Part 11

“Ask him up, then,” replied Elizabeth. She was somewhat flurried at the thought of receiving Clavering alone, but there was no help for it. She was not, however, disappointed; on the contrary she felt a deep and curious interest in seeing this man and tracing if possible that singular recollection of him, so sharp yet so impalpable and still actually inexplicable to herself.

In a few minutes Serena ushered Clavering into the room. At close range he was even more attractive than at a distance. It was difficult to associate any idea of advancing age with him. Maturity was all that was indicated by his handsome, smooth–shaven face, his compact and elegant figure, his iron–gray hair. Manual labor had left but one mark upon him—his hands were rough and marred by the miner’s tools he had used. He was perfectly well dressed and entirely at his ease. He introduced himself with the natural and unaffected grace which had been his along with his sutler’s license and miner’s tools.

“This, I presume, is Mrs. Darrell. I thank you very much for allowing me to wait for General Brandon’s return.” He said no word about his appointment with General Brandon being at half–past nine while then it was only a little past eight.

Elizabeth invited him to sit down, and herself took a seat opposite him. The color which came into her pale face very much enhanced her looks, and Clavering thought he had never seen so interesting a woman. Her slender black figure unconsciously assumed a pose of singular grace and ease, the delicate color mounted slowly into her pale cheeks, and she was indeed worthy of any man’s notice. And as her personality had struck Clavering with great force at the very first glimpse he had had of her ten years before, so, seeing her close at hand and her attention fixed on himself, she overpowered him quickly, as the warm, sweet scent of the jessamine flower is overpowering. It was what he would have called, had he been thirty years younger, love at first sight.

Clavering’s coming into the room was, like some new, strong force, making itself felt over everything. The small room seemed full of him and nothing else. He was by nature a dominant personality, and he dominated Elizabeth Darrell as strangely and suddenly as she had cast a spell over him.

“My father will regret very much not being here when you came. Perhaps he misunderstood the hour of your appointment,” she said.

Clavering’s white teeth shone in a smile. “Don’t trouble about that. Besides, it has given me the pleasure of seeing you.”

Elizabeth was not unmindful of the fact that Clavering was a married man, with a wife across the street; and his words, which would have been merely those of courtesy in most men, could not be so interpreted, for Clavering was not a man of pretty speeches.

He picked up the volume of Herodotus which lay on the table. “So you’ve been reading old Herodotus! That’s pretty heavy reading for a young woman, isn’t it?”

“I took it up at random just now, and became interested in it,” answered Elizabeth.

“You are a great reader, I suppose?”

“N–no. Hardly, that is. But I am very much alone, and I have read a good deal since I have returned to America.”

“Why should a woman like you be alone? Why shouldn’t you go about and see people and live like other women of your age?”

Elizabeth made no reply to this; she could scarcely admit that her seclusion was more of her father’s doing than her own. She was struck by the beauty of Clavering’s voice and by the correctness of his speech, which was better than that of many college–bred men.

“How long have you been a widow?” he asked.

“A year and a half.”

“And have you any children?”

“No, I lost my only child when he was a baby.”

“That’s hard on a woman. You women never forget those dead babies. But all your life is before you yet.”

“It seems to me it is all behind me.”

“Why? Did you love your husband very much?”

Elizabeth had suffered Clavering’s questions partly through surprise and partly because Clavering could say and do what he chose without giving offence—a quality which had been one of the great factors in raising him from the shaft of a mine to a seat in the United States Senate. But the question put to Elizabeth was so unexpected,—it had never been asked of her before,—it was so searching, that it completely disconcerted her. She remained silent, while her eyes, turned upon Clavering, wore a look of trouble and uncertainty.

“A great many women don’t love their husbands,” said Clavering, “and if they are left widows, their feelings are very complex. They think they ought to grieve for their husbands, but they don’t.”

