-and-butter. Mrs. Bronson let her stand there, apparently not seeing these things, while she searched her little shut over-clouded face, which showed plainly enough a resolve to say no more about it. "But to you, I do believe, all this makes no difference!" Mrs. Bronson pursued. "Let him be, let him do, what he pleases, you will care just the same, just as much. Are you completely a fool, my dear, and blind as a mole, or--do you see more than we do? That's what I can't make out. I beg your pardon!"

She accepted the cup from her, and helped herself to the bread, and took a seat on the music-stool. She drew the gloves off her beautiful milk-white hands liberally begemmed with diamonds and sapphires, and mechanically folded her bread. She tasted the tea, and continued looking off out of the window. Marie-Aimée brought a cup of tea for herself, and stood in the window-place too, looking off, drinking.

What Mrs. Bronson thought in her long stare at the grave distance from which the light was beginning to depart, she may, as her eye caught the silhouette against it of the other woman's meek, set profile, have perceived the futility of saying. "You have a beautiful view," was her next remark.

Marie-Aimée deplored its not being to-day at its best; she described it by touches, when finest. And they talked a while like parties to the most ordinary call, of views, flats, and so forth, but in intonations so curiously detached and melancholy that they might have been ghosts talking over a tragedy that had its end three centuries ago.

Suddenly, over the roofs, flashed an arc of light, splendid; strings of lamp-like jewels, red and green and golden, publishing to earth and sky the name of an actor and of a melodrama. Mrs. Bronson looked at her watch, set down her cup, and rose.

"So I shall go as I came," she said; "I had thought I had such things to say to you, Miss Nevers, so to the point, so irrefutable, that you could not but listen to me. I thought that the fact that it was I who came to you and said them would have its weight. I meant, at a pinch, Miss Nevers, to demand of you to leave, at all events to break off relations with Anthony. But now, see, I am going, and I have demanded nothing. I am all adrift. You have taken me out beyond my depth. You shall do as you feel right. As for me, I don't know. I have not a heart to lead me, as you have. I have only my common share of hard worldly sense, and you have made me feel that it might be unsafe sometimes to trust it. Do as you please. I don't know! I don't know! Perhaps it is you who are right, you who love him, and all we who are fools."

In Marie-Aimée's face, which her eyes were intently interrogating as she spoke this, Mrs. Bronson could not fail to read a perplexity equal to her own, but coupled with a forlornness such as her own nature could never match, no, not if Fate should place her alone on a storm-beaten rock in mid-ocean--as Marie-Aimée might have been imagined standing, with that face. Marie-Aimée drew in the air through her lips, till her shoulders were lifted, and let it out in a great sigh.

"Ah, we are poor things all!" Mrs. Bronson agreed, with an echo of the sigh; and repeated that gesture of pressing her hand to her eyes, not to hide tears, but as part of an attempt to concentrate the mental vision upon those mysteries in life which offer the effect of blank impenetrable walls. She tore away her hand almost at once, her brief pantomime declaring the uselessness of trying to understand anything, verily, of all that happens in this sorrowful world; and whether in mockery of it, or of herself, or in the wish merely to effect a change in the current of their thoughts, struck a startling, brilliant chord on the piano under her hand; and while it still vibrated, another, and another, and executed a cadenza that seemed to laugh aloud and shake fool's-bells.

"Do you remember," she sat fairly down before the keyboard, and preluded while she talked, "the last time? After that scene of blood and tears, you poor sweet thing, how you played for me, so dearly obliging as you were? And polonaises and waltzes you played; as well as elegies and nocturnes. And then I played and then you played. You played and played, my dear, till you had missed an engagement. I shall miss one now if I don't hurry off instantly, but let it be missed. I shall count it well done, if you will sit down here a moment and play for me."

"Oh," moaned Marie-Aimée, putting up the ever-willing hands, like a martyr in prayer, "don't ask me. And don't take it ill if I can't. It's not the same thing any longer." She let her head hang; "I haven't the heart for it to-night."

"I am a beast!" said Mrs. Bronson heartily, and without adding a note further to the musical phrase she was in the middle of, jumped up, sick at herself. And feeling of so little importance before depths of woe such as she suspected near her that it mattered nothing whether she apologized, she pressed Marie-Aimée's hand with all her strength, and murmuring, "I will take myself away," made haste to be gone.