The color fled suddenly out of Elizabeth’s cheeks. Clavering’s words fitted her case so exactly and so suddenly that she was startled and frightened. It was as if he had looked into her soul and read at a glance her inmost secrets. She half expected him to say next that she had loved another man than her husband. And as for applying the common rules of behavior to a man like Clavering, it was absurd on the face of it. He was leaning toward Elizabeth, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his eyes fixed upon her with a kind of admiring scrutiny. He found her quite as interesting as he had expected, and he ardently desired to know more about her and, what is as great a mark of interest, to tell her more about himself.

Elizabeth remained silent for a while, and then forced herself to say: “My husband was one of the best of men. He was as good as my father.”

“That settles it,” replied Clavering, with grim humor. “I never knew a woman in my life who spoke of her husband’s goodness first who was really in love with him. When a woman is in love with a man, it isn’t his goodness she thinks of first; it is his love. Now don’t fly off at that; I’m not a conventional man, and you must know it if you ever heard of me before. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful. On the contrary, I want your good opinion—I have wanted it ever since the first time I ever saw you. I was very much struck with you then. I have wanted to know you and I have planned to know you. Have I committed any crime?”

“But—but—you are a married man,” said Elizabeth, faltering, and conscious that she was talking like an ingénue.

Clavering laughed as he replied: “That’s downright school–girlish. Any boarding–school miss would say the same. Well, I can’t help it now that I married a woman totally unsuited to me before I was twenty–one years old. Come, Mrs. Darrell, we are not children. I wanted to know you, I say, and I always try to do what I want to do. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Well, let us then know each other. I swear to you I know less of women than I do of any subject I have ever tried to master. True, I never had time until lately; and, besides, I was a middle–aged man before I ever met any educated and intelligent women. In the class of life from which I spring women are household drudges and bearers of children, and I never knew them in any other aspect until I was over forty years of age. Then you can’t imagine what a stunning revelation to me a woman was who had never done anything but amuse herself and improve herself. Suppose you had never met any educated men till now—wouldn’t you find them captivating?”

When a man talks to a woman as she has never been talked to before he is certain of finding an interested listener, and, it follows, a tolerant listener. So Elizabeth could not disguise her interest in Clavering, nor was it worth while to pretend to be offended with him. The superficial knowledge she had of the vicissitudes of his life was calculated to arouse and fix her attention; and there was so little to do in her present life that she would have been more or less than mortal if she had turned from the first object of interest she had yet met with in her new and changed and dreary life.

She paused awhile before answering Clavering’s last question. “I dare say I should feel so,” she answered. “I remember how it was when I was first married and went to India. Everything interested me. I could not look at a native without wanting to ask all manner of questions of him and about him, which of course I could not be allowed to do; and the life there is so strange—their race problem is so different from ours, and all my modes of thought had to be changed. I was in India over eight years, and it was as strange to me when I left it as when I arrived.”

Elizabeth had got the talk away from the personal note upon which Clavering had pitched it, and he, seeing he had said enough for a beginning, followed Elizabeth’s conversational lead. He asked her many questions about her life in India, all singularly intelligent and well put, because drinking at the fountain of other people’s talk had been his chief source of education during his whole life. And Clavering, without being widely read, was far from being an ignorant man. Although he knew not a word of any language except his own, nor the history of any country except his own, he was well acquainted with the history of his own times, and he knew who every living man of importance in his own country and Europe was, and what he was doing. Seeing that Elizabeth was susceptible to the charms of conversation and had a distinct intellectual side, Clavering appealed to her on that side. He told her with an inimitable raciness and humor some of the incidents of his early life in the West, his later adventures, even of his career in the Senate.

“I think I never worked so hard in my life as I have during the five years I’ve been in the Senate,” he said. “No man can come to the Senate of the United States with the education of a sutler, miner, promoter, speculator, and what not—such as I have had—and not work hard; that is, if he expects to be anything else than a dummy. But it isn’t in James Clavering to be a dummy anywhere. So I have thought and read and worked and slaved, and bought other men’s brains in the last five years as earnestly as any man ever did. The result is that when I open my mouth now the senators listen. At first the lawyers in the Senate used to hide a grin when I began to speak, and I admit I did make some bad breaks in the beginning. But I saw my way out of that clearly enough. I found a man who was really a great constitutional lawyer, although he had never been able to make more than a bare living out of his profession in Chicago. I have always invested liberally in brains. When you can actually buy brains or news, you are buying the two most valuable commodities on earth. Well, when I took up a question I had my man go over the legal aspects of it and put them down in black and white. Then I knew well enough how to use them, and I may say without boasting that I have done as well, or better, than any man of my opportunities now in the Senate. However, I don’t compare myself with such men as Andrew Johnson. You know his wife taught him to write, and that man rose to be President of the United States. Of course he wasn’t what you would call a scholarly man, like many of the senators, but good Lord! think of the vast propelling force that took an illiterate man from the tailor’s bench and gave him such a career as Andrew Johnson’s, and made him Vice–President of the United States. Those men—and men like me, too—can’t be called all–round men, like Senator Thorndyke, for example. All of us have got great big gaps and holes in our knowledge and judgment and conduct that the normal well–educated man hasn’t. But where we are strong, we are stronger than they. Do you know anything about Thorndyke?”

“I have heard my father speak of Mrs. Thorndyke, whose family he knew many years ago, and he visits occasionally at Senator Thorndyke’s. Mrs. Thorndyke sent me a request that I would call to see her, but—but—I don’t pay any visits now.”

“It’s a shame you don’t—a woman like you. Mrs. Thorndyke is charming, but not so charming as you. And I lay claim to great nobility of soul when I praise Mrs. Thorndyke, or Thorndyke either, for that matter. Mrs. Thorndyke has no use for me or for anybody of my name, except my second daughter. And Thorndyke, although he isn’t leading the pack of hounds who are baying after me to get me out of the Senate, is quietly giving them the scent. Yet I swear I admire Thorndyke—or, rather, I admire his education and training, which have made him what he is. If I had had that training—a gentleman for my father, a lady for my mother, association with the sons of gentlemen and ladies, a university education, and then had married a lady—“

Clavering got up and took a turn about the narrow room. Finally he came and sat down in a chair closer to Elizabeth, and continued: “Thorndyke is one of the lawyers in the Senate who used to bother me. It seemed to me at first that every time I opened my mouth in the Senate chamber I butted into the Constitution of the United States. Either I was butting into the shalls or the shall nots, and Thorndyke always let me know it. I could get along from the first well enough in the rough–and–tumble of debate with men like Senator Crane, for example,—a handsome fellow, from the West, too, very showy in every way, but not the man that Thorndyke is. It was the scholarly men that I was a little afraid of, I’m not ashamed to say. I am a long way off from a fool; consequently I know my own limitations, and a want of scholarship is one of those limitations.”

Elizabeth listened, more and more beguiled. She could not but see a sort of self–respect in this man; he respected his own intellect because it was worth respecting, and he had very little respect for his own character and honor because he knew they were not worth respecting. As Elizabeth studied him by the mellow lamplight, while his rich voice echoed through the small room, she could not but recognize that here was a considerable man, a considerable force; and she had never known a man of this type before. She noted that he was as well groomed as the most high–bred man she had ever known—as well as Pelham, for example. He had come into the room with ease and grace. No small tricks of manner disfigured him; he was naturally polished, and he had the gift, very rare and very dangerous, of saying what he would without giving offence,—or, rather, of disarming the person who might be offended. And in spite of his frank talking of himself Elizabeth saw in him an absence of small vanity, of restless self–love. Unconsciously she assumed an air of profound interest in what Clavering was saying,—a form of flattery most insidious and effective because of its unconsciousness.