Mrs. Bronson was conscious of a vast relief, by which she first learned in what suspense she had been living, when a few days later she recognized Marie-Aimée's hand-writing on a letter to her. She read:

"I went, you see, after all. I am at my sister's, to remain with her and the dear children until I have thought further what I had better do. You were right in wishing me to go, though not perhaps for the reasons you gave. My thoughts are not at all clear upon the subject of the rightness or wrongness of what I was doing then, or what I have done since. I felt sure I was justified against the whole world, and even now I find no good argument against it. Only, it came home to me that I who used to love everyone and have only feelings of kindness towards others, was fast coming to hate everybody, myself most, and it seemed a sufficient sign. But you won't think that was quite all. I did also think of you, who perhaps--which of us knows her own heart?--care more than you believe. Very likely not. But on the barest possibility of the sort, how could I continue obstinately fixed in my position?

"And now, lest the sympathy you showed me be troubled on my account, I want you to be sure that I shall not be unhappy. For one thing, because there is something strangely compensating in the assurance a person may gain that the one she loves is never, to the edge of doom, to lack the whole love of at least one heart; and then, because I believe you will grant a request I am about to make, oh, more humbly and supplicatingly than pen and ink can show: which is that you will try to see him more truly, to discern what is good and lovable in him; and that--I find it difficult. Yet why? Let me seem brazen and indelicate, I will finish. I have thought I divined that he is a pensioner of yours, and sometimes a straightened one. It cannot be but that you are by nature as generous as you are kind, nothing else would accord with your forehead and eyes. I can only think that you have imagined things about him, that his marriage perhaps was mercenary, and this has been your revenge. Do differently hereafter. Show him and yourself this respect. Grudge him not the independence and the honors that beseem the state of the lion growing old. For, do not deceive yourself, he has been great. Those upon whom God bestows such a gift are marked for the reverence of others.

"You will forgive my meddling and will do what I ask? You asked me to go, and I went. You could not demand it, nor can I demand this. Yet let it be as a bargain between us, will you?

"For your infinite kindness and gentleness and generosity to myself, receive the assurance of my utmost gratitude; and for the affection you were so good as to say you feel for me, a return of affection which is of sufficient strength, I believe, to outlast all that divides us.

Marie-Aimée."

Mrs. Bronson kissed the name, like a school-girl; but glancing back over the letter could not repress a laugh tinged with disdain as the thought presented itself: "She wishes to provide against his missing her. Oh, the poor child, how well she knows him, after all!" Rising to the noblest height of her nature, she determined to set the figure of Anthony Bronson's income, as near as her fortune permitted, at what should represent her own estimate of his loss in Marie-Aimée; at the same time reflecting that very much less--but very much less, indeed--would quite as effectually have kept him from missing her overmuch.

VERSES

BY

A. E. HOUSMAN

There pass the careless people That call their souls their own: Here by the road I loiter, How idle and alone.

Ah, past the plunge of plummet, In seas I cannot sound, My heart and soul and senses, World without end, are drowned.

His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.

There flowers no balm to sain him From east of earth to west That's lost for everlasting The heart out of his breast.

Here by the laboring highway With empty hands I stroll: Sea-deep, till doomsday morning Lie lost my heart and soul.

_From "A Shropshire Lad."_

MY ELECTION TO THE SENATE

BY

CARL SCHURZ

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

When I arrived in the United States again, the impeachment trial was over and President Johnson had been acquitted. There had indeed not been any revolutionary disturbance, but the public mind was much agitated by what had happened.

I had, since I left Washington, been quietly engaged in editing the Detroit _Post_, when one day in the spring of 1867 I received, quite unexpectedly, a proposition from the proprietors of the _Westliche Post_, a daily journal published in the German language in St. Louis, Missouri, inviting me to join them, and offering me, on reasonable terms, a property interest in their prosperous concern. On further inquiry I found the proposition advantageous, and accepted it. My connection with the Detroit _Post_, which, owing to the excellent character of the persons with whom it brought me into contact, had been most pleasant, was amicably dissolved, and I went to St. Louis to take charge of the new duties.

A particular attraction to me in this new arrangement was the association with Dr. Emil Preetorius, one of the proprietors of the _Westliche Post_. He was a native of the Bavarian Palatinate, the same province in which in 1849 the great popular uprising in favor of the National Constitution of Germany had taken place, and of the town of Alzei, which, according to ancient legend, had been the home of the great fiddler among the heroes of the Nibelungenlied--"Volker von Alzeien," grim Hagen's valiant brother in arms. The town of Alzei still carries a fiddle in its coat of arms. Mr. Preetorius was a few years older than I. He had already won the diploma of Doctor of Laws when the revolution of 1848 broke out. With all the ardor of his soul he threw himself into the movement for free government and had to leave the Fatherland in consequence. But all the idealism of 1848 he brought with him to his new home in America. As a matter of course, he at once embraced the anti-slavery cause with the warmest devotion and became one of the leaders of the German-born citizens of St. Louis, who, in the spring of 1861, by their courageous patriotism, saved their city and their State to the Union. He then remained in public life as a journalist and as a speaker of sonorous eloquence.