Elizabeth herself, in the eighteen months of loneliness, poverty, and desperate anxiety which she had lately known, had almost lost the sweet fluency which had once distinguished her; but presently Clavering chose to make her talk, and succeeded admirably. She found herself speaking frankly about her past life and telling things she had never thought of telling a stranger; but Clavering seemed anything but a stranger. In truth, he had probed her so well that he knew much more about her than she had dreamed of revealing.

When at last General Brandon’s step was heard, Elizabeth started like a guilty child; she had forgotten that her father was to return. General Brandon was delighted to see Clavering, and took a quarter of an hour to explain why he had been ten minutes late.

“I didn’t expect to see any papers to–night,” replied Clavering, “but I should like to talk over some things with you. Please don’t go, Mrs. Darrell; what I have to say you are at perfect liberty to hear.”

Elizabeth hesitated, and so did General Brandon; but Clavering settled the matter by saying: “If I am to drive you out of your sitting room, I shall feel obliged to remain away, and thereby be deprived of General Brandon’s valuable services.” Elizabeth remained.

Clavering then began to give the history from his point of view of the K. F. R. land grants. It was a powerfully interesting story, told with much dramatic force. It embraced the history of much of Clavering’s life, which was in itself a long succession of uncommon episodes. It lost nothing in the telling. Then he came to the vindictive and long–continued fight made on him politically, which culminated in the bringing of these matters before a Senate committee by a powerful association of Eastern railway magnates and corporation lawyers, aided by the senators in opposition and others in his own party who, because he was not strictly amenable to party discipline, would be glad to see him driven out of the Senate. But Clavering was a fighting man, and although driven to the wall, he had his back to it; he was very far from surrender, and so he said.

Elizabeth listened with breathless interest. Nothing like this had ever come into her experience before. It struck her as being so much larger and stronger than any of the struggles which she had heretofore known that it dwarfed them all. Everybody’s affairs seemed small beside Clavering’s. Yet she was fully conscious all the time that this was special pleading on Clavering’s part. She admired the ingenuity, the finesse, the daring, that Clavering had shown and was showing; but it all seemed to her as if there must be something as large and as strong on the other side.

No such idea, however, came into General Brandon’s kind, simple wooden head. When Clavering had finished speaking, the General rose and, grasping him by the hand, said solemnly: “My dear sir, I sympathize with you profoundly. I am convinced that you have been the victim of misplaced confidence, and that this unprincipled hounding of you on the part of men who wish to rob you, not only of your property and your seat in the Senate, but your high character and your priceless good name, is bound to come to naught. I offer you my sincere sympathy, and I assure you that I place entire credence in every word that you have told me.”

This was more than Elizabeth did; and when Clavering thought of it afterward, sitting over his library fire, he laughed to himself. On the strength of it, however, he had secured opportunities of seeing General Brandon’s daughter very often, and he did not mean to let the grass grow under his feet.

_Chapter Eleven_

The season opened with a bang on the first of December. The smart set could barely get six hours in bed from going to parties at all hours. This did not apply to Mrs. Luttrell, who, although she was out every night, did not disturb herself to appear in public until four o’clock in the afternoon. That particular form of barbaric entertainment known as a ladies’ luncheon had no charms for Mrs. Luttrell, because there were no men to be found at them; for this woman, who cherished with an idolatrous recollection the memory of the only man she had ever loved, and who had refused more offers of marriage than any other woman of her day, frankly admitted that she couldn’t enjoy anything without a masculine element in it. And men she contrived to have in plenty, with a success but little inferior to that of Ninon de l’Enclos.