_The Convention of 1868_

In the winter of 1867-8, as I have said, I made a visit to Germany. Not long after my return to St. Louis, the Republican State Convention was held for the purpose of selecting delegates for the Republican National Convention which was to meet at Chicago on the 20th of May. I was appointed one of the delegates at large, and at its first meeting the Missouri delegation elected me its chairman. At Chicago a surprise awaited me which is usually reckoned by men engaged in politics as an agreeable one. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Marcus L. Ward, informed me that his committee had chosen me to serve as the temporary chairman of the Republican National Convention. It was an entirely unexpected honor, which I accepted with due appreciation. I made as short a speech as is permissible on such occasions, and, after the customary routine proceedings, surrendered the gavel to the permanent president, General Joseph R. Hawley of Connecticut.

That General Grant would be nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency was a foregone conclusion. As to the nomination for the vice-presidency, there was a rather tame contest, which resulted in the choice of Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the National House of Representatives, who at that time enjoyed much popularity and seemed to have a brilliant future before him, but was fated to be wrecked on the rocks of finance.

When the Committee on Resolutions made its report, I observed with surprise that the proposed platform contained nothing on the subject of an amnesty to be granted to any of the participants in the late rebellion. This omission struck me as a grave blunder. Should the great Republican party go into the next contest for the presidency without, in its profession of faith and its program of policy, holding out a friendly hand to the erring brethren who were to return to their old allegiance, and without marking out for itself a policy of generosity and conciliation? I resolved at once upon an effort to prevent so grievous a mistake by offering an amendment to the platform. Not knowing whether the subject had not been thought of in the committee, or whether a resolution touching it had been debated and voted down there, and deeming it important that my amendment should be adopted by the Convention without a discussion that might have let loose the lingering war passions of some hot-heads, I drew up a resolution which did not go as far as I should have liked it to go, but which would substantially accomplish the double object I had in view--the encouragement of well-disposed Southerners and the commitment of the Republican party--without arousing any opposition. It was as follows:

"That we highly commend the spirit of magnanimity and forbearance with which men who have served in the rebellion, but who now frankly and honestly coöperate with us in restoring the peace of the country and reconstructing the Southern State governments upon the basis of impartial justice and equal rights, are received back into the communion of the loyal people; and we favor the removal of the disqualifications and restrictions imposed upon the late rebels in the same measure as the spirit of disloyalty will die out, and as may be consistent with the safety of the loyal people."

The resolution received general applause when it was read to the Convention, and, as I had hoped, it was adopted and made a part of the platform without a word of adverse debate.

_Grant, the Candidate of the Whole Republic_

The presidential campaign of 1868 was not one of uncommon excitement or enthusiasm.

The Republican candidate, General Grant, was then at the height of his prestige. He had never been active in politics and never identified himself with any political party. Whether he held any settled opinions on political questions, and, if so, what they were, nobody could tell with any assurance. But people were willing to take him for the presidency, just as he was. It is quite probable, and it has frequently been said, that, had the Democrats succeeded in "capturing" him as their candidate, he would have been accepted with equal readiness on that side. He was one of the most striking examples in history of the military hero who is endowed by the popular imagination with every conceivable capacity and virtue. People believed in perfectly good faith that the man who had commanded such mighty armies, and conducted such brilliant campaigns, and won such great battles, must necessarily be able and wise and energetic enough to lead in the solution of any problem of civil government; that he who had performed great tasks of strategy in the field must be fitted to accomplish great tasks of statesmanship in the forum or in the closet. General Grant had the advantage of such presumptions in the highest degree, especially as he had, in addition to his luster as a warrior, won a reputation for wise generosity and a fine tact in fixing the terms of Lee's surrender and in quietly composing the disagreements which had sprung from the precipitate action of General Sherman in treating with the Confederate General Johnston. On the whole, the country received the candidacy of General Grant as that of a deserving and a safe man.

On the other hand, the Democratic party had not only to bear the traditional odium of the sympathy of some of its prominent members with the rebellion, which at that time still counted for much, but it managed to produce an especially unfavorable impression by the action of its convention. Its platform stopped but little short of advocating violence to accomplish the annulment of the reconstruction laws adopted by Congress, and it demanded the payment of a large part of the national debt in depreciated greenbacks. The floundering search for a candidate and the final forcing of the nomination upon the unwilling, weak, and amiable Horatio Seymour presented an almost ludicrous spectacle of helplessness, while the furious utterances of the fiery Frank Blair, the candidate for the vice-presidency, sounded like the wild cries of a madman bent upon stirring up another revolution when the people wanted peace. The Democrats were evidently riding for a fall.