For that reason Richard Baskerville was not only the person Mrs. Luttrell loved best in the world, but was really her most intimate friend. There was nothing Mrs. Luttrell enjoyed so much as a midnight tête–à–tête over her bedroom fire with Baskerville, he just from his books and she just from her nightly gayety. Mrs. Luttrell scorned a boudoir,—or the modern version of it, a den. She had a huge, old–fashioned bedroom, with an ancient four–poster mahogany bed, with green silk curtains, and a lace valance; and everything in the room was big and square and handsome and comfortable, like the bed. There was a large fireplace, with shining brass fire–dogs and a monumental brass fender; and Mrs. Luttrell frequently admitted that when she got her feet on that fender and her dressing–gown on, she grew so communicative that she would tell the inmost secrets of her soul to the veriest stranger, if he had his feet on the fender at the same time.

It was on a night early in January that Mrs. Luttrell nabbed Baskerville at her door, as she was being let in by the sleepy black butler. Baskerville followed her upstairs into her room, considerately turning his back while the old lady got out of her black–velvet gown, and whisked off her flannel petticoat, into her comfortable dressing–gown—an operation she performed without the least regard for his presence. Then, when her delicate, high–bred feet were on the fender before the glowing wood fire, she said:—

“Now you can turn around—and I’m a great deal more clothed than the women you take down to dinner or dance with at balls.”

“I don’t dance at a great many balls. Let me see—I haven’t danced for—“

“Oh, I know. Well, I’m just from a dinner at Secretary Slater’s, where that ridiculous little Mrs. Hill–Smith, his daughter, was in great feather, and also the Baldwin girl and Anne Clavering.”

“You ought to beg Miss Clavering’s pardon for bracketing her with Mrs. Hill–Smith and Eleanor Baldwin.”

“My dear boy, it would make you die laughing to see the patronizing air Mrs. Hill–Smith and Eleanor Baldwin put on with Anne Clavering. As the Slater family is at least forty years old and the Brentwood–Baldwins quite twenty years old, they regard the Claverings, who have come up within the last six years, very much as the old French nobility regarded the _bourgeoisie_. But I think Anne Clavering is a match for them. Indeed, she proved herself a match for a much more considerable antagonist—that is, myself—this very night.”

“Have you been impertinent to Miss Clavering?”

“Well, Richard, my dear boy, I am afraid I have been. But it was all the fault of those two foolish creatures, Mrs. Hill–Smith and Eleanor Baldwin. It was in this way. The gentlemen,”—Mrs. Luttrell still used this antique word,—“the gentlemen had come into the drawing–room after dinner—very prim and proper they were after their cigarettes and two glasses of hock. In my time, when the gentlemen came in after dinner they were always as merry as lords and delightfully free: I have been slapped on the back by Daniel Webster at a dinner, when I was sixteen years old. But nothing so agreeable happens now—and there aren’t any Daniel Websters, either. Well, when I was talking to that ridiculous Mrs. Hill–Smith something unluckily started me off upon the new people in Washington. Mrs. Hill–Smith, you know, assumes that she has sixteen quarterings, so she has to grin and bear it when I begin telling about people; and I always say to her, ‘You and I, Mrs. Hill–Smith, who knew some people before 1860.’ Somebody was speaking about Mrs. James Van Cortlandt Skinner’s private chaplain—that woman has added much to the gayety of nations. There’s a story going around that she had a darling of a fight over it, not only with the bishop, but with the bishop’s wife; and I was giving a very amusing account of it, when Anne Clavering quietly remarked that she happened to know that Mrs. Skinner had not spoken of it yet to the bishop. Of course this spoiled my story, and I was a little cross about it. Judge Woodford was present, and he told a pleasant little tale about my grandfather having been very cross on one occasion, and having pulled somebody’s nose, and I said my crossness was a case of atavism on my part. And so it was turned into a joke. When we were leaving I was sorry I had been short with Anne Clavering, so I went up and asked her to come and see me on my next day at home, and to pour tea for me—that I still held to the good old fashion of keeping a day at home and seeing my friends. And what do you think the minx said? She was very sorry, but she had an attack of atavism, too,—her grandfather wasn’t used to afternoon tea and she had never acquired any real taste for it!”

Baskerville laughed delightedly.